 Welcome back to AWS re-invent. You're watching theCUBE, and we're here with Steve Mulaney, who's the president and CEO of Aviatrix. Steve, I got to tell you, great to see you, man. We started the whole pandemic. Last show we did was with you guys. Well, don't say we started it. We didn't start it. We started, right, we kicked it off. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. With our virtual coverage, that hybrid coverage that we did, how ironic. Yeah, as the world was shutting down. Yeah, so great to see you face to face. Yeah, great to see you too. Wow, so you're two years in. Two and a half years, yeah. We started, the company was, I mean, standing start. Two billion dollar valuation, raised a bunch of dough. Yeah. That's good, you got to feel good about that. We were 38 people, two and a half years ago. We're now 400. We had a couple million in ARR. We're now going to be over 100 million next year, next calendar year. So, significant growth. We just raised $200 million three months ago at a two billion dollar valuation. Now have 550 customers, 54 of them, the Fortune 500. When I started two and a half years ago, we didn't have any Fortune 500s. We had probably about 100 customers. So, massive growth, big growth, and so it's exciting. I'd ask you, I love to ask CEOs, entrepreneurs, how did you know when to scale? You just know it when you see it. Yeah, there's no formula. You just know it, and what you look for are that point where you say, okay, we've now proven the model. And until you do that, you minimize things. And we actually just went through this. We had 12 sales teams four months ago. We now have 50, 50, five zero. And it's that step function as a company. You don't want to linearly grow because you want to hold until you say, it's happening. And then once you say it's happening, okay, the dog's reading the dog food, this is going, then you flip the other way, and then you say, let's grow as fast as we possibly can. And that's kind of the mode we're in right now. Okay, so you've, so that's the other piece of that is how fast do you scale. And now you're sort of doing that step function. We're growing as fast as we possibly can. Wow, that's awesome. Congratulations, and I know you got a long way to go. But, so okay, let's talk about the big trends that you're seeing that Aviatrix has taken advantage of. Maybe explain a little bit about what you guys do. So, so we are what I like to call multi-cloud native networking and network security. So, if you think of what was- Cloud native, you got to explain that. Well, I got to explain that. So, when, so here's, here's what's happened. It's happening. And what I mean by it's happening is enterprises two and a half years ago, and this is why I joined Aviatrix, all decided for the first time, we mean it now. We are going into cloud. Because before that, they were just mouthing it. And they said, we are going into the cloud. And oh by the way, I knew two and a half years ago, of course it was going to be multi-cloud. Like, because enterprises run workloads where they run best. That's what they do. It's sometimes it's AWS, sometimes it's Azure, sometimes it's Google. It's of course going to be multi-cloud. And so from an enterprise perspective, they love the DevOps, they love the simplicity, the automation, the infrastructures code, the terraform, that cloud operational model. Because this is a business transformation moving to cloud. It's not a technology transformation. It's the business. It's the CEO saying we are digitizing. We have an existential threat to the survival of our company. I want to grow a market share. I want to be more competitive. We're doing this. Stop laying across the tracks. Technology people, we will run you over. We're doing this. And so when they do that, as an enterprise, I'm BNY Mel and I'm United Airlines. I'm you name it, your favorite enterprise. I need the visibility and control from a networking and network security perspective like I used to have on-prem. Now I'm not going to do it in the horrible, complex operational model of the Cisco 1994 data center. Do not bring that crap into my wonderful cloud. So that ain't happening. But all I get from the native constructs, I don't get enough of that visibility and control. It's a little bit of a black box. I don't get that. So where do I get the best of the cloud from an operational model, but yet with the visibility and control that I need that I used to have on-prem from networking and network security? That's aviatrix. And that's where people find us. And so from a networking and network security. So that's why I call it multi-cloud native because what we do is create a layer, a basically an abstraction layer above all the different clouds. We create one architecture for networking and network security with advanced services, not basic services that run on AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, Oli cloud, top secret clouds, Gov clouds, you name it. And now the customer has one architecture, which is what enterprise want. I want one network. I want one network security architecture, not AWS native, Azure native, Google native. We leverage those native constructs, abstract it, and then provide a single common architecture with advanced services, irrespective of what cloud you're on. Dave, I've been saying this for a couple of years now. That cloud native, yeah, that abstraction layer, right? And I said, the guys who do this, who figured this out are going to make a lot of dough. So Flake's obviously doing it. You guys are doing it. It's the future. It's really an obvious construct when you look back at the world of, call it legacy IT for a moment, because did we have different networks to hook up different things in a data center? One network, of course. I don't care if the physical stack comes from Dell, HP, or IBM. I want an abstraction layer about that. Exactly. So the other thing that happens is everybody, and you all understand this from being at Oracle, everybody wants to forget about the network. Network security. It's down in the bowels. It's like plumbing, electricity. It's just, it has to be there, but people want to forget about it. And so you see Datadog, you see Snowflake, you see HashiCorp going IPO in early December. Guess what? That next layer underneath that, I call it the horsemen of the multi-cloud infrastructure. It's networking and network security. That's going to be aviation. You guys make some announcements recently in that space. Every company's a security company, but you're really deep into it. Well, that's the interesting thing about it. So I said, multi-cloud native networking and network security. It's integrated. So guess where network security is going to be done in the cloud? In the network. In the network. What a strange concept. But guess what? On-prem, it's not. You deflect traffic to this thing called a firewall. Well, why was that? I was at Synoptix, I was at Cisco because we didn't care about network security. So that's why firewall companies existed. It should be integrated into the infrastructure. So now in the cloud, your security posture is way worse than it was on-prem. You're connected to the internet by default. So guess what? You want your network to do network security. So we announced two things in security. One, we're now a security competency vendor, partner for AWS. They do not give that out lightly. We were a network competency four years ago. We're now a network security competency. One of the few that are both. They don't do that. That took us nine months of working with them to get them. And they only do that for the people that really are delivering value. And then what we just announced is what we call FRET IQ with FRET Guard. So again, built into the network. Because we are the network, we understand the traffic. We're the control plane and the data plane. We see all traffic. We integrate into the network. We subscribe to FRET databases, public databases. We see what are the malicious IPs. If we have any traffic anywhere in your overall, and this is multi-cloud, not just AWS, every single cloud, if we see that malicious traffic going to some IP, guess what? It's probably Bitcoin, crypto mining. It's probably some sort of data exfiltration. It could be some TOR thing that you're connecting. Whatever it is, you should not have traffic going. And so we do two things. We alert and we show you where that all is. And then with FRET Guard, we actually will do a firewall rule right at that gateway, at that point that it's going out and immediately. We'll take the action. We'll take the action. And so every single customer, Dave and David, that we've shown this new capability to, it lights up like a Christmas tree. Okay, but now you've made some controversial statements. Which time? Okay, so you said Cisco, I think VMware. Hey, he's writing them down. Oh, I know he's writing them down. And I think you said. But I can back it up. I think you said Cisco, VMware, and Arista, they're not even in the cloud conversation now. Oh yeah. Arista, J.Sri Ullal is a business hero of mine. So I don't want to integrate her. She's awesome. But what do you mean by that? Because can't Cisco come at this from their networking perspective and security and bring that in? What do you mean by it, by they're not in the cloud conversation? They're not in the conversation. Okay, cool. Defend that. And the reason is they were about four years ago. So when you're four years ago, you're moving into the cloud. What's the first thing you do? I'm going to grab my CSR and I'm going to try to jam it in the cloud. Guess what? The CSR doesn't even know it's in the cloud. It's looking for ports, right? And so what happens is the operational model is horrendous. So all the cloud people, it just is like oil and water. So they go, oh, that was horrendous. So no one's doing that. So what happens in the cloud is they realize the number one thing is the cloud operational model. I need that simplicity. I have to be a single terraform provider. Infrastructure is code. Where do I put my box with my wires? That's what the on-prem hardware people think. They're selling ports, you're saying. They're selling boxes. And so they'll say, oh, we got a software version of it. No, it runs as a VM. It has no idea it's in the cloud. It is not cloud native. I used to call that cloud naive. They don't understand. So then the model doesn't work. And so then they say, okay, I'm not going to do that. Then the only other thing they can do is they look at the cloud providers themselves and they say, all right, I'm going to use native constructs. What do you got? And what happens basically is the cloud providers say, oh, we'll do everything and anything you'll ever need. And networking, network security, and the customers, oh my God, it's fantastic. Then they try to use it. And what they realize is you get very basic level services and you get no visibility and control because they're a black box. You don't get to go in. How about troubleshooting? Package captures, simple things. How about security controls? Performance traffic engineering, performance controls, visibility, nothing, right? And so then they go, oh shit, I'm an enterprise. I'm not just some DevOps Danny three years ago who was just spinning up workloads and didn't care about security. No, that was the cloud three years ago. This is now United, BNY, Nike. This is like elite of elite. So when my VC was here, he said, it's happening. That's what he meant. It's happening, meaning enterprises, the dogs are eating the dog food and they need visibility and control and they cannot get it from the cloud provider. Well, that's happening in its early days, Dave. Yeah, so Steve, we're going to stipulate that you can't jam this stuff into cloud but those dinosaurs are real and they're there. Explain how to use. Explain how to call them dinosaurs now. They are roaming the earth and they're going to run out of food pretty soon. The comet hit the earth. Hey, they're going to go down fighting. But the thing is, the dinosaurs didn't all die the day after the comet hit the earth. It took a while. That's right, it took a while. So how are you going to saddle them up? That's the question because you're in the cloud. You're going to saddle them up. It's over, they're walking dead. I don't need to do anything. Is it the captain Kirk to con, let them die? Yeah. Because you're in the cloud, you're multi-cloud. That's great, but 80% of my IT is still on-prem and I still have Cisco switches. Is that just not your market or? When IBM and DEC, did we have to do anything with IBM and DEC in the early 90s when we created PC client server IP architectures? No, they weren't in the conversation. So we didn't compete with them. Just like, you know what? Whatever they do on-prem, keep doing it. I wish you the best. But do you need to integrate with them and play with them? No. Not at all. No, we integrate, here's the thing that's going to happen. So to the on-prem people, it's all point of reference. They look at cloud as off-prem. I'm going to take my operational model on-prem and I'm going to push it into the cloud. And if I push it into multiple clouds, they're going to call that multi-cloud. See what multi-cloud? No, you're pushing your operational model into the cloud. What's happening is cloud has won. It won two and a half years ago with every enterprise. It's like a rock in the water. And what's going to happen is that operational model is moving out to the edge. It's moving to the branch. It's moving to the data center. And it's moving into edge computing. That's what's happening. So I put an outpost in my data. Is that aviantrix? Absolutely, we're going to get dragged with that. Because we're the networking and network security provider. And as the company pushes out, that operational model is going to move out. Not the existing on-prem O-T-I-T branch office pushing in. And so what's happening is you're coming at it from the wrong perspective. And this wave is just going to push over. And so I'm just following behind this wave of AWS and Azure and Google. I mean, here's the thing. You can do this. And you don't have a bunch of legacy technical debt. So you can be cloud-native, multi-cloud-native, I think you called it. I love it. You're building castles on the sand. You know, Jerry Chen's thing. Now, the thing is, today's executives, they're not as naive as Ken Olson, Unix of Snake Oil, who would need a PC. So they're not in denial. They're probably not in denial. So they have some resources. So the problem is they can't move as fast as you can. So you're going to do really well. I think they'll eventually get there, Steve. But you're going to be, I don't know how many, four or five years ahead. You know, that's a nice lead. That's a bet I'll take any day. What, you don't think they'll ever get there? No, 10 years. Okay, but they're not going out of business. No, I didn't say that. I know you didn't. What they're doing, I wish them all the best. Because a lot of their customers move. I don't compete with them. It's not, I don't. What did you mean, we're out of time. What did you mean by AWS is like sandals? You mean like cool, like sandals? Oh, no, no, no, no, no. You mean like the vacation place? The vacation club? Have you ever been to sandals? I've never done it. What do you mean by that? No comment, no comment. Which version of sandals? You're unbelievable with these analogies. Or an enterprise, no, the thing is with sandals. This is for an enterprise, by the way. And look, sandals is great for a lot of people. But if you're a cloud provider, you have to provide the common set of services for the masses because you need to make money. And by the way, when you go to sandals, go try to like get a bottle of wine. They say we got red wine or white wine? Oh great, what kind of red wine? No, red wine, and it's in a box. And they hope that you won't know the difference. The problem is some people in enterprises want four seasons. So they want to be able to swipe the card and get a good bottle of wine. And so that's the thing with the clouds. But the cloud can't offer up a 200 bottle of wine to everybody, my mom loves box wine. So give her box wine. Where ISVs like us come in is great. They're complimentary to the cloud providers. For that person who wants that nice bottle of wine, because if AWS had to provide all this level of functionality for everybody, their instant size would be too big. Too much custom for them. They're cost way too much. You're right on. And as long as you can innovate fast and stay ahead of that and keep adding value. They're not going to do it for multi-cloud either, though. I wouldn't trust them to do it with multi-cloud. No, no enterprise would. And I don't think they would ever do it anyway. That makes sense. Steve, we got to go, man. You're awesome. Love to have you on theCUBE. Come back any time. Awesome, thank you. All right, keep it right there, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech coverage.