 Live from Massachusetts, here is your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, this is Stu Miniman with wikibond.org with SiliconANGLE TV on the ground at the VTUG Fall Forward 2014 event here at beautiful Gillette Stadium. Joining me for this segment is Jason Nash with the CTO of Arrow. Jason, first of all, welcome to the home of the Patriots, and what brings you to the Boston area today? Well, thank you. We came up here to do a couple of things this week. The first thing is we are soft launching of Arrow Boston. So we've started an office up here, started to hire, looking for a physical space. So we call this kind of our soft launch. And then I'm up here to help support the VTUG. I like this organization. I'm going to be doing a session on SDN and VMware NSX this afternoon. And we just thought it was a great time to kind of get everybody together and start talking about these things. All right, so Jason, you and I met many years back and some of the changes going on in the networking world, of course, SDN, the big battle going on between Cisco ACI, VMware NSX. Tell us a little bit about what you're going to be talking to the users here today and what conversations you have with your customers about SDN. So today, specifically NSX, kind of what I call a real world look at it, what it takes to implement, use it, what you actually get out of it. And that's also a lot of what I've been talking to customers because, you know, as you said, we've been talking about this for years. And now we actually have products. We have technology and products that we can implement, ACI, NSX. And customers are asking us to come in and kind of say, all right, give us a real lay of the land where things are now, whether they're going to be in a couple of years. Here's what our vision is. Here's our common use cases. What do you think we need to do? Which of these products do we need to look at and how deep do we need to go in today? So it's a lot of, I mean, we're kind of hitting where the rubber meets the road these days. You know, it's not just talk anymore. All right. Great comment. When I interviewed Martin Casado at VMworld, he said, it's now. It's exciting. It's happening. Can you talk to us about, you know, real deployments? Do you have customers that are piloting and rolling out NSX today? We do. So we have customers that are actually looking to pilot both of these. So I'll play kind of the political middle. But it really depends on the use cases. But yeah, we're doing POCs and pilots. I'm not going to say we've got really any production deployments yet. I know I would question that for a lot of people, but we're actually getting to that point. And actually, we had a customer dinner last night. And one of the great questions that I got after dinner was, why are we all talking about SDN now? I mean, just kind of why now? And I think the reason for that is what you just kind of hit on is we're actually doing true production, testing, pilots, POCs, whereas over the last couple of years, it's been a lot of talk, a lot of hype, a lot of pre-announcements. And now is the time to really start taking advantage. All right. So usually one of the big pivot points is when we get from kind of the vendor push as to why this is the great nest thing is to users having a poll as to a problem that they're solving or something is happening. What are the questions that customers are asking or what is the solution solving today to make their lives easier? I would bet you probably 90% of the briefings that I'm doing are security driven. A lot of discussion NSX specifically around Palo Alto integrations, micro segmentation, things like that. Very similar conversations on the ACI side. It's a little bit of automation orchestration, efficiencies heavily in the security space. And what's interesting about that to me is when SDN was first really being discussed, I saw that as the high level larger customers. These security discussions are the medium to large customers. It's really moving down to the stack, I think, to smaller organizations than a lot of us thought. And I actually had a conversation with one of the VMware person here today who said the same thing. We're seeing a lot of uptake in these medium sized environments that we didn't expect right away. And I agree, that's exactly what we're seeing. Yeah, so there's that kind of unspoken tension between some of the solutions out in the marketplace. Of course, Varo, you partnered with VMware, you partnered with Cisco. Are the customers really cognizant of most of that or is it just the noise that they mostly ignore? They're aware. I mean, they're obviously getting messaging from all the different angles and all the different sides. One of the things that we are trying to do is we're obviously a really great Cisco data center partner, great VMware partner. And a lot of my briefings that we have with customers are we come in, no manufacturers in the room. Let's talk about what you're trying to do. Let's talk about your use cases and let's see where these things fit. I think it's interesting, I'm fond of saying that a lot of these things don't directly compete. They overlap sometimes heavily, but there's not straight competition. And I think you're going to find a lot of environments that actually deploy both ACI and NSX for different reasons, but are very complementary when you get down to it. Jason, last question I have for you is, as we rolled in things like UCS and SDN, Varo really expanded to cover a broad spectrum of the stack, really a data center practice. How does cloud fit into the conversations that you're having with customers? Cloud is always part of the conversation. But what we're starting to see is kind of like the true utilization of hybrid cloud technologies now. Again, we're moving into, you can do this today, the technologies are there, the processors are there. Some of it is still kind of being worked out. Cisco is a great example. They are really starting to firm up their intercloud strategy, just have some briefings again with them. I think they have a really great roadmap and vision. I'm very interested to see how they execute on that over the next six to nine months. And again, customers are coming to us, what do you think about this? And it's an interesting melding of what Cisco wants to do, open stack, probably be a lot, I think a lot of our customers in that mid-size, that'll be their first taste of open stack when Cisco really starts to deploy intercloud. It's going to be interesting. Alright, so Jason, we're here at the Vtug. Last word I want to give you, when you talk to users, why do they come to VMware user groups, the virtualization technology user groups, or your own company's event, Varo Madness, what do they get out of them, what kind of interactions do you see that are so valuable? I think a lot of it is just peer networking. I think that's something people talk about, but don't really think that happens, but it definitely does. I mean, obviously, the sponsor booths and things are nice, but with social media and everything going on today, it's not hard to get information about the sponsors. It's really about sitting down at the lunch table or whatever and finding out that, guess what, the problems that you're facing and the challenges, a lot of other people are too, and you'll get some interesting ways to solve that and some interesting perspectives and kind of you'll get that unbiased opinion from people. And I think that's why people come to these things. Alright, thank you so much. Jason Nash from Varo, appreciate you taking time to talk to us. We'll be back with plenty more coverage from the VTUG.