 From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to this special exclusive presentation from the CUBE. We're digging into Pensando and their future-proof your enterprise event. To help kick things off, welcoming in friend of the program, Scott Renevich. He is the principal analyst at Futurum, coming to us from Montana. I believe first time we've had a guest on the program in the state of Montana. So, Scott, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks, Stu, happy to be here. All right, so we're gonna dig a lot into Pensando. They've got their announcement with Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Might help with give a little bit of background and definitely I want Scott and I to talk a little bit about where things are in the industry, especially what's happening in networking and how some of the startups are helping to impact what's happening on the market. So, for those that aren't familiar with Pensando, if you followed networking, I'm sure you are familiar with the team that started them. So, they are known for those of us that watch the industry as MPLS, which are four people, not to be confused with the protocol MPLS, but they had very successfully done multiple spin-ins for Cisco, Andiamo Nuovo and NCME, which created FiberTanel switches, the Cisco UCS and the ACI product line, so multiple generations of the Nexus. And Pensando is their company. They talk about future proof your enterprise as the proof point that they have today, talking about the new edge. John Chambers, the former CEO of Cisco is the chairman of Pensando. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is not only an investor, but also a customer, an OEM piece of this solution. And so, very interesting piece. And Scott, I want to pull you into the discussion. The waves of technology, I think the last 10, 15 years of networking, a lot of it has been, can Cisco be disrupted? So, software-defined networking was, let's get away from hardware, and drive towards more software, lots of things happening. So, your commentary, just some of the macro trends you're seeing, Cisco's position in the marketplace, how the startups are impacting them. Sure, Stu. I think it's very exciting times right now in networking because we're just at the point where we kind of have this long battle of software-defined networking, like you said, really pushed by the startups, and there's been a lot of skepticism along the way, but you're starting to see some success. And the way I describe it is, we're really on the third generation of software-defined networking. You have the first generation, which was really one company, NYSERA, which VMware bought and turned into their successful NSX product, which is a virtualized networking solution, if you will. And then you had another round of startups, people like BigSwitch and Cumulus Networks, all of which were acquired in the last year. BigSwitch went to Arista, and Cumulus just got purchased by, who were they purchased by, Stu? Purchased by NVIDIA, who interestingly enough, they just picked up Melanox. So, watch NVIDIA build out their stack. Sorry, I was having a senior moment. It happens to us analysts, but yeah. So NVIDIA is kind of rolling up these data center networking plays, which is interesting, because NVIDIA is not a traditional networking hardware vendor, it's a chip company. So, what you're seeing is kind of this vision of what they call the industry disaggregation, having the different components, sold separately, and then of course Cisco announced the plan to roll out their own chip. And sell that disaggregated from the network as well. So I think that's, when Cisco did that, they acknowledged that this is successful, basically. They acknowledged that disaggregation is happening. It's originally driven by the large public cloud providers like Microsoft Azure and Amazon, which started the whole disaggregation trend by acquiring different components, and then melding it all together with software. So it's definitely the future. And so there's a lot of startups in this area to watch. I'm watching many of them. They include Arcus, which is a exciting new routing vendor. Drive Nets, which is another virtualized routing vendor. This company Alkira, which is gonna do routing fully in the cloud, multi-cloud networking. Aviatrix, which is doing multi-cloud networking. All these are basically software companies. They're not pitching hardware as part of their value add or their integrated package, if you will. So it's a different business model and it's gonna be super interesting to watch because I think the third generation is the one that's really gonna break this all apart. Yeah, you brought up a lot of really interesting points there, Scott, that disaggregation and some of the changing landscape. Of course, that more than a billion dollar acquisition of NYSERA by VMware caused a lot of tension between VMware and Cisco. Interesting, I think back to when Cisco created the UCS platform, it created a ripple effect in the networking world also. HP was a huge partner of Cisco's before UCS launched and not long after UCS launched, HP stopped selling Cisco gear. They got heavier into the networking component and then here many years later we see who does the MPLS team partner with when they're no longer part of Cisco and Chambers is no longer the CEO. Well, it's HPE front and center there. You're gonna see John Chambers at HPE Discover. So it was a long relationship in Chamed and from the chip companies, Intel, of course, has built a sizable networking business. We talked a bit about Mellanox and the acquisitions they've done. One you didn't mention but caused a huge impact in the industry and something that Pensanda was responding to is Amazon bought Anaperna Labs and Anaperna Labs, a small Israeli company and really driving a lot of the innovation when it comes to compute and networking at Amazon, the Graviton compute and Nitro is what powers their outpost solutions. So if you look at Amazon, they buy lots of pieces. It's that mixture of hardware and software. In early days people thought that they just bought kind of off the shelf white boxes and did it cheap but really we see Amazon really hyper-optimizes what they're doing. So Scott, let's talk a little bit about Pensanda if we can. Amazon with the Nitro solutions built outposts which is their hybrid solution. So the same stack that they put in Amazon, they can now put in customers data center. What Pensanda is positioning is, well, other cloud providers and enterprise rather than having to buy something from Amazon, we're going to enable that. So what do you think about what you've seen and heard from Pensando and what's that need in the market for these type of solutions? Yes, okay. So I'm glad you brought up outposts because I should have mentioned this next trend. We have the, if you will, the disaggregated open software-based networking which is going on. It started in the public cloud but then you have another trend taking hold which is the so-called edge of the network which is going to be driven by the emergence of 5G and technology called CBRS and different wireless technologies that are emerging at the so-called edge of the network. And the purpose of the edge, remember, is to get closer to the customer, get larger bandwidth and compute and storage closer to the customer. And there's a lot of people excited about this including the public cloud providers. Amazon's building out their outposts. Microsoft has an edge stack, the Azure Edge Stack that they've built. They've acquired a couple of companies for a billion dollars. They acquired MetaSwitch. They acquired Affirm Networks. And so all these public cloud providers are pushing their cloud out to the edge with this infrastructure, a combination of software and hardware. And that's the opportunity that Pensando is going after with this outposts theme. And it's very interesting, Stu, because the co-operation is very tenuous. A lot of players are trying to occupy this edge. If you think about what Amazon did with public cloud, they sucked up all of this IT compute, power and services applications and everything moved from these enterprise private clouds to the public cloud and Amazon's market cap exploded, right? Because they were basically sucking up all the money for IT spending. So now if this moves to the edge, we have this arms race of people that want to be on the edge, whether that takes the way to visualize it as a mini cloud, whether this mini cloud is at the edge of Costco so that when Stu's shopping at Costco, there's AI that follows you in the store and knows everything you're gonna do and predicts you're gonna buy this cereal and we're gonna give you a deal today. Here's a coupon, this kind of big brotherish AI tracking thing, which is happening whether you like it or not, or autonomous vehicles that need to connect to the edge and have self-driving and have very low latency services very close to them, whether that's on the edge of the highway or wherever you're going in the car, you might not have time to go back to the public cloud to get the data. So it's about pushing these compute and data services closer to the customers at the edge and having very low latency and having lots of resources there, compute, storage and networking and that's the opportunity that Pensando is going after and of course HPE is going after that too and HPE as we know is competing with its other big mega competitors, primarily the Dell VMware combo and the Cisco machine. So at the same time, the service providers are interested in this as well and they have, by the way, they have infrastructure, they have central offices all over the world so they are thinking that can be an edge and you have the data center people, the equinixes of the world who also own real estate and data centers that are closer to the customers in the metro areas. So you really have this very interesting dynamic of all these big players going after this opportunity, putting in money, resources and trying to acquire the right technology. Pensando is right in the middle of this, they're going after this opportunity, using the P4 networking language and a specialized ASIC and a NIC that they think is going to accelerate processing and networking at the edge. Yeah, you laid out a lot of really good pieces there Scott. As you said that the first incarnation of this, it's a NIC and boy, I think back to years ago, it's like, well, we tried to make the NIC really simple or do we build intelligence in it? How much the hardware versus software discussion? What I found interesting is if you look at this team, they were really good at the end, they made a chip. It was a switch, it's an ASIC, it became compute and if you look at the technology available now, they're building a lot of your networking just in a really small form factor. You talked about P4, it's highly programmable. So the theme of future proof of your enterprise, with anything you say, ah, you know, what is it, it's a piece of hardware. Well, it's highly programmable, so today they position it for security, telemetry, observability, but if there's other services that I need to get to the edge, so you laid out really well a couple of those edge use cases and if something comes up and I need that in the future, well, just like we've been talking about for years with software defined networking and network function virtualization, I don't want a dedicated appliance, it's going to be in software and a form factor like Pensando does, I can put that in lots of places. They're positioning, they have a cloud business which they sell direct and expect to have a couple of the cloud providers using the solution here in 2020 and then the enterprise business and obviously a huge opportunity with HPE's position in the marketplace to take that to a broad customer base. So interesting opportunities, so many different pieces, flexibility of software, as you laid Scott, it's a complicated co-operation out there. So I guess what would you want to see from the market and what is success from Pensando and HPE if they make this generally available this month, it's available on ProLiance, it's available on GreenLake, what would you want to be hearing from customers or from the market for you to say further down the road that this has been highly successful? Well, I want to see that it works and I want to see that people are buying it. So it's not that complicated. I mean, I'm being a little superficial there, but it's hard sometimes to look in these technologies, they're very sophisticated and sometimes it comes down to whether they perform, they deliver on the expectation. But I think there are also questions about the edge. The pace of investment, we're obviously in a recession and we're in a very strange environment with the pandemic, which has accelerated spending in some areas, but also throttle back spending in other areas. And 5G is one of the areas that appears to have been throttled back a little bit, this big explosion of technology at the edge, nobody's quite sure how it's going to play out, when it's going to play out. Also, who's going to buy this stuff? Personally, I think it's going to be big enterprises, it's going to start with the big box retailers, the Walmarts, the Costco's of the world, who by the way, Walmarts in a big competition with Amazon. And I think one of the news items you've seen in the pandemic is all these online digital e-commerce sales of Skyrocket, obviously, because people are staying at home more. They need that intelligence at the edge, they need that infrastructure. And one of the things that I've heard is the thing that's held it back so far is the price. They don't know how much it's going to cost. So we actually ran a survey recently, targeting enterprises buying 5G and that was one of the number one concerns, like how much does this infrastructure cost? So I don't actually know how much Pensando costs, but they're going to have to deliver the right ROI. Like if it's a very expensive, proprietary, Nick, who pays for that and does it deliver the ROI that they need? So we're going to have to see that in the marketplace. And by the way, Cisco's going to have the same challenge and Dell's going to have the same challenge. They're all racing to supply this edge stack, if you will, packaged with hardware, but it's going to come down to how is it priced, what's the ROI, and are these customers going to justify the investment is the trick. Absolutely, Scott, really good points there too. Of course, the HPE announcement, big move for Pensando, doesn't mean that they can't work with the other server vendors, they absolutely are talking to all of them. And we will see if there are alternatives depends on whether they come up or if they end up signing up. All right, so what we have here is I've actually got quite a few interviews with the Pensando team, starting with, I talked about MPLS, we have Prem, Jane, and Sony, Giandani, who are the P. And the S in MPLS is part of it, both co-founders, Prem is the CEO. We have Silvano Guy, who if anybody that followed this group writes the book on it. If you've watched all the way this far and want to learn even more about it, I actually have a few copies of Silvano's book, so if you reach out to me, easiest ways on Twitter, just hit me up at atstu. I've got a few copies of the book about Pensando, which you can go through all those details about how it worked, the programmability, what changes and everything like that. So we've also of course got Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and while we don't have any customers for this segment, Scott mentioned many of the retail ones, Goldman Sachs is kind of the marquee early customer, so did talk with them, I have Randy Pond who's the CFO, talking about they've actually seen an increase beyond what they expected at this point of being out of stealth, only a little over six months, even more, which is important considering that it's tough times for many startups coming out in the middle of a pandemic. So watch those interviews, please hit us up with any other questions. Scott Rainovich, thank you so much for joining us to help talk about the industry and this Pensando partnership extending with HPE. Thanks Stu, always a pleasure to join the CUBE team. All right, check out the CUBE.net for all the upcoming as well as if you just search Pensando on there, you can see everything we had on there. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching the CUBE. Innovation, impact, influence. Welcome to the CUBE disruptors, developers and practitioners, learn from the voices of leaders who share their personal insights from the hottest digital events around the globe. Enjoy the best this community has to offer on the CUBE, your global leader in high-tech digital coverage. From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to this Pensando event. We're talking about how Pensando is helping to future-proof your enterprise. Really happy to welcome back to the program. Prem Jayne, he is the CEO of Pensando. Prem, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. All right, so we had the opportunity. Jeff Frick was at the launch when Pensando came out of stealth. Of course, we were all together there, New York City. Beautiful views at the Goldman Sachs office in New York City. We had John Chambers there and Tony O'Neary. And really explaining to the world what your team is doing and giving that amount to the world. We're a little bit more than six months later. So just first, give us the update. How's your team been doing? Obviously, when people come out of stealth or have any major things going on, you can't necessarily predict when things like a pandemic or global financial situations are happening. But how's the team doing? And give us the updates since last week's talk. Yeah, sure. Sure, thank you. It was a great launch actually we had and that was in October. Since then, the company had made tremendous progress in all different areas of the company. So let me start with a number of people. We have grown to 250 plus people in the company. We filled up all our key positions in the company and we are really making very good progress with the whole overall team. Product-wise, we continuously delivering since October last year. We had made multiple releases for the enterprise customers. We have made multiple releases for the cloud customers. And we also have done work with some other service provider customers. And the product is really doing very well in these environments. We have partners like you mentioned in the Discover show. HP is going to launch our cards into their server. This is the official launch. We are already shipping to some customers. And this particular thing is with all their servers as well as with a GreenLake product. We continue to work with our cloud partners and there also we have done multiple releases to them and they will all go in production in next six months time frame. We also have a lot of interest. We are seeing it from the service provider customers and we are working with a few of them. I cannot mention the name at this particular point but we will share with you once that information becomes available. And they are very excited about the technologies which we have and they think this innovation which we're bringing it to the market is really great for the edge market in the cloud as well as edge of the service provider. I'll cut to the end of the video. Congratulations Prima on the progress there. Of course, HPE was an investor and expected to be an OEM. So getting that less than a year from when you've come out of stealth to being generally available this month, great milestone there. And as you said, you've already got some early customers using it. Help us understand when the company first launched your team has a very storied pedigree. Everyone in the network industry knows what you've done before when I was waiting to watch when you were in stealth it's like, okay, well, I know there's going to be a chip and we'll see how all the software that's happening in the world is going to change that. So very much edge is one of the key use cases that you talk about that you're enabling but help our audience understand a little bit. If I'm an HPE customer and I'm looking at GreenLake, I'm looking at ProLiant, what are those things that I'm doing that says, oh, hey, HPE is now going to offer this to me? Yeah. So I think what the customer is going to get from the very beginning is HPE is going to ship our DSC card into the server. And that's make the server to a future proof. And the reason for that is because initially they're just using the networking capabilities but then going forward, they can enable security capabilities. We can do like distributed firewall. They can do distributed load balancing. We can provide the encryptions. We can provide the capability of making it sure the system is highly secure. We have created a air gap between the host and the network itself. They can also making it sure that they can get the visibility on the networking side as well as the application is very close to the application edge. Security is the right place to be close to where the application is running on the server. And then we provide the capability with a policy and service manager so that they can manage life cycle of this particular products into all these servers which is installed as well as making it sure they can enable all these features and capabilities based upon the object model. Yeah, excellent, absolutely. Security needs to be everywhere. So when they think about edge models, how do I get into those devices? So therefore, form factor of a card that fits in, seems to be well. We've talked about it at the launch. Goldman Sachs was a customer of yours there. Very well known in the enterprise space. Financial services needs to make sure security's there. Needs to understand that. Maybe speak to that enterprise customer and if there's anything specifically with how Goldman sees this rolling that could help illustrate a little bit more of what you're doing. So we start shipping to Goldman right after the launch as we talked about in the launch itself. They have since then, they are now expanding it and rolling it out more servers and capabilities into their environment, particularly using distributed firewall and other capabilities, which is they wanted to make sure that it get deployed into their environment. And one of the things which is we are looking at it also is that we want it to be, for every future servers they buy, we want to be part of it and then they can enable all these services related to like I talked about before, firewall, load balancing, micro segmentation, other capabilities, containers down the road to make sure that we can provide storage also as a part of it. So we can enable them to deploy those services and that makes it also in their case a future proof once they deployed, roll out this particular capabilities. At the same times, we have more than 10 to 12 customers, which is we are doing a Poc and these are all very large enterprise customers and the Poc so far is going very well and these customers again will deploy different capabilities of the product starting in Q3, Q4 this year. So Poc is going very well and we are very excited about working with these customers and these are name brand customers. Once you will see it, once we will announce it, you will see this is really making a difference in their environment. You talk about the capabilities that customers are using today and then the roadmap of services that they will be able to add on top of that. Obviously, if you're talking about future proof, I shouldn't change the hardware, but how do I think about it from a customer standpoint? Is it similar to kind of a SaaS model as to how things updated? Do I purchase it more as it's gripped in than as a feature card? How should I be thinking that from a consumption model or the finance team when you say, oh, there's all these wonderful things, what will that do to my cost over time? No, absolutely, I think it's a very good point. The way the customers should think about it is that they're getting, one is the piece of the hardware which provides these capabilities and then on top of it, the subscription model which allows them to pay in three years or if they want to buy it all in once, they can also do that. It's a very cost-effective way of deploying these services. This is a new paradigm. This is a world of distributed services paradigm. And I think this will allow them to scale up, scale down, whatever is needed because by the time you add this card into a server, you are basically adding these capabilities in every server and more servers you're going to add. You don't need to worry about, do I need to add this particular capabilities on the servers? You can enable whatever is necessary to enable in that server. And it's a very cost-effective model once you enable these services, encryptions, compressions, firewall, load balancing, all the networking services and storage services. Once you enable all those, it's very cost-justifiable in terms of deploying these capabilities. So when I think about HPE and their history, you market very much, they offer flexibility. They want things to be really simple when they go out the door. You've both partnered with them as well as created competing products with HPE in the past. So it gives a little bit more as to what Pensando plus HPE will deliver to the marketplace. Yeah, I think it's a very good partnership so far. I think then we assume that this is going to continuously get better and better. The reason I think is very important because instead of just selling a classic server, HPE is now had the ability to provide the security solutions, networking solutions, as well as storage solutions to their customers. And this one is really providing all these services, simplifying the design of the network and also making it sure that the customers can enable all these capabilities wherever they want. It's a model which is unprecedented in the sense of it's a totally distributed and the customers should be able to enable whatever the service they need there even if they didn't plan it in the past. Yeah, excellent. We very much these days talk about how important data is and I need to be able to deliver services where the data is. So very much a discussion of the cloud as well as the edge. So it sounds like this is extending the importance of that data and being able to bring those services very much where the data is being created and serviced in real time. Okay, so the HPE relationship obviously gives you a good chunk of the enterprise business but down the road should we be thinking about other partnerships and potentially even other OEM relationship? Yes, I think, like I said, we are working with two or three major cloud vendors and they will be rolling it out by the end of this year. And they see themselves like we said, we are going to democratize the cloud based upon the fact that the only solution which is Amazon has based upon the Nitro we are now providing the capabilities to all the cloud vendors and they can take this particular technologies and integrate in their environment which is what we are providing the software stack and they are integrating and they will be going into the productions and providing more capabilities, more features and stuff like that and then what the competition will provide. So this is really an excellent opportunity both for us as well as for our cloud vendor partner. Yeah, one of the key things when you hear talk of what AWS is doing with Nitro and the Outpost solution is they talk about from a hardware standpoint and a software standpoint they pull certain things off of the software layer to be able to have the B-Bore performing but also it's both in the cloud and in your location whether that be an edge data center with Outpost it's the same on both ends. So it should I be thinking of this in a similar model that you need to, I guess where is it that it would be an enterprise only play and what considerations is it between enterprise and cloud when you'd be buying it from multiple vendors if they're enabled by your solution? Absolutely and I think for the enterprise the people who wants to build their own cloud I think this is provided a really excellent solution because all the capabilities which we have will provide all the features which you can get from the cloud vendors in that particular sense. And if you are in the cloud you can provide the scale and capabilities to the cloud vendors. So the combination is a very powerful solutions between you can get the same services whether you are in a premise or leveraging the cloud. And that can give also hybrid opportunities you can run same capabilities, same features in the hybrid cloud model where you're running some on your premises and some running in the cloud itself. Excellent. All right. So, Prem, you've got the solution coming out with HPE you talked a little bit about some of the other partnerships in the cloud partners there gives a little bit priorities for the second half of 2020. Yeah, so I think the first half we have done very well financially also we are running almost close to 50% ahead of our forecast where we were at this particular point. Going forward I think we need to make sure that we execute based upon the current roadmap which we have and making it so that we meet the customer's expectations and our partner's expectations. And also I want to also give you another thing is that which is our plan is basically our second generation innovation also is going to come in very soon and we will be able to take that into the production also on the first half of next year. So I think overall for the second half we have a pretty good opportunity to really capture with our solutions as well as looking forward to win some more design wins both with our current solutions as well as the new solutions that we are going to take into the production. All right, well, Premjean let me just give you the final word as to how customers should be thinking about Pensando as they look to future-proof their enterprise. Absolutely, I think based on the history we are known as a innovation machine in the industry and we continuously to do better and better. So I think the people should think about us is providing really looking at this transition which is happening in the enterprise cloud as well as in the service provider space and we will provide the solution which is really will meet their expectations and the solution is consistent whether it's for VMs, whether it's for containers whether it's for bare metal services and providing all these services in a very consistent manner. Well, thank you so much for the updates. Congratulations on the continued steps along with HPE and definitely look forward to catching up with you and the team in the future. Thank you very much for giving me this opportunity and definitely we will talk six months from now and again see how much progress we have made and what I told you and I will compare the notes and say this is what we have done better. All right, stay tuned. We have a lot of interviews with some of the Pensando teams as well as the partnership with HPE. I'm Stu Miniman, check out theCUBE.net for all of the background on this and thank you for watching. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. I've been an analyst with Wikibon and a co-host theCUBE since 2010. Before that I've worked in the tech industry for many years at a number of different companies. My background really is in networking, virtualization, cloud computing since the early days. I really love the intersections of some of the technologies. I've spent most of my career before being an analyst, working with customers, helping them improve their challenges and how to take advantage of new technologies and continue that through the research I've done at Wikita, lots of practitioners. We really believe that theCUBE is a unique property. We help both the practitioners share with their peers what's happening as well as give a broad audience a view to what's coming down the road how to take advantage of that. We give people an insight into what's happening at events. It's a great way to learn more, to find more about people and to take advantage of some of that technology. It's been an exciting journey working with theCUBE. We get to go out to so many shows, help extract the signal from the noise, interact with such a wide variety of clientele, both practitioners, thought leaders, the big name industry people and we've helped some people raise their profiles in there. Especially love working with those practitioners. We've seen them move their careers forward and move their businesses forward as they take advantage of technologies and practices that they've learned talking with us, working with our research people and working with their peers. This is Stu Miniman, thanks for watching theCUBE. From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to this special CUBE presentation. We're talking with Pensando and their event is Future-Proof Your Enterprise to help us really understand where the company is and the partnerships, what they're hearing from customers. Really happy to welcome back to our program, Randy Pond. He is the Chief Financial Officer at Pensando. Randy, thanks so much for joining us. My pleasure, thanks for having me. All right, well, Randy, obviously today, we're talking to people everywhere, they're remote. So not quite as plush as the last time we talked to you at the Goldman Sachs office in New York City, beautiful view in the background, but that was a great backdrop. When you talk about bringing a company out of stealth, John Chambers there, your chairman, Antonio Neary, talking about the investment and the partnership and Goldman Sachs, an excellent customer there. Here we are a little bit more than six months later and that partnership with HPE is taking the next step. You've got the general availability this month of the HPE ProLiant with Pensando Solutions. Bring us up to speed a little bit though. We'll talk about HPE maybe in a second, but your customers, your progress, you had, I believe it was up to your C round of funding when you came out of stealth. So give us your viewpoint as to where the company is today. So today I think we're sort of divided conversation between financial and from a business perspective. So financially, we're in great shape. The C round came together very well. We were way over subscribed. We raised our limits to secure additional funding which has worked out really well given where we are currently with the pandemic. So financially we're in great shape. Our case burn is held steady and we've done a good job of forecasting that. So I think the board's pleased. From a business perspective, we've done a really good job delivering on our roadmaster product perspective. So the team has released the cloud production. We're going to release the cloud of customers about a month or two ago. We just did a release to the enterprise space, the HPE. We got another release coming up at the end of this month. There's releases scheduled for Q3 and Q4 this year. Our second ASIC will come back, I think the 15th of June. So we're going to get access to our new design. I think that's great news. Some of our cloud customers are excited about that because it provides a little more capability than the current device does. So and we had a great Q1 and we're off to a great start on Q2. Are we overachieved in Q1? We look like we're going to overachieve again in Q2, both in terms of units and dollars. So we're in a pretty good place. Yeah, I like, we can break down to kind of the financial and the business piece. On the financial side piece, you've worked with this team for quite a long time. There's got to be a different financial model that you put in place when you know that you've got really your exit built in had from the three spin-ins before. It proved the product, get it out there. And then, well, I've got an in-house team with the full channel there as opposed today. Is the model we should be thinking, what percentage of that is OEM? You talk about, there's the cloud model and the enterprise model. And how do you structure things a little bit differently for that time of model versus maybe what the spin-ins were or a traditional startup that might have a few different models to choose from? So we're much closer aligned to a traditional startup environment. Now, the one unique point is the HPE relationship because they've been my primary, they are my primary go-to-market partner in the enterprise space today. They're also a strategic investor. So the reality is in the enterprise space, we have to sell the product through the OEMs. Most of the average enterprise customer doesn't have the capacity to install himself. That's a very different model than is in the cloud side. So it's an indirect sales model, most likely through HPE and other server providers like Dell, Cisco possibly, Supermicro, every customer has their sort of requested server manufacturer. On the cloud side, the individuals build their own. So that's a, I shifted them and they installed it themselves. It's a different software model. It's a different manufacturing model. And we have a more traditional direct sales model on that side where we've got a partner enable my model on the enterprise side today. We've set him up as both. HPE sort of serves like a quasi Cisco environment for us because we're depending on their engine to find our leads and it's worked out really, really well. Excellent. Maybe bring us inside a little bit where you are with what you think about customer acquisition leading up to now and what's the expectation now that HPE is fully ready to roll. So we, let me split the conversation again. There's the cloud side. So on the cloud side, we have three committed customers today. One is in production. The other two are going into production later part of this year. They need the release. We're going to give them in September, October timeframe, but they've committed to us from a design perspective. And then there's a follow on generation of product in 21 where they really ramp hard. I've already have a signed contract with two while I'm working on the third. On the enterprise side, we're, we're modeling ourselves after the top 200 HPE customers right now. So they normally align themselves around financial services, pharmaceuticals, transportation, sled. We're working through those customers. We have active POPs and many of them today. They're in ourselves pipeline. We manage that relationship together. Generally HPE opens the door. We explain the technology to the technical team. They say they can see a place for us. They let us stand up a POP. And then we go from there. Excellent. So Randy, you know, we reference the global pandemic going on right now. It's been a bit of a bifurcated model in the tech world. It's been definitely a tailwind, somewhat from the cloud standpoint. There's many infrastructure pieces that have seen us, you know, an immediate acceleration, things like work from home technology. So, you know, there's certain devices and certain deployments. And there's other things that of course, you know, we put a pause button trying too much uncertainty out there. What are you seeing out in the market? And how's that impacting? You know, you as a relatively new start on it. So in general, your point is well taken, the cloud players are telling us their demand is up dramatically. And therefore the signal they're sending us is they want to accelerate deployment. And it's likely it's going to be bigger than we had originally had estimated. So that's been great news for us. In the enterprise space, it's really very different. You know, we're not selling a lot of, you know, product of Walmart or Gap or the retail space. They're, they're struggling mightily than any hotels, motels. Carnival lines is not buying our product today, but if you look at the financials, if you look at the farmers, their demands up quite a bit. They're both buying ahead a little bit to hedge their bets in the supply chain for a situation today. And they're actually seeing their real demand go up. The banks especially have seen it go up that their work from home has gone through the roof. So it's been a, it's been a good opportunity for us to sort of seize the moment and demonstrate how we can be part of their new implementations and bring new services to them. Yeah, Randy, wondering if you can actually, you know, give us a little bit of that voice of the customer. And, you know, what is the problem you're solving? Because, you know, we talked about there, there's certain immediate initiatives that companies need to take care of. You know, absolutely like today, security is more important than ever. You know, when, when people are working from home, the bad actors actually are trying even harder to get involved there. We talked a little bit about clouds. So, you know, what is that itch that Pensando scratches and therefore, how do you fit into the current land? Sure. You know what our customers today is, there's similar problems and dissimilar problems between the cloud and the enterprise. The similar problems is that Pensando quickly solves things like east-west security inside of their environments or compute environments, which is difficult to do today. It's expensive and difficult to do today. And we provide it pervasively at wire rate. So that's a sort of an easy sell initially. The other one that's been pretty easy for everyone to look at is observability and telemetry. Because we're, we're positioned in the compute space, we see every packet, which provides us with a lot of knowledge about what's going on in their environment. So that's been a pretty easy initial sell. In the, in the case of the enterprise customers, you know, we can solve other pieces of their solution that are either expensive or introduced latency or management problems, whether it's firewall technology or load balancing technology or micro segmentation technology, all of which we can do inside of our blade. And today has done either through appliances or through virtual machines consuming CPUs. In the cloud space, we do all of that. Plus we allow them to download their own image into our devices today, which is pretty powerful. We've got a, we have a lot of memory and we have a lot of capacity from an ARM core perspective. And we allow them to pick and choose the features and functionalities they want and then run everything at wire speeds at much faster speeds. The enterprise is running 10, 25. The cloud partners are running 25, 50 going to 100 where we're even more compelling, we think. Randy, I want to get back to talk a little bit more about HPE, you know, you spent long time working at Cisco. For a good part of that, HPE was one of your bigger, you know, partners on that. So tell us what it's like working with HPE. Any compare contrast would be welcome. You know, it's interesting. So the cultural environment of HPE under Antonio Neri is very similar to what we saw at Cisco. And he and John have a phenomenal relationship. It's a very collegial environment. It's a very bright environment. They move quickly for a big business where it's vastly different. Is there a much tougher on the numbers side because they under much more margin pressure and competitive pressures that we ever had at Cisco. It just an all fairness to them. But if we look into the organization, like the executive that was assigned to our account from a sales perspective used to work at Cisco. I think one or two of his guys used to work at Cisco. There's program management people that used to work at Cisco. There are people in engineering that came from Cisco. So it's an environment that's similar enough that it's easy enough for us to navigate. And we're connected sort of at all levels which has really been useful. And we have a weekly standing dialogue across all the different functions. So we're pretty deeply embedded with HPE right now and it's gone very, very well. You said that even with the global pandemic right now that Pensando is a bit ahead of where you expected shipments to be. I'm curious always when I talk to CFO, how do you see macroeconomic impact of what is going on there? Any concerns on your end about supply chain either for yourselves or for partners like HPE, how do you see what we're currently going through and the recovery future? So it's an interesting question. Getting this pandemic sort of processed through the supply chains like a pig to a Python. There's just no way to get around it. I mean, we had the first breakdown where they closed the country in Malaysia and I just couldn't build final product. They literally just shut the place down. So it took us about 10 days to get ourselves up and running from the Skeleton perspective. The government worked with us to let a small crew come into our manufacturing partner to get some finished goods up with one of our OEM customers. As we've come back up, we've seen lead times extend on some of the custom parts. It's just a fact of life. I think there's a little bit of an artificial demand that's driving the supply chain a little bit crazy right now because now people are panicked that what happens if it comes back? Will I get caught again? Can I get enough inventory to buffer myself for two weeks to three or four months to being on how aggressive you want to be or a conservative you want to be in that space. And then I think as the supply chain trickles back online, you end up discovering that, yes, I can build final product and I can get the A6 in the memory, but now I want to buy some RS-232 devices. And it turns out that, sure, he's got them, but the magnetic that goes inside of it that comes from Eastern China, they aren't quite up and running just yet. So we're seeing legacy problems, nothing catastrophic, nothing that's been painful. We've had to move some work around to get an incremental volume for ourselves. We've added fab vendors and a few other things. So it's really made us focus on second sourcing everywhere we can because we were, we thought we were small enough and the volume perspective wasn't that big a deal, but just get the second sourcing once we get the product market. That's heated back up when we're doing all that work now. So I think knock on wood, this is our recovery has gone very well. We don't see any big problems in the supply chain. Now, I think the bigger the player like an HPE and the longer the window they were shut down, the harder they pull when they turn the supply chain back on. So I think the big players, Cisco, HPE and others, it's going to take them a longer time. I think they really see how this trickles all the way through because you can't really get good visibility. How much safety stock or buffer stock does everybody have at every level of the chain? So if everybody pulls at once, do you run dry in a week a month? Is it fast enough to recover from production perspective? All those things I think are still not quite resolved yet. One other related aspect of the pandemic that I would love you to point on, work from home obviously is what everyone is doing right now. I'm curious if you think that what the recovery looked like from that standpoint, is there anything from Pensando that makes you shift where you think about hiring it? I've been to the Cisco headquarters and it's a long street with a lot of buildings and a lot of people and everybody's wondering, will that headquarters and centralized structure that we had before, is that forever changed? And that's a great question. So it's for certain changed, I think until there's a therapeutic or a vaccine for the current COVID virus. So that's just a fact of life. And we've been comparing notes with a lot of other companies about what they're doing to bring the workers back who are comfortable, want to come back to work. Because even inside of Pensando, I've got some folks like this and I'm not comfortable coming back. I've got kids at home. I don't want to take the chance. That's fine. We don't have a problem with that. And quite frankly, we can make a case that in some of our functional areas, we're more productive than we were before the pandemic. In India specifically, this has been a boon for us because they're not getting on enough buses. They're not spending three or four hours trying to get back and forth to work. They're happy working from home. We're happy having them at home. The guy who runs India for us says productivity's up and employee satisfaction couldn't be higher. Our plans now is we have to bring a small team back into our headquarters in Moffitas to bring up our new ASIC. So that's going to be 15 to 20 people, not all at one time. We're going to spread them out. We're already articulating what parts of the building can and can't be used. One-way hallways, masking, temperature taking, everything you would expect. The next phase for us is some sort of rotational work where we'll say, we're going to bring 25% of the people in, 30% of the people in. You work a week, you're off for two. You work a week, you're off for two. Until we can get through the back of this thing, it's unlikely. It's almost impossible in my mind. We would bring back 100% of our employees into the building. Now, does that change the view long term? It's a great question because I think what it's forced us to do is to get more comfortable with remote work so that we can truly make it an option of any one employee in specific areas. Like the lab guys have to be in the lab and the IT guys got to be in the computer room. But if you're a software developer, if you're a marketing guide, you really have to be in the building. And I think it's pushed us to really learn to manage them more effectively with remoteness. And I think it provides us, at least with options going forward, when I hire the next 100, do I have to put them in a building someplace or do I just deal with them where they are and bring them into the fold? We've brought on dozens of people since the pandemic started. And quite honestly, we onboard them, we train them and we mainstream them remotely and it's worked out great. Excellent. All right, Randy, let's bring it back to the HPE partnership for the final question. Sure. Tell us what we should be looking at through the rest of this year, what the general availability of this means to your business and the impact you expect to have on your customer. So from an HPE perspective, I think this is going to be great innovation that will bring it to the marketplace to their customer set. It allows them to, I think, separate themselves in the market, at least for some period of time and until the other players get pulled along by the end users. The product has a pretty steep ramp, the front half and the back half of the year for us are dramatically different in terms of size and ramp and it really sets us up for a very large, we hope, fiscal 22, which for us will end in January 31st of 22. We're going to know. If we go GA in just a few weeks, we're going to get a sense that we can turn these pox into in-customers. We're also going to see the ramp of the cloud customers in Q4. I really feel like both for us and for HPE, the next three, four months, as we start getting back to some regularity of interacting with customers physically, not just remotely. And we see the early benefits and some of the early cost of ownership analysis on deployment of our technology. This could be dramatic for us and for them, quite honestly. All right, well, Randy Pahn, CFO of Pensando. Thanks so much. Really pleasure catching up with you and getting to discuss about how Pensando is helping to future-proof your enterprise. Thank you very much. It's my pleasure. Have a great day. All right, I'm Stu Miniman. Check out theCUBE.net for all our coverage. Thank you for watching theCUBE. Innovation, impact, influence. Welcome to theCUBE. Disruptors, developers, and practitioners. Learn from the voices of leaders who share their personal insights from the hottest digital events around the globe. Enjoy the best this community has to offer on theCUBE, your global leader in high-tech digital coverage. From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a CUBE conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio. We've been digging into Pensando and the technology that they've been doing. Happy to welcome to the program Steve Hirschkowitz. He is the vice president of worldwide sales with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, part of the HPE Pensando relationship. Steve, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me, Stu. Really happy to be here. So, obviously, Pensando made a bit of a splash when they came out at the end of 2019. We were really excited to have theCUBE at the launch, had some big-name guests there, including your CEO, Antonio Neary. HPE has an investment and is an OEM of Pensando. So, bring us in as to why this partnership, why this investment from HPE's standpoint. Well, thanks, Stu. So, obviously, there are a lot of reasons why HPE would be interested in a partnership with an innovative company like Pensando, understanding the fact that you have the NPLS team that had developed industry-changing technologies for their previous company at Cisco and leveraging their expertise and their market leadership to bring new innovation to the market, which was very interesting to us, as well as the partnership that was launched between Pensando's chairman, John Chambers and our CEO, Antonio Neary. And when you hear them speak, they talk about being partners for life. And so I think what's unique and what's interesting to us is you'll hear our CEO, Antonio, talk a lot about HPE's evolution as a company and how we are absolutely the edge-to-cloud platform as a service company. And when you have a strategy that involves service and consumption, you have to follow the innovation engine and the market transitions to be able to satisfy your customers and get out in front of some of the market trends. And so the technology and the innovation that Pensando brings to the market is unlike anything else that's available today that anybody else can do. And we saw this as a great opportunity for us to really serve our customers as they move more of their data to the edge and wanna apply and distribute a lot of the services to the edge where the data is created and of course where most of the data is consumed. So it's an exciting partnership for us. We also have a board seat in the company and we're very, very excited about the opportunity and our customers are really, really excited as well about the partnership. Yeah, it's interesting. Those of us that have watched the industry long enough, I remember back, John Chambers for many years, HPE was one of Cisco's biggest partners for a long time. It's really interesting what you're talking about, some of the new opportunities, what's going on with Edge. Bring us inside the partnership a little bit. How has it been going? You've got about six months since it's unveiled to the world. What can you tell us so far now that it's seen the light of day? Well, so the partnership is very, very strong. And I think if you asked some of the senior executives on the Pensando side, including some of the board members, they would tell you that the partnership with HPE is different than any other relationship that they have with any other company. And it is that way because we've created a very unique bond through our global business unit that's responsible for bringing these products to market and defining the roadmap to a very, very unique go-to-market strategy that we've developed where we actually have myself leading a go-to-market engine of people that are helping with the enablement, with the training, with the customer interactions, qualifying opportunities, and really helping to make a market for this technology as we do have first mover advantage. So we work very closely with all aspects of the Pensando team. Our business units are aligned. Our development teams are aligned. Our sales teams are very, very closely aligned. Their Chief Revenue Officer Frank Palomo and I are tied at the hip as we bring this technology to market together with both of our sales teams. And then as we look at further innovating together, you know, we are completely locked and aligned on the combined roadmap. So it's a unique partnership. It creates unprecedented opportunity for HPE through this partnership to gain architectural control and help our customers gain architectural control over these next-generation data center networks and really make a leapfrog over any of the technologies that are available today. And, you know, really two focuses, right? One is in helping the cloud service providers that want to better compete with the 800-pound gorillas with a much better technology, a faster technology, and a technology that leapfrogs anything that they've built. And the other side of that is our ability to help enterprises as we sell more as a service offerings and more edge solutions, help our enterprises make their environments much less complex, much more secure, and really help them improve, you know, business application performance so that they can sustain competitive advantage and make their data center networks look a lot more like what the hyperscalers have built, but only a lot better and a lot faster and a lot more secure. Yeah, I tell you, Steve, one of the things that I've always been really admired about HPE over the years is, you know, baking these solutions together. It's not just a bunch of pieces, get them at the customer's site and figure it out, but, you know, both, you know, I've worked on standards, I've worked on a lot of solutions over the years and HPE and now HPE always make sure when it gets to the customer, you know, it's together, it works, the time from getting it to being able to use it, you know, really is minimized and that focus on simplicity is something that, you know, I've seen time and again from HPE. When it comes to the Pensanda solution, how does this fit in with the HPE products? You know, where does it fit in? What do those solutions look like today? It's a really, really good question, Sue. So initially we're going to market on our ProLiant Rack server platform and we will launch in June general availability of these solutions. We've been offering them to customers, very select number of customers through a private SKU that we've created, but it fits initially within our Rack server portfolio but over time you'll see us start to begin to integrate this across the entire compute portfolio where it makes sense and where there's a market and where customers are asking for it in addition to some integration points with different business units, right? So we have, this relationship is so exciting that almost every business unit within HPE is interested in figuring out what the leverage points are to help solve customer problems and create opportunities for customers. So everything from our Blade servers through Synergy, through our Aruba relationship, through our software stack, we're going to be doing a lot more integration. So I think you look out for initially an opportunity to install this digital services platform where you have a lot of Rack servers and you want to reduce the complexity and really distribute a lot of those network services that are provided today in a centralized fashion through a number of different black boxes with a number of different operating systems, a number of different service contracts, move those to the compute edge at the exhaust of an HPE server on a platform that's factory integrated and that we stand behind and we support and sell. And you made another comment about support and how HPE does a really good job at making sure that when we sell a solution, it's a tightly integrated solution that scales, that works together and that customers can count on and versus something that's loosely coupled and disjointed as you see a lot of partnerships, which we try and avoid. So one of the parts of this relationship that's unique is that HPE is actually going to be supporting and providing the L1 and the L2 support for this product on a global basis. So when our customers have an issue or they need help, they come to us and it really rounds out the relationship. So it's not just taking a portfolio or a solution and putting it into an HPE server. It's a factory integrated, factory tested solution with a lot of different integrations that we stand behind, that we sell and it scales. It'll work just as well with 100 DSPs and servers as it will with 100,000. I'd love to drill in a little bit on really the customer use cases there. When you talk about edge computing, first of all, there's a lot of misnomers out in the industry. Edge can be anything from the telco edge. I've seen lots of things like network function virtualization, I've talked to HPE about those network offerings in the past through down to kind of IoT devices and everything in between. You said you've got some customers that have been getting early access. Are there any patterns or anything you can tell us about what are those edge use cases that this solution is a good fit for? Sure Stu, I think when we started this journey six months ago, we initially thought that the most common use case that customers would be interested, especially the large New York financial customers or the large financial customers in general would be security, right? And so we had a lot of conversations about things like East-West firewall. 70, 80% of the traffic as we talk to customers nowadays is East-West, right? It's application to application traffic where it used to be North-South. And that East-West traffic, especially in a virtualized world with virtualized networks and virtualized servers has created a lot of complexity for customers. So we thought originally security, micro segmentation, East-West firewall encryption would be the use cases. But interestingly enough, as we started to talk to customers, what we found out pretty quickly was that many of these customers have lost track because of the sprawl in the growth of the data in their data centers. It really lost track of which applications are talking to which applications, which people are talking to which people. And in fact, we had some customers tell us that if we were to put your system in and turn on firewall services from day one, we could potentially bring our network to its knees because we've lost track of where everything is going. So what that's led itself to is a lot of customers very interested in the first use case, which is around visibility, observability and telemetry, giving our customers the ability to really graph out and see their application patterns because what you can't see, you really can't secure. And then what we believe will happen over time when we're starting to see this play out is that those customers, once they have a handle on what their traffic flows are, and they have some good telemetry, they have some good services on being able to get that visibility, then they'll start to define security policy based upon those traffic patterns and use the centralized Pensando Policy Services Manager to distribute that policy, whether it be micro segmentation for managing and securing virtualized traffic or east-west firewall, and then later on encryption in a future release. So that's what we're seeing. Excellent, oh great customer data already. What you've been saying really resonates. Customers today know that that pace of change and keeping track of things is really challenging. It's gone from something that people might be able to get a handle to with to knowing I have to have the automation, the systems, the intelligence baked into the system to be able to handle it. All right, so June, this month, you've GA the product, congratulations on getting that. So tell us what you expect to see, the Pensando HP relationship, are there expanses in the product line we should be looking forward through the rest of 2020 or any other pieces as you look forward? Sure, so we are excited about the June launch. We're also excited about the fact that we have our large customer show coming up this year, HP Discover, and we're gonna be profiling the new Pensando partnership at Discover and giving customers the ability to see the power of this technology and how it can really help them solve their most pressing business and technical priorities. But we have a full roadmap that we've built out jointly with our partners at Pensando that involves taking this platform across different parts of our portfolio. One of the things that we'll be doing as we launch almost immediately is we're gonna be putting this on our flagship GreenLake offer, right? Which is our as a service offering. And so customers will have the ability to purchase Pensando solutions under GreenLake. And then over time we'll enhance that to provide the detailed metering that our customers have come to know through that platform. So I think you'll see a big splash there. And then there's a lot of work being done to leverage the SDKs that Pensando was providing to provide better integration into some of our workflows and some of our tools. And again, as I mentioned to you earlier, Stu, almost every business unit in our company has got meetings going on with Pensando trying to figure out how they can leverage the power of this technology to help HPE gain and sustain long-term competitive advantage as customers move from these old legacy three tier networks that are very complicated to run and they have to stitch VLANs together. They have to go through different service chaining to get simple things done. I think there's gonna be a lot of work going on across all of our business units to keep Pensando front and center and help us deliver this platform jointly so that we're differentiated. One other thing I think it's important Stu is that we're also building a whole host of differentiated services around this platform. So things like professional services, training services, security assessment services, right? We're getting a lot of experience through the trial and proof of concept process that we're going through right now. And we're building runbooks, right? To be able to sort of document exactly what we've learned as we do these big implementations and these trials and be able to bring those to our customers in the form of services that they can use as they look to migrate and modernize these legacy networks. Excellent. Well, Steve, sounds like just the GA is step one. You and your team have your hands full with a lot of pieces as you go to market with this and expand that offering. Really impressive, we're taking this. Want to give you the final word? Pensando, HPE, and what customer should be looking for? Stu, I think our customer should look forward to the GA launch coming out towards the end of June. And this technology is very exciting because if I had to sum it up in basically three statements, it would be this solution combined with what HPE has the ability to deliver and support will absolutely help our customers simplify their environments, reduce a lot of operational complexity thereby reducing significant cost as they look to re-architect and build their next generation data center networks. Secondarily, this solution, our combined solution together will help every customer, especially those in the financial industry or highly regulated industries really substantially improve their security posture and reduce the amount of risk that they have in their environments. And then lastly, and I think almost equally as important is the fact that this solution because it's built on a highly programmable, customized ASIC that's traditionally used in networking technology, not necessarily seen at the exhaust of a server is gonna give our customers the ability to exponentially improve their application performance so that when business applications run faster, it gives them opportunities to get to market faster with their own products and drive additional revenue to sustain long-term competitive advantage. So we're excited about the opportunities, Stu. It's gonna be a lot of fun. Excellent, well, Steve Hershkowitz, thank you so much for the update. Congratulations on the launch and absolutely we'll be keeping track of the progress. Thank you for your time, happy to be here. All right, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. I've been an analyst with Wikibon and a co-host theCUBE since 2010. Before that, I've worked in the tech industry for many years at a number of different companies. My background really is in networking, virtualization, cloud computing, since the early days. I really love the intersections of some of the technologies. I spent most of my career before being an analyst, working with customers, helping them through their challenges and how to take advantage of new technologies and continued that through the research I've done at Wikibon and we get to talk to lots of practitioners. We really believe that theCUBE is a unique property. We help both the practitioners share with their peers what's happening as well as give a broad audience a view to what's coming down the road, how to take advantage of that. We give people an insight into what's happening at events. It's a great way to learn more, to find more about people and to take advantage of some of that technology. It's been an exciting journey working with theCUBE. We get to go out to so many shows, help extract the signal from the noise, interact with such a wide variety of clientele, both practitioners, thought leaders, the big name industry people and we've helped some people raise their profiles in there, especially love working with those practitioners. We've seen them move their careers forward and move their businesses forward as they take advantage of technologies and practices that they've learned, talking with us, working with our research people and working with their peers. This is Stu Miniman, thanks for watching theCUBE. From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to theCUBE Conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio. Happy to welcome to the program. First time guests on the program, Francis Mattis, he's the vice president of engineering at Pensando. Francis, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, glad to be here. All right, so Francis, you and I actually overlapped in some of the companies we work with. If anybody familiar with Pensando, you have worked with some of the MPLS team over the years through some of those spin-ins, but for our audience, give us a little bit about your background. What brought you to help and be part of the team that started Pensando? Sure, yeah, yeah. So I started my career with advanced micro devices in the mid-90s, got out of school, really wanted to build microprocessors, and so AMD being in Austin, Texas and me going to LSU for undergrad was a perfect sort of alignment. And so I got to AMD in Austin, built K5, worked on that team, worked on the team with K7, and then I came out to California to help with K8, and that brought me to California, and then we got into the dot-com era, and being at AMD fighting Intel, so to speak, seemed like a hard battle. And so with the dot-com era coming, I just saw this perfect opportunity to jump into the internet. And so that's how I got into building internet and data communications equipment. Went to Nishan Systems, we talked a little bit about that earlier, and that got me into storage, and from there I got into a company called Andiamo, which was building fiber channel sand equipment. So built chips there, and got to know the MPLS team there. I always say they hired me off the street. And from that point on, well, we've been together since 2001, so 19 years would be, yeah, and been building silicon with them in systems for almost 20 years now. So it had quite a journey. Yeah, it's been fun. Great stuff, yeah. Going back, Nishan, talking about iSCSI, in the networking world, it's a little bit of a dark arts in general for most people. Understanding the networking protocols and all the various pieces and three and four letter acronyms aren't something that most people are familiar with. Pensando, I'm curious, networking in general, you're like, I work on internet stuff and we're the tubes that things go around. So when you describe Pensando, how do you explain that to the people that maybe aren't deep into East, West or South over and under underlay protocols? Yeah, absolutely. So for me, Pensando was kind of the culmination of all the things I've done in my career, processing, being able to build compute engines that are programmable, starting with microprocessors, being able to do storage and storage networking with Andeamo. We built the computer with Mova and the virtualization layers around the ethernet interfaces in the adapter with what was really our first smart nick in 2006, 2007 timeframe. And then with SDN and CMA, all of these elements kind of came together, these multiple different layers in the infrastructure stack, if you will. And so Pensando, for me, what was interesting was the explosion of scale in both space and time with the advent of, let's say 25 gig, 50 gig, 100 gig to the server, the notion of very dense computing in each rack and the need for very high scale. After doing all of these technologies and seeing where silicon kind of started to fall in place with 16 nanometer, it seemed that bringing this kind of technology to the edge at very low power with sort of an end-to-end security architecture and end-to-end policy engine architecture, distributed services, as we're doing, all seem to naturally fit into place. And the cloud was already proving this model. When I say the cloud, I mean the hyperscalers like Amazon and Microsoft were already building these platforms. And so it dawned on me that I didn't think that this was possible unless you built the entire platform, you built the entire system. If you built any one piece, the market transition would take a lot longer. And I think this is true in technology history. It tends to repeat itself starting with mainframes when IBM built the entire computer and that built the entire computer and HP built HP built. So these kinds of things are important if you wanna really push a market transition. And so Pensando became this opportunity to take all of these things that I've done in my past life and bring them together in a way that would give a complete stack for the purposes of what I call the new computer, which is basically the data center. And so when my mom asks me, what is it that you're doing? I said, well, just imagine the computer you have right now and multiplying by thousands and thousands stack them in a rack and anyone can use it at any one time. And we provide the infrastructure and the mechanisms to be able to orchestrate and control that at the very high speed layers. So I don't know if that was a long answer. No, no, no, it's fascinating stuff. And when I look at the industry, cloud of course is that just mega wave that changed the way a lot of people look at this, the way we architect things. There was this belief for a number of years, well, I'm gonna go from this complicated mess that I had in my own data centers and cloud was going to be inexpensive and easy. And I don't think anybody thinks about inexpensive and easy when they look at cloud computing these days, then add edge into these environments. So I guess what I'm asking is today's environment, we know IT always is additive. So I have various pieces that I need to put together. You talked about building platforms and how can it be a complete stack? So companies like Oracle from many years said we can do everything from the silicon all the way up through your application. Amazon in many ways does the same thing. They can, you can build everything on Amazon but they built out their ecosystem. So how does Pensando fit into this multi-cloud, multi-dimensional, multi-vendor world? Absolutely, yeah, so that's a good question. So one of the things we wanted to do was to be able to bring a systematic management layer to heterogeneous computing. And what I mean by that is in any enterprise data center, modern data center, you're gonna have multiple types of computing. You're gonna have virtual machines, you're gonna have their metal and you're gonna have containers or at least in the last, say, three or four years, chances are you'll have some containers and moving there. And so what we wanted to do was be able to provide an infrastructure, a management mechanism where all of these heterogeneous types of computing could be managed the same way with respect to policy. And what I mean by policy is sort of this declarative or intent-based model of I declare what I'd like to see, whether that be network policy or end-to-end security with data in motion and be able to apply it in a distributed manner across these different types of heterogeneous elements. The cloud has the advantage that it's homogenous for the most part. I mean, they own the entire infrastructure and they can control everything on there. Now, our systems will obviously manage the homogenous systems as well. And in many ways, that's easier. But bringing together this notion of heterogeneous types of computing with one management plane, one type of interface for the operator, specifically the networking services operator was fundamental. And then the second thing is being able to bring the scale and speed to the edge. So a top of rack switch or something in the middle of the network is obviously very dense in terms of its IO capability. So the silicon area that you spend in building a high-speed switch is really spent for the most part on the IO. That's typically 30 to 40% of the area that will be IO. And the rest will be very much hard-wired control protocols. We know that as we go to SDN services, then we want, let's say, software-defined mechanisms in terms of what the policy looks like, what the protocols look like, the ability to change over time in the lifespan of the computer, which is three to five years, you want that to be programmable. Very difficult to apply at very dense scale in the core of the network. And so it was an obvious move to bring that to the edge where we could plug it into the server effectively. Just like we did really in the UCS system, with NOVA system. Yeah, some really tough engineering challenges. For the longest time, it was very predictable in the networking world. You go from one gig to 10 gig. There was a little discussion how we went the next step, whether 25, 50, 40, and 100 gig now. But you talk about containerized architectures. You talk about distributed systems with edge. Things change at a much smaller granular level and change much more frequently. So what are some of the design principles and challenges that you make sure that you're ready for what's happening today, but also knowing that technology changes are always coming and you need to be able to handle that next thing? That's right. So I think part of the biggest challenges we have are around power with respect to the design power. And then what is the usefulness of each transistor? So when you have a sort of a scale of flexibility, CPUs are the most flexible, obviously, but have probably the least performance in them. FPGAs are pretty useful in terms of its flexibility, but not very dense in terms of its logic capability. And then you have hardwired ASICs, which are extremely dense, very much purpose-built logic, but completely inflexible. And so the design challenge that was put in front of us is how do we find that sweet spot of extremely programmable, extremely flexible, but still having a cost profile that didn't look like an FPGA and got us the benefits of a CPU. And that's where this notion of domain-specific processing came in, which is, okay, well, we're gonna solve a few problems and we're gonna solve them well. And those few problems are gonna be, we're gonna bring PCIe services, we're gonna bring networking services, we're gonna bring storage services, and we're gonna bring security services around the edge of the computer so that we can offload or, let's say, partition correctly the computing problem in the data center. And to do that, we knew a core of CPUs wasn't gonna do the job. That's basically borrowing from this guy to pay this other guy, right? So what we wanted to do was bring this notion of domain-specific processing, and that's where our design challenges came in, which is, okay, so now we build around this language called P4, what is the most optimal way to pack the most amount of threads or processing elements into the silicon, while managing the memory bandwidth, which is obviously, you know, packet processing has been said to be embarrassingly parallel, which is true. However, the memory bandwidth is insane. And so how do we build a system that ensures that memory is not the bottleneck? Obviously we're producing a lot of data, we're computing a lot of data. And so these were some of our design challenges. All of that within a power envelope where this part or this device could sit the edge inside of a computer within a typical power profile of a PCIE attached card in a modern computer. So that was a huge design challenge for us. Yeah, I'd love to hear, you know, it was a multi-year journey to launch the solution. You know, I think of the old world, it was very much a hardware centric, 18 to 24 months for design, you know, all the tape outs you need to do on this. Sounds like, you know, obviously there is still hardware, but it is more software driven than it would have been, you know, 10 years ago. So give us some of the ups and downs in that journey. Love to hear any stories that you can share there. Well, yeah, I think, you know, good question. It's always, there's always ups and downs in anything you do, especially in the startup. And I think one of the biggest challenges we've faced is the exact hardware-software boundary. So what is it that you want in hardware? What is it that you want in software? And, you know, one of the greatest assets in our company in Pensando are the people. We have amazing software and hardware architects who work extremely well together because most of us have been together for so long. So that always helps when you start to partition the problem. We spent the first year of Pensando, which was basically 2017 when the company was founded, really thinking through this problem. For all the problems we wanted to solve, the goals that were given to us end to end security. Okay, so I want to be able to terminate TCP and initiate TLS connections. What's the right architecture for that? I want to be able to do storage offload and be able to provide encryption of data at rest, data in motion. I want to be able to do compression, these kinds of things. What's the right hardware-software boundary for that? What do we hardwire in silicon versus what do we make programmable in silicon, obviously, but still through a computing engine? And so we spent the first year of the company really thinking through those different partitioning problems. And that was definitely a challenge. And we spent a lot of time in conference rooms on whiteboards figuring that out. And then 2018, the challenge there was now taking this architecture, this sort of technology substrate, if you will, that we built, and then executing on it, making sure that it was actually going to yield what we hoped it would, that we would be able to provide the services. And when we talk about L4 firewall at line rate that's completely programmable, did we achieve that? Can we do load balancing? Would this P4 processing engine and the innovations we brought to P4 satisfy all of these requirements we had put for us? And so 2018 was really about execution. And there you always have the challenges in execution in terms of, you know, things are going to go wrong. It's not if it's when and then how do you deal with it? And so again, I would say the biggest challenge in execution is containing the changes. You know, it's so easy for things to change, especially when you're trying to really build a software platform, right? Because it's always easy to sort of kick the can and say we'll deal with that later in software. But we know that given what we're trying to do, which is build a system that is highly performant, you can't kick that can, you have to deal with it when it comes. And so we spend a lot of time doing performance analysis, making sure that all these applications we were building, we're going to yield the right performance. And so that was quite of a challenge. And then 2019 was kind of the year of shaping the product, really lots of product design. Okay, now that we have this technology and it does these pieces that we want it to do, these pieces meaning these services, what are all the different ways we can shape this product? After talking to customers for months and months and months, as you know, Sony is very much customer driven, customer centric. So we were fortunate enough that we got to spend a lot of time with customers. And then that brings us to other challenges, right? Because every customer has unique problems. And so how do we form this product around a solution that solves quite a bit of problems that really brings value? And so those were the challenges in 2019, which we overcame now. Obviously we have several releases that we've come out with already. We've got the A6 and the chips and it's all there now. So now 2020, unfortunately COVID's here, but this is our year of growth. This is the year that we really bring it out into the world with our partners and our customers and show how this technology has been developed will benefit customers over the next years, two years. Francis, really appreciate the insight there. Yeah, that discussion of the hardware versus software brings back memories for me. Lots of heated debates as to where that is. That's right, yeah, absolutely. Well, one of the lines we've used on theCUBE many times is, you know, software will eventually work and hardware will eventually break. So. Yeah. Well, Mario, Mario taught me something a long time ago. He said that hardware is hard to change. Software is hard to stop changing. So. Yeah, no, that's a great one too. All right, so you gave us through the last three years journey, give us a little bit look, you know, on the next three years and where you expect Pensando to be going. Sure, where I see Pensando in the next three years as we go through this market transition is both a market leader and a thought leader in terms of the next wave of data center edge computing, whether it be in the service provider space, whether it be in the enterprise space or whether it be in the cloud space, the hyperscaler space. As I was mentioning at the beginning, when we were talking about the journey, market transitions of this nature really require understanding the entire stack. If you provide a piece and someone else provides a piece, you will eventually get there. But it's a matter of when. And by the time you get there, there's probably something new. So, you know, time in and of itself is an innovation in this area, especially when you're dealing with a market transition like this. And so we've been fortunate enough that we're building the entire system. I mean, we go from the transistors to the restful APIs. We have the entire stack. And so where I see us in three years is not only being a market leader in this space, but also being the thought leader in terms of what those domain specific processing look like at the edge. You know, what are the tools? What are the techniques for really, as we say, democratizing the cloud, bringing this technology to everyone? Excellent. Francis, it's been a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you so much. Congratulations on the journey so far and can't wait to see how things progress going forward. Yeah, we're excited and I appreciate it. Thank you for your time too. All right, check out thecube.net. We've got lots of back catalog with Pensando also. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. Innovation, impact, influence. Welcome to theCUBE, disruptors, developers, and practitioners, learn from the voices of leaders who share their personal insights from the hottest digital events around the globe. Enjoy the best this community has to offer on theCUBE, your global leader in high-tech digital coverage. From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi and welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm Stu Miniman coming to you from a Boston area studio. We've been digging in with the Pensando team, understand how they're fitting in to the cloud, multi-cloud edge discussion. Really thrilled to welcome to the program first time guest, Silvano Guy. He's a fellow with Pensando. Silvano, really nice to see you again. Thanks so much for joining us on theCUBE. Stuart, it's so nice to see you. We used to work together many years ago and that was really good and it's really nice to come to you from Oregon, from Bend, Oregon, a beautiful town in the high desert of Oregon. Yeah, I do love the Pacific Northwest. I miss the planes and the hotels. I don't necessarily, I should say actually, I don't miss the planes and the hotels, but going to see some of the beautiful places is something I do miss and getting to see people in the industry I do like. As you mentioned, you and I cross-passed back through some of the spin-ins back when I was working for a very large storage company. You were working for Cisco. You were known for writing the book. You were a professor in Italy, many of the people that worked on some of those technologies were your students. But Silvano, my understanding is you'd retired. So maybe share for our audience what brought you out of that retirement and into working once again with some of your former colleagues and on the Pensando opportunity? I did retire for a while. I retired in 2011 from Cisco, so if I remember correctly. But at the end of 2016, beginning of 2017, some old friend that you may remember and know called me to discuss some interesting idea, which are basically the seed idea that is behind the Pensando product. And the idea were interesting. What we built, of course, is not exactly the original idea because product evolve over time. But I think we have something interesting that is adequate and probably superb for the new way to design the data center network, both for enterprise and cloud. All right, and Silvano, I mentioned that you've written a number of books, really the authoritative look when some new products had been released before. So you've got a new book, Building a Future-Proof Cloud Infrastructure. And look at you, you've got the physical copy. I've only gotten the soft version. The title, really interesting. Help us understand how Pensando's platform is meeting that Future-Proof Cloud Infrastructure that you discussed. Well, network have evolved dramatically in the data center and in the cloud. Now the speed of a classical server in the enterprise is probably 25 gigabit. In the cloud, we are talking of 100 gigabit of speed for a server going to 200 gigabit. Now the backbone are ridiculously fast. We no longer use spamming tree and all the stuff. We no longer use access core aggregation. We switch to closed network. And this closed network have a huge, enormous amount of memory. And that is good, but it also imply that it's not easy to do services in an decentralized fashion. If you want to do a service in a centralized fashion, what you end up doing is creating a giant bottleneck. You basically, there is this word that is being used that is trombone or tromboning. If you try to funnel all this traffic through that bottleneck, it's not really going to work. The only place that you can really do services is at the edge. And this is not an invention. I mean, even all the principle of cloud is move everything to the edge and maintain the network as simple as possible. So we approach services with the same general philosophy. We try to move services to the edge as close as possible to the server and basically at the border between the server and the network. And when I mean services, I mean three main category of services. The networking services, of course, there is the basic layer, two layer, three stuff plus the bonding, the MLog and what is needed to connect the server to a network. But then there is the overlay. Like the XLAN or Geneva are very, very important basically to build a cloud infrastructure. And that are basically the network service. We can have others, you know, but that sort of is the core of the network services. Some people want to run BGP there. Some people don't want to run BGP. There may be EVPN or kind of things like that, but that is the core of the network services. Then of course, and we go back to the time we work together, there are the storage services. At that time, we were discussing most about fiber channel. Now the buzzword is clearly NVMe, but it's not just a buzzword, it's really a new way of doing storage. And it's very, very interesting. So NVMe kind of services are very important. And NVMe has a version that is called NVMe OF over fabric, which is basically a sort of remote version of NVMe. And then the third least but not last most important category is probably security. And when I say that security is very, very important, you know, the fact that security is very important is clear to everybody nowadays. And I think security has two main branches in terms of services. There is the classical firewall and micro segmentation in which you basically try to enforce the fact that only who is allowed to access something can access something. But you don't at that point care too much about the privacy of the data. Then there is the other branch that is encryption, which you are not trying to enforce to decide who can access or not access the resource, but you are basically caring about the privacy of the data and encrypting the data so that if it is hijacked, snooped or whatever, it cannot be decoded. Excellent, so, Silvano, absolutely. The edge is a huge opportunity when someone looks at the overall solution and say you're putting something in the edge. You know, they could just say, this really looks like a nick. You talked about some of the previous engagement we worked on, you know, host bus adapters, smart nicks and the like. There were some things we could build in, but there were limits that we had. So, you know, what differentiates the Pensando solution from, you know, what we would traditionally think of as an adapter card in the past? Well, the Pensando solution has two main, multiple pieces, but in terms of hardware, it has two main pieces. There is an ASIC that we call CAPR internally. You know, that ASIC is not strictly related to be used only in an adapter form. You can deploy it also in other form factor, another part of a network, another embodiment, et cetera. And then there is a card. The card has a PCIe interface and sit in a PCIe slot. So yes, in that sense, somebody can call it a nick and since it's a pretty good nick, somebody can call it a smart nick. You know, we don't really like that two terms, we prefer to call it DSC domain-specific card, but the real term that I like to use is domain-specific hardware. And I like to use domain-specific hardware because it's the same term that NSC and Patterson use in a beautiful piece of literature that is the Turing Award lecture. It's on the internet, it's public. I really ask everybody to go and try to find it and listen to that beautiful piece of literature, modern literature on computer architecture, the Turing Award lecture of NSC and Patterson. And there they introduce the concept of domain-specific hardware. And they explain also the justification for why now it's important to look at domain-specific card. And the justification is basically in a nutshell and we can go more deep if you are interested, but in a nutshell is that the spec-ing that is the single-tread performance measurement of the CPU is not growing fast at all. It's only growing nowadays like few point percent per year, maybe four percent per year. And with this slow grow of the spec-ing performance of the core, the core need to be really used for user application or customer application. And all what is non-essential can be moved to some domain-specific hardware that can do that in a much better fashion. And by no mean, I imply that the DSC is the best example of domain-specific hardware. The best example of domain-specific hardware is in front of the eye of all of us and our GPUs. And not GPUs used for graphic processing which are also important, but GPU used basically for artificial intelligence, machine learning, inference. You know, that is a piece of hardware that has shown that something can be done with performance that there are public processors. Yeah, it's interesting, right? If you turn back the clock 10 or 15 years ago, I used to be in arguments and you say, do you build an offload or do you let it happen in software? And it was always like, oh, well, Moore's law will mean that the software solution will always win because if you bake it in hardware it's too slow. It's a very different world today. You talk about how fast things speed up. From your customer standpoint, though, often some of those architectural things are something that, you know, I look for my suppliers to take care of that. Speak to the use case. What does this all mean from a customer standpoint? What are some of those early use cases that you're looking at? Well, as always, you get a bit surprised by the use cases in the sense that you start to design a product thinking that some of the most cool thing will be the dominant use cases. And then you discover that something that you have never really thought the most interesting use case, you know? One that we have thought about since day one, but it's really becoming super interesting is telemetry. Basically measuring things in the network and understanding what is happening in the network. And I was speaking with a friend the other day and the friend was asking me, oh, but we had SNMP for many, many years, which is the difference between SNMP and telemetry, no. And the difference is to me, the real difference is in SNMP or in many of these management protocol, you involve a management plane, you involve a control plane, and then you go to read something that is in the data plane. But the process is so inefficient that you cannot really get a huge volume of data and you cannot get it practically enough with enough performance. Doing telemetry means thinking a data path, building a data path that is capable of not only measuring everything in real time, but also sending out that measurement without involving anything else, without involving the control path and management path so that the measurement become really very efficient and the data that you stream out become really usable data, actionable data in real time. So telemetry is clearly the first one is important. One that you honestly, we had built, but we weren't thinking it was going to have so much success is what we call bidirectional ER span. And basically it's just the capability of copying data and sending data that the card see to a station. And that is very, very useful for replacing what are called TAP network, which is just network that many customers put in parallel to the real network, just to observe the real network and to be able to troubleshoot and diagnose problem in the real network. So these two features, telemetry and ER span that are basically troubleshooting features are the two features that at the beginning are getting more traction. You're talking about real time things like telemetry, the applications and the integrations that you need to deal with are so important. Back in some of the previous startups that you've done, was getting ready for say, how do we optimize for virtualization? Today you talk cloud native architectures, streaming very popular, modular, often container-based solutions and things change constantly. You look at some of these architectures, it's not a single thing that goes on for a long period of time but it's lots of things that happen over shorter periods of time. So what integrations do you need to do and what architecturally, how do you build things to make them as you talk future proof for these kind of cloud architectures? Yeah, I mean, what I mentioned were just the two low-hanging fruit if you want the first two low-hanging fruit of this architecture. But basically the two that come immediately after and where there is a huge amount of value are distributed state for firewall with micro segmentation support. That is a huge topic in itself. So important nowadays that is absolutely fundamental to be able to build a cloud. That is very important. And the second one is wire rate encryption. There is so much demand for privacy and so much demand to encrypt the data, not only between data center but now also inside the data center, you know. And when you look at the large bank, for example, the large bank is no longer a single organization. A large bank is multiple organization that are compartmentalized by law that need to keep things separate by law, by regulation, by FCC regulation, you know. And if you don't have encryption and if you don't have distributed firewall, it's really very difficult to achieve that. And then, you know, there are other application, you know, we mentioned storage and VME and it's a very nice application. And then we have even more if you go to look at load balancing between server, you know, doing compression for storage and other possible applications. But I sort of lost your real question. So just part of the piece is when you look at, you know, integrations that Pensando needs to do for really kind of maybe some of the applications that you would tie into any of those that come to mind. Yeah, well, for sure it depends, you know. I see two main branches again. One is the, are the cloud provider and one are the enterprise. In the cloud provider, basically, this cloud provider have a huge management infrastructure that is already built and they want just the card to adapt to this to be controllable by this huge management infrastructure. They already know which rule we want to send the card. They already know which feature we want to enable on the card. They already have all that. They just want the card to provide the data plan performance for that particular feature. So we are going to build something particular that is specific for that particular cloud provider that adapt to that cloud provider architecture. We want the flexibility of having an API on the card. That is like a REST API or a GRPC in which they can easily program, monitor, and control that card. When you look at the enterprise, the situation is different. Enterprise is looking to two things, two or three things. The first thing is a complete solution. They don't want to, they don't have the management infrastructure that they have built like the cloud provider. They want a complete solution that has the card and the management station that's all what is required to make from day one a working solution, which is absolutely correct in the enterprise environment. They also want integration. And integration is with two that they already have. If you look at many enterprise, one of the dominant presence is clearly VMware virtualization in terms of ESX and vSphere and NSX. And so most of the customers are asking us to integrate with VMware, which is a very reasonable demand. And then of course, there are other players, not so much in the virtualization space, but for example, in the data collection space and the data analysis space. And for sure, Pensano doesn't want to reinvent the wheel there, doesn't want to build a data collector or a data analysis engine and whatever. There is a lot of work and there are a lot of out there. So integration with things like Splunk, for example, are kind of natural for Pensano. Excellent, so you talked about some of the places where Pensano doesn't need to reinvent the wheel. Talked through a lot of the different technology pieces. If I had to have you pull out one, what would you say is the biggest innovation that Pensano has built into the platform? Well, the biggest innovation is this P4 architecture. And the P4 architecture was a sort of gift that was given us in the sense that it was not invented for what we use it. P4 was basically invented to have programmable switches. And the first big P4 company was clearly barefoot that then was acquired by Intel and barefoot built a programmable switch. But if you look at the reality of today, the network, most of the people want the network to be super easy. They don't want to program anything into the network. They want to program everything at the edge. They want to put all the intelligence and the programmability at the edge. So we borrowed it before architecture, which is a fantastic programmable architecture. And we implemented that edge. You know, it's also easier because the bandwidth is clearly more limited at the edge compared to being in the core of a network. And that P4 architecture give us a huge advantage. If you tomorrow come up with the Stuart encapsulation super duper technology, I can implement in the Capri easy the Stuart, whatever it was called super duper encapsulation technology. Even when I designed the easy, I didn't know that encapsulation exists. It's the data plane programmability, it's the capability to program the data plane and programming the data plane while maintaining wire speed performance, which I think is the biggest benefit of themselves. Well, Sylvano, thank you so much for sharing your journey with Pensando so far. Really interesting to dig into it and absolutely look forward to following progress as it goes. Stuart, it's been really a pleasure to talk with you. I hope to talk with you again in the near future. Thank you so much. All right. Thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching. From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a CUBE conversation. Really pleased to welcome back to the program, one of our CUBE alumni, Sony Giandani. She is a co-founder and also the Chief Business Officer of Pensando. Sony, thanks so much for joining us. Hi, thank you for having me here. All right, so Sony, we've had you on the program a few times. You know, those that have watched the program or followed your career, of course, you've had a story career. I've worked with you as a partner, back through some of the spin-ins. You're one of the MPLS group. And now, of course, Pensando, we helped at the launch towards the end of 2019. Just want to take a step back and understand, how did you find yourself in the startup world? Well, you know, I got involved with the startup ventures as part of the MPLS team. This is going back now, gosh, 20 years ago in Calendia 2000. My first venture was with Andiamo. It was a very unique situation that Mario, Luca, Prem, myself were part of a setup and a startup venture. But all four of us, the MPLS crew, did not have any equity in it. Luca and I basically were tasked to operate with that venture to ensure its ultimate success from a product execution and a go-to-market perspective. A lot of those elements did not exist from a go-to-market perspective in Cisco at that time. And it was basically a ground-up effort for Luca and me to not have any financial association with the outcome of the Andiamo venture, but at the same time, take on the responsibility from the execution perspective and building up the whole go-to-market perspective. Yeah, so talking about these startups, you've been a part of two things. First of all, you were part of Andiamo, Duova, and NCME. So did you need to learn Italian to be part of these projects? But more importantly, how did you work on that product, customer fit, understanding what to build? And you talk about, right, how do you make something successful? It's super challenging. Well, first and foremost, I think I've been fortunate in the group that we are all part of. It is definitely Italian, Indian, and some folks from Indiana, for example, like Randy Pond, who's part of this venture with us at Pensando. If I were to go back and take a look at the simple formula, I mean, Mario, Luca, and Fran, they're veterans in this industry and they typically focus on the conceiving of the idea and the product. And starting with a clean slate approach, of course. I participate from a market validation, development, competitive landscape, and a business, and all related aspects to bringing the product to market and how that maps into customers and partner. But we have consistently focused on market disruption, particularly for the last two decades. The biggest focus has been on what are the market transitions occurring, both from a business and a technology perspective, and that is ultimately what creates the opportunity to emerge and drive these concepts into reality and put yourself in a market leadership position, is to capture the transition at the right time. Yeah, I think back to some of your previous ventures and understand some of the waves, technology's coming together. Sometimes it's the maturity of a technology or being able to take advantage of something new. Let's talk specifically about Pensando. What are those waves of change and the technology coming together that makes the opportunity that your team sees today? Well, I mean, if you go back and you take a look at really what has been exciting about this Pensando opportunity has been to look at the unique ability that has been coming upon us with this market transition, where the cloud is moving to the edge. What is ultimately driving this movement to the edge has been the application. The applications is, you know, whether it's driven by technology trends like 5G, for example, and the fact that bulk of what the customer's data is being driven is going to be at the edge. That when you look at the cloud moving to the edge and evolving that with the transitions occurring, this will require deep innovation, deep innovation in the areas of distributed network processing, security like encryption, full observability while you have turned on encryption, traffic engineering and doing it at very low predictable latency at the speeds of 100 gig and above all, doing it on a small power footprint. We were really the only guys and gals who could do this and we have done it. Yeah, Sony, some really big challenges that laid out there. Bring us inside a little bit, you know, customers. You know, I think about, you know, when I've been watching edge computing for the last, you know, three or four years, you know, it's still relatively early days for customers, but there's a lot of technical challenges there. So help us understand how much, you know, it was you had technology that could help solve something and how much it is driven by some of the customers that you've been talking to over the years. Now, one of the key things that we learned, and this was going back to the early days of Cisco is that everything we were doing, we had the customer at the center of another heart of what innovation we were building. From an engineering perspective, you want to build things that can have the most impact in the marketplace and within your customer base. So one of the early times we went back to getting our customers involved in the innovations we were bringing to bear. I still have recollections of a blueprint that we had iterated upon and sitting in a room, whether it was with the likes of Josh Matthew at Goldman Sachs or whether it was with some of our early cloud customers, like the Oracle Cloud Team, to better understand with these innovation and these blueprints, what were their burning problems? What were their use cases that we could really go and tackle? So it is one thing to think about market disruptions. It's another to bring it to life and having customers engaged with you during the early phases of as you are incubating something is a very important item because it helps you focus your biggest energy on the areas so that you can put your arms around what problems are worth solving and how can you bring that to life with customers use case. And this is something we have done time and over again. So this is a constant refinement of what we have been doing now for now two over two decades, as I said. Yeah, it's fascinating here. And when you've got the Chief Business Officer title, Sony, one of the biggest changes obviously is if I look back at the spin-ins, you kind of understood how the go-to-market was what was involved. The Cisco execution machine, the sales process that they had can plug in. If the product was successful, they would help accelerate what you're doing. Now you've got some POAM partnerships, you have relationships with customers. Help us understand a little bit, the update on the go-to-market, how you have to have a solution that fits for not only the end users, but through multiple different go-to-market partners. So I think it's very important that as a startup, we stay very close to our customers and our partners. Not just when we are thinking about what the innovation is and how can it solve their problems. But I think in a world where the, we want to go solve for what the customer, where we want the customer, where our customers want us to be. Our partnerships is a core part of it. I mean, if you look at from the early days, we secured successfully funding from our customers and our strategic partners. And it is these customers and strategic partners that are shaping the roadmap and are shaping the routes to market. And what we are doing is we are successfully, not only delivering the product to these strategic customers and partners, but we are also then replicating it across the verticals. If you think about in the enterprise space, our focus has been to focus on regulated markets where security is quintessential, real-time observability that can increase your security posture is a very important element. So taking the blueprints that we are taking into global financial services customers, the healthcare industry, the education market and the federal market, then those are the industries that really care about and are in regulated market where we can take the blueprint that we have already built and amplify it across those customers. So there again in close alignment and our partnership with HPE, we are working very closely there. While recognizing that we will be doing strategic elements only with partners like HPE, we're also onboarding and getting certifications done with Dell because most enterprises have at least dual source vendors from a server perspective. So that is one aspect. The other aspect clearly is working in a high-touch model with our cloud customers and having the opportunity to deliver to them and onboard them from a production-worthy perspective while taking that same blueprint and applying it to other cloud customers and other service providers, edge providers that can take advantage of the similar capability. Yeah, I'm curious, Sony. Obviously the cloud is a space that has been going through a lot of change and accelerating. I'd say much faster than traditional networking did. So curious what you see, what you're hearing from customers, when they talk about their needs for your solution, what they're doing with multi-cloud environment, what is that landscape? And I guess we'd love to hear a little bit about how you would compare and contrast yourself to other solutions out there. The one that comes to mind, of course, is AWS, what they're doing with the Annapurna chip in their Nitro offering as part of their output. So, as I mentioned earlier, I think the cloud is pushing to the end. There's a high demand for a lot of packet processing needs with these new age applications. Customers want to build and give the, we want to be in a position to provide through the democratization and open availability of our products to multiple cloud providers, our technology, and as they are experiencing tremendous growth, they are seeking to build cloud with more capacity, with greater degree of security and services functionality, and the ability to process a lot of data at the edges with millions of simultaneous connections happening at a very small footprint. And that's where we come in. The value that we are essentially providing to not only the existing cloud strategic partners, but additional cloud customers we are taking into production this year, is that we are enabling them to leapfrog the Nitro technology on multiple fronts, whether it is the ability to have predictably low latency and consistently low jitter in the nanoseconds, that is eight times superior than what a Nitro can do today, or the ability to process up to nine times more packets per second, in the millions of packets per second, and the ability to do it in a power footprint, which is almost one third that of what you would need on an AWS Nitro, where they need five times more Nitro elements than we can with a single device, or whether it is the ability now to handle not just power and latency, but millions of flows that can run simultaneously and maintaining the state of all of those and the power of the end, the ability to run multiple services with security turned on at the same time, are all elements that really differentiate us, and this technology is now readily available to all cloud customers. All right, so I understand some of the technical items that you're saying there, what I'm curious about is when I look at Outpost, most customers don't really think about the Nitro chip, it's that Amazon's providing an extension of their solution into my environment, and they manage everything. So, you know, you can't talk about multi-cloud environments without talking about Amazon, because every customer, almost every customer I talk to have more than one cloud, and one of them is almost always Amazon. So how does your solution fit into that whole discussion then? So I think that, you know, one of the things that becomes very important is that if I put my enterprise customer hat on, I want to be enabling my private cloud, the private cloud that I build, to have the ability to not just have the option to support an Amazon cloud, but I typically already am in a multi-cloud environment. So while Outpost and Nitro, Nitro is really enabling Outpost to deliver those services on a customer's premises, it's only allowing that customer to be locked into one way of dealing with one public cloud company. But if I had to go and think about, as I build out my hybrid cloud strategy as an enterprise customer, I want to have the same building blocks and the same policy models that are consistent with all the, with the entire breadth of cloud vendors that I'm dealing with. So bulk of our customers are essentially telling us, I don't want to be locked into a single public cloud company from a hybrid strategy. I want to have the ability to drive a public, a private cloud architecture that is cloud-like from a policy delivery perspective. But at the same time, I want to have the flexibility of deploying a multi-cloud environment. And what we would provide them is the consistency of that same policy model that you would only find in a public cloud with the freedom to not have to tie themselves or lock themselves up into a single public cloud customer. So, Sony, your team, you said over two decades of experience there have been some global impacts that have happened during that time. You said you got together in 2000, well, 2001 was right there in front of you, the 2008, you know, downturn there. So here in 2020, obviously the global pandemic has, you know, broad financial ripples. How's this impacting to Nostando? How's it impacting your discussions with your partners and your customers? Well, you know, honestly, I would say that we, like everyone else, have been affected by the pandemic and we pray that everyone recovers soon with minimum loss to themselves and their families. And this is something very personal. This is, you know, I feel very passionate about hoping that everybody comes through with this and their families are all okay. That's the most important thing in my mind. Now for us from a pandemic perspective, what this has done is it has made us more resolute to continue to execute remotely to the best of our ability to meet our customer's expectations. The advice that I would give to other startups is keep your head down, focus on the 80-20 rule. Execute on 20% of the things that need to be done that'll have 80% of the impact to your business, including undeterred product execution. Stay close to your customers and your partners. Spend your cash, logistically, you know, be very careful on where you're spending your money to make it last as long as you can to ride this pandemic out and double down on being close to your partners and customers. Fortify your sales plans, meet your customers where they are and not where you thought they were, but where they really are and partner with them on this journey and partner with your supply chain. You're going to need them. So this is your time to really be a partner to them as opposed to seeing how can you shortchange them? No, no, really partner with your supply chain because you're going to need them. Yeah, that's some very sound advice there. Sony, while we're talking advice, that you're a very successful career. I'm wondering what advice you would give to other women looking at pursuing careers in tech, specifically if they wanted to start a startup, be a founder, whether that's in Silicon Valley or outside, what advice would you give them? You know, my advice would be to have an undeterred focus. Focus is extremely important. Luke, I used to always remind me, Sony, when you're focused on two things, you're de-focused. So focus, undeterred focus, be driven, believe in the vision that you have set out for yourself and your team, and keep your eye on the customer. I think in customer success will lie your success. That's the message I would give. I would give that same message to my female and the male colleague. All right, well, we know that you and your team, Sony, are very focused. So I'll give you the final word, give us a little look forward. If we go forward, you know, 18 to 24 months, what should we be expecting to see from Pensando and your solution? Well, in the next 18 to 24 months, we would like to meet and hopefully also exceed our customer's expectation in terms of product execution and the ramp. Of course, profitability will be a very important aspect that we're going to keep a very close eye to. I think it's too early to be thinking of an IPO and our focus remains to be on customer success. We have been in the market for a little over, I would say a little less than six months with the product, the September 2019, October 2019 is really when we launched the company. And the customer always is at the center of everything we do. So that's where we're going to be focusing on. Product execution and ramp, ramp of product, ramp of customer. Well, Sony, Jean, Donnie, it's a pleasure to catch up with you. Thank you so much and please stay safe. Thank you, you too. All right, be sure to check out thecube.net for all the interviews. You can go see the launch videos that we did at Goldback office in New York City from 2019. If you go to thecube.net and many more interviews from Sony and her team. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. I've been an analyst with Wikibon and a co-host theCUBE since 2010. Before that, I've worked in the tech industry for many years at a number of different companies. My background really is in networking, virtualization, cloud computing since the early days. I really love the intersections of some of the technologies. I spent most of my career before being an analyst, working with customers, helping them through their challenges and how to take advantage of new technologies and continued that through the research I've done at Wikibon and we get to talk to lots of practice. We really believe that thecube is a unique property. We help both the practitioners share with their peers what's happening as well as give a broad audience a view to what's coming down the road, how to take advantage of that. We give people an insight into what's happening at events. It's a great way to learn more, to find more about people and to take advantage of some of that technology. It's been an exciting journey working with thecube. We get to go out to so many shows, help extract the signal from the noise, interact with such a wide variety of clientele, both practitioners, thought leaders, the big name industry people and we've helped some people raise their profiles in there, especially love working with those practitioners. We've seen them move their careers forward and move their businesses forward as they take advantage of technologies and practices that they've learned, talking with us, working with our research people and working with their peers. This is Stu Miniman, thanks for watching thecube. From thecube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is acube conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to acube conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio and we're going to be talking about some networking giants. So joining me is a first time on the program, some of his team members have been on and thecube covered the launch of Pensando. So Vipin Jain, he's CTO and co-founder of Pensando. Vipin, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you Stu, it was very nice talking to you. All right, so, you know, big theme we've been talking about for a number of years now is multi-cloud and I go back and think about, you know, that the concepts of cloud and even, you know, I've been around long enough you think about the X and one of the challenges you look at is well, security is always a challenge. The other thing is network. You know, bandwidth is not infinite. The speed of light has not been solved. So, you know, help us understand because, you know, first I guess, you know, give our audience a little bit of your background. As I said, anybody in the networking world knows the PLS team. So tell us, you know, have you been on the journey with them for all of that? Or, you know, what brought you to Pensando? Yes, yes. I've been in the journey with the team since 2006. So it's pretty long, I would say 14 years now. And it's been tremendous. At heart I'm an engineer who takes, you know, pride in building things and taking upon challenges. And I've worked with multiple startups before the spin-in at Nuova. Three more startups before that. And of course, you know, they were not spin-ins, some more independent startups. And, you know, also the course, I have gained appreciation for, like, you know, starting all the way from Silicon to build a distributor systems and a UI all the way up to the fully consumable, you know, system. So I totally understand the angle that you need to look at the system in a holistic manner, having contributed to Cisco, UCS, and Nexus products. And before joining Pensando, I was contributing with my own open source container networking project, which was quite exciting to see how to evangelize, you know, my own core. And that was fun. And that's where I come from. But I'm a software engineer to start off with, started contributing to ASICS, then started going into the application world with containers, trying to build container networking. We did a server product with Cisco UCS and pretty much all over the stack with respect to orchestration. So that's my background. But it's been exciting to consider what's next for me and I was largely trying to see. Yeah. So, Vipin, actually, if I could jump in there, right. You know, I think back to UCS, it was, you know, some of those ways coming together, virtualization had been around for quite a number of years at that point, but, you know, how do you optimize an experience? How do you transform infrastructure to live for those environments? So, you know, UCS, you know, remember people back saying, you know, is Cisco getting into servers? It's like, well, they are and they aren't because they're changing that compute model, really caught that, you know, Cisco led that wave of the surge infrastructure. So many things you talked about that we'll get to later in the interview, open source, station. When I look out today, you know, infrastructure has changed a lot and cloud obviously has a huge impact, but also the applications are changing. So help us understand kind of the waves that are riding together and, you know, what was it that, you know, Pensando decided to build in order to meet what, you know, the customers of today require? So I think, you know, going back to the UCS comment that you had, we started off thinking, for example, what are, what were the challenges with respect to scaling out the deployment of servers? And we quickly realized that manageability is number one challenge. And of course, you know, when we speak about manageability, it comes down to the underpinnings of what you're building. Are you able to see the entire infrastructure together or are you still seeing those two pieces? And that's when I think UCS was born to say that, look, we need to bring everything together that could be consumed in a holistic manner. And for that, you have to have all those components that are somewhat independent to be consumed as a unified thing. Which is why I think it was called unified computing system UCS. And then I think, you know, Pensando is a journey that takes it to probably not just that concept, but in general, the challenges and the disruptions that we were seeing to the next level. So I mean, just to summarize, I would say we started off with looking at all the disruptions that are happening in the industry and there are many of those. I'm happy to talk about which ones we looked at. And then we looked at what are the consumption models that people are largely, you know, finding it very appealing these days. Because the days in which you're going to write a script to do something is still pretty old. You want to be able to consume in a mostly software-consumable way. How can we build, you know, how can we build systems that are programmable in the field, those kind of things? So consumption model, programmability, software is the primary factor there and highly appealing to APIs and all that. Last, you know, not least we also wanted to be really ahead in the game, competitiveness wise. So those were like the three overarching set of things that we started to think about like what disruptions are we going to solve and how the consumption model needs to be for the future of infrastructure and how can we get that leap which is far ahead and better than anything that exists out there. So that's where we started to look at, let's build something which is bigger, be spear and something, even if we have a possibility of failing it, let's still go ahead and attempt doing that kind of thing. Yeah, and absolutely there's been so much discussion over the last decade or so about how software is eating the world and what's going on there. Yet, you know, your teammates, it's a lot of times it's been the tip set. There have been some huge ripples in the industry, you know, major acquisitions by some of the big disruptive companies out there. Apple made a Silicon acquisition, you know, everybody paid attention to that, we'll have both back. You can't talk about disruption today without talking about Amazon. And of course when Amazon bought in a Perna Labs, you know, those of us looking at the enterprise and the cloud space was like, oh, keep an eye on this and absolutely it's been something over the last year or so. You know, where we've seen Amazon roll things out and of course at the critical component of what Amazon's doing from outposts. So with that as the stage there, you talk about wanting to be industry leading, you know, Amazon, you know, is really kind of setting the bar that everyone didn't measure it against. And when I look at the solution to Pensando, the kind of best comparable analogy that we've seen is, you know, look at what Nitrochip can do. This is an alternative for all of the other clouds and for customers that might not want to get them from Amazon. So is that a fair comparison? And how would you line up what Pensando's doing compared to what Amazon has done there? So, you know, what you've seen in the Amazon announcement really is, first of all, Amazon is a great benchmark to beat. So no make no mistakes. We are very happy to say that, you know, we are doing quite comfortably. But then, you know, Amazon is more than just the chips that they are building. I mean, what you consume is what they are building. And underneath the engines are really powered up by the nicety of all those things that they have built. Having said that, you know, Pensando is consisting of both the, you know, it's recognized as a team which has been in traditionally building chips, but yet I think, you know, the ACI or the previous venture from MPLS team was somewhat of an eye-opener as to how bringing things together is much more value in OPEX and simplifying things is a huge, huge value compared to just putting performance and those things. So while this is important, there is another aspect which is important in trying to simplify things and make it consumable like software. And Pensando itself has probably, you know, I would say a good chunk, like about 60% of the people in software team and not the, you know, basic and hardware team. This is not to say that, you know, we, you know, we are under emphasizing one versus the other, but software is a bigger beast when you start trying to build all those programs on a programmable entity that you have created and start to roll out those applications. And so that's why I think the infestation software is there. Having said that, you know, it's a software that runs the data path pipeline. There's also a layer of software that we are building that can help manage all, you know, all the products in a more cohesive manner and unified way. Okay. That's, thank you for laying that out. You mentioned you've got some background in open source. It's definitely an area where for a number of years, you know, Amazon has not exactly, open source has not exactly been a strength for AWS. They have put a lot of effort. They've done some requires over the last couple of years. How do you see open source fitting into the space? What is kind of the, you know, the philosophy of Pensanda when it comes to open source and where do you see it playing in kind of the, you know, this network piece of the multi-cloud discussion? Yeah. Yeah. No, I think it's, it's, it's, it's quite relevant in a way that, you know, the cloud native movement on how applications will be built and the normalization of APIs across multiple clouds is real. We are all seeing the benefits of it. And I think that that trend will continue and which is all driven through an open source community that exists, you know, in the cloud native world. So personally for me, I think I learned a whole lot of things in the open source community, you know, the importance of evangelizing, whatever you're working on, the reason to have convinced other people about contributing into whatever you're working on. And frankly, I also learned how difficult it is to make revenues in an open source-based product and strategy. So I think, you know, those were the things that I got away from it when I was doing my own open source project for container networking. But at the same time, Pensando, you know, we have to make sure that we are 100% aligned with anything that's happening in open source, never replicate anything that might be, that might be happening in open source instead, try to make people use those things in the best possible way and in the most efficient way and the easiest possible way to use those. So our strategy largely is that, you know, embrace open source, which exists out there from infrastructure point of view. We are collaborating and communicating with the rest of the user, fellow people on the internet and all that. I think we are going to standardize most of the things we are working in people community. So our stance largely is that, you know, if we are building a programmable platform, then the community is what is going to drive it and we are very much working towards it step by step, of course, trying to get to a stable state where we could not just empower people who are taking up the open source efforts, which are going on, but at the same time, we can also contribute our programs into the open source community and define the right abstractions into the community. Because we came out of stealth pretty recently, you will start seeing the ramp up in those activity as we go. Excellent. Well, Vipin, you know, the launch of Pensando, you had a phenomenal lineup. Not only, you know, John Chambers obviously has the relationship with your team, but, you know, OEM partners of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and IBM, as well as, you know, Markey customer of Goldman Sachs. Things look a little bit different in the first half of 2020 than they did in the end of 2019. So, you know, curious, you know, the global pandemic, the rippling financial implications, you know, what does that mean to Pensando? How has that impacted conversations that you're having with your customers? Well, one thing I know at a broader level, let me cover where things are heading. And in that sense, you know, I see that network and the infrastructure, in general cloud infrastructure networking is going to become, and we have realized this during recent, you know, early 2020s that it is going to be very important to have an underpinning infrastructure that is not just working efficiently, securely, but is, you know, highly cost-effective and very high performance. You know, ranging from people who are trying to connect from home to people who are trying to use video conferencing and people who are going to need more and more use cloud-based services even to order simple stuff that they've been going to source for. So network will become essential, you know, essential element for things as we go forward. And we do see that being embraced by our customers and things where we were trying to communicate that, you know, look, you will need performance and cost benefits are becoming more and more real now. It's like, oh, things that we were having things in the pipeline for us, we need to work on that now. And the reason is because the things that we anticipated, the demand increase which was going to happen over the period of years is happening literally in a few months. And so that is what we see. We are definitely, you know, very well poised to take advantage of that demand for sure. But also the fact that, you know, it needs to be done super efficiently. And so I think we are, you know, we are quite, well, I would say, you know, situated to be able to take advantage of that. Yeah, absolutely. You know, one thing you can't control as a company is, you know, what the global situation is when you come out of stealth and, you know, move through some of those early phases. You know, you've been part of, as you said, a number of startups, you've been part of spinning. Give us a little bit of the inside baseball of, you know, being part of Sando, you know, any stories on a little, some of the, you know, ups and downs on the kind of multi-year journey to get where you are today. Definitely, I think, you know, spinnets are good. They are largely an execution play. Relatively independent startup is going to be about, you know, how we crack the overall market, product fit and execution, of course, and deal with maybe in a competition in a different way, of course, like maybe big companies are great partners at the same time you have to navigate that. So the overall landscape in spin-in versus not is quite different. We can be much more bolder when we are independent company in trying to disrupt almost anything because we don't have any point of view to defend, or say, we could do exactly what could be the most disruptive way to potentially benefit the users and that's a big change, I would say. We are being quite paranoid as well at the same time and practical to look at how we could navigate this situation in a very practical way and all that. Okay. So the journey of an independent startup is, you know, personally for me, this is my fourth independent startup and best of all independent ones, I would say largely because the kind of validation that we are getting being an independent company is so huge that I'm less concerned about those things, but more importantly, trying to ensure that, you know, we can be that disruptive that we wanted to be and we started. Excellent. Guess what, you know, one of the other things about being a startup is, you know, what, you know, adjustments do you need to make along the way? So I'm curious as, you know, you've gone to some of your early customers, any feedback or adjustments in some of the use cases or, you know, things that you've learned along the way that you can share? Fundamentally at a base level, we haven't shifted from what we started off with. We look at disruptions on how consumption models are going to be changing, how speeds and feeds are going to become important because, you know, because Moore's law is going to be almost decorating, how we could, how we need to deliver things end to end, how containers are going to be a primary, you know, vehicle to deliver and build applications. So we recognize those disruptions and we haven't changed quite fundamentally from those disruptions that we wanted to go after. But at the same time, I think, you know, as we went and socialized our ideas and architecture and designs for customers, we realized that they are giving us a lot more feedback on what all we could do and starting to become like we could take on different segments of market and not just one. So why stick ourselves to the data center cloud? Why not work on something on Edge Cloud? Why not build solutions for 5G where latency and performance is super crucial? Why not take up on a, you know, branch type of use cases? So there are many things that are opening up and largely the, you know, the shift or I would say the inclination of what we should change versus not as happening with respect to where our customers are driving us. And it is very important to make sure that, you know, the users of our products are indicating how the shift happens as opposed to, you know, as opposed to anything else. So we listen to them like super, super carefully and at the same time, trying to make sure that we not only meet their needs, but meet their demands. So definitely, you know, from the overall landscape of things, we are starting to get a lot more than what we thought we could capture, which is good news, but at the same time, we are trying to also take on one product at a time, you know. All right, so Vipin, I can't let you off the hook as the CTO without talking a little bit about the future. You know, I think earlier in my career, there was the old discussion and said, you know, we should have started it, you know, a year or two ago, but, you know, we didn't, so we should start it today. With the changing pace of technology, you know, I've always said, you know, if I could, I'd rather wait a year or two because I can take the care of the next generation. I can take advantage of all these other things, but I can't wait because then I'd never ship anything. So I need to start now. Give us a little bit, you know, look out in the future. How is your architecture designed to be able to, you know, take advantage of all the wonders coming with 5G and everything there? And anything that we should be looking at, you know, through the next kind of 12 to 18 months on the roadmap that you can share. Sure, yeah, Stu. So I would first of all say that we didn't build a product actually. What we built was a platform on which we can build multiple products. And we started off doing that because we thought that, you know, the platform that we're building is capable of doing a lot more things than one use case that we start off with. And so to that point, I would say that, yes, I mean, we start focusing on one product initially. And the possibilities of trying to take it to multiple segments is not only very much there, but we are already, you know, having those conversations to see what is the first set of use cases that we could get into for different segments besides the data center, you know, public private data center. We are looking at Edge. We are looking at 5G, looking at segments and so as well as the, you know, storage and conversion infrastructure. So I would say that the fruit of all those things that we are starting to engage is going to start showing up in next 18 months. Architecturally, I think we are very well poised to take advantage of what we have. The hardware that we are shipping is going to be 100% compatible with what programs we write on those. So there is a lot more possibility to start addressing more use cases as we go. The software architecture that we have built is very accessible as well. So we believe that, you know, we believe that we can not only satisfy those use cases, but we are starting to get into those things now, which will start to show up in actually useful products and usable products with customer testimonials in maybe 12 to 18 months from now. All right, well, Vipin, thank you so much. Great to catch up with you. Really appreciate you coming on. Thank you, Stu. It was good talking to you and, you know, I appreciate your time as well. Thank you. All right, I'm Stu Miniman. Be sure to check out thecube.net for all the coverage. You can go see the launch that we did with Kondo in the second half of 2019. And thank you for watching theCUBE. Innovation, impact, influence. Welcome to theCUBE. Disruptors, developers, and practitioners. Learn from the voices of leaders who share their personal insights from the hottest digital events around the globe. Enjoy the best this community has to offer on theCUBE, your global leader in high-tech digital coverage. From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. Hi, welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE Conversation, digging in with Pensando, talking about what they're doing to help people, really bringing some of the networking ideals to cloud-native environments, both in the clouds, in the data centers. Happy to welcome to the program, Krishna Dota Penny. He is the Vice President of Software with Pensando. Krishna, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Stu, for talking to me. All right, so Krishna, the Pensando team, you know, very well known in the industry, you know, innovation startup, especially in the networking world. Give us a little bit about your background specifically, how long you've been part of this team and, you know, what helped, you know, you and the team, you know, start Pensando. Yeah, so I'm VP of software in Pensando. Before Pensando, before founding Pensando, I worked in a few startups in CMA networks, newer systems and Greenfield networks. All those three startups have been acquired by Cisco. My recent role before this company was, I was VP of engineering in Cisco. I was responsible for a product called ACI, which is Cisco's flagship SDN product. So, I mean, when, why did we find, found Pensando? So when we were looking at the industry the last few years, right? The few trends that are becoming clear. So obviously we have a lot of enterprise background. We were watching ACI being deployed in the enterprise data centers. One sore point for customers from operational point of view was installing service devices, network appliances or storage appliances. So not only the operational complexity that this device is bringing, it's also, they don't give you the performance and bandwidth and PPS that you expect for traffic, especially from East-West. So that was one major issue. And also if you look at where the intelligence is going has been, this been the trend, it's been going to the edge. The reason for that is the routers or switches or in the devices in the middle, they cannot handle the scale. As I mean, the bandwidths are growing, the scale is growing, the stateful stuff is going in the network and the switches and the appliances are not able to handle it. So you need something at the edge, close to the application that can handle this kind of services and bandwidth. And the third thing is obviously, X86, few years back, every two years, you're getting more transistors. I mean, obviously more slanted and we know how that part is going. So the X86 cycles are more valuable and we don't want to use them for all this network services, including SDN or firewalls or load balancers or NVMe virtualization. So looking at all this trends in the industry, we thought there is a good opportunity to do a domain specific processor for IO and build products around it. And that's how we started Pensando. So Krishna, it's always fascinating to watch. If you look at startups, they are often product of the time that they're in and the technologies that are available. Sometimes there are ideas that it takes a few times and maturation of the technology. And other times, I'll hear teams and they're like, oh, well, we did this. And then, oh wow, there was this next new innovation that came out that I wish I had had that when I did this last time. So we do a 2.0 or 3.0 generation. We've been talking about distributed architectures for well over a decade. It's been a long time now. In many ways, I feel edge computing is just the latest discussion of this. But when it comes to, you've got software under your purview. What are some of the things that are available for Pensando that might not have been in your toolkit five years ago? Yeah, so the growth of open source software has been very helpful for us because we build a scale out microservices based controller. The last time around when we were building that, we had to build our own consensus algorithm. We had to build our own distributed database for metrics and events and logs. So right now, I mean, we have, because of open source thing, we leverage at CD, Elastic, Influx, in all this open source technologies that you hear, since we want to leverage the Kubernetes-based ecosystem, that helped us a lot. At the same time, if you think about it, the even the software which has not open source, closed source thing are maturing. I mean, if you talk about SDN seven, eight years back, it was like, there are N versions of doing of SDN, but now the industry standard is on EVPN, which is one of the core pieces of what we do, we do a SDN solution with EVPN. So it's more of, the industry is coming to a place where these are the standards and this is the open source software that you could leverage and quickly innovate compared to building all of this some scratch, which will be a big effort for startup to succeed and build it in time for your customer success. And Krishna, you talk about open source, not only in the software, it's in the hardware standpoint, I think about things like open compute or the proliferation of GPUs and GPUs and everything along that. How has that impacted what you've built? So I mean, it's a good thing you're talking about. For example, we are working in the future on OCP card. It's a good thing that OCP card goes into a HPE server, it goes into a Dell server. So pretty much, we want to, I mean, see our goal is to enable this platform that what we build in all the use cases that customer could think of. So in that way, hardware standardization is a good thing for the industry. And then same thing, if you go in how we program the ASIC, we are about standards of this before programming. That's an industry consortium led by a few people. We want to make sure that, we follow the standards for the customer who's coming in, who wants to program it. It's good to have a standards-based thing rather than doing something completely proprietary. At the same time, you have to enable innovations and then those innovations, you have to push it back to the open source. That's what we're trying to do with P4. Yeah, excellent. I've had some real good conversations about P4 and the way Pensando is leveraging that maybe a little bit differently. And you talk about standards in open source, oftentimes it's like, well, is there differentiate? There's certain parts of the ecosystem that you say, well, it's kind of been codified. Obviously you're taking a lot of different technologies, putting them together, help share the uniqueness of Pensando, what differentiates what you're doing from what was available in the marketplace or that I couldn't just cobble together a bunch of open source hardware and software together. I mean, if you look at technologies like the, I think the networking that both of us are very familiar with that if you want to build an SDN solution or you can take OBS or you can use X86 and take some much in silicon and cobble it together. But the problem is you will not get the performance and bandwidth that you're looking for. So let's say, if you want a high PPS solution or you want a high CPS solution because the number of connections are growing for your IoT use case or 5G use case, right? If you cobble together with an open source thing without any assist from a domain specific processor your performance will be low. So that is the, I mean, that's one enterprise side in the cloud use case, right? As you know, you're trying to pack as many VMs as containers in one server because you know, you get charged. I mean, the customer, our customers make money based on that, right? So you want to offload all of those things into a domain specific processor that what we build, which we call the TSC which will do all the services at pretty much no cost to X86. I mean, X86 you'll be using zero cycles for doing features like security groups or VPCs or VPN or encryption or storage virtualization, right? That's where our value comes in. I mean, if you count the TCO model using bunch of X86 cores or in a bunch of in ARM cores or AMD cores compared to what we do at TCO model works out great for our customers. I mean, that's why, you know, there's so much interest in our product. Excellent. I'm glad you brought up customers. Krishna, one of the challenges I have seen over the years with networking is it tends to be, you know, a completely separate language that we speak there. It's, you know, a lot of acronyms and protocols and, you know, not necessarily accessible to people outside of the silo of networking. I think back to, you know, SDN, you know, people on the outside would be like, that stands for still does nothing, right? Because it's like networking, you know, mumbo jumbo there for people outside of networking. You know, when I think about, you know, if I was going to the C-suite of an enterprise customer they don't necessarily care about those networking protocols. They care about the, you know, the business results and the productivity. So how do you help explain what Pensando does to those that aren't, you know, steeped in the networking? So the way I look at it, right? What is customer looking for? Yeah, you're right. Customer doesn't know what in-cap you use. Customer is looking for his operational simplicity and then he wants looking for security, right, you know? And if you look at it, sometimes, you know, both are like in orthogonal. If you make it very highly secure but you make it like 10,000 operational procedure before you deploy a workload that doesn't work for the customer because in operational complexity increases tremendously, right? So where we are coming in is that we want to simplify this for the customer, you know? There's a very simple way to deploy policies. There's a simple way to deploy a networking infrastructure and the way we do it is we don't care what your physical network is in some sense, right? So because we are close to the server that's a very good advantage we have. We apply the policies before even the packet leaves the server, right? So in that way, he knows his fully secure and environment and we, and you don't want to manage each one individually. We have this product called PSM which manages all the servers from the central place and it's easy to operationalize a fabric whether you talk about upgrades or you talk about deploying new services. It's all of driven with REST API and you have a GUI. So you can do it single place and that's where a customer's value is rather than talking about as you're talking about end caps or exactly the raw throughput. That is not the main thing that, I mean, they wake up every day. They wake up every day thinking about it so I have a security risk. And then how easy for me is to deploy new services or bring up new data centers. All right, Krishna, you're also spanning with your product a few different worlds out there. Traditionally, if I think about an enterprise data center versus a hyperscale public cloud and edge sites it comes to mind very different skillset for managing them different types of deployments there. If I understand right, you were going to play in all of those environments. So talk a little bit about how you do that and just where you sit in that overall discussion. Yes, so I mean, number one rule inside our company is we are driven by customers. And obviously, our customer success is our success. So, but given that, what we try to do is that we try to build a platform that is kind of programmable, obviously starting from before that we talked about earlier. But it's also a software point of view. It's kind of pluggable, right? So when we build the software, for example, our cloud customers and they use DSC, they use the same set of APIs or GRPC or SAPS that DSC provides the their controller. But when we ship the same platform for enterprise customers, we built our own controller and we use the same DSC APIs. So the way we are trying to do is think there's fully leverage in what we do for enterprise customers and cloud customers. We don't try to reinvent the wheel, obviously. At the same time, if you look at the highest level constructs from a network perspective, right? Or even storage perspective, what are you trying to do? You're trying to provide connectivity, but you're trying to provide isolation and you're trying to provide security. So all these constructs we encapsulated in APIs, which in some mostly like cloud-like APIs and those APIs are used for cloud customers and enterprise customers. And the software is built in a way where any layer can be removed or any layer can be added, right? Because it's in our interest, we don't want to build multiple different softwares for different customers, right? Then we will not scale. So the idea when we started the software architecture is that how we make it pluggable and how we make it programmable that customer says, I don't want this piece of it, you can put the third party piece on it and still integrate at a common layer with using REST APIs. Well, Krishna, I have a little bit of appreciation for some of the hard work that goes through what your team's been doing, a couple of years in stealth, but really accelerating from the announcement coming out of stealth at the end of 2019 to just about half a year, you're GA with a major OEM of HPE, definitely a lot of work that needs to be done. Bring us, what are you most proud about from the work that your team's doing? We don't need to hear any major horror stories, but there always are some of the not holes or challenges that often get hidden behind the curtain. Personally, I'm most proud of the team that we've built. So obviously, our executives have a good track record of disrupting the market multiple times, but I'm most proud of the team because the team is not just worried about technology that they're very senior technologists and they're great leaders, but they're also worried about a customer problem, right? So it's always about getting the right mix of execution combined with technology is when you succeed. That is what I'm most proud of. We have a team with independent leaders running all these projects independently and then releasing almost, we have a release every week if you look at all our customers, right? And then being a small company, doing that is pretty challenging in a way, but we came up with methodologies where we fully believe in automation, everything is automated, and whenever we release software, we run through the full set of automation so that we are confident that customer is getting good quality code. It's not like we cooked up something and they should be worried when they need to upgrade to this software. So that's, I think that's the key part if you want to succeed in this day and age, developing the features of the velocity that you would want to develop and still support all these customers at the same time. Absolutely, well, congratulations on that, Krish. All right, final question I have for you. Give us a little bit of guidance going forward. Often when we see a company out and we try to say, oh, well, this is what that company does. You've got a very flexible architecture, a lot of different types of solutions. What kind of markets or services might we be looking at from Enthondo down the road a little bit ways? So I think we have a long journey ahead. So we have a platform right now. We already, I mean, we have a varied baby, we are shipping. The platform is already shipping in a storage provider. We are integrating with premier clouds, public clouds, and enterprise market, we already deployed distributed firewalls, some of our customers deployed distributed firewall. So if you take this platform, it can be extendable to add all the services that you see in data centers or in clubs, right? But primarily we are driven from our customer perspective and customer priority point of view. So where we will go is we will try to add more edge services, we'll try to add more storage features. And then we are also this initial interest in service provider market, what we can do for TyG and IoT because we have the flexible platform. We have to see, you know, how to apply this platform to this new application. That's where probably we'll go in future. All right, well, Krishna Dutta Penny, Vice President of Software with Pensando. Thank you so much for joining. Thank you, Stu. It was great talking to you. All right, be sure to check out thecube.net. You can find lots of interviews from Pensando. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. I've been an analyst with Wikibon and I co-host theCUBE since 2010. Before that, I've worked in the tech industry for many years at a number of different companies. My background really is in networking, virtualization, cloud computing, since the early days. I really love the intersections of some of the technologies. I've spent most of my career before being an analyst working with customers, helping them through their challenges and how to take advantage of new technologies and continue that through the research I've done at Wikibon. We get to talk to lots of practitioners. We really believe theCUBE is a unique property. We help both the practitioners share with their peers what's happening as well as give a broad audience a view to what's coming down the road, how to take advantage of that. We give people an insight into what's happening at events. It's a great way to learn more, to find more about people and to take advantage of some of that technology. It's been an exciting journey working with theCUBE. We get to go out to so many shows, help extract the signal from the noise, interact with such a wide variety of clientele, both practitioners, thought leaders, the big-name industry people, and we've helped some people raise their profiles in there, especially love working with those practitioners. We've seen them move their careers forward and move their businesses forward as they take advantage of technologies and practices that they've learned. Talking with us, working with our research people and working with their peers. This is Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching theCUBE. From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to this CUBE Conversation. We're digging in with Pensando, talking about the technologies that they're using, and happy to welcome to the program two of Pensando's technical leaders. We have Krishna Dota Penny. He's the vice president of software, and we have Hirabu Raman. He's a principal engineer, both with Pensando. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Stu. All right, so Krishna, you run the software team, so let's start there and talk about really the mission, and shortly, obviously, bring us through a little bit of architecturally what Pensando is doing. Yeah, so we just started, right? So Pensando, we are building a platform which can automate and manage the network storage and security services. So we talk about software here. It's like the breadth of software is you start from all the way from boatloader to all the way it goes to microservice controller. So the fundamentally, the company is building a domain-specific processor called DSP that goes on the card called DSC, and that card goes into a server in a PCI slot. Since we go into a server and we act as a NIC, we have to do drivers for Windows, all the versus Windows Linux ESX in free PSD. And on the card itself, on the chip itself, there are two fundamental pieces of the chip. One is the P4 pipelines, where we run all our applications. If you can think like, you know, firewalls in the virtualization or security applications, and then there's ARM SOC, which we have to bring up the platform and where we run the control plane and data and management plane. So that's one piece of the software. The other big piece of software is called PSM, which kind of, if you think about it in data center, you don't want to manage one DSC at a time or one server at a time. We want to manage all thousands of servers using a single management and control point. And that's what that's where the PSM comes from. Yeah, excellent. You talked about a pretty complex solution there. You know, one of the big discussion points in the networking world and, you know, IT in general has been, you know, really the role of software. I think we all know it got a little overblown, the discussion of software does not mean that hardware goes away. You know, I wrote a piece, you know, many years ago, if you look at, you know, how hyperscalers do things, they hyper-optimize. They don't just buy, you know, the cheapest, most generic thing. They tend to configure things and they just roll it out in massive scale. So, you know, your team, you know, is well-known for, you know, really from a chip standpoint. I think about, you know, the three Cisco spin-ins. If you, you know, dug underneath the covers, yes, there was software, but, you know, there was an ASIC there. So, you know, when I look at what you're doing in Pensando, you've got software and there is a chip at the end of the day. You know, it looks, you know, the first form factor of this looks like, you know, a network card at the NIC that fits in there. So, give us in there some of the challenges of, you know, software and, you know, there's so much diversity in hardware these days. You know, everything getting ready for, you know, AI and GPUs and, you know, you listed off a bunch of pieces when you were talking about the architecture. So, give us that software-hardware dynamic, if you would. So, I mean, if you look at where the industry has been going towards, right? So, I mean, the Moore's law has been ending and the Dennett scale is a big darn Dennett scaling, right? So, if you want to set all the network in Surin Security Services on X86, you'd be wasting a bunch of X86 cycles. The customer, why does he buy X86? He buys X86 to run his applications, not to run IO or do security for IO or policies for IO. So, where we come in is basically, we do this domain-specific processor, which will take away all the IO part of it and just the compute of the application is left for X86. The rest is all off-roaded to what we call the EnSanto. So, Nick is kind of, you know, one part of what we do. Nick is how we connect to the server, but what we do inside the card is, you know, firewalls, all the networking functions, SDNs, load balancing, you know, all the storage functions, NVMe virtualization and encryption of all the packets, data of data at rest and data in motion. All the services is what we do in this card. And, you know, yes, it's an ASIC, but if you look at what we do inside, it's not a fixed ASIC. Yeah, we did work on the previous spin-ins, as you said, with ASICs, but there's a fundamental difference between that ASIC and this ASIC. In those ASIC, for example, there's a hard-coded routing table or there's a hard-coded ACL table. This ASIC is completely programmable. It's more like, you know, it's a programmable software that we have a domain-specific language called P4. We use that P4 to program the ASIC. So the way I look at it, it's an ASIC, but it's mostly software-driven completely and from all the way from controllers to what programs you run on the chip is completely software-driven. Excellent. So, Pirabu, you know, of course, the big announcement here, HPE, you know, you've now got the product, becoming generally available this month. You know, we'd watch from the launch of Pensando, obviously having HPE as not only investor, but, you know, they're an OEM of the product. They've got a huge customer base. Maybe help explain, you know, from the enterprise standpoint, you know, if I'm buying ProLiant, where now does, you know, am I going to be thinking about Pensando? Is there, you know, what specific use cases? How does this translate to the general kind of enterprise IT buyer? So, we cover a whole breadth of use cases. At the very basic level, if your use cases are, if your company starts ready for all the different features, you could buy it as a basic nick and start provisioning it and you will get all the basic network functions. But at the same time, in addition to the standard network functions, you will get always on telemetry. Like you will get rich set of metrics. You will get packet capture capabilities, which will help you very much in troubleshooting issues when they happen, or you can leave them always on as well. So, you can do some of these TAP add kind of functionalities, which financial services do. And all these things you will get without any impact on the workload performance. Like the customer's application don't see any performance impact when any of these capabilities are turned on. So, once this is as a standard network function, but beyond this, when you are ready for enforcing policies at the edge, or you are ready for enforcing state-filled firewall, distributed firewalling capabilities, connection tracking, some of the other things, like Krishna test upon NVMe virtualization, there are also a lot of other features you can add on top of. Okay, so it sounds like we're really democratizing some of those cloud services or cloud-like services for the network down to the end device, if I have this right. Maybe if you could, networking, we know our friends in network, we tend to get very acronym-driven, overlays and underlays and various layers of the stack there. When we talk about innovation, I'd love to hear from both of you, what are some of those kind of key innovations if you were to highlight this one or two, probably maybe you can go first and then Krishna would love your follow-up from that. Sure, there are many innovations, but just to highlight a few of them, right? Krishna touched upon P4, but even on the P4, P4 is very much focused on manipulating the packets, packets in and packets out, but we announced it so that we can address it in such a way that from memory in, packet out, packet in memory out, those kind of capabilities so that we can interface it with the host memory. So those innovations, we are taking it to the standard and they are in the process of getting standardized as well. In addition to this, our software stack, we touched upon the always on telemetry capabilities. You could do flow-based packet captures, net flow, you could get a lot of visibility and troubleshooting information. The management plane in itself has some of the state-of-the-art capabilities, like it's distributed, highly available, and it makes it very easy for you to manage thousands of these servers. Krishna, do you wanna add something more? Yes, the biggest thing of the platform is that when we did underlays and overlays, as you said, everything was fixed. So tomorrow, you may wake up and come up with a new protocol, or you may come up with a new way to do storage, right? Normally in the hardware world, what happens is, oh, I have to sell you this new chip. That is not what we are doing. I mean, here, whatever we ship on this ASIC, you can continue to evolve and continue to innovate irrespective of changing standards. If NVMe goes from 1.2 to 1.3, or you come up with a new encapsulation of VXLan, you do whatever encapsulation, whatever TLVs you would want to, you don't need to change the hardware. It's more about downloading new firmware and upgrading the new firmware and you get the new feature. That is, that's one of the key innovation that's why most of our cloud providers like us, that we are not tied to hardware. It's more of software programmable processor that we can keep on adding features in the future. So one way to look at it is like, you get the best of both worlds kind of a thing. You get power and performance of ASIC, but at the same time, you get the flexibility up closer to that of a general purpose process. Yeah, so Krishna, since you own the software piece of things, help us understand architecturally how you can deploy something today, but be ready for whatever comes in the future, because that's always been the challenge as to, gee, maybe if I wait another six months, there'll be another generation of something where I don't want to make sure that I miss some window of opportunity. Yeah, so it's a very good question. So it's not, I mean, basically you can keep enhancing your features with the same performance and power and latency and throughput, but the other important thing is how you upgrade the software. I mean, today, whenever you have an ASIC, when you have to change the ASIC, and obviously you have to pull the card out and you put the new card in, here when we're talking upgrading software, we can upgrade software while traffic is going through, without with very minimal disruption in the order of subsequent, right? So you can change your protocol. For example, tomorrow, you change from VXLand to your own, your own innovative protocol. You can upgrade that without disrupting any existing network or storage IO. I mean, that's where the power of the platform is very useful. And if you look at it today, where cloud providers are going, right? In the cloud providers, you don't want to, because there are customers who are using that server and they're deploying their application. They don't want to disturb their application just because you decided to do some new innovative feature. The platform capability is that, you could upgrade it and you can change your mind from time in the future, but whatever existing traffic is there, the traffic will continue to flow and not disrupt your app. All right, great. Well, you're talking about clouds. One of the things we look at is multi-cloud and multi-vendor peer-a-boo. We've got the announcement with HPE now, ProLiant and some of their other platforms. Tell us how much work will it be for you to support things like Dell servers or I think your team's quite familiar with the Cisco UCS platform. Two pieces on that. Number one, how easy or hard is it to do that integration? And from an architectural design, does a customer need to be homogenous from their environment or is whatever cloud or server platform there on independent and we should be able to work across those? Yeah, first off, I should start with thanking HPE. They have been a great partner and they have been quick to recognize the synergy and the potential of the synergy. And they have been very helpful throughout this integration journey. And the way we see it is a lot of the work has already been done in terms of finding out the integration issues with HPE and we will build upon this integration work that has been done so that we can quickly integrate with other manufacturers like Dell and Cisco. We definitely want to integrate with other server manufacturers as well because that is in the interest of our customers who want to consume Pensando in heterogeneous fashion not just from one server manufacturer. Yeah, I just want to add one thing to what I was saying. Basically, the way we think about it is that there's x86 and then all the IO, the infrastructure services. So for us, as long as you get power from the server and you can get packets and IO across the PCI bus, we want to make it a uniform layer. So the Pensando, if you think about it, is a layer that can work across servers and could work inside the public cloud and when we have one of our customers using this in hybrid cloud. So we want to be the base where we can do all the storage network and security services irrespective of the server and where the server is placed, whether it's placed in the colo, it's placed in the enterprise data center or it's placed in the public cloud. All right, so I guess, Krishna, you said first x86, down the road, is there opportunity to go beyond Intel processors? Yes, I mean, we already support AMD, it's another form of x86, but our architecture doesn't prevent us from any servers. As long as you follow the PCI standard, we should, it's more of a testing matrix issue. It's not about support of any other OS, we should be able to support it. And initially we also tested once on power PC, so any kind of CPU architecture, we should be able to support. Okay, so walk me up the application stack a little bit though, things like virtualization, containerization. There's a question of does it work, but does it optimize, any of us live through those waves of, oh, okay, well, it kind of worked, but then there was a lot of time to make things like storage and networking work well in virtualization, and then in containerization, so how about your solution? So I mean, if you, I mean, you should look at, I mean, good example is AWS life, what AWS does with Nitro. So on Nitro, you do EBS, you do security, and you do VPC, right? You know, in all these services, it's effectively weak, think about it, all of those can be encapsulated in one BSC card. And obviously when it comes to this kind of implementation on one card, right? You, the first question you would ask, what happened to the noisy neighbor? So we have the right cures, mechanisms to make sure all the services go through the same card, at the same time giving guarantees to the customer that, you know, you're, you're multi, especially in the multi-tenant environment, whatever you're doing on one, one VPC will not affect the other VPC. And the advantage of the platform that what we have is this is very highly scalable and highly performant. Scale will not be the issue. I mean, you know, if you look at existing platforms, even if you look at the cloud, because when we're doing this product, obviously we'll do benchmarking, right? With the cloud and enterprises, with respect to scale performance and latency, we did the measurements and we are order of magnitude compared to even the existing clouds and currently whatever enterprise customers have. Excellent. I'm curious from the enterprise standpoint, are there certain applications, you know, I think about like, you know, from, you know, an analytics standpoint, Splunk so heavily involved in data that might be a natural fit or other things where, you know, it might not be fully tested out with anything, kind of that ISV world that we need to think about. So if you're talking in terms of partner ecosystems, we enterprise customers do use many of the other products as well and we are trying to integrate with other products so that we can get the maximum value. So if you look at it, you could get rich metrics and visualization capabilities from our product, which can be very helpful for the partner products because they don't have to install an agent and they can get the same capability across bare metal virtual stack as well as containers. So we are integrating with various partners, including some CMDB configuration management database products, as well as data analytics or network traffic analytics products. Krishna, do you want to add anything? Yeah, so I mean, I think just not the analytics product, we're also integrating with VMware because right now, you know, the VMware is a computer orchestrated and we want to be a network policy orchestrator. In the future, we want to integrate with the Kubernetes and OpenShift. So we want to add integration so that the platform capability can be easily consumable irrespective of what kind of workload you use or what kind of traffic analytics tool you use or what kind of data like you use in your enterprise data center. Excellent, well, I think that's a good view forward as to where some of the work is going on the future integration. Krishna and Pirabu, thank you so much for joining us. Great to catch up. Thank you. All right, I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you for watching theCUBE. Innovation, impact, influence. Welcome to theCUBE, disruptors, developers and practitioners, learn from the voices of leaders who share their personal insights from the hottest digital events around the globe. Enjoy the best this community has to offer on theCUBE, your global leader in high-tech digital coverage. From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to theCUBE Conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio and we are going to be digging into P4 which is the programming protocol independent packet processors. And to help me with that, first time guest on the program, Mario Baldi. He is a distinguished technologist with Pensando. Mario, so nice to see you. Thanks for joining us. Thank you, thank you for inviting me. All right, so Mario, you have a very robust, technical career, a lot of patents. You've worked on many technologies deep in the networking and developer world. But give our audience a little bit of your background and what brought you to Pensando. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I started my professional life in academia. Actually, I worked for many years in academia, about 15 years exclusively in academia and I was focusing both my teaching and research on computer networking. And then I also worked in a number of startups and established companies in the last, about eight years almost exclusively in the industry. And before joining Pensando, I worked for a couple of years at Cisco on a P4 programmable switch. And that's where I got in touch with P4. Actually, for the occasion, I wore a T-shirt of one of the P4 workshops, which reminds me a bit of those people when you ask them whether they do any sports. They tell you they have a membership at the gym. So I don't just have the membership. I didn't just show up at the workshop. I've really been involved in the community. And so when I learned that what Pensando was doing, I immediately got very excited that the Isaac that Pensando has developed is really extremely powerful and flexible because it's fully programmable, partly programmable with P4, partly programmable differently. And Pensando is starting to deploy this Isaac at the edge in HOS. And I think such a powerful and flexible device at the edge of the network really opens incredible opportunities to, on the one hand, implement what we have been doing in a different way. On the other hand, implement completely different solutions. So I've been working most of my career in innovation. And when I saw these, I immediately got very excited and I realized that Pensando was really the right place for me to be. Excellent. Yeah, it's interesting. Many people in the industry, they talk about innovation coming out of the universities. Stanford often gets mentioned, but the university that you attended and also were associate professor at in Italy, a lot of the networking team, your MPLS team at Pensando, many of them came from them. Selvano Guy, you know, have written many books there, you know, very storied career in that environment. P4, maybe step back for a second. You know, you're deep in this group. Help us understand what that is, how long it's been around, you know, and who participates with P4. Yeah, yeah. So as you were saying before, and you were one of the few people from whom I've heard saying it because everyone calls it P4 and nobody says what it really means. So programming protocol independent packet processors. So it's a programming language for packet processors and it's protocol independent. So it doesn't start from assuming that we want to use certain protocols. So P4, first of all, allows you to specify what packets look like. So what the headers look like and how they can be parsed. And secondly, because P4 is specifically designed for packet processing, it's based on the idea that you want to look up values in tables. So it allows you to define tables and keys that are being used to look up those tables and find an entry in the table. And when you find an entry, that entry contains an action and parameters to be used for that action. So the idea is that the packet descriptions that you have in the program define how the packets should be processed. Header fields should be parsed, values extracted from them. And those values are being used as keys to look up into tables. And when the appropriate entry in the table is found an action is executed and that action is going to modify those header fields. And this happens a number of times. The program specifies a sequence of tables that are being looked up. Header fields being modified it. And in the end, those modified header fields are used to construct new packets that are being sent out of the device. So this is the basic idea of a P4 program. You specify a bunch of tables that are being looked up using values extracted from packets. And so this is very powerful for a number of reasons. So first of all, it's simple, which is always good, as we know, especially networking. And then it maps very well on what we need to do when we do packet processing. So writing a packet processing program is relatively easy and fast. It would be difficult to write a generic program in P4, you could not. But the packet processing program is easy to write. And last, but not least, P4 really maps well on hardware that was designed specifically to process packets. What we call domain specific processors, right? And those processors are in fact designed to quickly look up tables that might have T-cam inside. They might have processors that are specialized in performing, in building keys and performing table lookup and modifying those header fields. So when you have those processes that are usually organized in pipelines to achieve a good throughput, then you can very efficiently take a P4 program and compile it to execute it very high speed on those processors. And this way, you get the same performance of a fixed function ASIC, but it's fully programmable. Nothing is fixed, which means that you can develop your features much faster. You can add features and fix bugs with a very short cycle, not with the four or five year cycle of baking a new ASIC. And this is extremely powerful. This is the strong value proposition of P4. Yeah, absolutely. I think that resonates Mario. I used to do presentations about the networking industry and you would draw timelines out there in decades because from the standard to get deployed for the hardware to get baked, the customers to do the adoption, things take a really long time. You brought up edge computing. Obviously, it is really exciting, but it is changing really fast. And there's a lot of differing capabilities out there. So if you could help us connect the dots between what P4 does and what the customers need. We talk about multi-cloud and edge. What is it that P4 in general and what Pensanda is doing with P4 specifically enables this next generation architecture? Yeah, absolutely. So Pensanda has developed this card which you call the DSC, Distribute Services card that is built around an ASIC that has a very, very versatile architecture. It's fully programmable. And it's fully programmable at various levels. And one of them is in fact P4. Now this card has a PCIe interface so it can be installed in host. And by the way, this is not the only way this powerful ASIC can be deployed. It's the first way Pensanda has decided to use it. And so we have this card that can be plugged into host. It has two network interfaces so it can be used as a network adapter. But in reality, because the card is fully programmable and it has several processors inside, it can be used to implement very sophisticated services, things that you wouldn't even dream of doing with the typical network adapter, with the typical NIC. So in particular, this card, this ASIC contains a sizable amount of memory. Right now we have two sizes, four and a gig, but we are gonna have the versions of the card with even larger memory. Then it has some specialized hardware for specific functions like cryptographic functions, compression, computation of CRCs, a sophisticated queuing system, a packet buffer with the queuing system to handle packets that they have to go out of the interfaces or coming from the interfaces. And then it has several types of processors. It has generic processors, specifically arms, arm processors that can be programmed with general purpose languages. And then a set of processors that are specific for packet processing that are organized in a pipeline. And those are ideal to be programmed with P4. They can, we can very easily map a P4 program on that pipeline of processors. So that's where Pensando is leveraging P4 as the language for programming those processors that allow us to process packets at the line rates of our 200 gigabit interfaces that we have in the card. Great, so Mario, what about from a customer viewpoint? Do they need to understand how to program in P4? Is this transparent to them? What's the customer interaction with it? Oh, yeah, not at all. The Pensando platform, Pensando is offering a platform that is a completely turnkey solution. Basically the platform, first of all, the platform has a controller with which the user interacts. The user can configure policies on this controller. So using an intent-based paradigm, the user defines policies. The controller is going to push those policies to the cards. So in your data center, in your host, in your data center, you can deploy thousands of those cards. Those cards implement distributed services. Let's say, just to give a very simple example, a distributed, stateful firewall implemented on all of those cards. The user writes a security policy says this particular application can talk to this other particular application and that's translated into configuration for those cards. It's transparently deployed on the cards that start enforcing the policies. So the user can use this system at this very high level. However, if the user has more specific needs, then the system, the platform, offers several interfaces and several APIs to program the platform through those interfaces. So the one at the highest level is a REST API to the controller. So if the customer has an orchestrator, they can use that orchestrator to automatically send policies to the controller. Or if a customer already have their own controller, they can interact directly with the DSCs, with the cards on the host, with another APIs that's fully open. It's based on GRPC. And this way they can control the cards directly. If they need something even more specific, if they need a functionality that Pensando doesn't offer on those cards, hasn't already written software for the cards, then customers can program the card. And the first level at which they can program it is the ARM processors. We have ARM processors, those are running a version of Linux so customers can program it by writing C code or Python. But if they have very specific needs, like when they write a software for the ARM processor, they can leverage the P4 code that we have already written for the card for those specialized packet processors. So they can leverage all of the protocols that our P4 program is already supporting. And by the way, because that software, they can pick and choose among a library of many different protocols and features we support and decide to deploy them and then integrate them in their software, in their software running on the ARM processor. However, if they want to add their own proprietary protocols, if they need to execute some functionalities at very high performance, then that's when they can write P4 code. And even in that case, we are gonna make it very simple for them because they don't have to write everything from scratch. They don't have to worry about how to process IP packets, how to terminate TCP. We have the software P4 code for that. They can focus just on their own feature and we are gonna give them a development environment that allows them to focus on their own feature and integrate it with the rest of our P4 program. Which by the way, is something that P4 is not designed for. P4 is not designed for having different programmers write different piece of the program and put them together. But we have the means to enable this. Okay, interesting. So maybe bring us inside a little bit in the P4 community. You're very active in it. When I look online, there's a large language consortium. Many of all the hardware and software companies that I would expect in the networking space are on that list. So what's Pensando's participation in the community? And you were just teasing through, what does P4 do and then what does Pensando maybe enable above and beyond what P4 just does on its own. Yeah, so yes, Pensando is very much involved in the community. There has been recently an event which, online event that substituted the yearly P4 workshop. It was called the P4 Expert on Table series. And Pensando had very strong participation. Our CTO, VP and Jane had the keynote speech talking about how P4 can be extended beyond packet processing. Before we said has been designed for packet processing but today there are many applications that require message processing, which is more sophisticated. Then he gave a speech on how we can go towards that direction. Then we had a talk that was resulting from a submission that was reviewed and accepted on in fact the architecture of our ASIC and how it can be used to implement many interesting use cases. And finally we participated into a panel in which we discussed how to use P4 in NICS, in SmartNICS at the edge of the network. And there we argued with some use cases and example and code how P4 needs to be extended a little bit because NICS have different needs and open up different opportunities rather than switches. Now P4 was never really meant only for switches but if we looked at what happened the community has worked mostly on switches. For example, it has defined what is called the PSA, portable switch architecture. And we see that the NICS have edge devices have a little bit different requirements. So one of the things we are doing within the community is working within one of the working groups. It's called the architecture work group. And we are working in there to create the definition of a PNA, portable NIC architecture. Now we didn't start this activity. This activity has started already in 2018 but it had slowed down significantly mostly because there wasn't so much of a push. So now Pensando coming on the market with this new architecture really gave new life to this activity and we are contributing actively. We have proposed a candidate for a new architecture which has been discussed within the community. And just to give you an example why do we need a new architecture? Because if you think of a switch, there are several reasons but one that's very intuitive. If you think of a switch, you have packets coming in they've been processed and packets go out. As we said before, that's the PNA, the PSA architecture is meant for this kind of operation. If you think of a NIC, it's a little bit different because yes, you have packets coming in and yes, if you have multiple interfaces like our card you might take those packets and send them out. But most likely what you want to do you want to process those packets and then not give the packets to the host. Otherwise the host CPU will have to process them again to pass them again. You want to give some artifacts to the host some pre-processed information. So you want to, I don't know, take those packets for example, assemble many TCP messages and provide a stream of bytes coming out of a TCP connection. Now these requires a completely different architecture. Packets coming in, something else goes out and goes out for example through a PCI bus. So you need some, a different architecture and then you will need in the before language different constructs to deal with the fact that you are modifying memory. You are moving data from the card to the host and vice versa. So again, back to your question how are we involved in the workgroups? We are involved in the architectural workgroup right now to define the P&A, the portable NIC architecture. And also I believe in the future we will be involved in the language group to propose some extensions to the language. Excellent. Well, Mario, thank you so much for giving us a deep dive into P4, where it is and some of the potential futures for where it will go in the future. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. All right, I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you so much for watching theCUBE.