 Welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're in our Palo Alto Studios for a Cube conversation. Taking a little break from the shows as we get ready actually for the winter break, which will be a nice little break for us and the crews and the gear. This is a different setting. It's a little bit more intimate and we're really excited to have our next guest. He's Sanil Khandekar. He's the founder and CEO of New Auge Networks, which is part of Nokia. Cube Alumni, I think we last saw you at DockerCon 2016. So great to see you. Great to see you again. Absolutely. So been a little more than a year. That's right. So kind of what do you see as the evolution since we last spoke at DockerCon? Sure. It's been great. I couldn't be more pleased with sort of the momentum that we've garnered in the industry. More adoption of our solution, more validation, more vents, more customers, which is great. That's all good stuff. That's all good stuff. And really, more specifically, in terms of adoption, large service providers across the globe, like BT, Telefonica, TELUS, exponentially, they've all adopted and launched with our SDVAN solution. We have had breakthrough wins in terms of public cloud, whether it's Fujitsu, whether it's an entity data, China Mobile. And of course, we continue to have a solid momentum in financial services companies for private cloud automation, as well as to provide them software-defined security in addition to the private cloud automation. And we had another breakthrough win in China Pacific Insurance Company. So that continues. And of course, it's great always to receive some good validation. So we've won a war at MEF on the best SDVAN solution recently. We've won the Right Stuff Award, Innovation Award at ONUG for software-defined security. And every leading analyst firm, Gardner, Forester, IDC, IHS Market, ACG, and recently Global Data, they've all put us in the top two SDN vendors for doing automation of networking end-to-end. Because automation and networking was the last piece of kind of the virtualization stack in the automation. So what is it that you think that you guys are doing special that's allowing you to win? Right. So if you remember when we talked, you know, when we started Nuage, we started Nuage to automate networking end-to-end with a software-based approach at the heart of which is a declarative policy and analytics engine. And what that means is we were doing intent-based networking before it was even a thing. Right. And we were doing software-defined networking. But in a way that allowed us to do software-defined networking not only in the data center, between the data centers, to the public cloud, across the wide area, and to the enterprise branches. What that means is we're not providing a siloed automation. Right. But we are doing automation end-to-end because ultimately it's about connecting users to the applications. Right. You had a great quote. I picked it up and do some research. You know, the meta problem is you said connect users everywhere to applications everywhere. Really simple kind of statement of purpose but not very simple to execute. Right. You got it. A lot of complexity behind that statement. That's right. That's right. It's an incredible amount of complexity. But it's important to construct the meta problem, look at what it is that enterprises have been with. Right. They have, let's look at it, right? They have users everywhere. And they want to connect to applications anywhere, whether it's private or public cloud. How do they want to do it? Quickly, securely in a self-service manner. But they want this agility without sacrificing safety and security. Right. Right. Because you've got to solve this network automation problem for brownfield or greenfield because there's nothing like just greenfields. Right. And if you were to do it in their private data centers, you've got to help them burst into the public cloud securely. And you've got to connect all their branch sites together. And what we've seen in the industry and our competitors, they are taking a very narrow view of the problem. So what they have is an automation for only the data center and automation for just the wide area. And that's only solving half the problem. Right. Right. And then you've got these pesky things that have just reestablished the expected behavior, the expected access. And oh, by the way, added significantly more attack surfaces and really changed the game in terms of what people want from their applications, what they expect from their applications. And it's tough for businesses to deliver to this level of promise. Indeed, indeed. And you know, the world is about instant gratification. You want access to your data quickly, instantly, wherever you are. Right. And what that means is, as consumers, we have everything at our fingertips. But as soon as you step into the business environment, that's completely not true. And so it's all about consumerization of IT. Right. And how do you make IT that agile? How do you actually modernize IT? Because enterprises, their high-order problem is what? To innovate faster by having massive automation across all aspects of their business. Right. What underpins that is a modern IT and cloud architecture. And what underpins modern IT and cloud architecture is three clear things that we are seeing in the industry. Software-defined data centers, software-defined wide area network, and software-defined security. So we like, and our customers love, that we've taught the problem end to end and provide all these three, which is absolutely unique in the industry. No one does this. So I'm curious to get your perspective, because you've been doing this for a while. Yes. As the security landscape has changed, right? Everyone is getting, you know, we get reports every day. We're numb to it now. Yeah. You know, basically everyone at Yahoo got hacked and, you know, Equifax got hacked. So everyone's getting hacked. So it's really not about, you know, the big wall anymore. There is no such thing as the big wall. That's right. The wall's all crumbled. So it's evolving. We've also seen an increase in state-sponsored attacks as opposed to just, you know, kids having fun in the basement. Yeah. How have you seen the evolution of the attacks change and how have you responded within your solutions over this period of time to kind of evolve to kind of the modern security stance that you have to have? Yeah. Look, every CXO I meet, the absolute thing that's out of mind is how do you make us go from where we are, a traditional environment to a highly agile, automated environment, but make it more secure than what we have. And as you noted, the tax surface has increased thanks to the mobility. And you have a lot more surface area because you have applications in public cloud, you have applications in private cloud, you have more mobile users. So the industry term that often gets used is microsegmentation. Now, what that means is that, and that's in response to the fact that as you noted again that perimeter security just doesn't cut it anymore. And not only that, but it's also very complex and very manual. So what you've got to do is while you're automating the data centers, while you're automating the wide area, you've got to bring the security along. You've got to make it as agile. Right. And again, what we have done is we do microsegmentation from the branch all the way to where the application is for that particular user. So in other words, finance users can only access finance applications. And that's a microsegment end to end. No one in the industry does that today. What they do is they do microsegmentation only for the applications within the data center, or they prevent just the users to communicate between each other, but not users to the applications. So that is very important for our customers to note that we have that capability. But then it's all about also understanding what's going on in the network. Right. And that's where the rich analytics that we have just really helps them understand who's talking to who at an application level and being able to then have that domain wide view and be able to very quickly respond to certain alerts. So because today when a certain alert comes in, they don't know what to do. They take a brute force approach because they simply don't know where and how to react. But now because you have this centralized intelligence and you have domain wide view and you're able to do microsegmentation end to end, you're able to push a button and be as coarse or as granular, but be very surgical and take action very quickly. All right. So hard to believe that we're almost to the end of 2017, which I can't believe. So as we turn the calendar, what are some of your priorities for 2018? You've been doing this for a while. What are you working on? What's kind of top of mind as we enter this new calendar year? Right. What we are noticing is we are going from beach hats to mainstream. So we are getting deployed. We have really solid deployments, not only as I noted in the data centers in public cloud, private cloud, but also in the wide area. We are collaborating with our customers to really make this mainstream because it is super important in terms of not only providing that automation and agility, but also the security. So that's what we are focused on. We'll continue to do that, not only for what we call as the virtualized security services solution that we have, not only the telco clouds, but also the virtualized security, virtualized services, cloud services. So we're going to cover the gamut and that's what we are after. We are really excited to be leading the charge here. All right. Well, Sunil, thanks for taking a few minutes. Hopefully it won't be 18 months before we sit down again and we look forward to watching the progress. Great. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Pleasure. He's Sunil. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios for CUBE Conversations. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.