>> From New York City, it's theCUBE, covering Welcome to the New Edge. Brought to you by Pensando Systems. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown Manhattan at the top of Goldman Sachs, like 43 stories above the Hudson. It was a really beautiful view a couple hours ago, but the cloud has moved in and that's only appropriate, 'cause cloud is a big theme of why we're here today. We're here for the Pensando event, it's called Welcome to the New Edge. It just came out of stealth mode after two and a half years, almost three years, raised a ton of money, got a really rockstar team and we're excited to have the CEO with us today to tell us a little bit about more what's goin' on, and that's Prem Jain and, again, the CEO of Pensando. Prem, great to see you. >> Nice to see you too. >> So, everything we did running up to this event before we could get any of the news, we tried to figure out what was going on, and all's that kept coming up was MPLS, MPLS, MPLS, which I thought was a technology, which it is, but it's really about the team. Tell us a little bit about the team and what you guys have built prior and why you're such a well-functioning and kind of forward-thinking group of people. >> So I think the team is working together, Mario, Luca, myself, and Soni. We are working together since 1983, except for Soni. Soni joined us after the first company, which is Crescendo, got acquired by Cisco in 1993. And since then, four of us are working together. We have done many spin-ins inside the Cisco Andiamo was the first one. Then we did Nuova systems, which was the second. Then we did, recently, Insieme. And then after we left, we thought we were going to retire, but we talked about it and we says, you know, there is still transitions happening in the industry and maybe we have few more years to go back to the industry and do something which is very challenging and impacting. I think everything which we have done in the past is to create a impact in the industry and make that transition, which occurring, very successful. >> Which is really hard to do, and John Chambers, who's on the board and spoke earlier today, kind of talked about these ten year cycles of significant change in our industry. And Clayton Christensen, "Innovator's Dilemma", it's really easy when you are successful at one of those to kind of sit on your laurels and, in fact, it's really, really hard to kill yourself and go on to the next thing. You guys have done this time and time and time again. Is there a unique chemistry in the way you guys look forward? Are you just, you just get bored with what you built, then you want to build something new? I mean, what is some of the magic? 'Cause even John said, as soon as he heard that you were the team behind it, he was like, "Sign me up. "I don't know what they're building "but I don't really care, "'cause I know these people can deliver." >> I think it's very good, whenever you look at any startup, the most important thing which comes up, is the team. And you seen lot of startup fails because the team didn't work together, or they got their ego's into this one. Since we are working for so long, we compliment each other. That's one thing which is very important. Mario, Luca, myself, we come from engineering backgrounds, Soni comes from marketing sales type of background. And we are really, in terms of the brain, if you think about, is the Mario behind the scene. Luca is really the execution machine. And I'm, you can think like, as a heart, okay, putting this thing together. As a team, we work very complimentary with each-other. It does not mean that we agree on everything. >> Right. >> We're disagree, we argue, we basically challenge each other. But one thing good about this particular team is that, once we come to a conclusion, we just focus and execute. And team is also known to work with customers all the time. I mean, even when we started Pensando, we talked to many customers in the very beginning. They shape up our ideas, they shape up the directions which as we are going, and what transitions are occurring in the industries, and all that. That's another thing which is, we take customer very seriously in our thought process of building a product. >> So when you were thinking around, sitting around the table deciding whether you guys wanted to do it again, what were the challenges that you saw? What was the kind of the feedback loop that came in, that started this? The gem of the idea? >> Thing is, also, is that we had developed so many different products, as you saw today in the launch. Eight or nine billion dollar product line, and stuff like that. So we all have a very good system experience. What is really needed, what transitions are occurring, and stuff like that. When we started this one, we were not really sure what we wanted to do it but, in the last one, when we did the Insiemi, we realized that the enterprise thing, which would deliver the ACI Solution for the enterprise, we realized that the services was the most complex way of incorporating into that particular architectures. So, right from the beginning, we realized that this particular thing is nobody has touched it, nobody thought about it, out-of-the-box thinking, that how can you make it into a distributed fashion? Which is also realize that cloud is going everything distributed. They got away from the centralized appliances. So is the enterprises now thinking of doing it cloud-like architectures and stuff like that. And the third thing, which has really triggered us also, there was a company which is Annapurna, which got acquired by Amazon in 2016, and we were looking at it, what kind of things they are doing, and we said, 'Look, we can do much better 'architecturally and next-generation.' Architecture, which can really enable all the other cloud venders, some of them are our partners, to make sure they can leverage their particular technologies and build the next-generation cloud. And that's where this idea of new edge came in, because we also saw that the new applications, like IoT's, 5G's and artificial intelligence, machine-learning robotics, drones. You just name it. Intelligent devices, which is going to get connected. What is the best place to process them? Is at the edge, or also at the back end with the application where the server is running these, and that is another edge, computer edge, in that particular sense. So, our idea was to develop a product so that it can cover wide segment of the market, enterprise, cloud providers, service providers, but focus very narrowly, delivering these services into existing architectures, also people who are building the next-generation architectures. >> Right. So it's the distributed services platform, or the distributed services architecture. So, at its core, for people that didn't make it today, what is it? >> It's basically is a distributed service platforms. The foundation of that is really our custom processor, which, as we have designed, is highly programmable. It's software defined, so that all the protocols, which is typically people hard-wired, in our case is programmable. It's all programs, which as we are writing. The language which we selected is P4.P4 extensions. The software stack is the major differentiated thing, which is running on the top of this particular processor. Which as we have designed in such a way, that is hardware agnostics. The capabilities which we have built is easily integrated into the existing environment. Say people already have the cloud, and they want to leverage our technologies, they can really deploy it. In the enterprise, we are basically replacing lot of appliances, simplifying the architectures, making it sure they can enable the service as they grow more, which is really amazing because right now they had to say firewall goes here, load balancer goes here, these DPN devices goes there. In our case, it's very simple. You put our server, of our technologies, and our software stack and our Venice, which is our policy manager, which is sitting outside and it's based upon Kubernetes architectures. Is basically a microservices, which as we are running and managing, the life cycle of this particular product family, and also providing the visibility and accountability in terms of exactly what is going on in that particular network. And it's all driven by intent-based architecture, which is policy-driven. >> Right. So, software-defined sitting on software-defined silicon. So you get the benefits of the silicon, but it's also programmable silicon, but still, you're sitting, you got a software stack on top of that, that manages that cloud. And then, foreign factors as small as a NIC. (laughing) So you can stick it in the HPE server. >> Yeah its basically goes into any PCI slot, in any server, in the industry, yes. >> It's amazing... >> That's overall first incarnation of what we are delivering, yes. >> Right, right right. But that's a really simple implementation, right? Just stick it right in there. >> Simple implementation, and easy to deploy. >> Right. And you guys are, your software is involved in security, it's involved in managing the storage, it's low power, which I thought was a pretty interesting attribute that you defined early on, clearly thinking about Edge and these distributed things all over the place. >> Absolutely. >> Bare metal, programmable, and then the other thing that was talked about a lot today was the observability. >> Yes. >> Why observability? Why was that so important? What were you hearing from customers that were really leading you down that path? >> Yeah, it's very important to, surprisingly enough, the visibility is one of the biggest challenge most of the data center faces today. Lot of people try to do multiple different things, but they're never able to do it in the way we are doing it. One is that we don't run anything on the host. Some people have done it, running the agent on the host. Some people have tried to run virtual machines on this particular environment. In our case, there's nothing which is running on the host; it runs on our card. And having end-to-end, that visibility, we can provide latency, very accurate latency to the applications, which is very important for these customers. Also, what is really going on? Where is the problem in the internet world? Isolation is another big thing. When something get lost, they don't know where it got lost. We can provide that thing. Another important thing which we are doing, which is not being done in the industries, everything which as we are doing is flow-based. Means, if I'm talking to you, there is a flow being set up between you and me. And we are monitoring every flow. And one of the advantages of our processor is, we have four to eight gigabytes of memory. So we can keep these states of these flows inside, and that gives tremendous advantage for us to do lot of things, which, as you can imagine, going forward, we'll be delivering it such as, for example, behavior of these flows. And think from this point of view, once you understand the behavior of the flow, you can also provide lot of security features, because, if I'm not talking to you and suddenly I start talking to you, I know that something went wrong. And we should be able to look at the behavior analysis, and should be able to tell exactly what's going on. >> You mean, we want a real-time snapshot of what's really happening, instead of a sample of something that happened a little while ago? (laughing) >> Which is what, no absolutely, you're absolutely correct. >> Yeah, yeah. That's terrific. So, put together the company and you immediately went out and talked to a whole bunch of customers. I was amazed at the number of customers and partners that you had here at the launch. Was that for validation? Were you testing hypotheses? Or were there some things that the customers were telling you about that maybe you weren't aware of, or maybe didn't get the right priority? >> I think it's all of the above. What you mentioned. It's in our DNA, by the way. You know, we don't design products, we don't design things, without talking to customers. Validation is very important, that we are on the right track, because you may try to solve the customer problem, which is not today's problem, may be future's problem. Our idea was that, then, you can develop the product that was set on the shelf. We don't want to do that. We wanted to make sure that this is the hard problem customer is facing today. At the same time, looking at it, what futuristic, and their architectures, understanding the customers. What are they doing today? How they're deploying it. What the use cases are. Understanding those very well and making it sure that we are designing, because when we design a ASIC or when you design a processor, you cannot design for one year. It has to be a long-term. And you need to make sure that we understand the current problems, we understand the future problems, and design that in. >> Prem, you're a smart guy, and you've been in this space forever. You're at Cisco before, and so I'd just love to get your take on exponential growth. It's such an interesting concept that people have a really hard time grasping, exponential growth, and we're seeing it clearly with data and data flows and, ultimately, everything's got to go through the network. I mean, when you think back with a little bit of perspective at the incredible increase in the data flow, and the amount of data that's being stored, and the distribution of these applications, and now, out to the edge and store and compute and take action at the edge, what do you think about? How do you kind of stay on top of that, as somebody who kind of sees the future relatively effectively? How do you try to stay on top of exponential curves? >> So, as you know very well, data is very important for anybody, in any business, whether it's financial, whether it's healthcare, whether it's, and it's becoming even more and more important, because of machine-learning, artificial intelligence, which is coming in. To really process this particular data and predict certain things, which is going to happen. We wanted to be close to the data. And the closest place to be data, is where the application is running, that's one place. Closest to the data, at the edge, is where data is coming in from the IoT devices, from the 5G devices, from the, you know, all kind of appliances, which has been classified under IoT devices. We wanted to be make sure that we are close to the data, doesn't matter where you deploy. And we want to be agnostic. Actually, our technologies and architecture is designed that these boundaries between north, south, east, west, is going to go away, in future. Cloud, lot of things which is being done in the back end will be become at the edge, like we talked about before. So we are really a journey, which is just starting in this particular architectures, and you're going to see lot more innovations coming from us, continuously, in this particular directions and, again, based upon the feedback which you're going to get from cloud customers, with enterprise customers, with our partners, and other ecosystem partners, which is going to give us a lot of feedback. >> Great. Well, Prem, again, thanks for having us out and congratulations to you and the team, it must be really fun to pull the covers off, after working so hard. >> It was really, really, >> For a couple of years. >> Absolutely, it is very historical day for us. This is something we were waiting for two years and nine months, to see this particular date, to have our customers come on the stage and talk about our technologies and why they think it's very important. Thank you very much for giving me this opportunity to talk to you. >> Thank you. All right, thanks Prem. >> Thanks. >> He's Prem, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at the Pensando launch at the top of Goldman Sachs in downtown Manhattan. Thank for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat techno music)
