Cloud Networking: Embracing the Chaos | The Six Five Summit

Hey everyone. Welcome back to the six five Summit. Daniel Newman, here, CEO of the Futurum Group.

Another great conversation coming your way. We're in the cloud infrastructure track. We're gonna be talking to someone that needs no introduction here at the six five Summit.

He's been in opening keynote with us before. He is someone that I can call a personal friend who's doing really important work in the space. Doug Merritt, C-E-O-A-V-A, Trix.

Doug, welcome back to the six five Summit. So good to have you again. Thank you, Daniel.

So good to be here. Uh, wished we were a person, but it's still good to do it. Virtual it virtually.

Yeah. You know what, uh, we will get there maybe at some point, you'll, we have so many great speakers and thinkers, you know, you and I live in the same town, and just trying to get together to have lunch takes three months. Just imagine trying to get 50 of your peers, CEOs, and top executives get 'em all in the same place at one time.

I think they do it once a year. It's called the World Economic Forum. I think that's the only time I've seen all people in the same place at one time.

It's a dream, but we will get there. But these conversations are so important and there's so much going on. Hey, I've, I wanna talk about kind of the, you know, the cloud networking and the chaos that's going on in this space.

But before I do that, you know, because Aviatrix, it's a, you're, you're running a new company. Not everyone here in the, at the, uh, six five Summit has seen you in this capacity. They saw you and you're running another very exciting growth company.

Give 'em the quick one minute. Aviatrix, what are you guys focused on? Um, yes, we'd love to.

Yeah. I've been aviatrix, uh, little bit over 10 months now. Uh, I thought I was going to retire and then realized that I'm who you are Young.

Yeah, I'm retire. I'm a bad retirement person. I get, I, I missed, uh, I missed the team.

I miss being part of a team. Um, but, uh, Aviatrix is about a 10-year-old company. Um, and we take the concepts of software, find networking, which been around since 2008, nine, and 10.

Um, but we, uh, have revitalized them in a completely different way so that we can provide networking services, we can provide integrated networking services, which done properly, and we could talk about that wouldn't separate out all these different functions, load balancing and firewalling and security. It'd be one beautiful integrated networking capability the way that networking should have been now. But we provide that in a native way inside of all the different clouds out there, but also to all the edge providers.

There's a lot of networking gear sitting at Equinix and Megaport and Digital Realty and other edge providers. And there's a ton of networking gear within, uh, last Prietary data centers. So we bridge the gap between the, that hybrid world, um, and provide a, a single networking abstraction layer and core transport layer, a whole data plane, uh, that, that makes networking, uh, controllable, uh, seamless, high visibility, a ton of analytics, highly secure across that landscape.

Yeah. And of course, uh, from what I understand and from our conversations and what's gotten me pretty excited about what you're doing there is there's a pretty compelling economic case as well that you can help people do all those things and at the same time drive some economic value. So you sort of started alluding to it, but talk a little bit about, you know, that that pivot because it's kind of legacy versus now the cloud chapter.

Yeah. Um, so if we, if we just, if we go back to, uh, Cisco and the boom of networking, uh, 1990s and, and two thousands in the classic data center world, uh, it was for a while. We all now know because of Nvidia, the Cisco was the most viable company in the world for a while.

A lot like NVIDIA's, uh, get getting there today because connecting things was so mission critical as we're going to the internet, uh, to be able to serve complex enterprises. The way that networking landscape was formed is a whole series of purpose-built boxes for the different networking functions. Say you networking, you have to move packets.

There's physics involved, which means you to do it properly in that world, you need a dedicated silicon, um, and, and purpose-built capabilities. So you had your routing boxes, your switching boxes, your load balancing boxes, your DNS boxes, your VPN boxes, your firewall boxes, boxes everywhere. Um, and they made up 10 to 20, even 25% of the typical bill of a data center.

Um, 'cause it took money to actually build and ship those things. It created, uh, a lot of capabilities and control. It had a bunch of negatives aspects as well.

There's a lot of overlapping capabilities between those boxes that should have been seamless. Um, you had different UIs, different command lines that you had to memorize, um, for something that should have been nice and natural and integrated. One whole thing.

Software find networking came about in 2000 7, 8, 9, uh, three professors began to evangelize that. It formed into a company called eventually. Um, but their concept was, why don't we do networking?

Right? Hardware has really progressed. We can get general purpose hardware now and have a combined networking platform.

And that movement began to take some shape, um, before cloud really intruded and changed the entire world. Um, and then they came forth a whole different networking paradigm. Uh, but that kinda, that historical context I think is important for everybody to understand.

Um, because we've gone through a lot over 30, 40 years of the old seven layer OSI stack, and really thinking through what's ideal in layer one all the way up to layer seven. We've gone through a lot of, a lot of iterations, um, to try and bring, uh, greater power and integration and flexibility across those layers in between those layers. And networking is mission critical in that layer three, layer four, um, component of that stack.

And, and we've also hit a moment with this AI inflection that's only accelerated the need for networking. The amount of data we're moving and pushing through the, the networks and through these data centers is gonna be exponential. We hear a lot about compute.

Everybody's focused a lot on compute right now, but we have to store the data and we have to move the data. We have to secure the data, we have to make it accessible, usable, and we have to keep this stuff, you know, we have to manage policies and stuff that these data, like you said, it's in the edge, it's in the cloud, it's on-prem data centers. There are many different, uh, hardware architectures.

There's many different storage architectures that are going on at the same time. There's lots of different app layers. You know, the cloud was supposed to fix all this, Doug, but you know, what I am sort of hearing you allude to is, you know, kind of like we always joke about it's just in someone else's data center.

The cloud didn't really fix all this, did it? Um, no, they did. They, they fixed a lot of things.

So the, um, amazing amount of infrastructure that's now available at I think a different price point than it was we had to build it yourself is awesome and has powered a lot of innovation around the world. Um, but ultimately the cloud providers, uh, all created a series of services from yeah, upper layer services, application and data services, all the way down to things like networking services that, uh, turned out to be proprietary to their clouds, which made sense because they understood the virtualization layers, the core infrastructure capabilities. They're trying to optimize what they're doing within their clouds, um, for networking for some odd reason.

Um, and not totally odd if you paid attention to the workloads that were coming onto your cloud. The big movement that we all saw kind of 27, 18, 19 and 20 was let me lift and shift, let me take my last gen applications that had, uh, and go back to networking land. These dedicated networking services that were virtualized software boxes and their underlying hardware components.

Let me take all that stuff and move it over to the cloud. Um, and that, you know, as along with modernization, that was one of the big, big, big movements still going on today. Um, the cloud network, cloud service providers looked up at those networking services and realize, Hey, why don't we, we, we need to provide some of those advanced services as well.

We shouldn't just be a, a core connectivity framework, so let's form teams to do that and let's form a routing team. Let's form a load balancing team. Let's form a firewalling team.

Let's form a, and they recreated that box metaphor that SGM was trying to obliterate. Um, that creates a whole series of problems. Uh, the way that they defined the boxes was different for every cloud service provider, every, every hyperscaler, they took their own view on what those boxes should be.

So no, you no longer had a, a consistent view of a load balancer router across these clouds. They're obviously proprietary to that. Cloud is typical for AWS to build a set of network and services are pretty low in the stack and say, these are gonna run better on Microsoft, on Azure than they do at AWS or as good as.

Um, so you've got a whole series of proprietary services that are defined differently within every single cloud that provide some pretty, um, non desirable lock-in within the cloud. Like if you can't get portability at the networking layer, you're really pretty stuck with what you can quickly and easily shift. You're not using the CSPs the way that they initially crafted themselves, which is use us for workloads that make sense and shift that around based on your, your business needs with lms.

That's Cisco and, and Hyperdrive. So it is a, a inefficient architecture. Um, and as you're alluding to kinno and there's operational over, there's operational overhead, there's security v and vulnerability ca uh, issues that people are dealing with.

There's latency issues. There's a bunch of things that if they could do it over, I bet you they would, um, that are soft costs. But then there are hard costs associated with that as well.

Literal, like things I pay for in my monthly CSP bill, um, they appropriately had to create data processing and egress fees. It cost them money to move stuff around those clouds and they've gotta pay for that infrastructure. Um, but if you are not logical or, or if you haven't really thought holistically on how to architects in these things, then you wind up incurring a whole bunch of unnecessary data processing egress costs inside of clouds and between clouds, obviously, for sure.

Um, so it turns out that not only is there huge operational efficiency gains and visibility and security and a whole bunch of holistic elements that something like K can offer, but that we actually offer in a pretty unique way. 'cause we're the only data plane that lives within the clouds that actually moves packets around. Um, but there are some significant hard dollar costs that we can provide hard dollar cost savings we can provide to customers as Well.

Yeah. So, so let me do a double click there. Maybe, you know, 'cause you said a lot and you said it efficiently and clearly you, you 10 months in, you've got it down, Doug, but the, the bottom line here is that the clouds were pretty well intent intentioned in what they were doing in terms of delivering the services comprehensively.

A couple things that most of the clouds didn't consider, for instance, was how much hybrid there would be and also how much multi there would be. And obviously none of them architected their, their environments or what AI was gonna do, right? All these things though, have had substantial impacts on networking.

Yeah. And as data is exponential, you are seeing more pressure on the network. You're putting more, we're bringing more costs back to move data around.

You're making, uh, you're making companies compromise on where data sits because they're thinking about that cost. And if you're compromising on where data sits, you might also be compromising on how much data is accessible for workloads if, for instance, could benefit from it. These are kind of the, the macro impacts that I'm hearing from you here.

But what I, you know, and I said this to you, and you know, as an analyst, I don't say this lightly. I admire what Aviatrix is trying to do because you're actually, and you were, you were very nice when you said you're not going to cloud saying cloud is wrong. You're just saying you can benefit from all these cloud relationships, have a multi-cloud architecture, but you can have a networking, uh, architecture as well that can drive some value on the dollar side, but also simplify the complexity.

So walk us through that one time, Doug, what's the approach that Aviatrix is recommending to get us through this chaos? Enable companies to maximize the utilization of their data through networking, security, um, but also help companies keep moving forward. Great summary, uh, lead and then I'll fill in the details.

Um, there's a great up uplifting, uh, so the, there, there, there are a couple different components that cus that most every customer I've talked to is wrestling with. Um, one of those is, uh, visibility and control, right? Like when you think about cloud, their promise was we're gonna take care of everything for you.

And we own the underlying infrastructure. They've invested hundreds of billions of dollars each in racks and racks of equipment all the way down to cabling and transport, uh, capability. So we manage the under the layer one, layer two underlay.

We manage physical infrastructure, we manage everything above. So something like networking, it just disappears. We handle it for you.

That kind of work in a dev test environment. When you get to production workloads and they're absolutely mission critical and you've got a hybrid architecture or you know, God forbid, you've gotta have multi-cloud and hybrid architecture control and visibility matters a lot. Where are the packets actually going?

What the, what are they doing when they're inside very single cloud? How do I make sure that I understand the performance? Going back to the data that can be trapped, you're highlighting how do I understand the performance of what my end user is feeling and how do I actually get visibility on, on what is happening within those clouds?

So we are able to provide that because we are a data plane and a control plane and an annex analytics layer. We're a complete networking stack that runs natively within every major cloud and on those edge providers all the way back to insertion, into proprietary data centers. So we give you that uniform visibility and control, um, which especially as you're saying, you're going into, uh, gen generative AI and large English model land, people have gotta get much more thoughtful and intelligent about what data they're moving where, and how do I actually control that data much more effectively?

It may not make sense to move all data to one big model. Yeah, you may want distribute models, you wanna, might want to keep some data close to the edge or where it's generated. Um, so I think that complexity that with that first piece of control and visibility is gonna, is only going up, right?

We, uh, there was a blog post I put out a couple weeks ago on Embrace the Chaos. There's a lot of the core of Splunk. We have a non, we had, Splunk has a non-structured data store.

It could have chaotic data, non normalized, non cleansed data. Um, Aviatrix is helping with the fact that diversity is going up. You're getting more distribution, more specialization.

I think the number of of clouds is gonna go through the roof because there's gonna be a ton of purpose-built generative AI clouds to compliment the big generative AI clouds that Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and others are, are working to build. Um, so we help people with that chaos because we provide a singular framework that abstracts them from that chaos and gives them control again, like how as a CIO how do I control my destiny? That should be very important to most CIOs and I think we're a key lever in, in giving them some control over their own destiny.

Again, Doug, I think you covered a lot of ground. Look, I've, uh, worked with you for a number of years. I watched you build a billion dollar run rate, uh, and revenue company in Splunk.

And I believe what you're doing at Aviatrix is putting you on a trajectory to solve a really big problem that's gonna create another opportunity to build another billion in a RR and growth. And I'm really excited to watch that progress and watch that process. Continue our conversations here.

Wanna thank you so much for joining on this year's six five Summit. I'm pretty excited and interested to see exactly where you'll be a year from now when we come back. But, uh, let's, let's talk again soon.

Congratulations on the progress and keep your head down because this is a big problem and I see a big opportunity for you and for Aviatrix. Well, thank you Daniel. And, uh, and hopefully a year from now when we are back together on something like this, a lot more people know about Aviatrix and know about, uh, what we deliver as far as regaining control, enabling freedom and liberty for our CIOs out there, um, so that they can ensure control of their destiny going forward.

2 billion. Um, when I, when I, Yeah, I didn't give you enough credit, but you, you, you knew where I was heading with that one, right? Yeah, yeah, no, for sure.

And I, I appreciate it compliment. It wasn't, but, but despite that, it was most exciting one I've ever been in my life. It, it did not have a hard dollar cost savings component to it.

And I honestly in my entire career have never been part of a hard dollar cost savings solution. There's lots of soft dollar deification you can have. We'll help you avoid hiring a bunch of people.

We'll help you avoid a breach, we'll help you, uh, decrease meantime to resolution. All those we equate to millions or billions of dollars. Isn't that amazing?

We could do that and put 5% of your monthly CSP bill back in your pocket, or 7% or networking should be 2, 3, 4, 5% of a bill. It shouldn't be 10, 50 and 20% of a bill. And we can help drive that equation.

So I'm, I'm hoping if we can get that word out. I'll end you here. It's like in this old Xerox commercial where the guy pulled out a, a, a thing and he goes, it'll save me a nickel.

And then he goes, we do, uh, x millions of transactions per day. It'll save me a And the point is, is that this is very calculatable. You can save dollars, you can get the outcome you want, improve the networking, and actually improve your bottom line.

It should be a no brainer, but the don't know, do nothing is your biggest competitors right now. So this session and so many more, Doug, let's get the word out there and help the market see that they have optionality. And what you're doing at AVIATRIX helps.

I gotta let you go. But thanks so much for joining us, Doug. We'll see you again soon.

Thanks Danielle. Alright, everybody back to the studio. Thanks for being here with us at the six five Summit.