 Cisco, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2015. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live here in San Francisco, Moscone North Lobby. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante. And our next guest is Jayshu Ula, the president of CEO of Ariston Networks. Welcome back to theCUBE. I haven't seen you in a couple years. Welcome back, you look great. Good to be here, John. Dave, I see you don't put me in the middle anymore. No, we want to stare right at you and get all the data out of your head and get a share of the audience. Well, first thing I want to say is last time we spoke, you were a private company. Now you've gone public. IPO, congratulations. What's it like? What's it like from private company to public company share experience? It's definitely different. For starters, we're not Ariston Networks, we're Anet, we are a four letter symbol, I guess. So you abbreviate everything. And then people just track us a whole lot more and there's an automatic branding and awareness of the company and anything we do and every time we sneeze we get written about. You guys are pacing the market and I remember Dave and I, when we first started theCUBE, we were in the Cloudera office and when we first chatted, we see the boxes of Arista coming in. You guys made a great mark early on around people doing large scale, a lot of networking, but the market's changed. SDN has exploded, VMware bought Nacera, SDN's the hot thing, NSX is doing well as Pat Gelsinger said. What's going on? You guys have done some things and SDN certainly takes the market to where you guys had originally had your vision. What's the update with that whole SDN and how does Arista play into that? I think if you step back and look at SDN in the beginning, it was a lot of confusion and my favorite acronym for SDN is still don't know, but I actually think we still do know now and we've gone from it being a marketing hype to really about openness, programmability and building an infrastructure to do network management correctly. Software clearly drives our industry and more importantly drives capex and op-ex reduction and what's really happening is there's a lot of change where it's not just devices and users and traditional applications but really it's about workloads and workflows and if you can realize there's so many different types of workloads that need control and so many different types of workflows that need telemetry. That fundamentally is the essence of SDN in my view and it takes a whole village. Arista can't do it alone. We're doing a lot of things on programmatizing our stack and making network more open and programmable but we work with a whole slew of vendors to really make it possible. Here in the early days, open flow was the buzz where it came out a lot of academic stuff that was being where the geeks were working on. What did people get right? There was a lot of missteps early on with open flow and then it's only because it's early on. What did SDN get right or did they get it wrong and how did you guys see that because you guys were in the already out shipping product when this hit. So what's your observation of what went right? What didn't go right? What's going right now? Can you share your insight? No, I think our founder, Kanduta would say this very well which is when you look at open flow it was a little bit of a technology searching for a problem. When you look at what Arista did with our extensible operating system, we built a state oriented published subscribe model to solve a problem and the fundamental problem we were solving was we saw the industry building monolithic enterprise stacks when everybody was moving to the cloud. What are the three attributes a cloud needs? You've got to be always on, you've got to have scale, right? And you have to have tremendous agility. You've got to move across your workloads fast. And that to me is the trick behind SDN not latching on to a technology but whether it's open stack or big data analytics or new cloud applications or bringing the land and the land together or places in the network converging fundamentally we were cloudifying everything whether it's public, private or hybrid. So I got to ask you, I know you're going to see Pat Gelsinger and shortly after this interview two themes that are coming on the queue of the past year around networking has been resiliency and agile, agility. Those two factors, because you have vertical and now horizontally scalable things going on. What's your take on that? As someone's been in the industry you've seen kind of the old generation now transition to the new generation cloud cloudification, API efficacian. These are new dynamics that are table stakes now in cloud. No, they are and yet, if you look at the problem, both problems are hard problems. They cannot be solved by sprinkling some pixie dust. And what I mean by that is when you look at something like high availability. In the past in networking you had two of everything, two supervisors, two operating systems. You had something called in-service software upgrades so that you'd bring one down and then bring the other. But today there's no tolerance for two everything. No customer wants to pay for two of everything even if the vendors want it, right? So what you really need is smart system upgrade where you're doing everything real time. At the kernel level you need to automatically repair your faults. Software has memory leaks. Software has faults. It's how quickly you diagnose them, troubleshoot them, trap them and recover from them. And then if you look at hitless upgrades you got to do them real time. You can't wait to have an enterprise window and bring it down and bring it up. Your boot time, your convergence time has to move from minutes to seconds. And the biggest thing you have to do is let's look at a simple command like copy paste. We do this over and over and over again. Change control has to improve. Rather than doing it every time a hundred times, would it be nice if you could just press one command and it happens across the entire switch, across all the ports, across the entire network? So I think the definition of high availability has completely changed where it's really about network rollback, time stamping, real time recovery and not just two or three of everything. So tight time here. John mentioned a public company. You guys have beat five quarters in a row. Of course, you get on that slope and the pressures go, but they can't fight the whims of the market. You just have to execute and you guys are executing very well. Great growth, you're clearly gaining share. Partnerships, you announced a deal with HP in Converged Infrastructure. Just saw this week, or maybe it was late last week, that HP is only aiming NSX. So now it's got a really interesting Converged Play with Arista against Cisco. I want to talk about the competition and that partnership. Well, it's not so much against Cisco. It's following the trends. And I think there are two major trends. And they're actually C letters too. Cloud and Converged. So if you look at what Arista is really doing, we're serving a big public crowd trend. We're in six out of the seven major cloud operators. And there's no doubt that the cloud is happening. It's not just a buzzer. You call them cloud titans. They call the cloud titans. You've done your homework, good job. And hopefully I'll be able to come back to the cube and say we're in seven out of seven, but today we're in six out of seven. And the cloud titan is the big hyper scale guys. Absolutely. And we're just in a very early innings with them. Everybody thinks we're already saturated, we're just beginning. How many innings are there in a baseball game? Nine. And nine. I think there are only two. What inning were you in? No, we're in the first of two in cricket. Our first in a so long list of goals. Our native is spread around the corner. There you go. What do the cloud native, what does cloud native mean to you? So the cloud native really means bringing that cloud experience to public, private or the hybrid. So you talked about the HP partnership. And over there, it's not really building a public cloud. It's about bringing a private cloud where you bring in the compute, the storage, the virtualization and the network as a converged experience. Now that one we can't do alone. And I couldn't think of two strong partner, better partners or stronger partners, than VMware and HP to help do that. Well, you said it's not against Cisco, but I mean, that's a great alternative for the leading products. Absolutely, I think the enterprise companies have to have a wake up call. They need to understand that the one neck to choke or one lock in that's all proprietary is a thing of the past. And really it's about building best of great building blocks. So I want to ask you, just on some current events and I'll see buzzwords that get recycled and every trend is QOS, policy based, fill in the blank, everything's policy based now. So that makes a lot of sense, I get that. Apple just announced a deal with Cisco where they are throttling, I shouldn't say throttling, or deep pack inspection. I won't say those two things. Giving iOS users a preferred fast lane with Cisco gear. So it brings up this notion that workloads are driving infrastructure or dev ops if you will. What's your take on all that? It's going to be more, are we going to see more things like that? We're going to see more customization around prioritization and... Well, I think QOS and especially policy are definitely overused words. First step, I don't think you'd apply policy to an application to make your network better. What you really have to do is make your workloads and workflows go better and have some control for them. So I'm not a big fan of tweaking every application with the policy because the applications are changing. But if you look at what Apple's doing, I think this is a great thing for Apple because what they're really doing is consumerizing and enterprising their systems and devices. You're seeing the convergence of consumer and enterprise coming together. So I see this is really about improving all of our iPhone experiences across the enterprise. We've got to wrap up because you've got to go see Pat. Guess what? I want to ask you one final question. You're an inspiration to the industry. You've been around a long time. You know a lot and you're leading a public company. What are the opportunities that you see for folks out there? Boys and girls, men and women in science and technology and entrepreneurial opportunities. I'm glad you asked this question because I think it's too easy with everything being hot for everybody to want to go straight to the top rung of the ladder. And I was telling Dave and you before, one step at a time. First you to build your foundation on education. Boys and girls, education is important. Follow your heart, follow your dreams with math and science. My dad started the IITs and he pushed me in engineering and I didn't like it then but I realized that you can be a cool engineer and before Moscone got started I actually went into the manhole of every PG&E circuit to make sure that the electrical circuits were okay for this now fantastic convention set. Can you help with the wifi? Actually, in those days there was no wifi. That's the next step. So definitely say, build your foundation, follow your dreams but go one step at a time. Don't expect to be at the top rung right away. I know you're a parent, we are friends on Facebook. What's your advice to the younger generation in terms of opportunities that they could pursue in science and math? There's a lot more opportunities, interdisciplinary was not just computer science or electrical engineering like it used to be when we were growing up but now it's much broader. What are some of the things that you get excited about? I get excited about science. I think when you look at engineering it's about applying science. Know your fundamental math, science, physics, chemistry, bio, whatever turns you on and don't make an assumption that it's tough or hard till you've been through it. So I had seven years of physics in high school. I don't recommend seven for everybody but I didn't really care for biology so I would say never shy away from trying something till you know. And then of course there's applied science whether it's computers or programming or media arts or visualization that you can add on top of that. So you're very right. I think there's the cake which is your foundation and then there's the icing where you can build on top. And will your passion, will they find their passion? Absolutely, find your aptitude and passion. You don't try to do drawing or needlework if you're not good at it, I wasn't. And I know my mom disparate about that but you go follow both what you're good at and what you're passionate about. Jayshree, thanks so much for spending time. I know you're super busy. Congratulations on your successes as a public. Thank you for having me here. It's always a lot of fun. And we got to get you back on. Thank you. Okay, bringing you more signal here, all the data here in theCUBE. We'll be right back more live from San Francisco to the short break.