Okay, we're back here live in Strata, New York City. This is SiliconANGLE.tv, SiliconANGLE.com's theCUBE, our flagship program, we go out to the events, we extract the silver from the noise, and our next segment is going to be the winner of the startup showcase last night at the big event where they've featured all the top startups in big data, and the winner is here with us on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com, and I'm joined by co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org, and as John said, we're here with Daniel Abadi, who's the chief scientist and co-founder of Adapt Daniel, welcome and congratulations on last night. Yeah, thanks very much guys, it's good to be here. So we had you on theCUBE last year when you came on, and no one ever heard of Adapt, but like, hey, you know I've heard of Yale, heard of Database, heard of Column stores, I've heard of Vertica and these other companies doing a lot of work, but in that one year, you guys have come out with the product, had a big launch, good successful launch of the product, great reception. You have the talk of Strata this year, a lot of people are throwing your name around with Cloudera, Hortonworks, we had the Tableau guy on, and so that's great, how do you feel about that?  It's been a huge year, as you said, we had our first product being released 1.0 earlier this year, we just announced 2.0 this week, and it's really so cool to see this technology that started off as just a research project four years ago at Yale University to go from there to this real product that real people are using. Is it because of Yale University? Because now the Brown guys, as you see the people know, Brown, Yale, Stanford, Cal, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, all jockeying for who's going to have the best start-ups. I think it's more like East Coast, West Coast thing, really, like I think all the East Coast guys get along pretty well, like Stan Sedoneck at Brown, and Mike and Sam at MIT, I mean, I came from MIT, so obviously I'm friends with those guys, so I think we got the East Coast thing, we got the West Coast people, there's some over there too, but it's a little bit sort of less intermingling, so. All kidding aside, that was just an inside baseball joke and the big data geeks, the computer science programs are booming, but seriously, let's talk about the technology, because one of the big themes in the marketplace is race to build out the middleware and the technology and the tools at the same time simplify. The demand for the products and solutions are high, so talk about the dynamic between you building the company, the rocket ship, at the same time, in terms of tech, and also making it an easy to use product and deliver solutions. So sure, yeah, so it's essentially what we're trying to do is take these ideas from two different and very important communities and sort of bring them together in one product, and obviously then make it very easy to use. The basic two communities we're looking at are database products, it's a DBMMS, so traditional national technology has been around for 30 years, that I come from the database community, so we've had three decades of research trying to make these things go really well on structured data, just to be able to produce very fast query results when you're dealing with transactions or analysis over structured data. So we want to combine that community with the Hadoop community, which came much later from originally from Google's MapReduce project, that's very good at processing on structured data and being able to go through text or write generics of MapReduce functions over any data that you really like, but doesn't do so well for, I mean you can do structured data in Hadoop, you can't really get high performance and certainly not interact with queries on that structured data. So what we're trying to do is bring some of these ideas from the database community to Hadoop. These ideas that my research group at Yale and many other research groups around the country, we know how to deal with fast query on structured data very well. So we want to take that and bring that to Hadoop. So that was originally what the HadoopDB project was four years ago, and that was commercialized and had apt also more than two years ago now. And that's what we're trying to do all about. Why the success, why the rapid success? Obviously yesterday you guys were voted as the hot start up by the crowd, not just by the event organizers. Why the success in your opinion? Well, I think it's a, this is something that people need. I mean, I think being able to have structured on structured data in one platform without connectors, really natively in one real platform to do any type of analysis you would like. I mean, you know, it really, this is more than just sort of big data where you have big data of many different systems to help you with it. It's like it's one system for all big data.  They want to be able to, I mean, it's a massive, you know, big data market is now, was it going to say, 30 something billion? 50 billion. 50 billion. 50 billion. 50 billion. 50 billion. 50 billion. 50 billion. 50 billion. 50 billion. 50 billion. 50 billion. 50 billion. 50 billion. 50 billion. 50 billion. In a one system without connectors. So Danny, but your thesis essentially became Vertica. Did you know, so when you were doing that initial thinking and work, was there something in the back of your head that said, okay, this is good, but I got to go back and fix this other problem that I know is going to emerge or did you not see it at the time? No, I mean, I think, sort of, as you said, it was my PhD thesis, right? So the thing with the PhD thesis is you have to go in a lot of depth down one subject. Once it becomes befesare, you can have a lot more breadth and do multiple things at once, But at PhD, if you want to graduate at a reasonable time, not take 13 years, like some people at MIT do, like if you want to get done, you have to find one thing and just go very deep on that thing. So my thing was column stores. But figuring out how to, when you have relational tables and rows and columns, rather than storing it row by row, store a column by column. So that was the thing, and we went very deep in that. We built a career execution engine, a compression engine, an optimizer for columns, all the way up the entire column store stack. And that was, as you said, a commercialized to Vertica. And that was great. But I think you're right. I think from the beginning, I think even, this was in 2004, basically, when this all started. Even by then, it was clear that text had some value. There was important information in textual data that you can't really store in rows and columns. So even though we didn't really focus on that particular problem, when we did the C-store project at this point eight years ago, wow. Yeah, so even though that wasn't what we focused on, it was a known problem in the database community that somehow we'd have to integrate text in some way, or at least more unstructured data. So once Vertica was sold to HP, actually a little bit before it was sold to HP, I'd already moved on to Yale, and then we started this HadoopDB project to really focus on the next, in my view, the way I view the database market was we had transactions. And so in the 70s and 80s, we really focused on doing very good performance in transactions. You get to the 90s, it's much more about analytics and to be able to do fast analytics, but still it was all on relational data. And then in my view, where the market's going and why we found it had happened two years ago and started working on this even before that, was really just once, I think the next level of research, the next big wave of research in database systems is being able to open up to nominations, to be able to handle text data, image data, array data, especially scientific data. So all of the biology, they have these big genome sequences of three billion base pairs. That's not really fits in the Rosin column. That's very much of a, that's really sort of text data in some ways, because it's just like ACT and G's times a billion. So a lot of these science data sets are also a big direction for the market to go as well. So I think the variety part of the three V's is a big area of research in database systems and an area that really interests me, and that's why we did Hedapt. So I've got to ask you because Cloudera made a significant announcement today with their Impala product, with the folks out there, go to SiliconANGLE.com, we got a cover there, blog post, essentially it's about real time. Cloudera's moving from the red hat of Hadoop to essentially a big data platform, and their slogan is, you know, Cloudera, the big data platform. We have Mike Olson on the CEO after you, but I want to get your take on that because Hedapt is exactly the same concept. So you look at what you guys have as a product that you're shipping, and what Cloudera introduced. Concept-wise, it's the same thing. There's some differences, obviously, but real time and simplicity. Talk about the difference between what Impala has and what you're striving towards, or Havins are striving for. So let me just stop by saying I'm not a business guy. So as far as business side of it, I don't want to speak too much, but as far as the technology side goes, just as a tech guy, I don't know what it means for a business, but a tech guy, I love the announcement. It's really great to hear people finally embracing this idea of making Hadoop, so bringing SQL ideas to Hadoop. In the past, if you look at Cloudera's history, they sort of, I think the first MPP database to partner with them was actually Vertica, and we were talking about before, where Vertica was the first one to partner with Cloudera and build a connector between them. So basically, I think it was actually, I think it was at Hadoop World 2010. Vertica actually built that connector itself, I believe. Well, I think they actually had some people from Hadoop Cloudera actually. But Vertica certainly took the lead on it. So that was two years ago. So for two years, Vertica was the first, but then we saw a Teradata and a Teaser, Aster, Green Fund, they all built these same connectors right between themselves and Cloudera. And Cloudera had like five, six partnerships, maybe even more than that, with database companies that sort of allowed, you had a database, you had Hadoop, you had a connector between them. And they managed to sort of convince the market board of them and the database guys managed to convince everybody that this was the right way to go, to have two different systems, two different clusters with a connector between them. So you could sort of try and combine them over this wire, this basically this network to connect these two things. But finally now, this year, finally it's really great to see that now we have, Cloudera is saying, no, these connectors are not working. It's not the right way to build it. The right way to build it is to just directly build the SQL support and the sort of ability to handle sort of database technology directly in the Hadoop cluster. I mean, that's absolutely the right way to go and that's what we've been saying for four years. So from that level, it's really sort of, it's a real, I mean, I hate to use word validation because such a CEO thing to say, but in a way it's like a validation of our measures. But we're talking about platforms now. This is what the market wants, because applications have not morphed as fast from last year, but analytics is booming, right? So analytics is the killer app. So that's what people want, that's the simplicity question. So that's what people want. And simplicity is, when you say use word simplicity, the key thing is to have one cluster. You really just do not want to have Hadoop and database on different clusters. I have to maintain the both. You have data silos, I don't know where my data is at any point.  And technology speaking, it's a really dumb way to go about it. It's just sort of like, we have two different clusters with a shared nothing MPP architecture where data is spread across each node and you're doing some sort of parallel processing on it, like it's just, it's so similar. There's just no reason why it shouldn't be one system. Well, we're going to have Mike Olson on shortly on their next guest. We'll ask him the same questions, but really good insight. Congratulations on your success. My final question for you guys is what's next? So for Hedapt and your positioning in the market, technically speaking, from a product and solution standpoint, what's next for you guys?   So we are ahead right now, but I think we have to keep on pushing that sort of, you know, sort of pushing the envelope, right? So we have to keep on, you know, staying as the thought leader in this space and, you know, build new product. You know, so I guess the main thing we have right now next is this, is this announcement that I think we had Scott on earlier today, like you talked about the sort of interactive queries hire thing. So now we've gotten rid of the Hadoop startup cost. So now, you know, we can have queries that run in less than a second. So I think that's, you know, bringing that out to market in the right way is, you know, is the most immediate concern. But then we have to keep on going beyond that and sort of, you know, continue to work on the performance improvements on our HDK and have some better analytics and just keep on going from there. Well, we always like to have you on the, I just want to add, so the implications of this I think are profound and David Floyer and Jeff Kelly on Wikibon just did some pretty detailed analysis on this. You know, chopping people understand the impacts on the existing data warehouse business and David got into sort of how it works. And so, check that out on wikibon.org. Daniel, great to have you on theCUBE when you were just a co-founder with the company you're building. You got great success. Also the product positioning is working and you voted the hot startup here at Strato this year. Congratulations. Thanks so much. It has to be there. We'll be back with our next guest. It's me, Mike Olson, the CEO of Cloudera right after this short break.


Diamond Dogs is a wonderful opportunity to see our beautiful dogs and fashion come together in the very best possible way. It's really an opportunity to showcase some amazing fashion designers but also to recognize the beautiful role that all of our dogs play in our lives. We have 14 designers involved today and they range from Romances Bourne to the Fabulous Lisa Barron to Camilla and many many others. So each dog will have its own designer coat and this will be showcased with the beautiful fashions that the models will be showcasing on the catwalk. The brief to some of the designers was we really wanted them to design something that was tactile and accessible so what this will do is this will provide an opportunity for people who are blind or have low vision to really experience from an accessibility and tactile nature what is being showcased in the fashion festival. I really liked all the student designer work it was really good to see the ideas that they came up with with the brief that they were given and see how they incorporated that into their their pieces and hopefully we'll be able to see them in the future as professional designers.


We finna jump right into it. So We're gonna start out by I'ma just draw Just draw a simple picture. I ain't gonna call it simple. It's gonna be dope cuz you know I'm seeing you boy Just naturally dope Anyway I know this ain't the best looking freeze in the world, but I remind you This is just a how-to color tutorial. Oh my god, you feel me so After you got your picture drawn what you want to do you want to Select everything Now we finna make every line that we draw we finna make it one we finna merge every line together So after you got everything selected go to object Expand appearance Go to your path finder and click merge now Every line I drew you made it one You know I'm saying I Like to grab my layer and drag it to this blank sheet of paper to make a copy of it Then I locked the top layer and the reason I do that because once I color this layer And I start adding my shadows. I keep that that line work layer on the top So every time I draw shadow, it'll fall under the line work It feels So after we got the top one locked what you want to do is you want to make sure you got this second one highlighted Pick the color you want to start out with Start out with Okay, you're gonna click your box tool.   You just made over your line work.  So what we're gonna do we're gonna click one eye Then we're gonna whole shift and click the other one so we can have two things selected at once Then we're gonna go to our color And move it to whatever we wanted to be once we click okay Find the color you wanted to change to Make his eyes red So what you want to do now you want to lock that layer Come over here and get you a Brand new layer and put it between it and we're gonna use this layer for our shadows Now we're gonna add one more layer for our highlights And that'll be all she wrote and there you have it how to color in Adobe Illustrator man like comment subscribe. Thank y'all for watching More heat coming soon stay tuned


I'm actually a graduating senior in the art practice department. I'm also part of the honors program in that department. So for the honors program, there are nine students that are admitted each semester and we get our own show at the end of the semester in a studio space the entire semester to sort of, you know, prep for that show. And for the first time ever, I was going to sort of create, you know, a gallery space that was inclusive of the blind and visually impaired community. And that was going to happen through the implementation of Braille by having an audio tour that included all nine artworks by also having sort of barriers around each artwork. So that when an individual is with a cane is interacting is trying to navigate the space, they would, they would be able to detect the barrier and that would inform them that, you know, there's an artwork behind that. And for my work specifically, it was going to be an installation that was going to activate anyone's, you know, like senses when they walk in. So it was a sensory experience, a multimodal experience. There was going to be scent sound. There was going to be a sculpture. Individuals could also touch my work, which is very, you know, like anti-museum. My hope was just, you know, for the show to be really inclusive of anyone that walks into the gallery space and not just individuals that were cited. Due to the coronavirus, our honors show is actually postponed slash canceled as well as our senior show. And my hope is for the gallery to really consider some of the ideas that were brought forward by the student body and to implement them, especially something like accessibility for the blind and visually impaired, because that's something that shouldn't be optional. You know, these places need to be more inclusive and welcoming to any individual that walks into the gallery space. The graduation situation is actually quite upsetting, especially because it's a graduating senior. That's something we look forward to the entire year. I was actually just telling my mom the other day, I never really graduated because I graduated a year early from high school, and then I went to film school and then I transferred to Berkeley. So I was really looking forward to this graduation. But if that's what it takes, you know, potentially canceling graduation to be able to make sure that everyone is safe and healthy, then so be it because our health and safety is way more valuable than graduation. And so I hope the school really makes the right decision with, you know, what's ideal for everyone.


The biggest challenges to establishing monitoring systems are the lack of long-term strategy to deliver and sustain those capacities, as well as working not only on the technical aspects, but also the institutional arrangements that need to be in place for those systems to work properly. Monitoring systems are a very large construct that requires a lot of agencies to work and collaborate together, and as long as those relationships are not duly established for the long-term sustainability of that process, it fluctuates. So what happens is that many instances we deliver capacity to the institutions, but then the fact that the teams are not institutionalized and depend on fundings that come and go makes it so that there is a fluctuation in capacity. So once the project finalizes, people move on, capacities drop, and then once again we find ourselves in these jo-jo-hope capacities, as you might call it. So we need long-term strategies to consolidate the capacities and then replicate those for a critical mass of practitioners.


All right, so I want to start with one of my favorite Zen stories I feel kind of that it cool. I can tell a Buddhist story in India And it's about these two traveling monks. We have the wise senior monk and his young apprentice As they're walking down the road they come to a village and there's just been a torrential rain So now kind of washing through the main street through this village is now this river from all the water That's been coming down over the past several days and as they approach this new water feature in the town They see it come across a nobleman on One side who needs to cross Now he's dressed very nicely and doesn't want to walk across So he's yelling at his servant. You've got to carry me. You've got to pick me up carry me across this water I can't get my clothes all dirty But the problem is he's just been shopping and all his servants are loaded down with these fancy packages So they hear that they've got to carry him. So one of them goes to set the packages down and The nobleman says what are you doing?   Don't you know who I am blah blah blah? Etc. Etc. This does not seem to faze the monk and he continues across the water eventually getting to the other side and setting the gentleman down Who continues to complain and yell at just about everyone and the monk continues on his way followed by his apprentice So they continue walking they go through that town they go farther down the road And eventually they make camp and they're having their modest supper when the apprentice Just can't hold it in anymore and he says master.  And he goes on and on And the master stops him and says I set that man down hours ago Why are you still carrying him and we can do the same thing with our ideas and our practices There are things that we hold sacred that might be getting in our way that we just can't put down And it's easy to change practices or easier to change practices Then the beliefs and ideas that underpin those and there's certainly good reasons why we hold on to them Maybe they've worked for us in the past. They've been successful. They're comfortable. We know how they work Maybe it's just someone told us that's what we're supposed to do so we do it and we've stopped challenging it So it makes sense that we hold on to these things, but we're when we're in this mode We can feel like the hammer in a world full of nails And that's not a bad feeling like I got this boom boom boom. I am the perfect tool to solve this problem Unfortunately when we open our eyes or often have our eyes forcefully open for us We realize that the world is a little bit more complex than that and the single tool is no longer the right one to get the job done So I think it's certainly not a stretch within this audience to say that change is not optional. It's required Einstein said we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we use when we created them We have to think differently and while we can often focus around Changing the world around us changing our context, which is important We also know that we have to change ourselves internally in order to prepare for change and that's what I'm going to focus on For the next, you know, 40 minutes or so I'm going to talk about six key elements that will help change how we think that will help us with Positive change and those elements are humility empathy ownership Awareness opportunity and reflection. I know six is a lot to remember So if you have a challenge, you have the easy acronym for all this is he or Okay, it's a lousy acronym, but anyway humility empathy ownership awareness opportunity and reflection. So let's start with humility Before any change is possible. We have to be willing to admit that maybe we're wrong Okay, maybe not completely wrong, but at least there's a better way of doing or working or addressing the problem that we're currently facing now unfortunately We're not wired that way Ray Dalio the author of principles fantastic book Calls his radical open-mindedness this openness to being wrong and he believes that it's more important How you deal with what you don't know Than what it is. You don't know I was getting ahead of myself. Like I said, we're not wired for this. We have confirmation bias Our brains look for things that already agree with what we believe So we have to work harder to find these counterpoints to our current beliefs What I find really fascinating is that when our core beliefs are challenged the same part of our brain activates as when we're physically attacked And an example I use in the US So you might have to use a little bit of imagination here because I don't know of an Indian example, but in the US You know our the founder of our country was George Washington So obviously he's highly revered and now when our country was founded 1700s, etc dental Practice was not what it is today. So a lot of people wore dentures and there's a famous story of George Washington having wooden teeth Most kids have heard this story. So now We know what teeth he has because the museums have them. They have his dentures So he didn't actually have wooden teeth. He had a set that was made of gold lead hippo ivory and some other animal teeth All right, you can probably you know, we can accept that it's not that different than wooden teeth animal teeth feels a little bit weird But it's not too challenging to our core beliefs as George Washington as a good man But when people also hear that he had a set of dentures that were made from slaves teeth That's harder to accept it challenges our identity Even as Americans if our founding father had a set of dentures made from slaves teeth, that's really uncomfortable But when we in our own work, we can find ourselves challenged by similar ideas and that's how our brain reacts as if we're attacked We get defensive. That's normal now going back to Dalio his suggestion is To find the most believable people who are likely to disagree with you and try and understand why they believe what they believe And what he means by believable Well, I'll say by example I've been in the UX field for more than 20 years if you want to talk about design patterns or user research I have a lot of experience. So I'm fairly believable if you'd like to talk about DevOps. Well, I've been around this community for a while So I have some high-level understanding about DevOps But honestly my opinions are not very believable. I don't have the experience to back it up So again, when you have questions and you're looking for input find the people who are most believable They have the experience they've done the work and whose opinions are likely to be different from yours and figure out Why they believe what they believe Now it helps if we have the right mindset Many of you may be familiar with the work of Carol Dweck who talks about a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset Now if you have a fixed mindset you believe that you are the way you are and you don't change So if you fail or succeed, it's innately who you are, right? If you fail it's a character flaw and it's because you stink and if you have a growth mindset You believe that you can learn new skills and failure is an opportunity to get better Now what's interesting is in different parts of our lives We can have a fixed mindset over here and a growth mindset over here But as we start to become aware of these we can move ourselves in more of a growth mindset direction One of my favorite examples of this is a friend of mine was working for Let's say a very large shoe brand that you've probably heard of and early on in this company's growth They were Getting a lot of revenue from affiliate marketers So that's where you know someone a smaller site will put an ad and they direct people to the the brand and if people buy Then that smaller site gets a little bit of revenue Now as this brand was growing You know they're this person saw you know a lot of our Profits are going to these affiliates. We're getting to be a big brand people know who we are Do we need these people anymore? So at one point he decided to cut off the program And it cost the company twenty million dollars. How many of you have made a twenty million dollar mistake? No one good. I'm glad to hear that How many of you think that your team would respond? Well, if you did make a twenty million dollar mistake probably not many luckily this person was not fired But they learned from it. They took this experience and Created a VIP program just for affiliates and was able to use that VIP program to grow the affiliate marketing to be 50% of their revenue Took that massive loss learned from it more than made up for it in how they grew and changed and evolved and for myself a personal experience about 10 years ago a little more than now when I was early on in my Personal Agile journey. I did a workshop with Jeff Patton. He's brilliant And it was a workshop on how to initiate projects in a fast way kind of design product sprinty kind of things that we talk about now He's going through the workshop and he's laying out the activities like well. This all feels pretty familiar And at the end I was like, you know Jeff you said this is gonna be fast, but this looks like six eight weeks of work It's kind of like what we do now in like waterfall design process So how long do you take to do this? He goes?  Luckily when having a day or two to reflect I get back to work the next Monday and I start thinking well He's pretty believable He's got the experience So how could this work? So I started said it set out an agenda like how would I structure this to get this done in two weeks? and I took a lot of his exercises and some of them I swapped out with things that I was a little bit more familiar with but accomplished the same thing and Wow, I had this Agenda that looked like it would fit in two weeks and I tried it out on the software startup I was working for and it worked really well So I did it with other companies and it worked pretty well and then I started hearing. Yeah. Yeah two weeks is too long Wait really for something that's critical to your business. You won't spend two weeks on it. No no two weeks too long All right, growth mindset again chopped it down to a week Further I've chopped it down to three days. So again when you can listen you can respond you can learn you can grow That's your growth mindset Now one way to kind of notice that you might be in a fixed mindset is how you respond to conflict We all have conflict or disagreements with other people, but when you are disagreeing with someone Are you seeking to convince them like you just convinced you're right? That's more of a fixed mindset Are you seeking to understand why they believe what they believe that's more of a growth mindset? You might learn something and also at least if you understand where what their position is if you still believe that your Opinion is correct. You'll be able to convince them better because you'll at least understand where they're coming from Everyone believes what they do for a reason they believe what they believe for a reason if you can understand that reason It's much easier to connect Again my personal experience As someone who's been in this field for a long time, especially the design field I go to a lot of conferences and sometimes I would see a speaker that maybe I didn't completely agree with or let's be more Generous and say I agreed with them but maybe I thought there was an important nuance that they weren't quite communicating to the audience and My need was I wanted the audience to learn as much as possible Now I at least had enough self-awareness not to be the person to raise their hand and contradict the speaker or not ask a Question but give information. I want them to own their talk and And have that be their their space so okay Well, how do I get my need met of seeing the audience get the information while being respectful of the person who's given the presentation? So I thought ah What if I ask a question where the obvious answer is What I think people should know Okay, I get my need gets met audience gets information and I get to maintain the respect of the person who's speaking And so when this comes up about 80% of the time the answer is exactly what I would expect and about 20% of the time The answer is different and then I learned something So you can also look for where you're uncomfortable again when you feel that discomfort it might be a trigger that You know, this might be a little bit of fixed mindset going so you can try and open yourself up You can think about all of your practices. What do you do now if you thought about changing that practice? How does that make you feel do you feel open to that or you maybe feel a little defensive? Are there things that you do that just haven't changed in a long time your process feels a little frozen? Again, maybe it's still the perfect way to do it, but maybe there's some opportunities there And then what are the things that you sort of just dismiss off-hand someone says something like la la nope not open to that again? Good trigger that maybe it's just worth investigating that reaction and seeing what's there and challenging that All right, so that's humility moving on empathy We need to have a deep understanding of the needs of our team our project our customers in order to know What types of experiments would actually benefit them? We need to be able to feel their pain because when we're while we're trying to level ourselves up We're not leveling leveling up for our own sake. We're leveling up for the sake of our teams and our customers It's not about us alone. You know, I'm sure you've all heard the whole there's no eye in team Yeah, yeah, well there is it's in the a-hole. Don't be the a-hole Moving on Next we'll talk about ownership you have to be willing to own your team's success Sorry, it's more of an American reference, but You have to believe that you can make a positive difference that if it goes well You have a part in that and if it doesn't going what go well, or it isn't going well There's something that you can do to have a positive impact as an example If I thought that my team would benefit from user research and they said we don't want to do any of that I could either say ah come on Don't they know how valuable this is and the benefit they're gonna get out of everyone who's anyone is doing good user research It's their fault.  I can take ownership and say well Maybe I'm not doing a good enough job Connecting the value of what I'm proposing to the goals of this team Or maybe I go even farther and say maybe I don't even understand the goals as well as I think I do Maybe I need to investigate that a little bit better so that what I propose will match And really support what's most important right now and maybe research isn't the most important thing to do right now Maybe there's something else that I can do but again, I have to take ownership for that result When we start thinking that way it often leads us to step out of our roles a little bit I one thing I've often done is lead retrospectives It's certainly not within the job title of the UX guy But as an experienced facilitator, it's a way that I can help out my team Going back to conflict We tend to have a lot of it you know, there's that team that's getting in our way or that stakeholder that makes our life difficult or whoever it is if they would only just get in line our lives would be easier and While it may seem like our small goals are in conflict typically if we take a step up We're on the same team our enemy is not them. It's outside of us. It's the marketplace. It's our competitors We have to find a way to work together so that we can be successful as a whole One way we can do this is with ownership. How can we take ownership of the problems the other people have? Maybe it's their obstacle which is preventing them from delivering to us So maybe we can help them fix it one it might break that bottleneck and then again We get what we need but the very least when you help other people They tend to want to help you back So by understanding what other people need even if it's outside of your own team you can often Everyone will get what they need and things tend to flow better All right So we're humble we know we can be better We have empathy for who we're trying to serve whether it's our team or our customers we're willing to take ownership of positive change and making it happen But what do we do? So that's where I think we come to awareness like what are the options because I don't think we need to invent everything a lot Of times there's stuff out there that would be perfectly useful You know lean talks about getting out of the building And I think generally we can just think about that as getting out of our comfort zone How do we learn new things whether it's reading books or articles or podcasts or meet-ups or conferences? These are all places where we can expose ourselves to new ideas and I would say don't limit yourself to just Your own industry your own practice see what other people are doing. It's great to see Dr. Sengupta and think about oh, what is transportation and science looking at there's lots of other interesting domains out there that we can learn from so Investigate those and when you find an interesting practice steal it Bring it into your practice. This stuff's usually not copyrighted. Anyway, it's ideas that people have so figure out What can I steal? What can I borrow? What can I riff on that's going to make my me and my team more useful? Now you may need to tweak it a little bit, you know something that someone says may not be a perfect fit for your current needs But my guess is you can adjust it a little bit and try it out All right, so we're humble we think things could be better we have empathy for who we're going to serve We're willing to take ownership. We have some ideas for experiments. We could try How do we structure the opportunity so that it's most likely to be successful? Because the reality is as much as we say it people don't like change We're comfortable in our in things that are familiar So unless you've got like one of the best teams around you might have to think about how you introduce a new experiment How you create the right timing? Because people will have resistance You can think about where is that resistance most likely to come from Who is going to be most effective affected? Sorry, who might be most threatened? How could you smooth that transition out? One strategy I like to use is figure out who's the best person to introduce this idea So maybe I went to a conference and I see a development practice. Oh mob programming sounds really cool I think that would be really beneficial to my team now the UX guy advocating for mob programming again I'm not terribly believable However, you know, there's a senior developer on the team and he loves trying new things So maybe I sit with him and I say hey, I was at this conference I learned a little about mob programming and this is how I think it would be really useful and if I can get that person excited and Point them in the right direction and they go learn more. Well, then I also know it has legs if they're like, yeah That doesn't sound very useful. Okay, maybe my idea wasn't so good But if they get excited and they're believable and then they can be the one introducing it to the team Now it's more likely to be adopted doesn't have to be my idea. I just want to see the team moving forward One of the things that I really like a coach. I worked with a while ago use the language of experiments, right? Well, let's try an experiment because it doesn't work very well to say on Monday at 8 a.m. Show up for your scrum and doctoration I mean training Right, that doesn't feel very good. But hey, let's try an experiment if it works. We'll do more of it It doesn't work. We'll do something else. Let's just try it for a little while Give it a shot a little harder to say no to that invite people along When you're trying to affect change, I think it's good a simple model is BJ fogs Equation around behavior change the behavior is motivation ability and trigger So if you want people to do something new or they motivate in the right way and Intrinsic motivation tends to be better than extrinsic motivation. Do they have the ability you know whether it's training equipment? Environment, etc. Is the ability to affect that behavior there and are the right triggers there to remind people until it becomes a habit? So something to think about And I talked about introducing change Timing is everything Dan pink in his book when talks about temporal landmarks as good Times to introduce change and temporal landmarks just tend to be The beginning of a period You know one of the simplest is at the beginning of a sprint, right? We do a retrospective at the end and we try a new process at the beginning of the next sprint But there's lots of temporal met landmarks Next quarter at the after the next project milestone or hey when we get back for vacation or after a holiday Let's try something new or Mondays. There's always another Monday coming So you have an idea on Wednesday. She said hey, let's start it on Monday That gives people some time to be prepared for it, right? When you set that that trial date in the future gives people time to get used to the idea of that change as opposed to let's start now Ah, not ready for that now future. I can deal with now. Hmm too scary Some other scenarios that I found useful are when you start a new project or you're in a new role So company I joined a number of years ago and about right when I joined they were about to kick off a big initiative And the product owner was fairly new to product ownership So I went to her And I said do you have a plan for how you want to kick this off? And she looked back at me.  I was talking about that. I derived from Jeff's work. I do. Would you like me to do that? Yes She was in a new role. I was in a new role new project great time to try something new Not only did it work really well for that project But it worked so well that I started doing it for other parts of the company and we introduced it as a practice political capital When you're serving other people and you've earned their trust they will trust you when you make a recommendation So I tend not to go in in the beginning and start to say here's all the changes. I want I start try I start by helping other people and when they say hey that person that guy really helped us a lot Then when I want to introduce something new They trust me because I've helped them and they're more likely to listen And the last two are the the ugly ones if a team is stuck We're having an existential crisis as a company then people are almost like we'll try anything We're open to that and I've been in that disaster Scenario where we either make this agile transformation work or there's no way this company is going to survive. Yeah, okay Well, we better get this right all hands on deck. Let's do it The other thing I'll talk about and it's a bit of a dark pattern is fear And it's not one that designers tend to use a lot because we tend to be very positive thinkers We want to make the world a better place, but a lot of stakeholders just want to avoid risk and I stumbled on this one. So when I was working for a company in online gaming So the online poker and our biggest market was France and France at the time was what you would call a gray market a White market is regulated a black market is illegal. The gray market just means there's no rules So you're not legal or illegal. You're kind of in the middle Well, the government of France said they saw all this money floating around they said we want that tax revenue Okay, fine. They're gonna regulate no problem Well, they decided as part of that regulation that They would Consider anyone operating in the country currently to be operating illegally So if you wanted a license, you're gonna have to wipe your membership database clean and start recruiting from scratch on day one That's really scary, especially considering that they were adding all these really Crazy restrictions around personal information and other things to create an account that had never been done in the poker industry before so this was scary for me and my hypothesis was that People are old customers would come back and they would try to create an account and they'd look at it go I don't want to give you that information. I've never had to give you that before I'm gonna go to one of your larger competitors And then they would get there and they would see the same information and go, huh They're asking me for that too and then maybe they'd read because no one likes to read and go. Oh, this is a government regulation I'm gonna get this everywhere All right, I'll give you the information, but they're probably gonna stay on the larger competitor not leave them and come back to us So that was a big risk. It was kind of this situation. You know what if we're wrong We're in trouble and all of a sudden when I never had money for user research before I had twenty five thousand dollars to go to France and test our actual users because there was a huge risk of failure so use it carefully, but It Fear can work. How am I doing on time where I got left? Anytime good. All right Reflection not going to go deeply into we have a deep tradition of retrospectives But when you've you've had the humility you have empathy ownership You thought of experiments you frame the opportunity you implement the opportunity you have to go back and say how well did that work? Did did we time it right? Did we deal with the resistance? Was it a good experiment? Did it match what we needed? Did I how was my ownership? Did it match the empathy the needs of the team? You know, we can go back and reflect on that again. We've got lots of traditions for that. I'm not gonna go into that so Humility empathy ownership awareness opportunity reflection now I appreciate you laughing at the beginning when I made my terrible acronym joke the first time I gave this presentation Woman came up to me afterward and she said I thought you were serious Really? She had a military background and she's got oh, yeah, that's higher earth orbit an area of responsibility It's like that's really cool Because when you're one to affect change sometimes you have to step back get into a higher earth orbit Look at things in a bigger picture, and it's good to know what is my area of responsibility? Where can I easily affect change and what's outside my area of a responsibility that I might be able to impact just as well Or I might need to influence other people so I thought that was actually a much better way than he or our To to remember this you can think about stepping back in a higher earth orbit and looking around in and out of side of your area of responsibility Now to help with this and because all the cool kids are doing it There is a canvas I will go through it briefly because everyone needs a canvas you can download this online I'll give you the the link in a minute. So it's another good way. It's just got the The six different things so you know you can talk about like Humility look at all the practices you have now, you know even just like keep a journal as you go through a week What are we doing? Which ones of those things do we feel some resistance about change or can we recognize that there's some value in changing of Those things that there's some value. How would that really impact the team? How does that empathically feel in terms of benefiting a team or their customer which of those might I or the team take ownership of? Now that we have a sense of that How can we generate awareness? Where can we go to learn more about what might help us? How do we structure the opportunity? Where's gonna be our resistance? What might our timing look like? How would we introduce this and then how well did that work? So just like a simple format it doesn't have to be linear You could start up here, but you might start with awareness. You're at a conference. You go. Oh, man. I heard about this great thing We could be better about that it would really help us and I'm willing to help drive it forward Cool. I heard about the thing. How do I introduce that and then move forward from there again? It's a good tool to help you remember it, but it doesn't have to be a linear process. That's the URL It's just a Google doc. You can copy, you know, it's a read-only, but you can copy it and then you know create your own version all right, so You're the best of the best because you're here you want to be better, right so All of us can still get stuck So hopefully if you can kind of keep some of these things in mind It will help you as you evolve and improve your own practice And sort of my last slide and then I'd love to open it up for kind of questions or discussion or maybe how these have played in Is that you know George box said all models are wrong, but some are useful So obviously this is incomplete But I hope at least these are six things and some things that are will be useful or helpful to you And with that, I would love to hear what you think. Do we have a mic that we can pass around? any thoughts questions So can you share an example of where this catalyst canvas can be used? I mean from your experience or what would be a right Case where we could possibly use this and get benefits out of it sure so for me It's kind of almost at any time you could say it's an experiment. Where are we now? And that's more of the investigation like what are what could we be develop some humility around where could we Get better you could start as an experimentation The other is again if you learn something new just use it as a validation that it will benefit my team I do think we can get better. Here's how it'll impact us. I think then the opportunity part is really the Interesting thing. How am I going to introduce this? What should the timing be? Where am I going to find resistance? It's really just a trigger because I know that the six things are kind of hard to remember So if a big piece of paper with some spaces on it is useful just as a mental exercise awesome It's also an experiment if anyone does use it I've used it a little bit, but as others use it I would love to hear how it works for you if you find it helpful or not so It's early on in its development so Other questions Thanks for the talk. It was interesting So as we know that there are various other canvases like the lean change management has introduced lean canvas business canvas Team canvas and in addition to that we have this new canvas just catalyst canvas Where do you think that it is it is the best fit? You know if I were to compare like the lean canvas business and team canvas Where would you see that you'll find the most value? Sure, and I think that's again, it's really in Thinking about your your personal and your team evolution because you could do it for yourself or you could do it for your team but I think that's sort of tangential or yeah tangential to some of those other things and And again, I largely mean it initially as a trigger like I just want to get people to think about these things Not that it's a it's a recipe that you have to follow So if there are if you feel stuck in some ways, I would hope that this could be useful to remind yourself of different a different approach that you could go about using to Reinvigorate yourself or your team around improving what I see with a lot of teams Especially when it comes to retrospectives is initially You know you're on this huge upward slope as the things that you're taking on are huge and you're making massive changes And then it starts tapering off as teams are making good improvements The changes get smaller as you hit that local maximum And a lot of teams just stay there and they're only dealing with small issues through their retrospectives I think something like this can help you think how do I find that next big jump? What's the next big stage of our evolution as a team? Because we're probably not the best in the world. We probably have another hill to climb So that's a thing another thing if you see those Retro items getting tiny to me. That's that's the signal that you're hitting a local maximum any other questions Yeah, I like the point you made how to spot changes, right? So The question for me. This is the beginning, right? So yeah spot changes and is that second step So this one question and the second one is you talk about in some teams. There's early adopters, right? But how do we deal? How do we grow the growth mindset? With others where it was majority peoples So how do you how to grow the growth mindset? What was the first one again? Uh, the second one. Okay. So what's the next step after the spot changes is the framework or this is independent techniques So how to spot changes and oh man, I have a really short-term memory. What was the second one again? I am so bad Yeah, one at a time. Okay. How to spot change it. So yeah I think this the intent is that it's more than just how to spot changes because when you think about that opportunity And then you implement it that and then reflect that second the bottom part of the canvas the last three values awareness opportunity and reflection are about actually implementing the change So the first part you sort of are am I open to change? Can I identify an experiment and then can I introduce it in a way that works? I think that is that second step is sort of part of that. I don't know but my answer I'm not answering your question Overcoming resistance Um, so right now it's semi-independent, but obviously it fits in with a large thing. Like I said, it's not a complete model Um Dealing with the resistance. I think it's good to be very gentle And kind of bring to gently bring people along because when you abruptly create change You just people will react negatively So I think that's it is one of the power of things like the temporal landmarks and the language of an experiment because you make it less Less Scary like, you know if I said hey, do you want to run a marathon tomorrow? Maybe you're a runner already, but that seems really scary. How about in a month? You want to run a marathon in a month? No, uh, next year. Do you think you could prepare you and I run a marathon? Yeah, you know when things are in the future They feel less scary now marathon. Obviously, that's a big commitment So again saying we're going to do something now right away big change. Whoa, that's scary But hey, let's talk about why change would be necessary Let's think look at the direction that we might go in Now let's talk about a practice You're sort of priming people and you're taking them one one step at a time and that can that also goes to understanding The type of people that are on your team the level of resistance that you're going to encounter because maybe it's the whole team You need to deal with maybe it's just one person out of that Any other question Any other questions? All right, well I'll hang around and if you have anything. Oh, no one more. Okay. I think we have time Uh, thanks for the great talk. Uh, this is slightly unrelated also. Uh, so we did talk about identifying a change And trying to grow that one of the challenges that organizations often You know face people within the organization when they want to bring about a change Is the question that's asked that what is going to be the like the long-term benefit Can you envision that for us? Can you project that for us? How does this approach cover that does it cover that or and if so how? I would say not explicitly Though I think part of the empathy process is you're thinking how is this going to benefit Uh, though, I think when we if we're approaching this from an agile mindset I'm a little less concerned about the impact a year from now Although I think of that like compound interest if I get one percent better every sprint A year from now. Okay. I don't know the math on that but a year from now. I'm going to be a lot better So I'm less concerned about How is this going to play out a year from now then are we going to make small progressive improvements? And sometimes they're big improvements, but you know, again, are we are we getting better from where we are now? I don't know what the needs are going to be of this team a year from now So I'm not trying to project out that far So I don't so I'm I guess I'm not answering your question But I'm also saying it's not tend to be tend to be not my concern. Maybe that's an executive concern I also think about this process as more within the team try to do things that you may not need permission for Um, if you do find you need permission to make a change then I would probably I'd dress that in the opportunity uh Bucket like in order for me to make this change This is how it would have to be structured and I would need approval from from these parties in order to implement What else? So there is one thing that I have Like observed or other experienced when I have taken ownership of a particular change that I want to introduce Is like the people are very reluctant to adapt that change And they try to be in their comfort comfort zone and they do not want to come out to the comfort zone Since this new idea does bring them out of that comfort zone. So how do you suggest that? What how can they can be brought out of it? So I'll tell you a story of a team I worked with a number of years ago It was an engineering team. They were really early in their sort of scrum adoption. They were doing four-week sprints They do planning poker by the hour on task and it would take them like three days to plan for a month-long sprint Holy crap. It was a pain and um, so I was playing sort of a backseat coaching role and I would make some gentle suggestions that are what we would all consider fairly standard and um, They would just look at me like I had three heads and I'm like Why are these people think that this what I would consider like a basic recommendation? Why do they see this is so threatening? So I put my user research hat on and I started going out to lunch with all these folks And asking them about their background and where they came from and what their experience was like Just so I could understand their perspective a little bit better What I found was that we basically had two profiles of engineers One of them had come from like the oracles of the world. They were used to these like multi-year gated processes and so for them a one-month sprint Oh my god, we are just zooming right along. They could not even imagine going any faster And then there was this other group of people that were these brilliant mit grads, but you know right out of school They knew how to code. That's what they wanted to do. They didn't have a sense of how How they worked was going to impact the value of what they're doing They just uh will give me something to do and I'll code it So now I understood a little bit about these two populations and I could communicate to them in different ways so For the experienced engineers who are used to the big process I had to be able to give them a vision of how it could be even better And once they could see that vision then they could move forward But until they could see that the practices that I was suggesting didn't make any sense And for the other engineers, I had to help them understand how How we worked was going to impact the value of what they did And then once I could communicate them in a way that made sense to them We were able to move forward that answer your question. Yeah, in a sense. Yeah, okay Um, all right. We do have five more minutes. I think If anyone else has any questions, if not, you can get a really jump on on lunch Or yeah All right. Thank you so much


the hidden secret of when I reverted to Islam. I had this absolutely amazing dream. I found myself levitating over an Islamic city. I don't know which city this is. There were minarets everywhere, minarets on mosques. And all of a sudden, I'm flying, I'm levitating and I hear the Adhan, I hear the Shahada. But it doesn't come from the mosques. It comes from my heart. It's a panel. The wildest thing is it tried to come out of my heart through my mouth, and I should have proclaimed it. But in that dream, I held my mouth shut. I didn't want to say it. It was so overwhelming that even though I was holding my mouth, it burst out through my heart. And then you heard it over all the rooftops of that city. La ilaha illala, you know, it was resonating. And then I woke up.


And expect us to know as I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGEL, my co-host Dave Vellante, co-founder of wikibond.com. Our next guest is Ramesh Prabhagaran, VP of products and partnerships at Viptella. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, we got to be here. So welcome back, just to be talking before we came on, Cisco and Apple announcing a partnership to make the fast lane. Again, wide area network carriers seeing a lot of stuff with Google doing fiber. There's a lot of stuff going on in transport, transit. Whatever you want to call it, wide area network, big part of the connected enterprises. That's right. What's going on with the WAN, the SDNOS we know is going on there. How's that translate to inter-office, inter-network? Am I constantly crossing carriers? Is there a one carrier fits all? I mean, what's going on WAN, why is it broken? Absolutely, so if you look at it from an enterprise standpoint, typically the predominant mode of connectivity has been you connect all your sites over one or two private networks, add a public network to the mix, and then you call it done, right? That's how traditionally it has been. Now if you look at it from the standpoint of a CIO that really cares about bandwidth growing 30% year over year and trying to keep the cost flat, they have an interesting challenge to deal with, right? So if you really look at it and nothing actually encapsulates the problem like what one of our CIOs mentioned to us, right? He said, why is it that I'm able to do two video streams, high def at my home, have my wife talk on FaceTime, and also have my kids play Xbox Live over a $50 circuit when I can't do any one of those things over a $500 circuit in my office, right? So, and if you really look at it, the- The civilization. Exactly, right? And if you really look at it, the applications are moving to different locations. It's no longer the case that your applications are exclusively inside the data center. Your content could be over the internet. It could be over a public cloud. So a lot of the transformation right now is around how do you optimize the network connectivity in order to access these services, right? So that's just one piece of it. It's the cost angle. The second big piece of it is really around time to capability, right? And in the data center virtualization world, it's all about agility. In the wide area networking world, you're not really talking about milliseconds. You're really talking about minutes to capability, right? And there you're looking at, how do I move from deploying, let's say two sites a month to maybe 20, 30 sites a month, for example, right? Or 20, 30 sites a day. And so that's the kind of agility you're looking for. How do I enforce policies? How do I upgrade my infrastructure? How do I implement change control over my network extremely quickly? So it's a combination of cost, time to capability, and then of course everybody cares about application performance, right? That resides on top of it, right? Now I need visibility into the applications that's going through my network. Is this traffic going to Dropbox versus Office 365 or says SFDC? And is this traffic going to Catvideos on YouTube, right? I know how do I identify that and make sure that I make that. Although Catvideos are very popular and drive a lot of traffic and costs. Exactly. Well, this brings up the question, the home thing is a great example. People relate to that. I got a great dynamic network at home, gaming, Netflix, enterprise. It seems to be static and like broken. Is that because the suppliers have an innovative? Is that because they're cost structures and what they pay for? Or both, is it technology or both? I think it's a combination of things, right? It's a combination of the amount of innovation that has traditionally been available for the wide area. And also the mirror side of it is also the availability of transport circuits, right? So if you look at the mentality from an enterprise standpoint, it's always been I build a five-nines available network and I say that's the next big thing, right? And it's always great that way. Now, if you look at the cost associated with maintaining and managing a five-nines available network, it's extremely, extremely high. And so what customers are gravitating towards is I have a portion of my network that gives me five-nines of availability. I have a portion that gives me maybe just two-nines of everybody and one that just gives me a lot of bandwidth and I don't really care about SLA there. Now, me as the enterprise can choose which traffic can go on what type of applications. So at the root of it, what I'm looking for is the ability to use multiple different transport circuits. I need to secure the infrastructure and I need to be able to also steer the applications in a certain way. But you're saying historically it's been a one-size-fits-all. That's right, exactly. Okay, and so by definition then I'm either under-provisioned or over-provisioned. That's right, exactly. So how do you solve that problem? So first thing is around the flexibility in using many different types of transport circuits. So if I have an MPLS circuit, I should be able to use that. And if you want to double your MPLS bandwidth, let's say every three years, it's not going to be economical for you. Now I start to look at, okay, what's really flowing inside my MPLS pipe? Maybe I have some mission-critical traffic that I want to keep over it. Maybe I have some other types of traffic that can go over a lesser SLA path, maybe over a broadband path. Now I start to mix and match different transport networks together. And that's what really gives you the economics. So it's almost a cap and grow in one type of the circuit infrastructure and then I have exponential growth in the other one. So that's obviously software in your secret sauce. Absolutely, exactly. And that's where real software innovation comes into the picture, right? Because I drop a device at the remote location and then I figure out, okay, what are all the components I need? I need, on one side, I need to be able to talk to the existing devices. And so there you bring in traditional protocols and whatnot that talk to it. And then on the other side, I need to be able to provide value-added services. And the value-added services always comes in the form of software innovation, right? And so that's where you choose a blaze platform, you provide all of the software capabilities, and then that gives you all the value associated. So your vision when you go and talk to a CIO is more than just consumer level experience. It's consumer level experience with all this granularity, with the security, with the resiliency, with the five nights. Talk more about that vision. Absolutely. So the vision is my network needs to behave the way I want, right? I mean, at the root of it. What that means is if cost is a factor, I need cost to be a factor, and I need to be able to build based on that. If security is a consideration, and absolutely every single enterprise CIO in the planet now cares about security, I need to be able to extend my security perimeter as well to wherever my network is, right? Why is it that I need to artificially place bounds within four walls and contain traffic that way and provide the security? Why can't I extend my security perimeter to wherever it is, right? And then around application, intelligence, application, visibility, how do I steer certain things in a certain direction? All of those things really come into the picture. And at the same time, if there were supposed to be, let's say there's a problem in the network, the first thing I want is I want to turn off all of those things. I just want basic connectivity, right? So a robust, underline secure infrastructure is stable stakes. And so that's why we actually innovated a lot in our technology to provide that robust, underline secure infrastructure first, and then build all the value-added services. So it's not a bolt-on, it says if you bolt-on security, you're going to have problems. So but what does that unpack that for us? What does that mean to fundamentally build security into your architecture? Yeah, I mean, get a little technical here, but let me keep it at a high level, right? So today when two devices have to talk to each other, what do you need to do? You need to basically make sure they can talk to each other, and then you build all the security policies around it, and then you build all the other policies around it, and so forth, right? Typically, the network team takes care of the network connectivity. The security team builds, the security policies are top, and the other guys come and put the policies. Now we have three different teams that don't talk to each other that often, that want to implement something that flows very well, right? So that's why we said, what we have to do is actually fundamentally integrate routing security and segmentation and policy together, so that if you make changes to one, or if you implement one, then it flows through exactly the same way. And to give you a compelling reason as to why this is important, when we go talk to the networking guys, we tell them security is built in standard, and so you don't have to worry about it. When we go and talk to the security teams, we say, you have been trying to influence your networking guys to build something, and this way you actually get it, and you just define your policies, and it automatically gets implemented, right? So the conversation now starts to become a lot more interesting for both the parties involved here. So how does what you do tie into this notion of virtualizing the data center? Absolutely. So if you look at the virtualization, there are literally three pillars, right? One is what happens inside the data center, the second piece of it is what happens in the wide area, which is the part that we address, and the third piece is all of the layer four through seven services are getting virtualized as well, right? So now there are two interesting challenges here. One is how do I provide enterprise connectivity so that all the sites can talk to each other over a virtualized van, and a virtualized van should have all the properties that we just spoke about, and how do I access a service as well at a remote point in the most effective way? I'll give you an example, a real example that we heard from one of our large financial customers. They said they have high-risk regions, and these are regions where they have a lot of political instability, and they wanted to implement a policy to take all the traffic coming from those sites, send that through a scrubbing location before it's allowed access into any of their crown assets and data center locations. They wanted to implement this change, and they looked up what it takes, they said it'll take about three months to do it, and the war broke out yesterday, right? And so they're looking for ways to implement these type of things. So in our technology, what we can do is actually you can connect any firewall, for example, connect that into our device, and we would advertise the fact that there is a device available at that location that provides these capabilities so that I can put a business policy that says any traffic from this high-risk region has to always go through a firewall before it goes anywhere else. Those types of things really took forever with the previous technologies, and we've actually brought that into our technology and we can deliver that in a matter of seconds, actually. Okay, so on, pretend I'm a CIO for a minute, I'm like, you know, I have all the troubles you mentioned. I saw your website, you're revolutionizing WAN. What does that mean? I mean, software-defined WAN, obviously software-based, I get that, at least I know SDN, all my guys. What does that mean? Give me the bottom line. So the bottom line is WAN is 10% to 12% of IT today, and we can actually bring that down 40% to 60%. Talk about the spend. Yeah, the spend, right? Now, if you... And performance maintains... And performance is maintained, you get a 10x improvement in bandwidth, you get a lot better user experience for your cloud applications, and you get a lot better security stance as well, right? So if I boil this down to numbers, it's 10% to 12% down to 4% of IT for your wide area, and then the rest of it is around the security and the application performance. Yeah, absolutely. So that's why... You guys have good success then on sales conversions? Yeah, absolutely. So actually we have a lot of Fortune 100, Fortune 500 production deployments right now. In fact, one of our largest customers actually rolling out a network that's about 1,000 plus sites, and this is something that they've actually entirely pledged over to the WebTeller technology because they saw the value that we bring to the table all the way from bringing up a site to implementing policies to reducing the cost, right? And we're able to deliver on the promise that I just spoke about to that customer. This is just a big example and take me through what does it take? I'm a 1,000 sites, I got a win, I got the cost, my bandwidth's going up, people are accessing apps, everything's going on, it's normal stuff. Absolutely. How fast am I up and running? Week, month, day, take me through the life cycle. Yeah, so what's the trigger point, right? The trigger point is I hit a pain with respect to bandwidth growth or my site growth and I'm not able to expand as quickly, right? So when you hear that type of a problem, you're usually willing to look at a new technology, spend some money in it as well, right? And so when we go in and we talk about the value, we can actually deliver the value that we're talking about instantaneously to two sites, right? And maybe you have 1,000 sites, maybe you want to trial the technology across just a pair of sites, right? That's exactly what we have done with some of the large enterprises. We said, we believe so much that this technology will work, that you can actually trial this across maybe two, five sites, whatever it is. Is it a box or is it software? So it's actually both. So the solution components is there is a box sitting at the location, it could be a branch data center ahead and whatnot. And there's also software components that sit in the cloud. Interestingly, our go-to-market has been either we can provide that as a hosted service for our customers and the customer is responsible for managing that infrastructure or through our carrier partners, we can actually offer that as a managed service as well. Interestingly, two of the large tier one carriers have actually taken our technology and have started to provide a managed service out of it in a matter of six months. And that's really a good place. So would they point their traffic in the managed service and then goes through their boxes? Yeah, so the carrier in that case would go to the customer and say, okay, I can give you MPLS and broadband and 4G and all of the diversity that you're looking for. I can also manage that infrastructure for you. And for you, it looks like what it was before. I have a circuit going in and I don't need to worry about anything else. So is it the problem I've seen? I mean, I've seen it before. The diversity issue, the cost that built silos and then okay, to bolt on another. Exactly. Silo cost more money. So it's kind of like a sprawl. Exactly, exactly. And especially it gets all the more tricky when you're talking about things like mergers and acquisitions. But one company buys another company. So I have my own network. I assume something else. And the larger the enterprise. And the people call the calling to their network. Exactly. Because they don't want to get fired. And we've seen some really, really, really broken networks out there. Can you talk about your product portfolio? You got an SDN controller? You got software? I mean, just lay it out for us. Absolutely. So there are two pieces to the overall solution. One is the device that would sit at the location of the customer. Think of it as a physical device that can go from 10 gigs to 1 gig to 100 meg of encrypted capacity. And there, really, we're talking about innovation on top of software. So hardware is hardware, but real innovation is on software. And then all of the intelligence when it comes to network-wide policies, network-wide information exchange, and whatnot, is actually implemented in a combination of the controller and also the management platform. So we give you also a single pane of glass that you can use to operationalize this whole network as well. So that point of control is the appliance, or it's actually the platform? It's a software. It's a software. And again, our go-to-market can be either we host that control cloud component for you, or if you're a managed service partner, you can actually host this for your customer as well. And how about the company? Give us where are you at with funding, headcount, growth?  I'm sure many of you have heard of it. Which partner is on the board? So Mike Gogan is the partner on the board and is available on the website as well for anyone to see. And ever since we have actually delivered our solution, we have also been able to deploy this across multiple customers. So we actually have production deployments, which means paying customers, which certainly helps a startup, as you can imagine. And so we are organically growing based on the footprint there. Overall, we're, I would say, approximately about 80 people right now as a company. And so a good mix of engineering and go-to-market. How about international offices, other areas? Yeah, so we do have two other international locations, one in Asia and also one in the Middle East, and mainly for support and sales as we start to expand into those markets as well. We do have customers outside the US. We have a few customers in Asia, some in Europe as well that we have deployed. Can you mention some of the use cases of where you guys are re-initiating? And M&A mergers and acquisitions seems to be a good one. What other areas of people who are watching out there, out there right now, saying, I have that problem. What are those things? What were the things that would tell the customer, potential customers, that they should be calling you guys up immediately? Sure, the trigger point is usually around some kind of a video application I need to roll to a remote site. Because at that time is when my two mixed skinny pipes really, really start to hurt. And another trigger point is really how do I onboard cloud-based applications? So we've had a disproportionate number of conversations in the recent past around onboarding things like Office 365 and Azure as well. As I start to subscribe to these IAS platforms and SaaS platforms, I need to architect my wide area for those. So really the trigger points around capacity, around cloud experience. What's the alternative to that? Just public internet, ACPAL? Yeah, you can subscribe to a public internet backbone but then there's no SLA, right? I mean, I don't get the user experience, I get the spinning wheel and nobody's happy. Yeah, it's spotty, it's great at one point and it's kind of like our office with Comcast. Exactly. For the small companies. That's right. So what size profile customers, small medium sized business, or is it large enterprises right now? So interestingly the solution that we have built actually scales to a really large number and this is multiple thousands, if not tens of thousands of locations. And as a result, where we have seen our initial penetration is in the really, really uber-large enterprise. And we have also seen- That's where the cost numbers are. And that's exactly. Right, and if you talk to somebody that has like a hundred million van budget and I say I can slash that down by 50, it starts to make absolute sense. You got my attention. You're on a plane. Exactly, so you do that as well.  Yeah, see you tomorrow. Come on, I have an opening, ironically. Yeah, first thing in the morning. And so that's where the problem is very acute and so we are actually seeing customers move very, very quickly as well. And being an early young company, that's your low hanging fruit. Exactly. But your managed service could be good for the SMB for the end of the carrier. Exactly. And that's where we really, there's a class of customers where we want to go and have those discussions because they have problems that are really, really complex and you need to be able to have a conversation with them to solve that problem. There are also a class of customers that can actually just benefit from this technology and roll that across 100 sites, 200 sites, 500 sites, whatever it is. So we have built our technology so that it can scale from the really small to the really large. And so we are using our partners to establish that right now. I just want to ask you, so this is our sixth year doing VMworld. So we've seen a total transformation. What do you make of VMwares moves into networking? Obviously the NYSERA acquisition, catalyzed all that. As a networking expert professional, what do you make of those moves? Absolutely. So I think even if you talk inside the data center, there's a large network component. And so it doesn't make sense to just do server virtualization or storage virtualization and call it done. You need to provide all of the agility with respect to network virtualization. Now the boundary for that is inside the data center. You need to be able to extend those concepts into the wide area. And you need to extend that as well into your whole NFV type L4 through L7 service virtualization as well. And so I'm interestingly seeing that the data center guys are really ahead in providing a solution that's virtualized for the data center. The wide area set of vendors, as included, are actually pushing our solution for the wide area. And the third piece that completes the puzzle in my opinion is really the service NFV type virtualization as well. Well, you have a great business model. Certainly when you lead in, I'm going to reduce your cost by 60%. That's a big deal. I got to ask you an industry-wide question that you're here. Cisco, Juniper, these guys have had huge market shares. We've seen the early days of routing, obviously, the Bay well fleet, the Bay and those mergers. It's hard to unseat an incumbent like a Cisco. They're so nested in there, Juniper as well, but they've had a little bit of their trials and tribulations lately. What though these guys struggling with right now? And why are you disrupting them? And what do you have as an edge over them? And are you afraid of those guys? Yeah, so let me take that in the same sequence. So first, what we have built is not a router. If I know and position my router versus another router, I'm just comparing capabilities, I'm not changing the conversation at all. So that's why we fundamentally changed the conversation by saying, okay, here's a solution, and here are all the values that you will get out of the solution. And a router happens to be a component in that, but that's not the near all end all type solution where I'm going and just comparing apples to apples. And so when you change the conversation of that type, you're not playing by the rules that have already been set aside. You're playing by the rules of something that's brand new, right? And so that's where we are seeing the most success. And there is a certain way to approach this market and we have done this in our previous lives at Juniper and all the other places where we've been able to go and displace the pretty large vendors as well. Ultimately, at the end of the day, if you provide enough value back to the customer, then technology is all on that. It's a focus issue, right? I mean, you've got Sequoia on the board. Those guys focus. But they also invested in a very successful called NetScreen. NetScreen ticked a space that was disruptible. Firewall. A hard place to compete, checkpoint, those guys. But they did it really, really well. Is that something that you guys see as similar strategy, not firewalls, but like picking a specific spot and nailing that? Absolutely. So the technology that we have built actually has lots of applicability. We have chosen the wide area as the place to go and have a foray because that's the place where you see the value show up the fastest, right? And we're talking about showing savings within the calendar year of deployment, right? And so that, to anybody's, it's a no-brainer, right? And so, absolutely. And as a start-up, we have to be focused. And so we have picked the wide area as the first point to start to disrupt. And then interestingly, our customers have pulled it into many use cases. And going back to your question, John, on what are the use cases, we started off actually a first series A, series B, deck if you look at it as like six use cases. Now we have over a dozen use cases because customers have said, hey, can I use it here? Can I use it here? And we start to expand on those conversations. So versatility in product. Exactly, right? So it's not a single product for a single point solution. It actually has a lot more applicability as well. All right, so you're the product guy. What's next on the product roadmap? So what's the next territory after WAN, revolutionizing the WAN and stuff we define? Yeah, so I mean, so cloud is another big area, right? And so we are looking at how you can start to expand your services into the cloud and that's an actual extension of what we do. There are a few other areas that our customers have provided input into as well. As with all things, one thing I've learned in a startup is focus and make sure that the customer on the other end, even before I ask our engineers to write a single line of code, right? And so we are doing that due diligence to make sure that, yes, we have identified three different areas, but I want to make sure I invest where I can immediately get returns as well. So we're going through that process as well. All right, well, quick question for you and enjoying the show here. Absolutely, I've been a big fan of this show and a technical marketing person, David mentioned that you guys are going to be here at VMware and I said, I absolutely want to come and talk. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and sharing the insight and good luck with your venture. No brainer knocking down costs. That's a great way to enter the market with instant value. We'll be back more with more value here on theCUBE, more insights, sharing the data with you. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. We'll be right back at the SurePay. You're watching theCUBE live in San Francisco. We'll be right back.