 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering open systems. The future is crystal clear with security and SD-WAN. Brought to you by Open Systems. Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier here at Las Vegas for a special CUBE presentation. We're at the Chandelier Bar at the Cosmopolitan Hotel, the Cosmo, on the Las Vegas trip. Part of a series of a lot of events going on. Gartner's got two events happening, but we're here as part of Open Systems, exclusive get-together of influencers, customers, all talking about the impact of cloud, secure SD-WAN, a variety of other things. Open Systems, a very successful Switzerland-based company spanning rapidly in the United States, a global platform. And we're here with the CTO, Stefan Keller. Thanks for joining me. Thank you for having me. You guys have been very successful in this, I won't say changing SD-WAN, a completely new reimagined SD-WAN market because with the internet and cloud, people don't want to connect to the internet anymore, they want either direct connection, they want high-secure, wide-area network connections, they want secure connections. More important than ever when you have internet of things and a lot of surface area. Never mind multiple headquarters or branch offices, so SD-WAN has gone from a connection connectivity to a fully integrated secure architecture that's easy to use that can deal with multiple events. You guys have been successful with almost no marketing, all word of mouth, successful product. Tell us, Stefan, as the CTO, what is the most compelling thing about the technology that's been resonating with customers? Well, as you said, I mean the last couple of years there was a lot of change, technology changed, the requirements of our customers changed as well. I mean, with cloud, you all of a sudden have traffic pattern that you didn't have before, before everything was static. You had just your van connectivity to the data center and there it left towards the internet. But with SD-WAN, you now have the capability to have very complex traffic flow at the branch office itself. So we have a lot of logic that you put to the branch office. And the challenge is now, how can you actually control all that traffic flow in a central way? Because in the end, all our customers or companies what they want, they want to have the flexibility to use all those new technologies, be it cloud, be it IoT, whatever, but still have the security in mind in the sense, they want to be protected, they want to be protected. You now have the branch offices with a lot of new traffic pattern. How do you control that? And that's where our integrated approach of SD-WAN and security is the perfect fit. So you really have a global policy that you assign locally. One of the big trends that's happening now, obviously is the cloud has grown so big and popular that if the economics suggests you cannot ignore the economics and the value in the cloud for what you're paying, agility, et cetera, we've heard that. However, validated even more than ever is on-premises. People are going to have an on-premises and cloud or hybrid cloud solution. Now, IT departments and these people managing the CISOS, managing all these people have to deal with the distributed, in some cases, decentralized operations. The problem is there's so many vendors. They don't have the expertise, so they need things as a managed service. Sometimes they want to maybe choose something on-premise that's deployed. So you need a diversity of choices without compromising ease of use. So the question for you is, how do you guys make that happen? Because this is something that we've heard people like about your product. Complex, I hate the word single pane of glass, but that's been an IT term, but that's essentially a dashboard. Central teams can use telemetry and data, but get the benefits of a variety of environments. Why is it so successful? What is the choices for customers? Is it managed service? Is that the direction or on-prem? What's your thoughts? Yeah, that's a good point. In the end of what I said, it's a combination because we are a managed service because as you said, things get more complex and the talent market, it's challenging so it's difficult to find the right talents that you can manage it. So that's where we come in as a strategic partner. We are not only in the SDVAN market, we're also in the security market as well. So we combine security and SDVAN and that's what you see with all the SDVAN vendors out there. They're very strong with SDVAN capabilities, but in order to provide security functionality, they start to partner, be it with a firewall vendor, with a proxy vendor, what so on. So in the end, you as a customer, you don't deal just with one partner, all of a sudden you have four, five, or even six such partners you have to deal with. And with a managed service provider who can provide a holistic approach of security and SDVAN, you have one partner you can deal with so it makes it for you very easy. So a lot of people have say, oh, they've been trying security variety and we've seen every scheme in the book. And the easiest one was, oh, network traffic, packet inspection, kind of not very good. But you want to watch the bad guys move. When things are moving around, that's when you get the pattern recognition. Is there software that you guys write? How do you get that security edge? Is it watching the movement patterns, not just the packets, but who asks what systems? Is it a variety of things? What's the underlying secret sauce for open systems? The secret sauce, what I'd say is that we are flexible to take out whatever is state of the art and put it together to manage service in a standardized way for our customers. So if you look at today's companies, if they want to do it on their own, they might have to deal with 30, 40 different kind of vendors and components and put it together. We do that for our customers. So really take state of the art technology, put it together and make out a service of it. And the advantage is because we have that high level of integration, we can of all of a sudden use one component for different kind of services we provide. So that's the difference when you have an ecosystem like SD-WAN vendors where you have three, four components, they don't really talk with each other. They do not have a common language. We bring the common language so that if a consistent view and a consistent logic over the entire banner for a customer. So you're the glue layer. Yes. Between all the different components. Right. Okay, so I've got to ask you a question. So if someone says to you, hey, step on, that's other vendor promised me all this stuff over here. There's some other person. I got to get current on SD-WAN. What do you think people don't know about SD-WAN that they should know? That might be a surprise or things that you've observed in your successful customer deployments that's a lot harder than it looks. Because a lot of people say, oh, we got that and it doesn't really work very well or there's a blind spot for the CISOs team, security team around capabilities. So you can be aspirational, but they've got to have the capability. What are some areas that you've seen that are important for buyers to consider when architecting and then deploying and executing an SD-WAN strategy? I mean, when you see all those SD-WAN vendors but they say, hey, it's easy to deploy. It's zero-touch deployment. Can be true, but in the end, you have a global network. You want to deploy a global policy and somehow you have to manage that. And this is something that most of them just underestimate. Here you need really a strategic partner who knows how to deal with it, who has the capabilities, the experience and the know-how to deploy it easily and manage it for you so that you don't have to pay. Give me an example of a customer. You don't have to say their name. Where the old way they did something and then the open systems wave side of it, they did it your way. And what changed? What was the impact? Did they have more efficiency with the people? They saved time. What were some of the consequences of doing the old way versus the new way? The old way also then involves some kind of an MPLS network, of course. So if you go with the SD-WAN approach, you really could once convince a customer, hey, you don't need MPLS. For the application you need, for the SLA you want to have, internet connectivity is fine and just have two or three such internet connection per location. So in the end it was cost-saving. It was a throughput increasement so performance all of a sudden was very great. And in the end they liked us because of our operational efficiency. So our operations model is very efficient and helps our customers so that they can in the end focus on their core business. So the applications get smarter. Yes. And then you actually save money because remember it still costs a lot of money instead of traffic over the network. Yes. In some cases. Okay, final question. There's a big trend towards direct connections. Where do you see that going? How does that impact SD-WAN? I would say then it's again on the security side because with SD-WAN you have a lot of flexibility which just didn't have in the past. This means you have traffic flow all of a sudden which is not expected by many people. If you go to a single branch office, a small one, all of a sudden they have local exits. They go, they do internet surfing, YouTube videoing. They have connections to their private data center, to their public cloud environment, everything. So different kind of traffic pattern. And here we have just a single way of how or a unique approach about global stone-based firewall. So this makes your traffic pattern all of a sudden very transparent and simple again. And this helps you to control the traffic flow and to avoid any kind of leak. As we always say, don't send those cat videos that still cost money to share the cat videos around. Super content's a big part of this too. You got all kinds of new SaaS applications talking to each other. This is super another layer of abstraction that needs to be managed. That's an area you guys do. APIs into applications. We are going in that direction. We will say we are not that far yet. We can do much more. But this is the area, the direction we have to go to. Final question. You come to the U.S. A lot of people are learning about you guys. We're at a cocktail party which we are now. And I say, hey Stefan, bottom line me. What's the one thing about open systems that makes you guys great? Then I still go back our operational excellence. We really have a way to operate thousands of devices in a way that is so efficient and scale very well for a huge customer base. All right, Stefan. Thanks for coming on. Stefan Kelle, CTO of Open Systems. Hot startup out of Zurich, Switzerland. Very successful company. Really now exploding in the United States, expanding to Silicon Valley. We are here in Las Vegas for cube coverage. Bringing all the action down here. The Open Systems Influencer Expert cocktail party. Here at the Chandelier Bar at the Cosmo Hotel. Part of a lot of events around Gargiers events. So here, covering it all. Stay with us for more after this short break.