 Live from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering Console Connect Live 2015. Sponsored by Console. There's your host, John Furrier. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in San Francisco for Console Connect 2015. This is theCUBE's special presentation. This is our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon National. I'm my co-host Jeff Frick, general manager of our CUBE business. Our next guest is Paul Camp, chief technology officer of IIX and Console Inc. All one new evolution, revolution, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, John, Jeff. It's been a long time coming. I'm looking forward to being here. So tell us, how did you get to IIX? What made you join? That's a great question. It's got a long story, so I hope we got plenty of time. Actually, I met Bill Norton 15 years ago when the United Nations Development Program paid Bill, my fellow friend of ours, Philip Smith, to be part of the team that were teaching Mongolia how to get on to the internet. So I've been involved in the internet community for a very long time. And when I caught up with Bill early last year, he was sharing with me the vision for IIX. Talked shortly with Albergio after that. And then once he realized what the vision is for this company, it was pretty hard to resist. And of course the CUBE videos. Of course the CUBE videos, yeah, I should mention that. Tell that story. So I was doing my background research on IIX and the founding members of the company. And you search for Albergio, and the first thing that shows up is the SiliconANGLE interview at the Peering2.o forum. And having a chance to hear Al talk about where he was going to take the company. And hearing you guys talk about the impact he had had on you in that event, it was a win for me. So it's amazing the shadow that you guys cast. All the way down under. All the way down under? Absolutely. We really appreciate it. And it's awesome working with you. We're talking about getting people on the internet who work you've done as pioneering. And I think one of the things that got me excited about IIX and what Bill, before they launched and talking to the team is this is the next generation re-architecting or re-platforming of what the internet should become or can become. So it's not pure internet per se. What Console Inc. is providing is actually two disruptive elements. You got the scale of bandwidth. And this social connection where you're scaling up the resources. So on DevOps, talk about 10X engineers. One engineer in the cloud is like 10Xs in the old days. Now you guys are the 10X networking company. Where you guys can do the same thing for networking. Explain what that phenomenon's all about. Yeah, so I think that one thing that really surprised me when I joined IIX and had an opportunity to hear more from Al and Bill and others about what their vision was was they kept talking about this ecosystem. They referred to the early, Bill's been in the community for a long period of time. He spent a lot of time building an ecosystem. They kept talking about, it's all about social. It's an aspect of social in helping networks get connected. It's network engineers getting to know and trust each other. So when we're building, when I was being asked to be part of the team to build the console platform, he kept saying, okay, we've got to be focused on socially. Interaction's got to be a core part of it. And at first blush, I didn't understand that. But as you will have seen for those who are here today and had an opportunity to see some of the customer interviews that we've done, we launched an early access program early in the year and several of the customers that have helped us develop the console platform kept reiterating back to me. I need to know who I'm connecting to. If this network connection should become an issue, I need to know who I can go to to be able to resolve those issues. It really is about fostering that ecosystem, about getting the connections. And as you refer to the 10 by DevOps engineer, we've got the 10 by network engineer. He's got that network. He's got that ability to liaise and trusted network. And we're helping accelerate that. First and foremost, it's been quite an eye-opening thing for me to realise that social was important. And obviously, that's been a core part of the platform console design. I think if I think about the other two things that have really helped us get to the point where we are today, you talked about the history of the internet. What's really afforded console to abstract so much complexity from the enterprise? Really, it's a few things that have happened over the last couple of years. First and foremost, it's software-defined networking. The fact that we can now automate a global fabric of 150 SDI nodes with something you couldn't do, or if you wanted to try and do it, it would have to be done at, you know, the cost of trying to achieve that personally would be too high. But now that we've got SDI technology, probably you've had an opportunity to meet with David Jorm today, an engineer at IAX, heavily involved in Open Daylight and the ONOS project. Obviously, SDI is a core part of our ability to automate a layer-two fabric. Network virtualisation, network function virtualisation. These are all disruptive trends. Agile's determined DevOps, but resiliency is the network concept. And we had Samuel Curtis from Rack 59 was on the key earlier. He said, you know, I'm a network engineer and I know how hard it is that goes on behind that push button provisioning you guys provide. Explain the complexity that you guys take away because to do what you do is not trivial. No, I certainly hope we've made it look that way. Well, that's the ideal, right? It's trivial, make it easy to use is a great thing. And I think what we've seen is, the enterprises have started to move their critical infrastructure outside the enterprise firewall and into the cloud. The enterprise no longer can not participate in direct connection. The enterprise has to be an active participant in direct connection, but it's complex. You refer to the DevOps challenge as just not that many good DevOps engineers. Well, it's even more compounded in the network environment where the core skills are not the sort of things that are taught at university. You don't come out with a university degree understanding BGP or to go through the complexity of, okay, which regional internet registry do I need to go to to get an ASN number? What is an ASN number? Why do I need one? So if you look at the fact that DevOps has driven this mass migration of enterprise applications outside the cloud, it's now put this immense pressure on the public internet, connecting the enterprise to those cloud applications. The only way for the enterprise to solve that is to be a participant in direct connection. It's interesting. The cloud brings a whole other level of paradigm shifting, mind-blowing paradigm shift where you think about the old days of internet working. Hub, switch, wide area, local area networks, that was a huge wealth creator, great disruptive opportunity. A lot of companies made a lot of money and also value for the cost down that deployed distributed computing. So now you have cloud and this idea of inter-clouding or traversing multiple cloud resources pools if you will, whether it's Azure, Amazon, VMware, what do you Google, whatever. That's a huge opportunity. But now the nuance is wherever the app sits, the workload is going to drive the policy. So it's actually flipped upside down. It's not the network to the app, it's the app down to the network. How does that affect what you guys do and why are you guys relevant in that conversation? That's a great question. I think it's relevant because we've taken ironically exactly the same things that have driven cloud adoption, virtualization, container technology, orchestration, and we've applied that to the network tier. So I described earlier how SDN's allowing us to create a global layer two fabric, but the real key I think that we hit upon in solving the problem for the enterprise is using that virtualization and container technology and applying it to routing. So you may or may not know, we're core sponsors of the CloudRouter project. So it's the ability for us to take on that routing component. Yeah, yeah, very proud of the work we've done with the CloudRouter project. A lot of core open source companies have backed us at launch, Cloudious, CloudVs, Nginx, a long list of OSV, a long list of companies that have helped to support us. Recently, the Australian National University has started contributing to the CloudRouter project. When we looked across the landscape of open source distributions, many of them are focused on meeting the needs up the stack. They're active participants in ensuring database applications run well on the operating system or they're focused on making sure the web servers run well on the operating system. We saw a gap in the community where they weren't focusing on down below the operating system. Where was the Linux distribution focused on meeting the needs of the network engineer? So we've really focused the CloudRouter project on being an open source distribution focused on solving the problem of routing. And that's the key to how we've been able to extract so much value from the enterprise because not only can configure a Layer 2 network, we can also take all the complexity of configuring Layer 3. So I want to drill down a little bit into that because you were at Red Hat for a long time so you clearly know the power of open source and you know the power of community to really drive innovation and to leverage that inside your enterprise. So talk about how you take a mad experience and leveraging that type of really horsepower, open source and community now with IAX and console. Great, well I guess the one thing that I've learned from the 20 year career in open source software is I wouldn't call it leverage. You have to respect and pay homage to the hard work of many engineers who contribute to open source projects. So first and foremost, our goal with the CloudRouter project is to give back to the community. You know, we're standing on the shoulders of giants. Open Daylight's got four or 500 participants. It's a massive code base, active, constant development. Onos is in a similar sort of camp coming up as the second in the race on who's going to lead open source SDN. So first and foremost, we wanted to give back to the community and give the network engineers that want to start to embrace open source, a vehicle for them to say, okay, you know, this package, this software application is relevant to me, but the traditional Linux distributions are not focused on making that part of the co-operating system. So that's an area where we think we add value back to the community. So that I think is the first thing that I learned is that it's not leverage, it's part of being active and contributing. It's sharing. It's sharing, that's the way. It's about being part of the system. Yeah, community. And so more specifically what we've learned from our time at Red Hat was that with Red Hat prior to the divergence into Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And that divergence really acknowledged the fact that there are two communities. The Fedora community is directly focused on the developer, fast release cycle, release early, release often. What a developer wants, right? A developer wants the latest libraries, the latest tools. The enterprise on the other hand wants stability. They want maintainability. They want good security management. So we're following that model to a large extent. Cloud Router is based on the most recent version of Fedora. We're pushing forward on ensuring that it includes the latest release of Open Daylight. Yeah, these are huge chunks of software and there's a lot of complexity in getting them working. And we think we can add value back to the community by doing that heavy lifting. And then obviously a version of that, Cloud Router, forms part of the heavy lifting we do on behalf of the enterprise in the labeling them to participate in direct connection. Paul, talk about the customer conversations. What are the big things you're hearing conversation-wise? And what should enterprises that aren't familiar with console, connect, or direct connection, understand about having their own autonomous system? Being an autonomous system is different than just plugging in to some bandwidth. Because they might say, hey, prices are dropping. Transit's down, so why, they might not be informed. So share your opinion on that. Great, thank you. So I think there's always that option I can just go by transit. But as we've seen over the, you know, 2015 is going to blow this off for 2014. 2016 is going to be even worse. I think a recent Gartner survey showed that 65% of IT professionals who are interviewed said that a denial of service attack can cost them $240,000 a day. And for one-fifth of those surveys, it was $1.2 million a day. So you have to acknowledge as an enterprise that if I'm going to use public internet or transit to get connected to my ERP or my CRM or my public-facing infrastructure, that I'm vulnerable to denial of service. That's only one of the issues with public internet. The other one, of course, is black-holing and hijacking, both of which refer to the fact that the internet's a network of networks. I described earlier how valuable these network engineers are. And those trust relationships are good people, doing the best they can. But it's only a several weeks ago that we had a large telco in Asia black-hauled big chunks of Europe because they made an error in their configuration. So suddenly all those packets that were destined for one destination suddenly get routed to another location. And all those packets get black-holed. So you need to, I guess, acknowledge the fact that sure, you can use transit if you like, but be aware of the risk involved. Yeah, it's like going out during wartime and not having any protection. You're always exposed. So I think what direct connection is, and you're asking, answering a question about ASNs, so to directly connect networks, that means that not only have you got a layer two connection between two locations and you can get a packet from one location to another, you're involved and engaged in routing. So I can advertise, these are my routes. This is my address. My good analogy is a zip code, right? So if I want to be able to send something via the US Postal Service, I got to give it a zip code. So think of an autonomous system number as a lot like a zip code. So, okay, here's this packet, now I know where it needs to go. And so you have to have an autonomous system number to participate in border gateway protocol. So if the enterprise wants to be truly directly connected to Google or Amazon or Azure, they have to be involved in BGP. They have to have an ASN and consoles help to solve all of that for them. The analogy we heard earlier in the queue was first class and coach. And I'm like, well, why not just a fleet of new jets? So what is the analogy that you guys like to use? Because this is a new class of service. It provides kind of the architectural foundation for end-to-end architecture, which you look at SDN and virtualization and some of the things going on with containers and application development. People want an end to end network, especially with the growth of internet of things. The edge of the network now is just as important as the core. So that's an end-to-end architecture. You're seeing the big guys all lining up. EMC's under siege from Hedge Fund, Gordon Gekko's of the world, because it's just a storage company. This HP's a server company. Dell's transforming. They're all kind of integrating in. Yeah, I agree. So the analogy we like to use, and now go to your point of phrase, your direct connect to.o. So if we look at the traditional one.o, it's the large SaaS application providers or the EMCs of the world who've been able to acquire the skills required to be part of that direct connect community. But now that all of the enterprise are moving, they're no longer running core infrastructure. The CIO today is far more focused on choosing the correct SaaS provider and the correct SLA than they were five years ago on building and maintaining private infrastructure. All of that mission critical infrastructure is now moving outside the enterprise firewall. It's now about the edge is, where is the edge, right? So I think- Well, it's perimeter-less. Yeah. It's perimeter-less. And the edge is everywhere, right? Exactly. Security's upside down. And now you've got edges that need to have low latency, real time, no jitter. I mean, this is like the new normal. It begs the question, why wouldn't they? I mean, what's holding back? Is it simply the skill set? Is it simply the ease? Is it prioritization? I mean, I don't hear a lot of reasons why not to direct connect on most of your core traffic and applications. Yeah, and I think that's where a console and IX comes in to add value because there is a lot of complexity to this. First, you'd have to know that you need a BGP. Then you got to know that you need an ASM. So you've got to find and retain a scare resource of a network engineer who's got the experience to do it. Then you've got to submit your articles of incorporation to one of the regional internet registries, acquire an ASM. Then you've got to configure your BGP peering session. Then you've got to work out, okay, who do I want to connect to and where are they? So then you've got to find the organization that you want to connect to. And that's a challenge, right? You don't, if I go to this data center, does that mean I'm going to be able to establish a direct connection to all the trading partners I want? Or am I going to have to establish multiple connections to multiple islands to get the richness of connectivity I need? We have one example of a customer here today who is using 50 SaaS applications. Now, what's the chance that I can get a piece of dark fiber, a network engineer, a sufficient experience in an ASM, and send my connection to one data center and get all 50 SaaS applications? That's not the case. Well, even if you could pull it off, that's like putting everything on the string, right? One time, how long is it going to take? Time and cost. What's the time scale on that? Months, years, weeks, I mean, it's a long time. Testing, QA, development. So one, time to market, time to value. And two, capability. Yeah, exactly. All right, so I've got to ask you the hard question. So I get the cost piece, right? No brainer, the hidden cost with DDoS and all managing all that, totally get it. No brainer on costs. What future enablement does that give the company? In terms of headroom, what value can be created? What creative license could they take? What could they do with that extra time, that resource? How do you guys see that? What's your vision? Great. So we've taken a design-driven development approach with the console platform. We've worked very closely with some core early access partners to help us develop that platform. So what we learned from our customers was to focus our design around four core areas. Trust, control, performance and automation. So that's where I think we're going to continue to add value to the enterprise. We've learned about how network engineers need to establish trust. If I'm going to directly connect my network to your network, I need to know how to get in contact with you. I need to know that your contact information is up to date, and we all know the quality of data increases with use. So that's why we've integrated aspects of social community to achieve that. Okay, we're out of time. Paul, appreciate your time. Give you the final word. What is this show about for the folks watching live right now and on demand? Who aren't here? What have they missed? What's the vibe? What's this core show about Console Connect all about today? I think the core value proposition is learning what we've been building. Where it's the unveiling of the console platform. It's the unveiling of what we described earlier. A social platform that provides layer three and layer two automation so the enterprise can directly connect to SaaS applications, cloud providers, trading partners, as simple as clicking a button. Paul, thanks so much. CTO of IIX and Console Inc. He is sharing his insight. Thanks for that great insight. On theCUBE, we'll be back more live from San Francisco for Console Connect Live 2015. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back.