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>> From our studios
in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California
this is a CUBE Conversation.
>> Hi I'm Peter Burris
and welcome to another CUBE Conversation.
from our Palo Alto studios.
Now as we do with all CUBE Conversations,
we want to have a great conversation
about an interesting topic with a thought leader
in the industry and that's exactly what we're doing today.
The topic we're going to breach is
why is it that networking remains so expensive.
If we go back over the past 20 years of computing,
we've seen dramatic price performance improvements
in virtually every single sector of infrastructure,
but networking persists as a relatively expensive
technology arena despite the fact
that we're moving into an era
that is going to become increasingly depending upon networks
and to better understand both what the nature of the problem
is and how we're going to move forward with a solution,
we've got Dominic Wilde with us today.
Dominic is a CEO of SnapRoute.
Dominic, welcome back to theCUBE.
>> Thank you. Great to be here.
>> So tell us, let's start.
Tell us a little bit about SnapRoute.
Tell us about yourself and SnapRoute
and then we'll get into it.
>> Sure, sure.
So SnapRoute is delivering
basically a new paradigm
in network operating systems.
We're delivering a cloud native
network operating system
that's designed from the ground up
to integrate in this, into this new world
of cloud architecturally.
It's a fully containerized microservices architecture
from the ground up.
And what that does is it enables an operator
to deliver fast time-to-service for applications,
to always be secure and up-to-date with security compliance
and also to drive significant
operational efficiencies as well.
So we believe that we have a really strong value proposition
for the industry here, particularly in the age of cloud.
But we're also marrying to that architectural innovation
some economic innovation as well.
An economic disruption
and we believe that the time is really right here
for networking to step up its game effective.
>> Oh let's talk a bit about that
'cause if I'm a CIO,
>> Yeah.
>> every year for a variety of reasons,
every other business comes to me and says,
okay, you got to give me back 10%.
We want you to do more.
And more is law and other physical features
of how computing work has been very kind to me.
>> Right.
>> I've been able to provide some of that back
because I was able to get cheaper servers
and then open source allowed me
to get cheaper operating systems
and even applications got cheaper
and then SAS comes along
and the cloud comes along.
Networking is a hold out.
Why has networking been the hold out?
>> Yeah, well simply stated, I think
it's because networking is not embraced
or driven software economics,
whereas compute has in many different aspects,
if you look at the sort of timeline
of what's happened in recent history in compute
and so to parallel that with networking,
compute got Linux.
And that gave an architectural innovation,
it gave greater control
and the opportunity for operators
to innovate on their own.
But it also drove this big economic disruption.
The prices really came down.
Then came virtualization,
of course there was the opportunity there
to drive down that the prices again
because I don't need five servers
I only need one.
And another great innovation in terms of operator control.
And here we are now
in the age of containers and cloud native
and get much greater, sort of performance benefits
of going containers on bare metal
and so all of these things have happened
where you have an architectural innovation
married together with an economic innovation
>> at the software level
>> At the software level.
And this has not happened in networking
because in networking we've continued
to really treat the network as an appliance.
Its proprietary integrated packaged
switches, routers, et cetera.
And quite frankly, we got Linux.
We got Linux in networking
but the price has gone up
because there was,
APIs are introduced and programmability,
and there's much greater value there
so therefore were charged more.
And then virtualization came along,
and SDN, the SDN movement.
And there was great hope, I think, in the industry
that this would drive a real sort of economic
revolution in networking.
But what happened was that,
rather than really addressing
the actual network itself
and the software issues with the network itself
that make it brittle and very difficult to manage,
we got overlays and we added overlays over the top
and abstracted the underlying network
and added more layers of complexity and expense.
And then here we are in the container age
and one of the things that we've done here at SnapRoute
is we've said, look, you know,
let's embrace containers fundamentally
and let's build an operating system
using that technology with DevOps principles
to deliver an architecture that lends itself to the task
at hand, which is the move to cloud
and how can we enable organizations
to move quickly to cloud.
And let's face it.
Cloud is a distributed architecture
and so
>> We hope so.
>> by building a network operating system
with an architecture that is essentially
a distributed architecture,
it gives us some advantages.
But let's marry together that,
let's put the economic, software economics in there as well.
And quite frankly we tried this
around about the time of virtualization,
the sort of white box networking movement happened
and again there was great hope
that, hey this means I can get cheaper networking.
>> But we'll explain that.
White box, you mean, is that effectively
you're able to get commodity hardware
>> Yeah.
>> and hopefully you could just drop
your network operating system software on top of it
and replace these full stack switches
and these full stack riders
that were supporting 50, 60% margins.
>> That's right, exactly right.
And I can go direct to an ODM.
I can buy the hardware at the same,
if I buy the volumes at the same cost
that an OEM would buy them at,
go find myself some software
or software operating system and put it on top,
up I go, it should be cheaper.
The reality was that what happened
in the industry is that the software that you could buy,
the disaggregated software operating systems
absorbed the savings that you got from a lower-cost hardware
and so everything even now
and actually, quite frankly
the white box has not delivered on its promise.
It has for the hyper scale vendors
who are buying a massive, massive volume
and are building their own operating systems,
built for purpose, but in the broader industry
we haven't seen those advantages.
And so what we did at SnapRoute
is we took a big step back and we said,
look, if you really need software economics here
then as a software company we need to step up.
We need to be >> You're a software company
and not a networking company.
>> We're a software company, I mean,
at the end of the day,
we're delivering a network operating
system >> Got it.
>> but we view it as it's an application
>> Sure.
>> And the architecture we've built
is not a traditional monolithic Linux
sort of blob as it were.
We've really embraced the DevOps culture,
the DevOps paradigms.
We've been embraced all this sort of, the application
and software developer paradigms
of how you build a state-of-the-art
cloud class application today.
And that's what we've done
with the network operating system.
We've taken that approach to deliver
what is effectively a distributed application.
>> So let's build on that a little bit
because the, as you said,
the white box approach doesn't work that well
in the networking world largely because some of these
network operating systems companies were delivering
these very large monolithic pieces of software
>> Right.
>> that really were just layers on top of the network
that often people didn't need
and generated a significant amount of lock-in
so that was always questionable to begin with.
The approach that you're taking,
using containers, modern software techniques,
cloud native approaches,
allows, it seems to be two benefits,
let me see if I got this right.
>> Yeah, sure.
>> Benefit number one
is it looks like a set of programmable services
to the DevOps world, which is good.
>> Yeah.
>> And number two because it doesn't have
this monolithic footprint
you can appropriately skinny it up
so that it now does make sense
>> Right.
>> to think in terms of a new economic model.
>> Yeah.
>> because you can get access to the services you want,
you don't have the security,
you don't have the footprint associated with...
>> Yeah.
>> Talk about that.
>> Yeah it's, I mean, it's
if you look at it architecturally
and you're spot on it
but if you look at it architecturally
and let's for a moment empathize with the net ops teams
because their job has been to take something,
take a network using tools and products
that the industry have given them
and try to live in a very dynamic world,
the cloud world, the new class of enterprise.
But what they've been given is a set of tools
and a set of products that only enable them
to build a very static and very brittle,
distributed sort of, system, distributed network.
And these are, they just haven't had the tools to work with.
>> They're largely separate from the services
that were running on the network.
>> Very much so.
The net ops has been siloed,
the network is more siloed.
Our founders came from Apple,
where they ran Apple's biggest data centers
and one of things they tell me
is that the sort of peer pressure and stuff was that
if there was a security vulnerability that had to be patched
or something that the DevOps team would come in,
the compute team would sort of say,
okay, we can patch that in couple of hours,
a couple of days at worst.
And there's the networking team,
they would sit there and in the corner of the room,
very shy, sort of saying, well it will take us several weeks
to get back to you with a plan for a plan
and then we've got to wait for an outage window
and we've got a, and it could take months.
And so net ops has had this really, really difficult task
of living in this dynamic world with everybody else.
But the issue here is that if you can deliver the tools,
the set of tools and that means an operating system
that is designed to be dynamic in the first place,
then you should also not only be able
to reduce the operational costs overall
because now you enable net ops teams
to move faster and stuff.
But you have to be able to deliver an economic value
in terms of effects because otherwise there's no reason
for anybody to move.
It's probably safer to stay where you are.
It's probably,
Change, it always comes with some kind of cost
and some kind of risk.
And by the very nature net ops teams have become risk-averse
because any time they changed anything
the network could break so they have had
to start live in a world of no.
Every time somebody comes to them and says,
hey I have an application, I need you to do this,
that and the other, the answer is no,
because I don't want to change anything.
I'm measured on uptime.
That is the standard measure
that networking teams are measured by.
And if I'm measured by uptime
then I don't want to change anything.
>> Well, the server world we used to talk
about how the cost of the change was underwritten
by the improvements in price performance
and in many respects what you're saying
is by taking a new approach
you are paying for the cost and risk of the change
because you're jumping to a new economic model
>> Right.
>> that could fundamentally put you on a different vector
not only for new economics
but also creates new classes of options
in the network that's much more cloud-like.
>> Yes, exactly. I mean it's,
And this is I believe a fundamental
of the sort of cloud thinking, cloud mentality
and the reason that we're all trying
to get to cloud is exactly because it gives you,
it gives you more flexibility at a lower cost.
I mean, everybody's embracing the public cloud.
Now what we've seen is
some recent numbers that are coming out of Lift
that they've had to commit 300 million dollars through 2021
to the public cloud provider
and those numbers are scary and terrifying
for a lot of companies.
So going all-in on the public cloud
maybe is not the right way to go.
But living in a hybrid world where you have some on-prem,
you have some public cloud
and working out which model is best for your company
is the right way to go.
And the network has been an inhibitor to that because
if you have to have a different on-prem network model
than is being used in the cloud
and the public cloud or use the virtual services there
well now you're adding a bunch of cost operationally
'cause you have to do two different things.
You have to figure all this out
>> And very importantly you're losing a lot of the options
that the cloud provides you
and the whole point is to get a better,
get a better cost profile to be able
to use new techniques and approaches
>> Right.
>> to building applications but also to be on a vector
that provides new types of options in the future
so that you don't have to worry
about this network having these limits
and that network having a different set of limits.
And so >> Right.
>> it brings a more unified approach to say,
this is a common resource to the business
that is these profiles, this physical characteristic,
these software characteristics,
and these economic characteristics.
>> Exactly.
>> Yeah, it's a service book mentality.
It's like, hey I want to have us a set,
a list of services that I subscribe to
and I just pick and choose.
Or innovate new ones
and that's been very difficult
in the legacy networking world.
So yeah, we're, the approach is to come in with this,
this architectural change
that it enables the innovation,
it enables that service mentality.
It enables, it frees up the business to be more dynamic,
to be more responsive and agile.
But give the economic driver.
Do it in software economics,
allows you to kick-start that,
allows you to gain the momentum within your organization
to say hey we should try something new
because there is enough savings here
and there are significant savings here.
So to give you an idea.
What we deliver at the system level
so if you take a white box,
an ODM box and you take our software
and put the two together.
Install one on the other at the system level.
We're about 50% the price of any of the legacy,
incumbent vendors, so it's half the price now.
Previously in white box what people have found
is actually when they were trying to do stuff themselves
the price is pretty much the same
if not a little bit more expensive
once you add in the operational costs.
So we're really actually giving the opportunity
to make white box successful.
We're giving the opportunity to deliver control
and the opportunity to innovate to operators,
but most significantly when you're going to talk
to your CFO or your CIO or anybody else
we're driving the price down so significantly that
>> Well I was doing quick calculation on my head,
50% savings on network and a sizable enterprise translates
into about two-tenths of a margin point for the business.
>> Yeah.
>> Not bad.
Dominic Wilde, CEO of SnapRoute.
Thanks very much for talking to us on theCUBE today.
>> Thanks, mate, thanks.
>> And once again I'm Peter Burris
and this has been another CUBE Conversation.
Until next time.
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