 From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. Hello everyone and welcome to this special presentation. We're going to introduce you to a new kind of company. First, you might recall, we've been reporting extensively on multicloud and the need to create consistent experiences across cloud at high performance. Now a key to that outcome is the ability to leave data in place where it belongs, not moving it around and bringing a cloud-like experience to that data. We've talked about Kubernetes as a multicloud enabler but it's an insufficient condition for success. Latency matters. In fact, it's critical and the ability to access data at high speeds wherever that data lives will we believe be a fundamental tenant of multicloud. Now today, I want to introduce you to a company called Vicinity, V-C-I-N-I-T-Y. The simplest way to think of this company is they turn wide area networks into a global land. And with me is Craig Hibbert. To talk about this, he's the VP at Vicinity. Craig, good to see you again. Thanks a lot. Thanks for having me, Dave. It's good to be back. So when I first heard about this company, I said, well, no, it can't, that breaking the law of physics. So first of all, tell me a little bit background about the company. Sure, yeah, absolutely. So about two decades ago, this company was formerly known as Bay Microsystems. They were asked to come up with a solution specific for the United States military. And there was a couple of people involved in that tender. Fortunately for us, Bay Microsystems prevailed. And they've had their solution in place with the U.S. military for well over a decade, approaching two decades. So that is the foundation. That is the infrastructure of where we originated. So did I get it right? I mean, you kind of, what you do, can you add some color to that? Yeah, yeah, as much as I can, right? So based on who the main consumer is. So we do some very creative things where we take the benefits of TCPIP, which is the retransmit, the ability to ensure the data arrives there in one piece. But we take away all the bad things with it, things like dropping packets. Typically, WANs are lossy networks and most people are accustomed to fiber channel networks, which of course, which are lossless. And so what we've done is take the beauty of TCPIP but remove the hindrances to it. And that's how we get it to function at the same speeds as a LAN over a WAN. So, but there's got to be more to it than that. I mean, it just sounds like magic, right? So you're able to leave data in place and access it at very low latency, very high speeds. So what's the secret sauce behind that? Is it, you know, architecture, patents? I mean, what can you tell us? Yeah, absolutely. So we have over 30 unique patents that contribute to that. We're not just doing those things that I just talked about before, there's a lot more. We're actually shortening the typical OSI stack, the moving through those layers and using RDMA. So a lot of companies use this today. Obviously, Infinidat uses it in between the nodes. Dell uses it at HP, it's a very ubiquitous technology. But typically it has a very short span. It's designed for low latency, has a 21 foot limitation. There's certain things you can do to get around that now. So what we did in our earlier iterations is extend that so you could go across the world, but utilizing that inside a proprietary sort of L2 tunneling protocol allows you to re-instantiate those calls that happened on the local side and bring them up at the other side of the world. So, and presumably that sets up for Rocky? It does, yeah, and Rocky too, yeah, absolutely. So we use that, we use converged ethernet. We can do some magical things where we can go in Infiniband and potentially come out rocky at the other end. There's a lot of really good things that we do. Obviously, if Infiniband's expensive, converged ethernet's a lot more feasible and a lot easier to adapt. Well, let me make sure I understand this. So you're thinking Infiniband, you're thinking, you know, in a data center or, you know, proximate and it's talking synchronous distances. Are you saying that you can extend that? We can, in fact. But extend it, not extending Infiniband, but you're saying you can translate it into ethernet. Yeah, yeah, we translate into, we have some proprietary mechanisms, obviously, that we hold the patents on. But in essence, that's exactly what we're doing here. We take, in the earlier years, Infiniband and extend that to wherever it needed to be over any distance, and now we do it with converged ethernet. At Infiniband, like speeds? Yeah, yeah, so obviously you've got, we can't get around physics. So, I mean, for instance, between our Maryland office and our San Jose office, it's a 60 millisecond RTT. And we can't get beyond that, we can't cheat physics. But what we can do is deliver sometimes a 20X payload inside that same RTT. So in essence, you could argue that we're beating the speed of light by delivering a higher payload. What's the trade-off? I mean, there's got to be something here. Yeah, so to today, it's not ideal for every single situation. If you were to do a transactional LTP, a database at one side of the world to the other, that would not be great for the solution. Talking big files. Yeah, so what we actually do, I mean, some great examples we have is seismic data. We have some companies that are doing seismic exploration. And it used to take a lot of time to bring that data back to shore, copy it to a disk array, and then copy it to multiple disk arrays across the world so people can analyze it. In that particular use case, we bring that data back. We can even access it via satellite directly from the boats that are doing the surveys. And then we can have multiple people around the world looking at that sample live. We do a demonstration for our customers that shows that. So that's one great example of time to market and getting ahead of your competition. What's the file system underneath? So we have a choice of different file systems, but it's a parallel file system. We chose Spectrum Connect. It's a very ubiquitous file system. It's well known. There is no other file system that has the hours of runtime that that has. We obfuscate the complexities from the customers. We do all of the tuning, so it's a custom solution. And so they don't see it, but we do have some of the hyperscalers that want to use Luster and Gluster and BGFS and things like that, and we can accommodate that. So you offer choice, but the preferred is GPFS, is that right? The custom one we have, yeah, absolutely. If somebody wants to use another one, we have done that and can certainly have dialogues around it. Quick, talk about how this is different from competitors. I think of guys like doing WAN acceleration. Sure, sure. Yeah, it's very different. So WAN acceleration, regardless of who you are today, is predicated upon caching, substantial caching. And some of the problems with that are obviously once you turn on encryption, that compression and those de-duplication or data reduction technologies are hampered in that caching. Based on who our primary customer was, we're handed encrypted data from them and we re-encrypted as well. So we have double layers of encrypted data and that does not affect our performance. So massive underlying technological differences that allow you to adapt to the modern world with encrypted data. So we've been talking, as I said in the intro, a lot about multi-cloud. Can you tell us where do you fit in? First of all, how do you see that evolving? And where do you guys fit in? Sure, so I actually read, it's actually very serendipitous. I read your article before we had a dialogue last week and there was a good article talking about the complexities around multi-cloud. And I think you look at Google, it's got some refactoring involved in it. They're all great approaches. We think the best way to deal with multi-cloud today is to hold your data yourself and bring those services that you want to it. And before we came along, you couldn't do that. So think now, a movie studio. We have a company in California that needs people working on video editing across the world and typically they would proliferate multiple copies out to storage in India and China and Australia. And not only is that costly, but it's incredibly time consuming. And in one of those instances, it opens up security holes and the movies were getting hacked and stolen. And of course, that's billions of dollars at worth of damage to any movie company. So by having one set of security tenants in your physical place, you can now bring anybody you want to consume that data, bring them all together, bid GCP, AWS, Azure for the compute and you maintain your data. And that segues well into things like GDPR and things like that where the data isn't moving so you're not affected by those rules and regulations. The data stays in one place. So we think it's a huge advantage. So has that helped you get some business? I mean, the fact that you don't have to move data and you can keep it in place. Maybe you can give us an example. Yeah, it absolutely does. I mean, if you think of companies like pharmaceutical companies that have a lot of data to process, whether it's electron microscopic data, nano tissue samples, they need heavy iron to do that. We're talking crase. So we can facilitate the ability to rent out supercomputers and the security company of the farmers is happy to do that because it's not leaving the four walls, present the data and run it live because we're getting land speeds, right? We're giving you land speed performance over the wan. So it's possible. We've actually done it for them to do that. Craze make money by renting. The farmers are happy because they can't afford craze. It's a great way to accelerate time to marketing. In that case, they're making drugs specific for your genome, specific for your body tissue. So the efficacy of the drugs is greatly improved as well. I want to ask you what I've been, we know the storage business, primary storage right now is, I've said it's a knife fight. And it's a cloud is eating away at it. Flash was injected and gave people a lot of headroom so they're not buying spindles for performance anymore. But data protection and backup and data management is really taking off. Do you guys fit in there? Are there use cases for you there? When you think of companies like Cohesity and Rubrik and many others that are, the cloud seems to be a tailwind for them. Is it a tailwind for you? I think so. And I think you just brought up a great point. If you look at, again, another one of your articles, I'm giving you some free kudos. I wonder if I get any discount. The article you wrote, I thought was excellent about how data is changed. It's not so much about the primary data now. It's about the backup data. And what Rubrik and Cohesity especially have done is bring value to that data. And they've elevated it up the stack for analytics and AI and made available to DevOps. And that's brilliant. But today they're confided to within the four walls of that company. What vicinity can do for those companies is come along and make that data available anywhere in the world at any time. So if they've got different countries that they're trying to sell into that may have different backup types or different data, they can access this and model the data and see how it's relevant to their specific industry, right? As we say, our zeros and ones are different than your zeros and ones. So it's a massive expansion. Take that richness that they've created and extrapolate that globally and that's what vicinity brings to the table. You know, in the days of big data, we used to look at high performance computing as an example, going more into commercial. And that's clearly happened. But mainstream is still VMware. Is there a VMware play for you guys or opportunity? Great question, great question. In Q1 of this year, so January, end of January, 2020, typically in the intro, we talked about how we were born on ASICS, which is incredibly expensive and limited to get one go at it. And then we moved to FPGAs. We actually wrote a lot of libraries that took the FPGAs into a VMware instance. And so what we're doing now with our customers is when we go in and present, they say there's no way you can do this and we show them the demo. When we actually leave, they can log in, download two VMware instances, put one in the East Coast, one on the West Coast, or with one of my customers we have now, one on the East Coast, one in London, download the VM and see the improvement that we can get over their dedicated lines or even the internet by using the VM. In fact, we did that in a test with AWS last week and got a 90% improvement just using the VM. So when you're out talking to customers, what's the situation that you're looking for? The problem that comes up that you say, boom, that's vicinity. Maybe you could. Sure, no, it's a good question. So I think a lot of that is people looking to use multi-cloud, right? That aren't sure which way they want to go or how they want to do it. And for other companies that can't move the data, there's a lot of companies that either went to the cloud and came back or cannot go to the cloud because of the sensitivity of the data. And also things like the seismic exploration, right? There is no cloud solution that makes that expedient enough to consume it as it's been developed. And so anybody that needs movie editing, large file transfer, DR, you know, if you're moving a lot of files from one location to another, we can't get involved in storage replication, but if it's a file share, we can do that. And one of the great things we do is if you have SIFs or NFS shares today, we can consume those shares with the spectrum scale, the GPFS under the cover and make that appear anywhere else in the world. And we do that through our proprietary technology, of course. Now remote offices can collapse a lot of the infrastructure they have and consume the resources from the main data center because we can reach right back in at land speeds. They just become an extension of the land. No different than me plugging the laptop into an ethernet pool. And you pay a penalty on first bite. We do. But it's almost transparent because of the way TCPIP works. Very chatty. Yep, it is. So we drop all that, that's a great question. An analogy we use in-house is you turn on a garden hose and it takes a few seconds for that garden hose to fill. But with us, that water stream is constant and it's constantly outputting water. With TCPIP, it'd be stop, start, stop, start, stop, start. And if you have to start doing retransmit, which is a regular occurrence of TCPIP, that entire capacity of that garden hose will be dropped and then refilled. And this is where our advantage is the ability to keep that full and keep serving data. What you just described makes people really think twice about multi-clouds and essentially they want to put the right workload in the right place and kind of leave it there. And essentially it's like the old mini computer days, they're creating silos, you're helping sort of bridge those. We are, and that is the plan. And so we have B2B, we have B2C. If you sit and think about the possibilities, it could end up on every one of these. This software, do we tackle every wireless point? This is some of the things that we can do. You're in an airport, do we put vicinity on there to take the regular TCPIP and send the communication through our proprietary network or our proprietary configuration? So there's a lot of things that we can do, we can affect everybody and that is the goal. So divide by hardware from you or software or both? That's another great question. So if you are in a data center and the analogy I just gave before about being a big data center, you would use a piece of hardware that's got accelerant in it and then the remote office could use a smaller piece of hardware or just the VM. With the movie company example I gave you earlier, India and Australia is editing live files on the west coast of the United States of America just using the VM. So it depends, what we come in is we look at your needs and we don't oversell you, we try and sell you the correct solution. And that typically is a combination of some hardware in the main data center and some software at the others. And as I said, multi-cloud in many ways creates more problems today than it solves. You guys are really in there attacking that. Multi-cloud is a reality, it's happening. I said historically it's been a symptom of multi-vendor but now it's becoming increasingly a strategy and frankly I think companies like yours are critical in the ecosystem to really drive that transformation for organizations. So congratulations. Thank you, thank you, we hope so and I'm sure we see more of you in the future. Excellent, well thanks for coming in Craig and we'll talk to you soon. Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time.