>> From New York City, it's theCUBE,
covering Welcome to the New Edge.
Brought to you by Pensando Systems.
>> Hey, welcome back everybody.
Jeff Frick here with theCUBE.
We are in Manhattan at the top of Goldman Sachs.
It is a great view if you ever get an opportunity
to come up here, I think 43 floors over the Hudson.
You can see forever.
But this is a cloud event so the clouds are here in.
We're excited to be here.
It's the Pensando launch.
The name of the event is Welcome to the New Edge,
which is a pretty interesting play.
We hear a lot about edge, but we haven't really
heard of a company really focusing on the edge
as their primary go-to-market activity
in really thinking about the edge first.
So we're excited to have the co-founder,
Cube alumn and many-time guest Soni Jiandani.
She's the co-founder and chief business officer.
Soni, great to see you.
>> Good to see you, too.
>> And our host here at Goldman Sachs is Josh Matheus,
he's the managing director of technology at Goldman.
Josh, great to see you.
>> Me too, thank you.
>> And thanks for hosting us.
Nice place to come to work every day.
>> You're right.
(laughs)
>> So, great conversation today.
Congratulations on the launch of the company.
Over two years in stealth mode.
Talk a little bit about that.
What it's like to be in stealth mode for so long?
And you guys raised big money, you've got a big team,
you're doing heavy-duty technology.
What's it been like to finally open up the curtains
and tell everybody what you've been working on?
>> It's clearly very interesting and exciting.
Normally it's taken me nine months to deliver a baby.
This time it's been two and a half years
of being in stealth while we've been getting ready
for this baby to come out.
So it's phenomenally exciting that, to be sharing
the stage with our customers and our investors
and our strategic partners.
>> Yeah, I thought it was pretty interesting
that you were launching with customers
and when you really told the story on stage,
of how early you engaged with Josh and his team.
First I want to get kind of your perspective.
Why were you doing that so early
and what did that ultimately do
with some of the design decisions that you guys made?
And then we'll come back to Josh, as to,
you know, his participation.
>> So, I think whenever you conduct technology transitions,
having a sense from customers that have the ability
to look out two to three years is very important
because when you're capturing market transitions,
doing it with customer inputs is far more relevant
than going about it alone.
The other key thing about this architectural shift
is that it allows the flexibility for every customer
to go take pieces of how they want to bring the cloud
architectures and bring it into their environment.
So understanding that use case.
And understanding the compelling reasons of what problems,
both technological and business, can we be solving.
And having that perspective, into the product definition
and the design and the influence
that customers like Josh have had,
is why we are sitting here and talking about them
in production as opposed to, yeah, we're thinking about,
we're looking at it from a proof-of-concept perspective.
>> Right.
And Josh, your perspective, you said earlier today
that, you know, as long as Soni's involved,
you're happy to jump in and see what she's been working on.
So how, you know, how did you get involved?
How did they reach out to you, and what is it like
working on, you know, technology so early in its development
that you could actually have some serious influence?
>> Well, it's an amazing opportunity
to get exactly what you want, exactly what you know is going
to solve problems for the business here.
And, you know, the other thing is, you know, we've worked
with this team through almost every spin in.
I think I was a little young for the maybe the first one,
but otherwise, this team has worked with them
through at least 15 years or more.
So we knew the track record for execution
and then, for us, on this product,
I mean, it was an opportunity because it's truly a startup.
You know, Soni and the team brought us in,
we kind of just put out problems on the table
that we were trying to solve.
And then, you know, they came up with the product
and the idea and we were able to put together, yeah,
these are our priority one, two, three that we want to go for,
and, you know, we've just been developing alongside them,
both software and, you know,
driving what the feature set is.
>> Right.
So what were some of those problems,
at a guess, it probably seemed like forever ago
when you started this conversation,
but as you kind of looked forward
a couple of years back
that you could see that were coming
that you needed to address?
>> You know, it's funny, we started with kind of like
well, we think containerization's going to be explosive
and, you know, really everything's
on virtual machines or bare metal; mostly virtual machines.
So, one, you know, as containers come out,
how do we track them, secure them?
How do we even secure, you know, the virtual machines
in our environment because there are
almost a quarter of a million of them.
The idea of being able to put network policy
that's, I would say, incorruptible,
not actually on the server, but at, you know,
that's why we use firewalls, right?
So solving that security problem was number one.
The other one was being able to have the telemetry
to see what's happening, what's changing,
and troubleshoot at, you know, at the network layer
from every single server.
Again, it's all about scale.
Like things were just scaling and the through puts going up,
traditional methods of being able to see
what's on your network,
you can't look in the middle,
it just can't keep up.
It's just speeds and feeds.
So being able to push those things to the edge.
And then, lastly, it really happened
more through the process here,
but about a year and a half ago,
we began segmenting our network
the same way a 5G provider does,
it's technology called segment routing,
and we just said, that's kind of our follow-on technology
is to, you know, put the network in the server
and put the segment routing capability all the way
out at the edge.
So, you know, some things we foresaw and other things
we've just developed, you know, it's been,
it's been two and half years,
so it's been a great partnership
and, you know, I think more features will come.
>> Soni, you and the team,
it's been talked about all day long,
have a history of multiple times that you've
kind of brought these big transformational technologies ahead.
What did you guys see a couple of years back
and kind of this progression that you saw this opportunity
to do something a little bit different
than you've done in the past, which is actually go out,
raise a round and do a real startup.
What was the opportunity that you saw this challenge here?
>> So we saw a number of challenges and opportunities
at the same time.
We clearly saw that the cloud architectures
that had been built by the leaders like,
and incumbents like AWS,
today have a lot of the intelligence that is being pushed
into their respective compute platforms.
And we also noticed that, at the same time
while that was what was needed
to build the first generation of the cloud,
the New Age applications, and even as Gartner has predicted,
that 75% of all enterprise data and applications
will be processed at the edge by 2025.
If that happens, then you need that intelligence
at the edge.
You need the ability to go do it where the action is,
which is at the edge.
And very consistently, we found that the architectures,
including scale out storage, were also driving the need
for this intelligence to be on, in a scale out manner.
So, if you're going to scale out computing,
you need the services to be going hand in hand
with that scale out compute architecture.
For the enterprises, so they can simplify
their architectures and bring the cloud models
that have only existed in the cloud world
into their own data centers and their own private clouds.
So there were these technology transitions
we saw were coming down the pike,
it's easier said now in 2019, it wasn't so simple in 2017
because we had to look
at these multiple technology transitions
and surprisingly, when we call those things out
as we were shaping the company's strategy,
getting validation of the use cases from customers
like Josh, was pivotally important, because it was
further validating that this would be the direction
that the enterprises and the cloud customers
would be taking.
So the reason you start with a vision,
you start with looking at where the technology transitions
are going to be occurring,
and getting the customers that are looking further out,
validate it, plays a very important role
so that you can go and focus on the biggest problems
that you need to go and solve.
>> Right.
It just seems like the big problem for most laymen
is the old one,
which is why networking exists in the first place,
which is do you bring the data to the computer,
do you bring the compute to the data?
And now, as you said, in kind of
this hyper distributed world,
that's not really a viable answer, either one, right?
Because the two are blended and have to be together
so that you don't necessarily have to move one to the other
or the other back the other direction.
And then, the second piece that you talked about
over and over in your presentation was security.
>> Yes.
>> And, you know, everybody talks about security all the time
and everybody gets hacked every day
and there's this constant theme that security has to be
baked in, you know, kind of throughout the process
as opposed to kind of bolted on at the end.
You guys took that approach from day one.
>> Yes we did.
>> Bake it into the architecture.
>> Yes, that was crucially important
because when you are trying to address the needs
of the enterprise,
particularly in regulated markets like financial services,
you want to be in a position where you have thought about it
and baked it into the platform ground up.
And so when we are building the programmable processor,
we had the opportunity to go put the right elements on it
in order to make it tamper proof.
We had to go think about encrypting all that traffic
and communication between our policy manager
and the distributed services platforms at the edge.
We also then took it a step further to say,
now, if there were to be a bad actor that were to attack
from an operating system vulnerability perspective,
how do we ensure that we can contain that bad actor
as opposed to being propagated over the infrastructure.
So those elements are things you can not bolt on.
At design time are when you need to go put those
into the design, day one.
Only on top of that foundation then can you build
a very secure set of services, whether it's encryption,
whether it's distributed firewall services,
so on and so forth.
>> And Josh, I'm curious on your take as we've seen
kind of software defined everything slowly take over
as opposed to, you know, kind of single purpose machines
or single purpose appliances etc.
Really, a different opportunity for you
to control but also, to see,
a lot of talk today about policy management,
a lot of talk about observability,
and as you said, now even segmentation of the networks
like you segment the nodes and you segment everything else.
How do you see this kind of software defined everything
continuing to evolve and what does it enable you to do
that you can't do with just a static device?
>> Well I mean the approach we took,
we started, like, you know, years ago, about six years ago,
was saying, we can get computers deployed
for our applications, no problem,
and, you know, on demand and in our internal cloud,
now we can do it as a hybrid cloud solution.
One of the biggest problems we had in software-defined
was, how do you put security policy, firewall policy,
with that compute?
And then, you know, our industry,
there's lots of segmentation
for material non-public information, compliance,
you know, it could be internet facing, B to B facing,
we do that.
Today we program various firewall vendors automatically.
We allow our application developers
to create these policies and push them through as code,
and then program the firewall.
What we were really looking to do here is distribute that.
So we, day one, in getting Pensando into production
was to use our firewall system, it's called Pinnacle,
we program from Pinnacle directly
into the Pensando vennis manager via API
and then it, you know, uses its inventory systems
to push those things out.
So for us, software-defined has been around,
I like to call it the store front, but for the developer,
it's network policy, it's load balancing,
and that's really what they see,
those were the big products on the net,
everything else is just packet-forwarding for them.
So we wanted, with Pensando,
at least starting with security,
to have that bar set, day one.
And then get, you know, all the benefits of scale,
through put and having the policies close to, on the edge,
you know, we're back to talking about the edge.
We want it right there with the deployment,
with the workload or the application.
And that's what we're doing, right off the bat.
>> Yeah.
One of the things you mentioned in your talk
was kind of in the theme of atomic computing.
You want to get smaller and smaller units
so that you can apply and redeploy
based on wherever the workload is in the chains.
And you've said you've now been able to, you know,
basically take things out of dedicated, you know, kind of
a dedicated space, dedicated line, a dedicated job,
so that you can now put them in a more virtualized situation
and grab more resources as you need them.
>> Well you would think the architecture, I mean,
even just theater of the mind is just, you're saying
I'm going to put this specific thing that I have to secure
behind these firewalls.
So it's one one catenative computers or a hundred,
it's still behind a set of firewalls.
It's a very north south, you know, get in, get out.
Here, you're talking about having
that same level of security and I think that's novel, right?
There hasn't been, if you look at virtual firewalls
or, you know, IP tables on Linux, I mean,
it's corruptible, it can be attacked on the computer
and once you've been attacked
and that attack vector has been, you know, hit,
you're compromised.
This is a separate management plane, you know,
separate control plane.
The server doesn't see it.
That security's provided, it's at scale, it's east west.
The more computers that have the Pensando, you know,
architecture inside of them, you know, the wider you can go.
And then the north south goes away.
>> I'm just curious to get your perspective as
you know, everyone is a technology company
at the same time, technology budgets are going down,
people are hard to hire,
your data is growing exponentially,
and everything's a securities threat.
>> Yes.
>> So as you get up in the morning, get ready to come to work
and you're drinking your coffee,
I mean, how do you kind of communicate
to make sure that senior management knows
kind of what your objectives are
and this kind of ongoing challenge
to do more with less in IT
even though it's an increasingly strategic place,
or if it actually is what the company does does,
it just happens to wrap it around airplane services
or financial services or travel or whatever.
>> I think you're, and I'd said it to John before,
it has to come, that budget has to come from somewhere,
so I think a combination of, of one that's less,
well, I'll say the one that's easier to quantify
is you're going to take budget from, say,
appliance manufacturer and move it to a distributed edge.
And you're going to hopefully save some money while you do it.
You're going to do it at scale, you're going to do it at,
you know, high through put and the security is the same.
Or better.
So that's one.
That's one place to take capital from.
The other one is to say, can I use the next computer?
Yes.
Because I don't have to deploy these other new computers
behind this stack of firewalls.
Is there agility there?
Is there efficiency?
Am I buying less servers and using, you know,
more of what I have and doing it,
you know, able to deploy faster?
And it's harder to quantify.
I think if you could, you know, over time see,
I bought 20% less server capacity or,
you know, X86 capacity, that's a savings.
And the other one that's very hard to quantify,
but it's always nice to have the development community
and we've had it recently, where they say,
"Hey, this took me a month to deploy
instead of a year."
And, you know, the purchase cycles, you know,
for procurement and deployment,
they're long, you know, in enterprise.
You want them to be quick but they're really not.
So all of those things add up and that's the story
you know, I would tell, you know, any management.
>> Right, I think, you know, the old historic way,
the utilization rates were just so, so, so, so low
between CPU and memory and everything else.
Because, if nothing else, because to get another box
you know could take like a long time.
(laughs)
>> Yeah, exactly.
>> Well, final question for you Soni.
You talked about architectures
and being locked into architectures
and you talked about you guys are already looking forward
you know, to kind of your next rev, your next release,
kind of your next step forwards.
What, where do you see kind of the direction,
don't give away any secrets,
but, you know, kind of where are guys going?
What are your priorities now that you've launched,
you've got a little bit more money in the bank?
>> Well our biggest priorities will be
to focus on customer success.
Is to make sure that the customer journey
is indeed replicable at scale.
Is to enable the partner success.
So in addition to Goldman Sachs, the ability to go
and replicate it across the federated markets
whether it's global financial services,
health care, federal.
And partnering with HP Enterprise, so that they can,
on their platform amplify the value of this architecture.
Not just on their compute platforms but in other areas.
And the third one clearly is for our cloud customers,
is to make sure that they are in a position
to build a world-class cloud architecture
on top of which then they can build their own,
deliver their own services, their own secret sauces.
So that they can excel at whatever that cloud is
whether it's to become the leading edge platform
as a service customer, or whether it is to be the
leading edge softwares service platform customers.
It's all about the execution as you heard in that room.
And that's fundamentally what we're going to strive to be.
Is to be a great execution machine and keep our heads down
and focus on making our customers
and our partners very successful.
>> Well Soni, congratulations again to you
and the team on the launch today.
And Josh, thank you for hosting this terrific event,
and being an early customer.
>> Yeah, yeah, happy to be.
>> All right.
I'm Jeff, this is Soni, Josh, we're at the top
of Goldman Sachs at the Pensando,
the new, welcome to the new edge.
Thanks for watching.
We'll see you next time.
(upbeat tech music)