Featured Speakers:
Analyst Chair: Scott Raynovich, Chief Technology Analyst, Futuriom
Amir Khan, Founder, President & CEO, Alkira
Galeal Zino, Founder & CEO, NetFoundry
Kevin Deierling, SVP Marketing, NVIDIA
Mark Fox, CEO, NetEvents
Hi everybody, I’m Mark Fox CEO of NetEvents and delighted to welcome you today to our session on developments in the new cloud edge. We have Scott Raynovich of Futuriom to chair this session today, and very pleased to have media here from Europe, Middle East, North America, and Latin America. So thanks very much for joining. And Scott, over to you.
Scott Raynovich Chief Technology Analyst Futuriom
Welcome everybody,y pleased to have a spectacular panel here to talk about developments in the new cloud edge. We have Amir Khan the Founder, President & CEO of Alkira an exciting, new cloud networking company. Galeal Zino, Founder & CEO of NetFoundry a cloud native networking company and Kevin Deierling, SVP Marketing of NVIDIA of course the giant chip and AI company that bought Kevin’s company Mellanox recently,. So it’s a really high quality panel that’s going to tell you a lot more than I can tell you but I’m going to kick things off with some thoughts. I’m the chief analyst and founder of Futuriom and we’re an independent research company. We really focus on innovations in cloud technology, as everybody knows things are moving very quickly in the cloud and we try to keep up to pace with all the changes. So let’s start shall we and we’ll move to the first slide. Of course, the topic is developments in the new Cloud Edge, SD-WAN, SASE and 5G. I’m going to talk about how all of these technologies are converging, they’re separate yet they’re all tied together at the same time. And what’s really catalyzing all this right now as we read the headlines and technology, everything is cloud, right, and unfortunately we have this tenacious pandemic that’s forcing us all into different habits, but of course the technology impact of that is everything has become more virtualized. We’re doing a lot more on zoom we’re doing virtual meetings were working in home offices more often. And this kind of triggered a cloud explosion if you will. You can see that just in the stock price of Zoom things are going a bit crazy. Now that means of course there’s more demands on cloud technology we need to connect things faster. We need to provide more bandwidth and we need to keep pace with this new demand, so I’m going to move to the next slide. Here’s just some more facts about this cloud explosion, you know, cloud compute spending is growing about 4.5 times the rate of it spending. Since 2009. We have 23% of its workloads now and public clouds, that’s up 19% just since June and Goldman expects this to reach 43% in three years. You’re seeing these pops explode all over the world. And of course, this is driven by the cloud explosion which is really driven by API software and infrastructure, connecting to other software and infrastructure. Using more flexible cloud native API’s is what’s driving everything. So I’ll move to the next slide. So we put together a little taxonomy here so that you can understand when we throw all these kind of buzzwords around, you know the topic of this is developments in the new Cloud Edge, SDN-WAN, SASE, 5G. But what exactly does that mean – well there are interesting groups of technologies evolving right now there’s quite a bit of innovation in each of these areas. And I will say it all started with SD-WAN – a topic that I started following about seven or eight years ago when some very smart person tipped me off. ‘Hey, you should should follow this SD-WAN thing’. And, of course, Amir knows all about that he founded Viptela which was sold to Cisco. So he was there in the beginning, and the innovation around SD-WAN was really kind of virtualizing enterprise network connectivity at the edge So how do you get all these branch offices connected more efficiently to a LAN without truck rolls and manual configuration of routers and all that. So it really provided an improvement in the management automation of the enterprise edge in the connection with the WAN. Now, as we move to SASE you might have heard this word SASE, Secure Access Services Edge, popularized by the research juggernaut Gartner last year. It’s really about the integration of security and networking taking these cloud security networks and orchestrating them with the cloud security services and orchestrating them with networks, and that is now starting to merge with SDN. Of course if you connect people at the edge of the network you also want to connect them with security. So we need to integrate the security services in the cloud, with the WAN and that’s kind of what’s happening with SASE. Then we move to Cloud Edge. Cloud Edge is really about pushing the cloud out closer to the end users. So, we you know we’re all hearing about 5G and I don’t know about you but I’m waiting to get the 5G connectivity in my neighborhood, it’s not here yet but it’s coming. It’s maybe a little more slowly than we wanted, but really what cloud with 5G is going to do it’s also going to provide services to enterprises and there’s a thing called private wireless which can put 5G in big box stores and warehouses. And what this is doing is pushing the cloud services closer to the end users. So we need to provide more compute, we need to provide more network in these new locations and this requires a lot of automation, a lot of scale. It’s also going to create a lot more traffic so the networks have to be able to support all this traffic. And that brings us to the next topic which is multi-cloud networking. And really, this is, as we drive all these services in this bandwidth into these multiple clouds. They need to be connected better and this is going to spur boom and multi-cloud networking providing you with connectivity between different clouds. So that’s kind of how we see all this playing out. I’m going to move to the next slide. This is kind of a vision of how we build this new virtual network. If you think about the cloud, as this big network in the middle that actually connects other clouds, whether it’s Google or Zoom, there’s really a lot of stuff that happens in there and it involves routing and internet transit service, meshes layer two, layer three connectivity, but it’s really all connected by API’s right like we have all these clouds of gateways. And these colocation points of presences, you know, Equinox building data, data colocation facilities. All these networks, all these applications can be connected with API’s and that’s kind of what’s driving the cloud revolution, has driven it from the beginning, cloud. You hear the term cloud-native. Cloud-native is about being able to easily connect things and drive things in the cloud virtualized services using API’s, and you see the upper left here. We’ll talk more about this but this is really the new model for networking to give customers and enterprises that control over their networks and services with web-based portal. So that’s kind of how the new cloud network is going to be driven. I’m going to move to the next slide. And when we ask people about this because Futuriom conducts end-user based research where we’re interviewing end-users every day and surveying them once a month, we ask them what they need for cloud networking. They really need public cloud networking infrastructure to be connected better, using cloud native networking and overlay technology, and some of the stuff I just showed you, and we need to build cloud native networking technology which is more integrated among the different clouds. So, those are the top two initiatives that people picked. To a lesser extent they want to preserve their existing legacy infrastructure, but really they’re more interested in moving toward this cloud integration. Next slide. So, we’ll talk a little bit here about what is the Cloud Edge. So, I showed you that network as a service model, let’s call it the core of the cloud getting to different clouds, but what happens is you go out, closer to the customer, to these edge sites, roadside cell site, macro site or you’re in the basement of a stadium or a big box store. We’re going to have these new cloud edges and this is compute and networking. As I said pushed out closer to the customer, driven by 5G, the new application that’s going to connect everybody a lot faster on the edge. This is going to be really interesting because if you look to the right, the cloud services, it’s going to push a lot more bandwidth across the network trying to connect these clouds. So, 5G in the cloud just kind of adds to the multi-cloud challenge and the need for networking. So let’s go to the next slide. So, as we talk to people and we gather this survey research, there are some key attributes of the cloud edge, you know what folks tell us that needs to be multi-domain. What does that mean? It means it needs to live in the telco world. It needs to live in the enterprise. Networking in IT world, and it needs to live in the cloud-native world, but really we need consistency between these models as every knows over time these different domains have developed a different set of technologies that are really starting to kind of coalesce around the cloud native technologies. And so that brings us to the next point – we need cloud-native networking. So, what is the top goal of network automation? We asked people this in August in our service provider survey about network automation and they really want to use networks to accelerate their services, be able to provision things on demand, accelerate the revenue, deploy services more quickly, number one choice 36%. They also want to simplify Lifecycle Management, the way the service lives on the network and how it’s instantiated and in changed. And then the next one is of course network security. So let’s go on to the next slide. A little bit on SASE, remember I showed you those four buckets of technology, SASE is pretty hot. Galeal’s gonna tell us a lot about SASE, but really secure access service edge, the driver is as I said integration of network and security at the edge in the enterprise networks, and the future is cloud based so taking cloud based security services, pushing them out to the edge, making sure they’re embedded in the network. Okay, and moving on to the next slide. So key attributes of SASE, we have these global SD-WAN footprints being pushed out these Pops. They’re also going to embed security services so the Pops can be used to deploy, not only networking connectivity but security services at the same time. That’s going to enable distributed inspection and policy enforcement of all the traffic. It’s all distributed with a cloud-native architecture. And we’re also moving towards identity driven security, what does that mean? It’s not necessarily attached to your device, or your IP address, but it’s tracking the identity of either the user or the application of the machine and making decisions based on that, who can access what. Okay so moving on. So, we asked why is SASE important? Why is it connected SD-WAN? Why is it connected to networks? Well because when you ask network users, and that’s what this survey is, 100 network administrators and managers and architects, what is their biggest driver? It’s better security. So security is the number one driver of new networking technology in the cloud automation. And the second is support for the cloud or edge services. Well we’ve talked about the cloud edge. So that’s a big deal and ease of use and management, the theme here really is flexibility as network architects set-up new networks. They need to be able to change them on the fly. They need to be able to manage them with software and they need to be able to have a nimble network that can adapt to all these cloud applications. Moving on to the next slide. So, we’re going to discuss all these topics that I bust through really quickly and we couldn’t have a better group of experts to talk about this. So, the first topic is my buckets of technology, I wonder if all of you agree with this and whether you see this convergence among the buckets? So let’s go look at them again real quick. And I’m going to start I don’t know if every screen is the same way. I’m gonna start at the top left and move. This is like kind of Hollywood Squares or something. Start with Kevin, and see Kevin if you agree with these buckets – tell us what it means for NVIDIA, whether you see this convergence.
Kevin Deierling SVP Marketing, NVIDIA
Yeah, absolutely. I think this is a good way to really classify the different aspects of networking and security and cloud and multi-cloud. And as NVIDIA networking we actually span all of that we support. Typically we’re inside of boxes, and you don’t always see us until you get to really the cloud edge, then we start to become more visible with some of the 5G classrooms that we have, but across all of these, I think security is critical. If you look at it, you’ve talked a lot about cloud networking and cloud native networking. I hope to talk more about that, but really cloud is not about implementation, but it’s about experience. And so you talked about some of the underpinnings with overlay networks and things like that, from the consumer perspective. It’s really about ease of use, and I want it to be the same way I always had it when it was in my enterprise data center that I managed, except I want it automated, and really autonomous. And so, what the implementation is that accomplishes that almost doesn’t matter. So, if there’s an overlay network who cares what my experience is I have a layer two layer. And the fact that it’s being spammed with the VPN across networks is really something that it’s useful to understand, but really I don’t need to know the expertise of that, we should be able to deliver that as a service. So that whether you’re at the edge, you’re in a multi-cloud environment, whether you’re connecting remotely through a secure connection with S-WAN, whether it’s Software as a Service, all of that is really hidden behind the your user experience
Galeal Zino Founder and CEO NetFoundry
Implementation shouldn’t be important, we should make it easy and autonomous.
Scott Raynovich Chief Technology Analyst Futuriom
That’s great. So, Galeal you’re an expert in cloud-native networking technology, and talking on the phone yesterday you’re telling me about this kind of convergence between SASE and SDN. So, do you agree, what’s happening here and tell us a little bit about your experience.
Galeal Zino Founder and CEO NetFoundry
Yeah, Scott. Thank you. I’ll take this first from the perspective of our customers, from the perspective of businesses around the globe. You know Scott they don’t necessarily care about labels or taxonomy. They care about winning. And in today’s world, they need to innovate. They need to be fast. They need to be agile. Obviously they need to do that in a cost effective manner. What’s interesting is that lead to incredible distribution and using that term (inaudible) ‘Time’ Scott in your presentation here in your service. This massive distribution of applications. We like to say that the service provider edge, or the Telco management cloud edge becomes less and less important than the new edge application itself. And on that business. I need to be able to securely and reliably connect that application, no matter where it is on a device, on a near edge forest, on the cloud, on multiple clouds. So I think that’s really the convergence we’re looking at here Scott. SASE as you mentioned, is basically saying to us I have a challenge, my apps are all over the place now. They’re mobile, they’re portable from microservices in the cloud. To my users for all of a sudden all over the planet, work from home etc gone from multiplying the number of inches by 50 or 100. That’s incredibly difficult to manage. And so it’s looking at fasting 10 Okay. I can’t have bespoke solutions. I can’t have a one-off solution for remote work of VPN, a different one-off solution for cloud access, a different solution for WAN, a different solution for web security. I need a platform type approach. I need to manage the connection between my users and devices. And my applications within one platform. Simple, agile, automated from a customer perspective Scott, that’s what they’re seeing from a business perspective, that’s how they’re looking at this type of trends.
Scott Raynovich Chief Technology Analyst Futuriom
Okay, that’s great. Yeah. Good point. So it’s interesting. Both you and Kevin are saying, the end users don’t really care about WAN. Us analysts come up with these fancy names for technology they just want it to work. I 100% agree with that but we do have to kind of explain what’s going on. So I think it’s a buzzword driven world, unfortunately. Amir, what do you think Galeal is talking about the applications and supporting them and of course, the network has to do that. And you’re involved in doing that every day so tell us what you’re seeing on the network’s side and connecting multiple clouds.
Amir Khan Founder, President and CEO Alkira
Thanks, Scott. It’s a pleasure to be talking to everyone today. So, it’s an interesting topic. We are talking about the network, and you have listed four major areas which are kind of trying to solve the same problem in different ways. So you know, when we invented Wide Area Networking, the SD-WAN stuff it was a very simple goal to create a common fabric across multiple transports and seamlessly tie it into your existing infrastructure on prem. And then some people started to bring it to the edge of the cloud to connect to multiple clouds and then of course it’s not cloud-native. So, you had to do manual stuff inside the clouds to tie things together. And then came the SASE world where we are trying to bring the security services together with SDN in some ways, and it’s a very specific security solutions, which are independently offered by security service providers, right, and you get to tie them on one-off basis into an existing environment, whether it’s cloud or on prem traditional way of doing things. And now we are starting to talk about 5G and cloud edge, and what is the cloud edge, and how many applications need that. Networking is inherently distributed technology. So, could we just seamlessly extend that into, you know, areas which are relatively closer to the user? And could we do services or provide services in a common way so that we don’t have to create a separate cloud edge from the cloud environments themselves? Then comes the multi-cloud world where we have the big behemoths like AWS and Azure and GCP and many others coming up, and they interestingly are doing things in their own way in each one of these clouds. So even though we are able to access these clouds with API’s, but they are independently done for each one of these clouds. So that’s where the problem is for the customer, they have tools to automate things through API’s or through terraform, but it’s done differently for each one of the clouds, and each one of the environments. So therein lies the problem, there is no common infrastructure across all these environments. And when we talk to our customers, they are in dire need to make sure things are simple, they stay up and running all the time, right, so requirements are simple from the customer perspective as Galeal said. People want to, you know, and Kevin also said, that people want to have the experience of utilizing the applications, which is seamless and you know that that experience is very important. So we have to take a step back as an industry and come up with a common infrastructure, which allows people to achieve their goals and thereby, what we are bringing to the table is the network cloud, which can span across multiple cloud environments. it can span seamlessly across your on prem environments, and it allows you to bring together best of breed applications into that infrastructure and it allows you to scale like a cloud, which we have never seen you know in in the networking environment. It’s always been piecemeal approach in these all independent environments so we need that for control for security for governance, we need an end to end infrastructure which seamlessly extends across all these environments and which is consumed as a service.
Scott Raynovich Chief Technology Analyst Futuriom
That’s a great point. I like the idea of the network clock because it does tie together. The infrastructure we talked about from the cloud edge, all the way into core cloud infrastructure. And I’m glad you brought up some good points Amir about the cloud edge and 5G which we’re going to talk about in our, our third discussion topic. So I’ll bring that back up but first I want to ask I talked about this cloud explosion so I’m fascinated by kind of the real time nature of the world we’re in right now. And you guys talked a lot about your customers. Tell me, do you get like phone calls every day from people like, how do we deal with this, you know 40% of our workforce just went online, how do we scale, how do we change, how do we become more nimble is that is that the topic of discussion every day? Let’s start with Galeal.
Galeal Zino Founder and CEO NetFoundry
Yes. It’s unprecedented Scott right, you mentioned the global pandemic. What that meant for many businesses. If I had 100 person branch office. Well now virtually overnight, I have 100 branch offices. And I don’t just have 100 branch offices that look like my old branch office. They’re essentially uncontrolled right there people’s homes. I don’t control the bandwidth button control the modem. I don’t have nearly, the amount of controls that I would have in a heavily engineered, heavily configured branch office type environment. So, that new normal, that next normal, if you will, Scott has dominated conversations but on the other side of that, as you mentioned, okay now. My folks are in the home offices, I now have 100, you know, hundred X amount of branch offices overnight. And where are their applications. Oh, applications on the cloud, right there, and increasing multiclass. So when you look at that topology Scott and you say, Okay, how do I securely connect someone in their house to some application cloud architecture the answer becomes pretty obvious, right, it becomes cloud-native networking. Right. I want to be able to take a direct flight, so to speak, use an application to whatever cloud that application happens to be in. And I need to do this code, not configuration right as Amir said, I can’t have one solution for Scott to access map and GCP, and a different one in Azure that one doesn’t scale. So that new topology. Scott has completely revamped our customers. Look at the design goals of simplicity user experience and security, and look at it now as a cloud native networking topology.
Scott Raynovich Chief Technology Analyst Futuriom
Excellent. Great point. So, Kevin at the beginning of this presentation I put up the zoom stock price but I probably should have put up the NVIDIA stock price too because I hear you guys are doing pretty well. Selling cloud powering chips. So, tell us what you’re seeing from demand and how people are adapting to this, this cloud explosion.
Kevin Deierling SVP Marketing, NVIDIA
Yeah, so, I think the calls that we’re getting from our customers are in fact video calls that they’re zooming in with us and connecting over all sorts of video and advanced cloud based applications. And really what our customers are asking because they are the service providers, whether it’s a cloud service provider or a telco service provider. They’re saying how do we deal with this massive demand that we’re seeing? So, I have a certain number of servers that I built into my data center, and that is directly responsible for both my CapEX and my OpEX. That’s my expense. And so what is the efficiency that I can get out of the infrastructure. And it turns out that there’s a ton of things that change that equation dramatically. So if I can support, 20 video calls on a typical server vs. 2000. Obviously it rips right down to the bottom line of the service providers. So, this whole notion of the network and network acceleration, intelligent networking and really accelerate and offload. Those are the key things that our customers are interested in so that their infrastructure allows them to scale. And this goes back to the cloud native architectures that is really about scalability and efficiency and flexibility. You know you can bring a traditional server to its knees just doing encryption, because all of this communication across the network needs to be encrypted. That’s IPsec or TLS that will literally grind a giant x86 CPU to its knees. And so those are all things that need to be accelerated, those are the kinds of conversations that we’re having with our customers. Here’s the demand we’re seeing in this new digital world, how do I address that in an efficient scalable manner.
Scott Raynovich Chief Technology Analyst Futuriom
That’s interesting. Yeah, we’re moving a lot more bits, aren’t we. So, Amir Let me ask you real quickly. By the way, Amir’s company announced the what like something $54 million in funding yesterday so congratulations on that, but I noticed the customer is Koch Industries. So tell us about that customer, why are they making this. They obviously see the advantage of this technology, what kind of demand are they seeing from Cloud and why are they looking for a new solution.
Amir Khan Founder, President and CEO Alkira
Sure. So Scott. As you may know Koch is one of the largest private companies in the US, and they have many different types of businesses, and their needs, from the data center and cloud side are enormous. They’re probably one of the largest consumers of the cloud services. and they had gone through multiple phases of deployment. The first one was obviously setting on the colocation facilities, and physically connecting to the clouds and by bringing high speed connections from their data centers into those colocation facilities, and obviously that was by no means cloud native or, you know, didn’t provide the type of access which was needed to the cloud resources, it was just bringing them to the edge of the cloud. Then they went and did it themselves in the virtual environment by spinning up virtual instances, for networking nodes and whatnot and built their transport hub architecture, which was sitting at different locations across the US and across the globe, they have presence in 70 countries across the globe. So it was becoming very complicated very quickly, and they realized that they needed to have a solution, which was as a service, which provided common capabilities across all clouds and across their on prem environments and common way of doing things like deploying firewalls for all types of capabilities like you know remote users working from home. Why should I have to secure them differently from how I secure my traffic from cloud to internet or on prem to the internet? And so they came to us in 2018, our visions were totally aligned. And we started working very, very closely with them and now they have, you know, they were instrumental in helping us refine our solution, and it is enterprise class solution they have deployed they continue to expand very quickly across the globe. And they started from very small deployment in a brownfield environment and now they’re planning to move all of their infrastructure into our network cloud offering and it’s the first of its type. It is the network cloud, and we hope many other people will follow that. And we’ll create some competition in the industry and have really strong solutions. You know, for the customers and they shouldn’t have to worry about dealing with things individually as we have been doing over the last 30 years we haven’t reached the level of automation that customers like Kevin’s company require you know from those networking environments.
Scott Raynovich Chief Technology Analyst Futuriom
That’s great. So you mentioned the term automation which is perfect because that happens to be our next topic so we didn’t even plan it right. So you guys all have great feedback from the end market which is like where I like to focus, what are the problems of these customers. So thank you for that. So let’s go to the next slide and the next topic of discussion if we will. So, it’s is cloud network automation happening so you guys all talked about, you know, these customers are experiencing the surge in demand. It’s not a manual world anymore. We can’t just depend on some guy with a tool belt to show up and move a router, right. We have to be able to connect these things with software and change them on the fly in some case have the machines, change the machines, right. So let’s talk about that I’ll start with Galeal. Why don’t you talk about how cloud-native networking can help us without automation. What do you say?
Galeal Zino Founder and CEO NetFoundry
You hit the nail on the head. Scott, not only is it happening, it’s absolutely necessary to get the security agility and cost efficiencies that businesses need. So, in a sentence we usually like to say code is replacing configuration. And as everyone on this panel knows networking historically it’s been very configuration oriented. And that made sense. When the goal was stability and you’re just nailing up a circuit, between point A to point B, put two expensive routers on either side, and calling to the day? Okay… Perfect. Now, like in the diagram you have there. Scott, where in reality one application can actually span all those clouds, right, it can have microservices across multiple clouds, it can call third party API’s in multiple clouds. And obviously on the far left it can be accessed from a person, anywhere on the planet, as well as devices increasingly like IoT. So, that level of distribution, and the need, makes it so that automation is not just a nice to have, like, not just a cost efficiency, but actually necessary, and actually Scott I kind of tie it way back to one of your poll questions that you’re tickling at the top where you know you’re asking folks about the drivers for some of these projects. And interestingly revenue was the number one answer on that, that poll that you could conducted. Now that’s a big change right, networking is not traditionally looked at as a revenue enabler anything was looked at as cost. And that’s the magic here. When we can take network and make it into an innovation enabler. Take configuration, put it into code. Make networking actually enable business outcomes revenue agility productivity. Now networking is on a whole new planet, so to speak, networking is now software, just like the rest of our business, and can that support those goals. Through this type of automation that’s a sea of change we’re seeing Scott, if you will.
Scott Raynovich Chief Technology Analyst Futuriom
That’s a good that’s a great point and I think to your point on the revenue, there is a great example of that. Yesterday, of course, Apple had their big event which the entire world watches and I was watching some of the analysis on Bloomberg afterwards and somebody pointed out that we still don’t have 5G. Really they have all these 5G phones but do you know anybody that’s really using a 5G phone yet? And so, to your revenue point, the network. And the service providers realize this network is slowing down their capability to deliver new revenue. They have to speed up the deployment of these networks and that’s kind of their big problem right now. You talked about that survey was a survey of service providers, they recognize the problem we just know it’s not an easy problem to solve right if you have the entire global service provider infrastructure moving from this legacy, you know, plug things in world to a software driven cloud native world, it’s a difficult process but they need to accelerate that process, so they can get these new services into the hands of the customers. So, I’ll go, I’ll let Amir weigh in and then Kevin. So Amir, what are your thoughts on that? Are you going to help service providers speed this up?
Amir Khan Founder, President and CEO Alkira
As a matter of fact, we talked to the end customers and that’s where the requirements come from. And in talking to the majority of the customers, whether it’s fortune 100 of global 100 or midsize companies. There’s a common theme, right, especially in the bigger companies, there’s a security team there’s a network team and there’s a cloud team. The cloud team always wants to move at the speed of the business, the networking and security teams are always lagging behind because they don’t have enough automated tools in their toolset. So, the question comes, how do we stay where we have been and as an industry to provide configuration tools or, you know, capabilities to program the environment, or we automate the environment to the extent that they can consume it as a service in a very simple manner. And that’s where the debate is inside the customer base and they all want to the networking team is under so much pressure all the time because things are even moving faster. As we move towards this digital age. Right. And so that’s where we bring our solution to customers and they really like it. It’s very simple, straightforward to deploy large scale environments across the globe, without having to know the nitty gritty details of each one of the clouds, or how your on prem environments work is simply point and click your environment, and click on provision. And this, the whole network across the globe comes up in less than an hour. So, we have spent a lot of time in working closely with the customers, and the service providers to refine our mechanisms to provide enough automation, so that the customers life becomes easier and it’s resonating extremely well.
Scott Raynovich Chief Technology Analyst Futuriom
Excellent, thanks. Kevin, how do we how do we get to the automation faster? What are your thoughts?
Kevin Deierling SVP Marketing, Networking, NVIDIA
Yeah. So I think one of the big challenges that service providers are facing is they don’t actually yet know what this technology is going to be used for. So we think the 5G capabilities that are coming, and all of the new network services that are coming challenges how am I going to use that and really one of the things that we focus on at NVIDIA is to make it a software defined answer. So it’s software defined and hardware accelerated computing. So, however you do that, everything as we move to this microservices architecture. So we take these giant monolithic software applications. And we break them up into smaller pieces, so we can address security, we can address the data processing, we can address AI, we can address video codecs and improve video conference quality. So all of those things are just software now that are accelerated, and they’re all built into microservices and you can scale them independently. Because even over the course of a day, you’re going to have massive changes in the workloads that are impacting the cloud. And so that’s the real key whether it’s 5G with an Arrow platform, or Jarvis, or Clara which is our healthcare platform. The real key is to make everything software defined and automated, so that the service providers, ultimately, when the application starts showing up. They will be able to address that in just software. So that’s the real key automation, you see. Right.
Scott Raynovich Chief Technology Analyst Futuriom
So, uh, that’s a great segue. You mentioned 5G again Kevin so I’m gonna go to the next hot topic. Let’s move to the next discussion topic about cloud edge, and I mentioned this big Apple event, just my personal view on 5G and I’m waiting for it as a business application, not a consumer application because I live in a little rural community and my DSL connection sucks and I want my 5G. So, we’re all waiting for this 5G and this cloud edge is going to bring a lot of new services and capabilities, whether that’s on the enterprise side enterprise, more flexible broadband, whether it’s a new low latency applications like VR AR autonomous driving or whether it’s just new iPhone applications or consumer applications, it’s going to bring these new things. But the cloud edge is a big place so let’s talk about cloud edge and I’m going to start with a question that was sent to me earlier was to tell us what you think the new cloud edge applications are/. One of them that’s mentioned frequently these days in the analyst communities, private wireless for enterprise, which is a little bit what I talked about how do I use it for a private wireless connectivity? So I’ll start with Kevin, since I noticed this is a pet topic of yours Kevin. What are these new applications on the cloud as what are we gonna see?
Kevin Deierling SVP Marketing, Networking, NVIDIA
Yeah, I think, as I was saying, it’s that the market doesn’t quite know yet. We have all these great new applications, lower latency and higher throughput. And clearly, those are going to enable new applications. And that could be robotics, and instead of a robot that is sort of governed by a human being, these are going to be autonomous robots, and they’re going to be working side by side with human beings. And now they need to make decisions in real time so that they don’t ever hurt the human beings, we’re going to go back to Asimov’s law, that’s the first law, don’t hurt human beings. And so for robots that actually make that possible they need to be intelligent, and it’s going to be running on an AI platform connected at the edge, everything needs to be secure. Everything needs to be scalable and whether that’s in retail environments with recommendation engines, whether it’s natural language processing that you’re going to be talking, and communicating to an intelligent entity that is going to be autonomously communicating with you. All of that is going to be driven by high bandwidth low latency and really accelerated computing, and so that’s where you know really we are focused in terms of enabling all of this, we want to do that on a single platform. We don’t want you to have to build custom platforms for each of those different types of applications. It’s just deploying software onto an accelerated computing platform,
Galeal Zino Founder and CEO NetFoundry
Which is what we do.
Scott Raynovich Chief Technology Analyst Futuriom51:46
Right, that’s great. I’m gonna see if I can bring up the slide, there’s the cloud edge. So it’s kind of what you’re talking about. And I think you’re right. And this is again, if I could do the meta analysis of my job as an analyst it’s quite challenging right because the brilliant marketers are always coming up with what’s gonna be really super hot. Right. And then we have to analyze what we think actually will happen, and it’s not always what you think and so we have all these different areas that we’re watching. We’re watching autonomous vehicles, we’re watching stadiums and private wireless in either consumer venues or commercial venues. Will you get your cool new app at Costco, that intelligently tells you about the new beer sale which is here in row four and send you a coupon in real time? This kind of futuristic shopping application, there’s all these new applications but we’re still waiting for them to show up though, I see some of them every day. So Galeal, tell us you what your play in the cloud edge is going to be. And I know you guys are have a big focus on security what the security needs of clouds are going to be.
Galeal Zino Founder and CEO NetFoundry
Yeah, I agree with Kevin that we don’t know specifically, by definition, were these kind of new apps that are going to take advantage of this environment we’re going to come from. Obviously, applications that need better latency data where it just doesn’t economically make sense to backhaul that data to the cloud, those categories of applications, certainly, I think the interesting and the promising aspect with these new capabilities, and I’ll compare it to Kevin’s chips right. When you look at the NVIDIA chips and Mellanox chips what you can do on those cheap sneakers, the AI you can do, the ML you can do. Because you previously couldn’t do that. Well, you can build applications that needed that. Right, you would have been building something that didn’t work well, now suddenly people have a brand new paradigm/ It’s the same thing here with 5G’s private LTE CBRS here in the US, a quick example Scott. We have a partnership with Microsoft for Azure Stack edge and private edge zones. The way that works Scott, is whether I’m a retail store, or whether, let’s have a remote site like oil and gas mining, pipeline etc. And I just instantly kind of spin up a local low latency highly secure 5G network. I can order this as your stack edge box from Microsoft. It will show up a plug in. I’ll give it an internet connection. I’ll give it hopefully some power and proper cooling environment. At that point, Scott. This slide becomes real like I didn’t build an entire network. I provide some power and an internet and now I have a private. Let’s say 5G or LTE network that can meet all my local needs. So let’s take a video example. Let’s say I’m doing a lot of video conferencing, and now on a local video. Well I don’t want to do that right on site, and now I can. With this stack edge solution from Azure from Microsoft. Now when the data needs to go to the cloud, but to save the metadata let’s say control plane data back to the Azure Cloud, what we did with Microsoft Teams. Then NetFoundry Zero Trust network and it’s built right into that box. So that come in and out of the box to the rest of the world. You now have global zero touch, automated networking. So again, I always like to bring it back to them customer perspective Scott, no matter what those applications are going to be, let’s just say it’s a new instance and let’s say, low latency applications with these type of ecosystem integrations. I mentioned the one with Microsoft and many others. The end customer now has the pieces. To be able to innovate, to be able to give the children automation they need. And, importantly, to do it with a kind of platform as a service type approach that’s, that’s what’s exciting to us here with these new set of capabilities.
Scott Raynovich Chief Technology Analyst Futuriom
Right. So, I mean not to bring up another buzzword. I mean what you’re talking about is the concept of infrastructures code right, having the network being automatically programmed by the application.
Galeal Zino Founder and CEO NetFoundry
That’s it. In a kind of declarative manner. Amir mentioned that earlier. He’s spot on. I don’t want to do something different. Just because the cloud is different, that just needs to look like an endpoint, and the proper abstractions and controls code, so that my endpoints can spin up in all those different clouds. And it just works. It just works Scott with security. Zero Trust in our case. It just works from a liability perspective, and it just works from an automation perspective. When we talk about cloud native networking that’s where we’re going, Scott.
Scott Raynovich Chief Technology Analyst Futuriom
That’s great. So Amir, what is cloud is going to mean for you guys? Like your more in the core of the network but obviously this is pushing more bandwidth and applications into multiple clouds right?
Amir Khan Founder, President and CEO Alkira
Yeah, so, I’m a very simple minded person so let’s dissect this diagram, right and you’re talking about autonomous cars. Majority of the decisions that our cars are making are on the road, staying in the lane, changing the lane, taking an exit, detecting a light. Do you really want to rely on the network, to be able to make that decision and that latency. Right, so you need that real time. So as an example Tesla today detects the light. And if you don’t start moving on the green light it gives you a pointer that you’re not moving. Right, so those are detected through cameras and different types of radars, etc. Now there are certain applications where you would require communication across multiple entities through the towers. But those are very few applications, even if you have robots monitoring a facility, most likely they’re going to have direct communications either over Bluetooth or other types of wireless mechanisms in the near vicinity. And then the remote monitoring person is going to have to talk to the robot and take that some actions which may not be as real time. So what I’m trying to get to is that especially in the enterprise applications the real time scenarios where you need the nanosecond type decision making, are very rare. You can get away with microsecond, millisecond type latencies. And as long as you are in single digit to maybe perhaps double-digit millisecond latencies the majority of your applications are covered. So what I like to say is that cloud is the new edge right and cloud is a distributed entity, which can, if needed, span to the tuber locations, and the solution that we are building, because it’s independent of the underlying clouds, the infrastructure is built in the cloud is very portable to different environments, it scales to all these different types of applications. But again, the users are not coming to us yet with highly sensitive, you know, in many verticals, latency based applications. There are very few of those applications that exist out there today, gaming, yes. If you are a gaming enthusiast, then absolutely you need something in a low latency, to work with each other.
Scott Raynovich Chief Technology Analyst Futuriom
Okay, that’s a great point. So I’m going to do one more question, We have media questions coming up in a few minutes so I’ll try to make this a quick one. We talked about SASE and there’s this term, I mentioned it a couple times, Zero Trust, which I hear increasingly, and we were talking about applications like autonomous cars. You don’t want people hacking into your car and driving it for you. So real quick definition, tell people what Zero Trust means Kevin. What is Zero Trust?
Kevin Deierling SVP Marketing, Networking, NVIDIA
Yeah, so I think it’s incredibly important concepts related to the edge, because if you’re looking at a traditional data center, Cloud Data Center. First time I went to one of these I was sort of blown away I felt like I was entering Fort Knox, because there were gates guards and guns that provided the physical security to get into that. And once you got in there you know they really made a point of demonstrating all of these edge appliance perimeter firewalls, connectivity points. But really in an edge environment, everything is turned upside down. And, you know, I would have agreed with what Amir said, even a few months ago before I became part of NVIDIA that 5G and the number of things that were going to be actually in cars and making autonomous decisions. What has happened since I’ve joined NVIDIA is I’ve really redefined what I think of as a cloud application. It’s just a microcosm of the cloud. And what I’ve seen in terms of autonomous entity that if you look at a smart city application or retail application. People are going to walk up and plug cameras into this edge environment that isn’t protected and users are going to be able to access have physical access to machines. And this is where you need a Zero Trust model. You trust nothing, you trust no entity, you trust no application, you trust no device. Everything needs to be authenticated. And once that happens, the peripheral security model is no longer sufficient. It’s vital, but it’s no longer sufficient. And what we’re doing is with our data processing units, we’re putting really a firewall into every server into every device, it’s software defined and hardware accelerated, but everything is authenticated every micro service every application every connection point is encrypted authenticated. That’s really the notion of, you know, Zero Trust model is you’re trusting nothing, everything has to be verified because ultimately you’re getting rid of this physical, and even logical security models that were sufficient in the past.
Galeal Zino Founder and CEO NetFoundry
Great.
Scott Raynovich Chief Technology Analyst Futuriom
Yep, I like the idea of keeping people out of my data center. Galeal, Zero Trust. I know you guys do this. What does it mean for you?
Galeal Zino Founder and CEO NetFoundry
It starts with identity, Scott, remember most enterprise networks. Today, the way they do identity is by location, like, are you in the branch office are you on my network. Kevin articulated that’s no good anymore. Used to be fine. Now my network includes billions of internet endpoints. Anybody can get in to my network. Despite the gates, garden, guns. So, location doesn’t work for identity, can’t trust location IP address. MAC address. Forget about it. They can be ephemeral they can be spoofed. You need an actual identity. So, what we’ve done on the underside for example, on our software is on an endpoint, when it’s in the cloud, when it’s on the router modem. It contains an X 509 certificate by directly authenticated with a controller, a very very secure identity. And we didn’t make it up Scott, right, I mean most apps. Take a banking app on your phone, most apps use the same kind of private key, public key cryptography to secure themselves, it works incredibly well. Except it’s incredibly difficult to do on the network inside. Historically we’ve changed that, we simplified that, we built it right into the solution, so it’s so simple for it to administer. They don’t have to go build a PK structure, etc. It just works, they now have an identity. And then as Kevin said now that you have a trusted identity. Now you can do authentication based on that identity, which privileged access, like Scott just because you’re Scott and I can verify your spot. It doesn’t mean actually give you access to an entire network and entire subnet entire suite of applications because what if somebody essentially takes control of your connection. Instead, least privileged access, what applications. Scott, right now at this point in time from what locations in, depending on the real time state and health of his identity the devices on the network etc. that needs privileged access. Again, very difficult to manage at scale when it’s something like VLANs hardware constructs tunnels. Forget about it. But now that you can manage up from the cloud. With cloud native networking, with cloud orchestration now it gets centralized visibility, the centralized control, to be able to enforce that least privileged access in a simple way. So Zero Trust, , to try to summarize that quickly Scott right Zero Trust says I don’t trust any of that. Right, obviously I need to trust something. So let me trust a secure identity and let me get that identity in an agile, easy to manage way, let me give it only access to what it needs access to.
Scott Raynovich Chief Technology Analyst Futuriom
Okay, that’s a great definition. Thanks. And I know that NetFoundry is a leader in Zero Trust and we see a lot of identity security discussion coming down the line. It’s going to be a big topic I think in 2021. Amir, how do you do Zero Trust on your cloud network? How does the cloud network become your trust.
Amir Khan Founder, President and CEO Alkira
Yes, I think these are all very important points that Kevin and Galeal bring up. And, as I said earlier, there’s certain functionality which is needed in the on the end node. There’s certain functionality which is needed in the cloud. And of course identity is very, very important. Even when we did STM at Viptela, we came up with the way to secure all the network nodes based on how applications are deployed. So, the key distribution at routing scale, was one of the innovations that we did at that time. So we fundamentally believe in securing everything in the infrastructure, no matter where it is whether it’s the end host or nodes in the network or nodes residing in the cloud everything needs to be secure and security needs to be distributed also I think Kevin alluded to that there are certain pieces of the security that needs to reside in the end nodes, like these autonomous vehicles and, you know, whatnot. And there are certain functionalities needed in the cloud, so that you can have multiple layers of security to secure the overall infrastructure. Now every node is becoming an, you know, attack point, right, and so you need to make sure going forward that we have a very secure environment, and that only can be achieved if we have commonality. If you have too many ways of doing things across different environments, then it’s very easy to create holes in those environments. So our belief is that make it simple, make it ubiquitous. Provide common services across all environments, one way of doing things rather than 100 different ways of doing things.
Scott Raynovich Chief Technology Analyst Futuriom
Okay, great. That’s a great summary. So I’ve got questions rolling in here so I’m going to start taking those. First question from Steve Broadhead of Computer Weekly: SASE is arguably the most popular jump on the bandwagon Gartner categorization. So are we going to get the age old problem for companies and end users, trying to work out exactly what they need from whom? And what else they will need from other vendors as all these people enter the market? So I guess my understanding of the question is it just going to sow confusion, you know with all these people glomming on to this new term. We all start with Galeal, you’re pretty rooted in the security business.
Galeal Zino Founder and CEO NetFoundry
Yeah, it’s a very fair question Scott and there will be, for sure, that level to navigate let’s say at the end of the day, though. Cloud is it simple analogy, infrastructure, the service. Like if I look at AWS, Azure, GCP, Alibaba, Oracle. The number of functions that are provided in the cloud. If I was to do that in my private data center I might be using 1020 vendors easily. The same thing applies to SASE. If my team is going to manage with agility, with proper economics in this world of incredibly distributed applications, and they can manage cloud, they need to manage edge. They need to manage obviously security across all of that they need to essentially consolidate those functions. That’s what SASE offers, at the end of the day, right so just to keep it really really simple. It says, I can go to 20 different vendors and try and patch it together and the solution and then when the world changes I need to kind of rebuild that solution. Or at maturity I can go to a single provider and take all of those functions as a service because at the end of the day, whether it’s networking, whether it’s classical web security, whether it’s cloud whether it’s edge, at the end of the day, we’re talking about securely connecting data and application of device, a user to an application. Logically, one platform one SASE platform can handle that task and dramatically make life simpler for it to orchestrate from the cloud.
Scott Raynovich Chief Technology Analyst Futuriom
That’s great answer. So, Kevin, Amir, you guys got anything to add on that?
Kevin Deierling SVP Marketing, NVIDIA
One thing is, you know, SASE is indeed the big buzzword bandwagon of the day on security, but there’s just no doubt that security is going to become more cloud like and integrated with the cloud and offered as a service. And, you know, one of the things we love about that is, it’s going to mean that there’s going to be a lot more security deployed across the network in boxes and storage with encrypted storage. And when the Gold Rush occurred you know the gold miners weren’t always the guys that made the money it was the guy supplying the picks and shovels. And so we’re excited because, you know, we basically accelerate and offload and isolate the server from doing that with our GPUs. And we’re encrypting data now with 200 gigabits per second. And we can put that into storage, we can manage all of the keys. This is what partners like Galeal and Amir and all of the other vendors. I don’t fully understand exactly how big SASE is going to be, but I know for a fact that it’s going to be cloud like it’s going to be secure everywhere in a Zero Trust model, and there’s a whole bunch of things that we’re going to help people to provide that so that the experience that customers have is both performance and secure, and their identities are secure and all of their data is secure because that’s what people care about more than anything else, how it happens, you know, we want to help make it happen, so that we can assure our customers and protect their data.
Scott Raynovich Chief Technology Analyst Futuriom
That’s great and Amir, I’m gonna go to you next. But first I’m going to get the next question. Only because it’s an extension of the question we just said it’s yet somebody else, Brandon Butler an analyst with IDC, says in his opinion one of the key challenges of SASE SD branch is managing multi vendor environment for the WAN edge enterprises look to more cohesively managed networking and security, how should they think about incorporating best of breed solutions with their existing network infrastructure So, I’ll let you answer that Amir first. But tell me, Amir is Akira, is the network cloud going to get into the business of security functions as well? How do you see this, this playing out.
Amir Khan Founder, President and CEO Alkira
So this is it seems like whoever asked this question was talking to me in the background. So interestingly, our view is that, you know, if you look at the security market evolution, right we saw so many players come and go. Right. There was NetScreen at Juniper, still exists in some form of shape, you know, Cisco used to be a decent player in the security market, right now there’s Palo Alto, there is Z-Scalar and where are we going to go from here? Right, so it is important to have the ability to have a common infrastructure which allows you to seamlessly integrate best of breed security solutions into that infrastructure as a customer right if one company is not meeting my needs today. Can I move to another one quickly enough and that’s the agility that we need in the cloud environment. And that’s why we are building the network cloud, it needs to be a common infrastructure across all these environments, and we need to have fully integrated higher services from the likes of Palo Alto, from other security vendors, which can be seamlessly integrated into this environment as your need changes. And it doesn’t apply only to the security services, there are multiple vendors for DDI, there are multiple vendors for other types of load balancers etc. Right. so how do you bring everything together it’s not about one piece of the infrastructure, it is how things work in unison, and we as an industry haven’t done a good job of streamlining things across these markets and over time it’s an opportunity to standardize things, but some vendor has to come in and create the common infrastructure so they can plug in these services in a seamless manner and that’s where we are headed with our solution. Yeah.
Scott Raynovich Chief Technology Analyst Futuriom
That’s a great point and it makes a lot of sense and Brandon’s question makes a lot of sense. Just to put in a quick plug for our research, we just happen to be coming up with a SASE report next week, but one of the findings was about SASE for the end users we talked to, it’s really about facilitating integration. So facilitating integration of these best of breed solutions. At the same time you see a lot of vendors, you talked about the Palo Alto, the Z-Scalers and the CASB players, like NetSkope and others. They’re really trying to consolidate many different functions and package them together as a cloud offering so i think that you know SASE is not really a product category as much as it is a movement to try to integrate these things in a kind of consumable cloud service
Amir Khan Founder, President and CEO Alkira
If I may add Scott, many people may be familiar with the audio analogy where they’re integrated systems and they’re best of breed components for enterprise and processes and stuff like that so the networking industry is quite similar. There are certain customers who are going to need an integrated system. There are certain customers who are going to need the best of breed. And we need to be able to cater to multiple sets of customers.
Galeal Zino Founder and CEO NetFoundry
That’s right, that’s right, flexibility.
George Rickman, NetEvents
I’m gonna jump in here just to remind our media audience that they can raise their hand if they want to ask questions as well as type and Guy has typed a question, but I can also allow him to talk so why don’t I allow Guy to just unmute unmuting his microphone right now.
Guy Matthews, AI Business
Yeah. Hi. We’ve been hearing today some interesting things about network clouds from our era and also there’s been talk of cloud-native networking. I’m just wondering to what extent. People visualize these two as mutually exclusive visions, or do they sort of intersect in some way?
Amir Khan Founder, President and CEO Alkira
So, you know, the network cloud is built as a native cloud application. The difference from what happens today is that you have either existing tools like SD-Wan, or, you know, things which were done for different environments. You know cobbled together in the networking infrastructure, run as instances, and manually stitched together, all you do you is build a infrastructure in the cloud for the cloud. And that’s the way we look at it differently, a lot of things can be done. natively in the cloud, but what the need from the customer is to have the least common services and that’s why we built our infrastructure natively in the cloud. And that’s why we are able to provide services across the globe on demand. But at the same time if you don’t build an infrastructure on your own, then the you know the every cloud has different lots of different limitations and different ways of doing things, and it becomes a nightmare for the customer. So that’s why we hide all of that, through abstraction across these multi cloud hybrid environments, which hasn’t happened in the industry today you can provide orchestration tools, you can provide ways to, you know, through terraform or other ways of coming in through API’s to build the infrastructure and program it on individual basis for each customer or you can provide a common infrastructure that spans across all these environments and makes the customer’s life easy and that’s the approach that we have taken.
Kevin Deierling SVP Marketing, Networking, NVIDIA
I think that was a great answer. I see them as completely complimentary. So cloud-native networking is really the underpinning architecture for a networking cloud service for example. So if you look at a cloud native networking, this is all about, you know, breaking your monolithic applications into micro services and containers and using CNI and all of the modern things that make things, scalable and flexible, because your cloud customers are going to be changing their demands on the fly, even which workloads they’re running so being able to support that. I guess in theory you could do it with a legacy architecture. But to me, these things dovetail together they’re so complimentary that I loved hearing them here talk about them, of course we have to do a cloud-native architecture and cloud-native networking is part of how we offer this as a service so I see this as completely complimentary.
Galeal Zino Founder and CEO NetFoundry
No, I’ll disagree, in a couple of ways and obviously, this depends on the scale.
Scott Raynovich Chief Technology Analyst Futuriom
I must say thank you, you guys are much more polite than certain politicians that appear on Presidential Debates but you know.
Galeal Zino Founder and CEO NetFoundry
Actually the two questions are related Brandon’s question as well right. In Brandon’s question when we’re talking about integrating best in breed to use Brandon’s words. When we talk about API integrations across the ecosystem cloud native architectures facilitate those types of integrations right with a cloud-native architecture. You can do the exact type of integrations that Brandon was referring to. If you don’t have a cloud-native architecture. If you’re just built in the cloud. If you’re just ‘a network cloud’ you’d have a very difficult time doing those type of API, and microservices type integration. So, the first critical point to me with cloud data is who can you integrate with? How easily can you do it, and how simple and powerful can you make that for your end customer? If you can do that well. Cloud natives. The second major point. Really important I think I compare it usually to direct flights versus one stop flights. Right in the non COVID world, all the good. Try to get nonstop flights as much as possible right and in logistics and economics, everything else. It just makes more sense, it’s the better option so to speak. Well, unfortunately. If you don’t have a cloud-native architecture. What it means is, again, from a customer perspective, a business perspective, it means most of our apps have to have at least one stop along the way. Now maybe it’s better than going through a VPN concentrator or SD LAN CPE of a private data center. Maybe it’s better than that stop. Maybe it’s a little bit more attractive spot. Maybe it’s one of, you know, 15 data centers a large provider has built in the cloud. But you’re still going to that third party data center. One Stop. And then you’re going to where you really wanted to go AWS, GCP, Oracle, Alibaba etc. By the way, can be incredibly multiplied by edge data centers, as opposed to what cloud native-networking. If you’re buying the true cloud-native networking solution it means the network goes with your app, or your app is going to Oracle, GCP, Azure, AWS etc. or if it’s going to a local edge data center. It’s not going to take a one stop flight through some cloud data center that you have your security, your control points, your networking are going to go right along with that app directly to that cloud edge. That’s cloud native-networking direct flights. Interesting.
Scott Raynovich Chief Technology Analyst Futuriom
Well, Amir I think he took a little bit of an issue with network clouds. I’ll let you respond right, thanks it’s just like the presidential debate that you have to have after somebody else talks.
Amir Khan Founder, President and CEO Alkira
So, yeah, interesting points Galeal. But the challenges that if you’re heavily dependent upon the underlying architecture. And that’s what we’re trying to stay away from right, I would like to compare it to the network management application with the past where the vendors built the solution or the devices or routers and added more functionality and the network management vendors were always lagging behind. And some of these orchestration tools and so called cloud-native is truly an application built in the cloud. Right, which is a microservices architecture. It’s not about programming, the natural constructs off the cloud. So what we have done is created an infrastructure, which abstracts out all the nitty gritty details and complexities of each one of the clouds from the customer it’s not that we’re not doing cloud-native. It’s a cloud-native architecture which is offered as a network cloud right and that’s the misunderstanding that I think a lot of people have is cloud-native to me is a way you build applications in the cloud, it’s not necessarily programming, you know, the natural constructs of the cloud to use it for my purpose. Right. And that’s where we have so much diversity in the cloud offering, because there is no standardization so you need a common infrastructure, which is cloud-native, which is offered as a network cloud to the industry so can you can span from on prem to multi cloud environments, that’s the way we look at it I think there’s some overlap in thinking but it’s just a different way of thinking. Excellent.
Scott Raynovich Chief Technology Analyst Futuriom
Well, I think, I think he offered you a fig leaf but we could we get into these semantic arguments and they can go on forever so I’m going to have to move on to the next question. Our final question because we were supposed to end at 15 past the hour I think we can go another few minutes, I’ll take one final question from Mary Branscombe, contributing editor ZDNet and CIO.com, as well as TechRepublic, Data Center Knowledge, the New Stack and Business Insider, well Mary, you are busy. So, Mary would like to know about the role of hardware. So we will throw this Kevin’s way he’s the most hardware guy we have today, Arm processors and AI acceleration on the cloud edge, like how important is the hardware these days?
Kevin Deierling SVP Marketing, Networking, NVIDIA
Yeah, it’s critically important and I think it goes back to what Galeal said earlier, that with GPUs and AI and machine learnings things that weren’t possible just a few years ago are now possible. And once that happens we’re going to see an explosion and new applications. And what we’ve seen is that fueling the GPU requires a ton of data, it has to be securely provisioned, and it needs to be. We say offloaded accelerated and isolated, but we have a GPU. So now we talked about the trinity of the platform is the CPU, the GPU and the GPU, which is our data processing unit, which is really all about secure networking and isolation so that what you see from a hardware perspective is a bare metal server. In reality, all of the cloud services and edge services in terms of, you know, security profiles being able to take advantage of the things that illegal in a mirror can do to actually identify a individual and assign all of those capabilities that he’s allowed what his profile is what he’s allowed to do and not allowed to do all of that is where the intelligence is that sits on top of the hardware, but there’s absolutely no reason that once you’ve applied that intelligence that then you should encrypt every packet in software or reapply the exact same decision that you’ve already made. Here’s a denial of service attack coming in. Why should I parse every incoming packet to decide that that’s a DDoS attack. Use the intelligence that other folks provide on top of the hardware and let the hardware accelerate the data path, as well as the applications AI and machine learning. Even 5G today, if you look at the modulation and error correction capabilities, you can do that in software, you can do that in dedicated hardware, or you can build it as a software defined hardware accelerated platform, that’s what we see with the GPUs.
Scott Raynovich Chief Technology Analyst Futuriom1:30:03
Okay. Excellent. Well, I’m gonna have to wrap it up here.
George Rickman 1:30:08
Hold on, Scott we’ve just got one more question from Hector Pizarro from DiarioTi. Oh, I think he’s, he’s just dropped off the call. But I’ve got his question: Can you feed data protection policies into a SASE implementation?
Galeal Zino Founder and CEO NetFoundry
Yes, easy answer. Yes.
Scott Raynovich Chief Technology Analyst Futuriom
All right. That does it unless anybody wants to fill that out. Excellent. Well I gotta hand it, thanks to all of you. Really, really good input and, I think, one of my takeaways is just how complex all these things are and you guys are really working hard to make it easier for people to connect all these cloud applications and networking, and there’s going to be a lot of stuff going on in the next couple of years. So, I’ll hand it back over to George and Mark to wrap but thanks everybody for their time and thanks for listening.
Mark Fox
Thanks, Scott. Thanks. Thanks very much to the panel, as well. Great, great session.
