 Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's the Cube at OpenStack Summit Vancouver 2015. Brought to you by headline sponsors EMC and jointly by Red Hat and Cisco with additional sponsorship by Brocade and HP. Welcome back to Silicon Angles Live Waterwall Coverage for three days from the OpenStack Summit here in Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman and excited to have with me Oasis Namat who's the co-founder and CEO of Plumgrid. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for inviting me Stu here. It's a great lovely day in Vancouver, it's sunny. Oh, I can't imagine a better place to come to an event even though I think a number of us were saying we want to be outside, lunch was outside, overlooking the harbor, but we got some tech to talk about here. So, co-founder of the company, can you give us just kind of the quick 30 second, what helped bring you to co-found Plumgrid and what's the company's mission in life? It's great to actually be on the show today. Believe it or not, I was walking in and I just realized that it was the fourth birthday of the company, it was incorporated on May 18th, 2011. So we are a four year old company, we're starting our fifth year, we provide networking in software. If you've heard of overlay networking constructs where you do multi-host networking right out of the Linux kernel itself, that's what we do, we specifically focus on OpenStack. And what we do is we make OpenStack Enterprise ready. And- Wow, that's an audacious goal. We've actually been digging in, last year one of my big foundings from the show in Atlanta was compute rock solid, storage in really good shape, networking needed some work. And it's an area we've been digging into and unpacking today. By the way, thank you, your folks for the five year pin. Five years from a technology standpoint, a lot has changed but most big, heavy projects take, I mean usually a decade to mature. So a big audacious goal to say, make networking enterprise ready, where are you today and how far are you along that journey of meeting kind of the mission statement? So we are in fact taking some of our customers to production, some of them are public. We have been announcing Swisscom as one of our early customers that use it internally, externally, as well as their public service. If you go to developer.swisscom.com, it's an open stack cloud that runs on Plum Grid today. We have also announced a communication as a service use case with interactive intelligence. Great customer to have. If you know about communication as a service, it's kind of like messaging, voice, PBX, everything that an enterprise would need for their communications need all hosted in one place. Okay, so I think back, I actually worked in telecom back in the 90s and saw the writing on the wall the voice over IP was going to kind of trickle the traditional voice. So is this kind of the next generation of that? Help connect the dots. So this is something, you know, think about it. It is a large enterprises like Kaiser Permanente or Intuit or LifeLock or other place, you know, customers like that who want to host their own communication solutions. They don't want to give it out, right? But they want it done internally in a hosted environment, right? Completely isolated interactive intelligence is one of our customers. They provide that service, right? End-to-end, they will build up, you know, hosted communication solution for their end users and customers, and they used to do it all in hardware, using these pieces like routers, firewalls, switches, all in hardware with racks of servers, all put together, 70 touch points of configuration, and they thought that, you know, it would take them four months to do it, right? And then they decided that it's time to change their infrastructure and make it more automated and it chose OpenStack for that. But as you know, networking in OpenStack is not easy. It's extremely hard, and this was a networking-specific problem. They wanted to make sure that all the things are automated, completely provisioned, so they used Plumgrid for it, and by using Plumgrid, they could actually reduce their service provisioning time from four months down to 15 minutes. It's literally a bunch of scripts that they had to write service templates, fire it off, and here you go, a complete customer is fully provisioned. Okay, can you kind of unpack for us a little bit how you fit into the stack? So my understanding, you guys are not a distribution for OpenStack. You're partnering with a number of the companies there. How does your solution fit into the overall OpenStack picture? So if you know about OpenStack for the viewers who don't know much, there is a compute piece, there's a core infrastructure, storage, and networking. The networking piece is called Neutron. We provide, I would say, secure, scalable, and automated solutions for the Neutron piece of OpenStack that go above and beyond what Neutron can do at this point in time. That's where we fit in. That's our core product offering. It's called Open Networking Suite for OpenStack. What we do is we integrate into a very broad set of distributions. Today, we announced with Huawei, that we integrated with Huawei Compass as an SDN solution, right? We have announced with RackSpace, RackSpace 10 that we are integrated over there. We are integrated and certified for Red Hat OpenStack, starting OpenStack 4, 5, and now 6, which is Juno-based. We are one of the first ones, networking solution that got certified, I shouldn't say certified, but it got integrated into Kilo-Release. Many of our contributors are contributing to the Neutron project directly into the OpenStack.org. Okay, so if you were to, we sometimes like to talk in sports analogies here on theCUBE, four years in, networking you said isn't the easiest today, where are we for making this, just generally something that customers can adopt from the network standpoint. We've passed the warm-ups, are we a couple of innings into it, or are we in the home stretch and we're going to be able to close out this game soon? No, I think it's still early, even in four years. People need to understand that the infrastructure takes long and four years is pretty much not much in the infrastructure life cycle. Many things have happened, many good things have happened already. We are well into it at this point in time, but enterprises are just starting up. So if you know that people would call OpenStack is a project not a product, you want to build an OpenStack cloud, it will take you six months long project to actually get it up and running, and that's why it was mostly popular in service provider space. That was 2014, if you need to see the big names or Comcast and AT&T and SwissComs, people who wanted to build these large public clouds, it was a great technology for that. I think what's now starting to happen is it has started to go into enterprises and there's a lot of work, there are a lot of missing links that need to be put in place before it's entirely enterprise ready, but the good thing is, some early enterprises are adopting it, they're deploying it, and use cases as communications as a service are coming up along with other use cases that we have seen. All right, so you talked about SwissCom and a couple of other year customers there. On the stage this morning we saw Walmart talking about kind of a global use case. Can you take us inside custody into the conversations you're having with customers? What is kind of the business problems that they're solving? What are the early use cases that show great promise for OpenStack and your solution? So it started off mostly as a dev test or dev ops kind of a use case, right? Where by, hey look, I want to get these things up and running, I'm developing two applications, I need some infrastructure for it. OpenStack seems like a good way to put a scrappy infrastructure together. Let's go start using it, right? That's where things were maybe two years ago and a year ago, right? That things have moved significantly from over there. We are now seeing production use cases where real life traffic for a lot of commerce, of hundreds of millions dollars worth of commerce, a billion dollars worth of commerce is being transacted over infrastructure that is powered by OpenStack. It is now, as Walmart showed, that they ran their last shopping season over it, right? We see those applications not only within a retail sector, I would say. We see them within software as a service providers. They're putting OpenStack as a backend infrastructure. We are seeing this more importantly in a new kind of application infrastructure which is built around, say, platform as a service layer like Cloud Foundry. One of our production deployments, in fact quite a few of our production deployments are around scaling and securing Cloud Foundry on top of OpenStack. One thing people need to understand is making it enterprise-ready. A lot of it has to do with security and a lot of the security today resides in many of those hardware and physical components that surround this machine for such that it is done in software. Yeah, so absolutely. We've talked a number of startups as well as the big companies as to how security is changing. In some ways, it's the conversation we've been having for at least over a decade in my world. How's Plumgrid helping there, both yourselves and through your partnerships to kind of change that security discussion? Well, security is fundamental to networking. If you think about it, networking had multiple roles. One is to actually transport the bits from point A to point B. That's very easy. You can do it with any networking solution. The harder piece is enforcing policies, making sure who can talk to who. Isolation, access control, compliance. And that's where networking is fundamental. Firewalls are a networking primitive. Load balancing, where traffic goes or not are a networking primitive. VLAN separation for PIPCI, DSS compliance, are a networking primitive. So networking is fundamental to security. What we do is as this hardware-based infrastructure has moved to this software like OpenStack, all these services which are security and networking related are still very much entrenched hardware. We have lifted them up, turned them into software and brought those into the OpenStack using our platform, which is Open Networking Suite for OpenStack. What we do is we provide these secure virtual domains that gets associated with these projects. Soon as you spin up a project in OpenStack, it creates a secure virtual domain which has a very well-defined perimeter. It has access control policies associated with it. You can chain them, whereby these multiple secure virtual domains that are some of them are under InfoSec control. Others are under tenant user control. You can auto-spin them, auto-scale them. And it kind of puts together that environment that is needed by enterprises to make OpenStack operational. All right, so as a startup, how do you manage that? You've got the big companies like Cisco and VMware tend to have these big megaphones that can really kind of drown out a lot of the discussion that's happening in the marketplace. The whole software-defined networking space. I mean, you got ACI on one side, you got NSX on the other side. How do you reach the customers? How do you kind of get beyond some of the marketing speak that's going on? So we're a small company, right? We think ourselves as too small to actually go ahead and compete with these big giants. We think our job is to make customers happy and solve their problems, right? And that's what we do. So what we have done is we actually have focused on very large customers, large customers who have significant volume of the needs where we can go in, start solving their problems and they can start replicating it across multiple use cases. Moreover, when we started off, we thought that partners are essential and fundamental to getting our technology proliferated, right? So we partnered, partnership is core. Core to us, we announced partnership with Apalia. They are one of the system integrators for OpenStack out in France and Switzerland, right? We just announced a partnership with Nebelu, which is again one of the early team that did Mercado Libre. OpenStack deployments, and they are now a service systems integrator in South America. We have a nice partnership with the NEC Systems Integration Company in Japan. We have partners in U.S., Onyx is a great partner. In fact, we are having a panel over here where many of our partners are there. So we think it's an ecosystem play. We think it's taking the product to enterprises play and that's where partnerships are extremely important for us. All right, what's your opinion on it? We're five years into OpenStack. How much do the users and the small companies are able to innovate? Or there's some criticism sometimes that the big companies come in. There's hundreds of people from some of those big brands. You're a former Cisco person yourself. I'm sure you can see the presence here. What's your assessment on OpenStack? I would say OpenStack, five years rapid development. I think there's a lot of development that has gone in every six months, new code, new features. And I think given the momentum, it was only natural that large companies would come in and try to steal thunder in the show. And many have come in, but I think they also contribute. We have to recognize they have a lot of experience in operationalizing these constructs and they have done it before, right? So they have something to contribute over here. I think where we are as OpenStack today, when we go to customers, especially our customers, we bring them these features and they see it. I think the focus from them has shifted more towards operationalizing those rather than keep innovating more and more. So I think this renewed focus within the OpenStack developer community and especially within the foundation board to define what is Defcore, which is core OpenStack so that it can remain stable. And it's always compatible and there's no that compatibility is never broken. Moving forward, it's a great initiative, right? Especially for enterprise adoption and having the context around it, right? With the big tent initiative whereby people can go ahead and innovate and keep adding more features, I think that kind of a separation is the right move in the right direction. All right, so I usually ask my guests, what brings them to this? Obviously, your company heavily focused on OpenStack. What excites you about this event? What are you looking to gain out of this week? And if you look back at the end of the show, what do you hope you've gained? We want to see a lot of customers over here who are interested. We were there in Paris, was around 4,700 people over there, 4,500. We've been in the OpenStack show as a company we've been coming in for quite some time. It's a great show, 6,000 people showed up, right? We are looking forward to having a lot of customer contacts. We have 11 sessions over here. We have some forward-looking technologies that we are demonstrating, like Docker's and Docker's networking. In fact, we're networking with Docker containers and virtual machines and physical servers all at once, right? We already have a solution out there. Some of our customers are experimenting with it. I just wanted to- Could you speak a little bit more to that maybe? Yeah, it's one of the biggest sessions here. I know the rooms here are a little small. I think they can fit more than mostly 300 people. I think the registration is more than 400 at this point in time. I would invite everybody to go take a look at that session. All right, so if people want to find out more about Plum Grid, how do they find out more and what would you recommend they start with? Come over to our booth, right? We have quite a few in collateral that is available for everybody and we have some live demos over there that if you're interested. Yeah, and the website is plumgrid.com. Do you have a special thing? Is the container information going to be posted online? It's the container information is online. There's a session of container networking here. I don't have the information with me, unfortunately. What exact time slot it is, but it's by Fawad Khalik, who's one of our neutron developers. He's the one who's presenting. He'll be doing the demo and anybody who needs more information can draw by our booth. We can show the demo live. All right, well, Awes Namat, co-founder and CEO of Plum Grid, really appreciate you taking time to share with our audience what's going on. Wish you best of luck at the show and going forward. And we will be right back with lots more of our coverage here from OpenStack 2015 in Vancouver. Stay with us.