 Live from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering ConsulConnect Live 2015. Sponsored by Consul, there's your host, John Furrier. Okay, welcome back everyone. You are watching Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Jeff Frick, Silicon Angle Media, and our next guest is Sonny Kumar, Chief Commercial Officer Summit IG. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you for having me. So congratulations. You were here at the ConsulConnect Live in San Francisco. You guys had a press release out as join their partner program. Yeah, absolutely. And that means you are now in their ecosystem for provisioning direct connections to customers who want to provision it. So talk about your business. What do you guys do and why ConsulConnect Live and what's the connection on the partnership? Sure, absolutely. Thank you for having me first off. So Summit IG is a three-year-old startup. We're focused on dark fiber infrastructure in a very disruptive way. So we've actually created the densest and largest footprint of dark fiber in Northern Virginia. And as you probably know, Northern Virginia is the magnet of the internet on the East Coast. So we connect all those data centers, all those key aggregation points with dark fiber. So that's available not to just the big companies or big service providers or big content companies, but that's available to anyone, a large enterprise or a small enterprise. So we're excited to join the partnership with Consul and IIX because we're helping them kind of get distribution and getting those customers on board to their platform. So you guys are just regional now in Northern Virginia, Mid-Atlantic State? Yeah, so we are in the Northern Virginia and the greater Virginia marketplace of the DC area. We're hoping that, you know, we monetize and show that there's value and prove that this is a model that customers are gravitating towards. And then we'd hopefully take this on the road and take it to other markets. How big is the geography? How far in the Mid-Atlantic area do you go? Do you have to Baltimore? Is it just within North Virginia? So we are, so the Northern Virginia corridor, if you're familiar with that area, think of Ashburn as kind of a hub or the magnet of the internet. There's about in the neighborhood of 30 to 40 data centers just in that area, six million square feet. It's actually going to be the largest data center coverage in the next couple of years. So the concentration, the density of dark fiber, or sorry, data center environments is like no other. So six million square feet going to nine million here in the next few years. So we do the Ashburn corridor. We do Reston, Tyson's, that entire corridor within Northern Virginia. And then we also created a network, a dark fiber network custom built, purpose built from the Northern Virginia marketplace down to Richmond. So Point South, bypassing Washington DC. It's almost like, I remember the old days in the corporations, Coax Cable, Hubs, local area networks, you connect everything. You guys are essentially connecting the market as like a local network. Absolutely, that's a great way to put it is. So we are looking to be the fabric or the mesh. And if you think of dark fiber is not, is something that's readily available, how would you architect your networks? So we're challenging the enterprises and the content companies of, if you had fiber at your disposal, would you look at, you know, lighting those services maybe in a different way? So we connect those data centers, as I mentioned, where we have an 864 count cable populated today that we can replicate six, seven, eight times over. So that you're done that over 5,000 strands of glass just within that ecosystem. Our nearest competitor has a 432, right? So you're talking about a very different density of fiber. Like a Ferrari of fibers. Yeah, so that's where it's like, you know, so I gave the example a little bit earlier, you know, Google or Microsoft, those big boys always go after dark fiber and they have the buying power to do that. But why can a small little startup that's trying to build their business, think about Facebook back in 0405, if they had availability of dark fiber, I'm sure that would help drive it their business model. And it's dark in that you're putting it in before you have demand for the services and then lighting it up, or did you take over some stuff that was already in the ground or explain the business model a little bit? So we've built, so all the stuff that we've done is owned and operated 100% underground, so top quality networks, and we built it over the last few years. Okay. So, and with that. In anticipation of the demand that you're going to light up, right? Yeah, because you think about, you know, what we talk about, you hear that the internet has grown five, six, seven times over the last three to four years. We see that as kind of the, we want to be that on-ramp or that onboarding ramp for enterprises and data center, data center companies. Okay, so. It's so funny on Facebook, I mean, because we're old, we're on Facebook. Younger kids are all on Instagram and Snapchat. Someone had a throwback Thursday post that said, it was a chart from Netscape's road show. Right. With the going public. Yeah, yeah. Internet adoption. Yeah. Like in 95. And the bars, they look decent, but they're like, now you look at it. No, the explosion's there. It's just beginning, but now businesses are looking at it differently because they have different issues that go into a whole nother level architecture because of the consumerization. And now the transit's getting lower priced, but the quality's not that strong. Exactly. So the transport now is a huge deal. Yeah. What's going on for the people that aren't following inside the ropes? Yeah. Why is this disruption happening? What is the big deal about this? You see cloud adoption happening. You had your earlier adopters that were coming into the cloud environments and the platforms, but now you're starting to see more mission critical go out there. But if the CIA was going to push its mission critical applications and systems out there in the cloud, they need to have better control and agility of those networks. So that's where the network infrastructure is very different than what it was seeing five, 10 years ago. It's actually part of their core business and core competency. I remember when I was working at other startups back in the early 2000s, Google and Microsoft were buying wavelengths from us. They were buying lit services or managed services from us. They quickly made that shift in the late 2000s and now every customer is following that because network infrastructural is what's going to drive their business strategy. So that's very important. So what happened to Fibermar? I remember back in the 90s, Quests had a bunch of fiber, never made it, made it out. All this dark fiber was being laid out in train tracks and underground. Level three in the whole thing. And then the huge bankruptcy and market crashed. People buying up the assets. What is the state of fiber in the U.S., for instance? I think inner city. So the example I'll give you is, I'll stay in our corridor or our marketplace for a little bit. But the inner city or the long haul connections, they're still there and people are using them. And some of them are using it in a dark fiber fashion. Most are using it in a lit capacity fashion. So unless you are a big boy, you're actually buying lit services from a level three request or someone else. But so there's abundance of fiber there, but what happens is you need to get all the way out to the end user. And that's where the dark fiber in the metro space is not available. Or you need unique routes or diversity from what's currently available. And who are the suppliers in the old model? The telcos? I mean, just based on the telcos, right? I mean, through T1s and internet access. Absolutely. So you think about the big boys, the quests, the level threes, the horizons, the 18 T's of the world. And then you have some of the smaller players, but we're just trying to solve a little piece of the puzzle, a little piece of our world. But we're looking at dark fiber in a very disruptive model, as opposed to what other people are doing. But again, we're looking at it from a metro and a regional space as opposed to a long haul. So when you talk to customers, what's the top conversations you're having with them? Is it the pressure to have more bandwidth, security, devos, more development? What's the big driver right now? I think so. From my standpoint, for our optics, we see security as the first and foremost is that they're looking at, they even got to make sure that their networks are secure. And then from our standpoint, it's dedicated fiber, right? So you're not on a shared network. You're not in a shared environment. You're not buying lit services from a telco. You're actually buying dark fiber services from an infrastructure provider like Summit. So I would say security is number one. A close second would be performance, right? So they're looking for the best performing networks possible. No one's ever complained by getting more bandwidth, but they'll complain if they get less bandwidth. Absolutely, because you think about whether it's reliability or to your point, there's choke points in the network or capacity choke points, the user's going to suffer. Whether that's an employee, a partner, and a customer, whoever that is, that user community is going to suffer. So the CIOs are looking at infrastructure, going back to my other comment, as, hey, if we bring that in-house, will you sell us the dark fiber to go do that? And absolutely the answer is yes. So can you give me an example in your territory where you've seen examples of people using the internet for backhaul or connection from, you know, two different requests and destinations where it got shipped off to China or shipped overseas to Europe, some of the hijacking spoofing. Could you elaborate on that concept and share an example for the folks watching? Yeah, so I think, you know, from, you know, security is always going to be some, there's going to be breaches and vulnerabilities in the network, and that's the stuff that we all need to improve on. But the Direct Connect philosophy that we have here at console is allowing the end user, the enterprise, to control that infrastructure to the point of interconnection. And that's what we're doing for these guys in the metro space. But you see, whether you're coming into Ashburn and that's kind of your onboarding node, and then you're shipping stuff over to Asia, over to Europe, over to the West Coast, those are things that are happening. But if you can create that private peering environment and that fabric or interconnection fabric using us along with console, that's where the marriage really is. What's next for you guys outside of the territory? You get, you know, in the Virginia, there's very lucrative concentration there, it's pretty solid. Right, right. Any plans? Yeah, no, I think, you know, from our standpoint, we're laser focused on the marketplace that we're solving. We want to be, we want to solve that problem in a rich way within Northern Virginia. But we always look to figure out ways how do we can enrich that experience for our customers. So are there other areas within that marketplace that we can grow into? So whether that's in going further south or diversity into Richmond or Norfolk, or stuff that's within DC or something like that. But we look at our model in the sense of we want to make sure we do what we can here in Northern Virginia. And then we'd love to take into another market. Explain to the folks watching the value proposition for a console and what that really means. There's a lot of nuances behind what they're doing, but it's correct. It scales not only the bandwidth, but also the human capital component. Absolutely. But also the business has benefited. It's a trifecta. It's really a triple threat. Yeah, it is. I think, you know, from a user interface perspective and all the things that they're doing to make it an easy user experience, even if, whether you have the competency or you don't, they've made it very easy to do. And it's kind of a seamless network and automated. So that's some of the stuff that we like because we're behind the curtain and they can use our infrastructure to onboard those customers easy and efficiently. So from our standpoint, we're excited to be part of the program and part of the partnership. And I think there's more to be done here in the coming months. Explain to the folks watching live who didn't make this event. I guess it's the second event, first console event. IAX had their inaugural event last year, which we geeked out on the prospects of interconnections scaling. Now they're shipping, they're announcing console. What's the vibe of the show here? What's going on? What's the content like? What are they missing? I tell you what, they need to make it out here next year. This is going to become an annual event for them. From our standpoint, it's a great set of customers in the community, kind of the, there's a lot of buzz about kind of the unveiling of console and the interface that's out there, but just the people that are part of the entire ecosystem. You know, we're excited to be a partner with them, but I know everyone else that's here as part of this show is really see the value in kind of being part of this interconnection. Awesome, and just comments on the industry right now. What do you see this SDN interconnection connecting, I mean, is it converging or? Yeah, that's a good question. My crystal ball, it's been wrong in the past, so I can't tell you that I know where it's going to go, but what I'll tell you is that customers are more and more chewing up bandwidth. They're pushing more and more mission critical applications outside their firewall, and then with that, they need control and accessibility, and that's where we are. If you're an entrepreneur out there right now, put your entrepreneurial hat on. What does this do for entrepreneurs? It seems like there's a lot of opportunities to innovate around this whole console concept. Absolutely. What are some of those things that you'd see? I think, you know, from a standpoint of, you know, depending on which vertical you're in and kind of the skill skits you bring, I think, you know, whether you're in the financial vertical, high tech vertical, you know, media or content vertical, all those things are going to have value to something like this. So I think from an early startup or an entrepreneur standpoint, if you can get in with a lower cost of ownership and create the right experiences for your end users, you're going to succeed in a model like this. Okay, really appreciate you coming on theCUBE, sharing your insight. We are live in San Francisco for Console Connect. Hearing the perspective, what's going on at the fiber? Dark fiber is going to be lit up soon. If we have our way, there'll be no dark fiber left. We're going to have plenty of bandwidth flowing out of the sky and wireless. Thanks so much, I appreciate you spending the time. Thank you for taking your time. We'll be right back with more live coverage for Console Connect 2015 after this short break.