>> Cisco, extracting the signal from the noise.
It's theCUBE, covering vmworld 2015,
brought to you by VMware and its ecosystems sponsors.
Now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vallante.
>> Okay, welcome back everyone.
We are live here in San Francisco at Moscone North Lobby.
This is SiliconANGLE's theCUBE, our flagship program.
We go out to the events
and extract the signal from the noise.
I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vallante.
And our next guest is Jayshree Ullal,
The President of, CEO of Arista Networks.
Welcome back to theCUBE.
We haven't seen you in couple years, welcome back.
You look great.
>> Good to be here, John, Dave.
I see you don't put me in the middle anymore.
(laughter)
>> I know, we want to stare right at you
and get all the data from out of your head,
and get it, share it with the audience.
Well, first thing I want to say is last time we spoke,
you were a private company, now you've gone public, IPO.
Congratulations.
What's it like?
What's it like from private company to public company?
Share the experience.
>> It's definitely different, for starters
we're not Arista Networks, we're ANET.
We are a four-letter symbol, I guess.
So abbreviate everything.
And then people just track us a whole lot more.
And, you know, there's an automatic branding,
an awareness of the company, and anything we do,
every time we sneeze, we get written about.
Good, bad, or not.
>> You guys are pacing the market, and I remember,
Dave and I, when we first started theCUBE,
we were in the Cloudera office,
and then when we first chatted,
we'd see the boxes of Arista coming in.
You guys made a great mark early on
around people doing large scale, lot of networking.
But the market's changed.
SDN has exploded, VMware bought Nicira, SDN's the hot thing.
NSX is doing well, as Pat Gelsinger said.
What's going on?
You guys have done some things.
SDN certainly is, takes the market to where you guys
had originally had your vision.
What's the update with that whole SDN
and how does Arista play into that?
>> I think if you step back and look at SDN in the beginning,
there was a lot of confusion.
And my favorite acronym for SDN is Still Don't Know.
But I actually think we still do know now,
and we've gone from it being a marketing hype
to really about openness, programmability,
and building an infrastructure
to do network management correctly.
Software clearly drives our industry,
and more importantly drives capxn OPX reduction.
And what's really happening is
there's a lot of change where it's not just devices
and users and traditional applications,
but really it's about workloads and workflows.
And if you can realize there's so many different
types of workloads that need control,
and so many different types of workflows
that need telemetry, that fundamentally is the essence
of SDN in my view, and it takes a whole village.
Arista can't do it alone.
We're doing a lot of things on programatizing our stack
and making network more open and programmable,
but we work with a whole slew of vendors
to really make it possible.
>> During the early days, open flow was the buzzword,
came out of a lot of academic stuff that was being
what the geeks were working on.
What do people get right?
And there was lot of missteps early on with open flow,
and only because it's early on.
What did SDN get right, or did they get it wrong?
And how did you guys see that
'cause you guys were already out shipping product
when this hit.
So what's your observation of what went right,
what didn't go right, what's going right now,
can you share your insight?
>> Yeah, I think, you know, our founder Ken Duda
would say this very well, which is
when you look at open flow,
it's a little bit of a technology searching for a problem.
When you look at what Arista did
with our extensible operating system,
we built a state-oriented, publish subscribe model
to solve a problem.
And the fundamental problem we were solving was,
we saw the industry building monolithic enterprise stacks
when everybody was moving to the cloud.
What are the three attributes a cloud meets?
You got to be always on, you got to have scale, right,
and you have to have tremendous agility.
You got to move across your workloads fast.
And that, to me, is the trick behind SDN
not latching onto a technology,
but whether it's open stack or big data analytics
or new cloud applications
or bringing the LAN and the WAN together,
or places in the network converging,
fundamentally, we were cloudifying everything
whether it's public, private, or hybrid.
>> So I got to ask you, I know you're going to see Pat Gelsinger
shortly after this interview.
Two themes that are coming on the queue over the past year
around networking has been resiliency and agile, agility.
Those two factors 'cause you have vertical
and now horizontally scalable things going on.
What's your take on that?
As someone who's been in the industry, you've seen
kind of the old generation now transition
to the new generation, cloudification, API-ification,
these are are new dynamics
that are table stakes now in cloud.
>> No, they are.
And yet, if you look at the,
both problems are hard problems.
They cannot be solved by sprinkling some pixie dust.
And what I mean by that is
when you look at something like high availability,
in the past in networking, you had two of everything,
two supervisors, two operating systems.
You had something called in server software upgrade,
so that you'd bring one down and then bring the other.
But today, there's no tolerance for two of everything.
You know, no customer wants to pay for two of everything
even if the vendors want it, right.
So what you really need is smart system upgrade
where you're doing everything real time.
You know, at the colonel level,
you need to automatically repair your faults.
Software has memory leaks.
Software has faults.
It's how quickly you diagnose them, troubleshoot them,
trap them and recover from them.
And then if you look at hitless upgrades,
you got to do them real time,
you can't wait to have an enterprise window
and bring it down and bring it up.
Your boot time, your convergence time
has to move from minutes to seconds,
and the biggest thing you have to do is,
let's look at simple command like copy paste.
We do this over and over and over again.
Change control has to improve.
Rather than doing it every time, a hundred times,
wouldn't it be nice if you could just press
one command and it happens across the entire switch,
across all the ports, across the entire network.
So I think the definition of high availability
has completely changed where it's really about
network rollback, time stamping, real time recovery,
and not just two or three of everything.
>> So, it's, tight time here with you.
John mentioned a public company,
you guys have beat five quarters in a row,
of course, you know, you get on that slope
and the pressures go.
But you can't fight the whims of the market.
You just have to execute,
and you guys are executing very well.
Great growth, you're clearly gaining share.
Partnerships.
You announced a deal with HP in converged infrastructure.
Just saw this week, or maybe it was late last week,
that HP is OEMing NSX.
So now it's got a really interesting converged play
with Arista against Cisco.
I want to talk about the competition and that partnership.
>> Well, it's not so much against Cisco.
It's following the trends.
And I think there are two major trends, right?
And they're actually C letters, too.
Cloud and converged.
So if you look at what Arista's really doing,
we're serving a big public crowd trend.
We're in six out of the seven major cloud operators.
And there's no doubt that the cloud is happening,
it's not just a buzzword.
>> You call 'em cloud titans.
>> They're called the cloud titans.
You've done your homework.
Good job.
And hopefully, I'll be able to come back to the theCUBE
and say we're in seven out of seven,
but today we're in six out of seven.
>> And the cloud titan is the big hyperscale guys,
is that right?
>> Absolutely, and we're just in a very
early inning with them.
Everybody thinks we're already saturated.
We're just beginning.
How many innings are there in a baseball game?
>> Nine.
>> Nine, in cricket there are only two.
>> What inning are we in?
>> No, we're in the first.
Of two in cricket, a long way to go.
(laughter)
>> Cloud Native's right around the corner.
What do you think of Cloud Native?
What does Cloud Native mean to you?
>> So, the Cloud Native really means
bringing the cloud experience to public,
private, or the hybrid.
So you talked about the HP partnership.
And over there, it's not really building a public cloud.
It's about bringing a private cloud
where you bring in the compute, the storage,
the virtualization, and the network
as a converged experience.
Now, that one we can't do alone.
And I couldn't think of two strong partners,
better partners or stronger partners
than VMware and HP to help do that for us.
>> Well, you said it's not against Cisco,
but that's a great alternative for the leading products
in the number one marketshare.
>> Absolutely, I think the enterprise companies
have to have a wake up call.
They need to understand that the one neck to choke
or one lock in that's all proprietary
is a thing of the past.
And really, it's about building
best of breed building blocks.
>> So I want to ask you, just on some current events,
and I'll see buzzwords that get recycled in every trend,
is QOS policy-based fill in the blank.
Everything's policy-based now,
so that makes a lot of sense, I get that.
Apple just announced a deal with Cisco
where they are throttling, I shouldn't say throttling,
or deep packet inspection, I won't say those two things.
(laughter)
Giving iOS users a preferred fast lane with Cisco gear,
so it brings up this notion that workloads are driving
infrastructure or devops, if you will.
What's your take on all that?
Are we going to see more things like that?
Are we going to see more customization around prioritization?
>> Well, I think QOS and especially policy
are definitely overused words.
First step, I don't think you'd apply policy
to an application to make your network better.
What you really have to do is make your workloads
and workflows go better and have some control for them.
So I'm not a big fan of tweaking every application
of the policy 'cause the applications are changing, right?
But if you look at what Apple's doing,
I think this is a great thing for Apple
because what they're really doing is consumerizing
and enterprising their systems and devices, right.
You're seeing the convergence of consumer
and enterprise coming together.
So I see this is really about improving
all of our iPhone experiences across the enterprise.
>> We got to wrap up 'cause you got to go see Pat Gelsinger.
But I want to ask you one final question.
You're an inspiration to the industry.
You've been around a long time, you know a lot
and you're leading a public company.
What are the opportunities that you see for folks out there,
boys and girls, men and women, in science and technology
and in entrepreneurial opportunities?
>> Yeah, I'm glad you ask this question
because I think it's too easy with everything being hot
for everybody to want to go straight
to the top rung of the ladder.
And I was telling Dave and you before,
one step at a time.
First you have to build your foundation on education.
Boys and girls, education is important.
Follow your heart, follow your dreams with math and science.
You know, my dad started the IITs
and he pushed me in engineering, and I didn't like it then
but I realized you can be a cool engineer,
and before Moscone got started,
I actually went into the manhole of every PG&E circuit
to make sure that the electrical circuits were okay
for this now fantastic convention center.
>> Can you help with the wifi?
>> Back in those days, there was no wifi.
That's the next step.
So I definitely say, build your foundation,
follow your dreams, but go one step at a time.
Don't expect to be at the top rung right away.
>> I know you're a parent.
We are friends on Facebook.
What's your advice to the younger generation
in terms of opportunities that they could pursue
in science and math?
There's a lot more opportunities, interdisciplinary,
not just computer science or electrical engineering,
like it used to be when we were growing up,
but now it's much broader.
What are some of the things that you get excited about?
>> I get excited about science.
I think when you look at engineering,
it's about applying science.
You know, know your fundamental math, science,
you know, physics, chemistry, bio, whatever turns you on.
And don't make an assumption that it's tough
or hard til you've been through it.
You know, I had seven years of physics in high school.
I don't recommend seven for everybody,
but, you know, but I didn't really care for biology.
So I would say never shy away
from trying something til you know.
And then, of course, there's applied science,
whether it's computers or programming
or media arts or visualization
that you can add on top of that.
So you're very right.
I think there's the cake, which is your foundation,
and then there's the icing where you can build on top of it.
>> And will they find their passion?
>> Absolutely, find your aptitude and passion.
You know, you don't try to do drawing or needlework
if you're not good at it.
I wasn't.
And I know my mom despaired about that,
but you go, follow both what you're good at
and what you're passionate about.
>> Jayshree, thanks so much for spending time.
I know you're super busy.
Congratulations on your successes.
>> Thanks for having me here,
it's always a lot of fun.
>> And we got to get you back on.
This is theCUBE, bringing you more signal here
all the data here in the theCUBE.
We'll be right back, more live from San Francisco
after this short break.