On today’s podcast, Max Clark talks with Aryaka’s CTO and Co-founder, Ashwath Nagaraj, about the actual impact of SD enterprises and how their product has evolved to support their customers' needs.
Max:00:03
Welcome to the Tech Deep Dive podcast where we let our inner nerd come out and have fun getting into the weeds on all things tech. At Clarksys, we believe tech should make your life better, searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven't heard of before. Welcome to the Clarkesys Tech Deep Dive podcast. I'm Max Clark. And today, I'm with Ashwat Nagaraj and Syed Ghair.Max:00:24
So Ashwat is the cofounder and CTO of Aryaka Networks, and Syed is the VP of Global Engineering for Aryaka Networks. Guys, thank you very much for joining.
Ashwath:00:34
Thanks for having us.
Syed:00:35
Thanks for having us.
Max:00:37
So Aryaka Networks is a SD WAN vendor. You're you fit in the SD WAN space, I mean, as it's now called in the marketing terminology. But give me a little more detail about that. How do you actually fit? What is the problem that you're approaching, and what was the inception idea for Aryaka?
Syed:00:54
So let me take that. Let me go back to 2009 when we started the company. It was probably easier to play it out from the beginning rather than see exactly where we fit here. You can see how we evolved into it. When we looked at the market in 2009, we looked at good, high quality WAN as deployed by, you know, enterprises that had global manufacturing and so on and so forth.
Syed:01:20
They were using MPLS, which is best of breed network. They typically had a riverbed or a Silver Peak box, you know, set of boxes to make that experience of using the global network better. But they were just about in that transition where they looked at it and said, we're now starting to move some applications to the cloud. We're trying to move some compute to the cloud. How does this fit?
Syed:01:42
And that's was really where Aryaka was born. We looked at that transition. We said, someday, there's gonna be a new network, and that network's gonna have everybody connecting to everything seamlessly. But the difference being, there's gonna be 2 parts. 1 is the cost sensitive people who are going to not worry too much about productivity, and that's going to be a really low cost network.
Syed:02:09
And the other extreme or the other set of customers, the enterprise customers are going to want same application usage experience around the globe as they have today, and we need to provide the same thing. So that's so that's how we we came up with this concept of building a core network, which was a high quality layer 2 based point to point links and so on between points of presence and have basically WAN optimization embedded into that riverbed again, so coming from riverbed, and then allow people to access this network through the last mile. And and we started seeing that the last mile was getting very fast and very high quality very quickly, but global links were not. So, essentially, we we split the problem up into 2 parts. We said we'll build a great global core, deploy all our services in these points of presence or service nodes, and allow people to access it over a short last mile.
Syed:03:04
But that last mile can be Internet. It can be layered too, so it makes it flexible. And then move that sort of junction for application control and management and all that into the parts. Now how did that evolve? So that that sort of fit pretty well, but remember, at the time, it was a there was no concept of SD WAN, and the move towards a software defined WAN hadn't yet started.
Syed:03:28
So it was a little early, but about 4 years later, people started coining the term, and so we also got along the same let's say, we we dragged into the same river.
Max:03:39
Mhmm. What makes Aryake unique? Let's talk about this. It it is so much about your your global network and your pops and the access to it. So there's not outside of a global carrier with MPLS, it's transitioning from MPLS now to an SD WAN play, there isn't anything else like this in the market still to this day.
Max:03:57
And it's more than just your PoP architecture. You're doing a lot of things inside of your PoP and on your backbone to do network acceleration and optimization for people as well. Can you dig into that a little bit?
Syed:04:09
Yeah. Absolutely. I think so when you look at the SD WAN evolving with MPLS, it's actually quite a different architecture, if you will. Right? What they'll look at is is they'll they'll build 2 parallel networks.
Syed:04:20
1 is over the Internet, and 1 is over the MPLS network from the edge. We sort of took that to a little a different, model where we make that junction box sit in our palm, and the kind of optimization you can actually achieve when you control both the endpoints of a link is phenomenal. Right? We can for example, we do TCP optimization between our points of presence, and a very simple look ahead into that, you know, why does our optimization work really well between the parts? Because we know the available bandwidth, and that's actually the actual bandwidth the customer subscribed for.
Syed:04:59
So TCP says, hey. You know, I'm gonna send you a couple of packets. You give me an act. I'll give you 4 packets, and, you know, we'll we'll figure out where we get to when we see loss. We don't have that.
Syed:05:10
We go straight to you subscribe for 20 megabits per second or 200. Every packet of yours, you know, the interpacket gaps and so on and so forth, look at, the data rate is always 200 megabits per second. So even if I have a 10 kilobyte transfer of a short file, it goes at 200 kilobytes per second or 200 megabits per second, whatever your subscription is, right? And so we modify the TCP stacks, and the stacks are modified so that it stays reliable. It's still a TCP stack, but the windowing is not about, you know, how much space do you have right now and so on.
Syed:05:47
The other side always has buffering, and we always make it such that it's a rate management stack. The receiver signals what's the available bit rate to this sending site. And so that allows us to make a very, very smooth, high performance experience for the end user because the WAN optimization proxy in the POP basically decouples the last mile. So think about it like this. It's like you get on an on ramp onto the freeway, and then the freeway, you just get slingshotted across to the other end, and then you come off and off ramp.
Syed:06:17
Right? And so that on ramp and off ramp being either the Internet or layer 2, typically, is Internet. And you'll be surprised that out of 10, 15, 25 millisecond latency, you can do a lot of cool things even with pretty heavy loss because the recovery is within 10 milliseconds. Do you you don't get the app? Okay.
Syed:06:37
And we can do a lot of other things like, you know, you you have 2 ISPs, 4 ISPs, whatever. Right? You take your ISPs. We can do load balancing across them. You can do error correction across them and so on.
Syed:06:47
And so you clean up that last mile, and then you're now sort of in hyperspace when you get in between the points of presence. Right? And then you really get basically slingshot across. That's one part. And, of course, data deduplication, which we can talk about a little bit later.
Syed:07:02
But all of that technology, you can't put it on a little box at the end because you need big, you know, heavy metal for a lot of this, especially the data duplication deduplication technology. So what you do is you split the problem up. And you say, I'll I'll take care of the small part, that's the last mile from my box at the edge to the pop, and I'll take care of the big part on much larger servers and so on and so forth.
Max:07:27
So, I mean, really, what you're talking about in part is, you know, automatically calculating a bandwidth delay product. So your PoPs optimizing that transmission from PoP to PoP along your backbone. So Africa to North America, China to Europe, whatever that entry and exit point is. And if anybody's gone through and had to manually calculate what a you know, bDPU is and how do you set your window sizing and, oh, I've got this 10 gig link from LA to New York. Why is it slow?
Max:07:53
You know, that's there's a lot of value in that. I mean, that that definitely makes life a lot easier, you know, for the end user experience as well as the network engineers that are that are responsible for maintaining this. And that's something, by the way, that MPLS lacks. I mean, you're now you're talking about an MPLS replacement product, but MPLS doesn't offer you that. That's something you have to do by hand.
Syed:08:13
Exactly. And, the other part with the PLS is, it is a congested network. I mean, in a sense that let's take a data center at one end talking back to a small site at the other end. Right? The data center has a gig pipe.
Syed:08:27
The branch has a 2. We are able to make sure that the, that in the middle mile first of all, it's zero loss. Right? If there's any if the 2 megabit site is actually signaling back through our stack saying, hey. I have 2 megabits of available bandwidth for you, mister data center.
Syed:08:45
And that's getting propagated through our stacks. So the proxy the pop at the, the pop at the data center is actually accepting only 2 megabits for this particular site while it's accepting much higher data rates for others. So that's the kind of thing that MPLS can never do. There it is. The endpoints send at the rate they can.
Syed:09:03
They figure out by loss how much they can actually send. Right? Here, we know exactly how much you can send.
Max:09:11
So that's the first part of it. The second part of it is deduplication. And I think the combination of the WAN optimization and the deduplication, I mean, I don't know of another product that's doing both or another service that's doing both of these in in one platform. And there's also I think this causes some confusion because when we look at sizing, you know, how Aryaka actually sizes its network and and what you do from a subscription, it's sized based on how much bandwidth is is going through your pop. But if you're talking about an application traffic going to a CRM instance or an ERP or, you know, a centralized application, there is a lot of data that doesn't have to be trans transmitted every single time.
Max:09:50
And so it's not a one for one. You know? It's not, hey. Look. You know?
Max:09:54
You need 10 meg or 20 meg or a 100 meg. I mean, it's much smaller than that. So what what is that experience like with your customers, and can you quantify a little bit of that?
Syed:10:02
Yeah. I'd say it's, it's probably the single biggest selling factor in a in a product. It, you know, it changes the user experience. And and I'll go back a little bit. So compression has several buckets, and let's go to gzip as a compression tool.
Syed:10:18
Right? It's pretty good, but it's pretty good on certain types of data. Data deduplication is actually pretty good on a lot broader spectrum of data, including encrypted files and so on. Right? And, what data deduplication does is essentially find strings that have already been sent before or sent in a very similar format so that they can be expressed as a small change and tells the other end, hey.
Syed:10:43
I already sent the string to you, and it's like a recorder at both ends, and the recorder is just replaying at the other end. Right? So a lot of data doesn't have to be traversing the network, as you said. Let's take an example. And by the way, just rough numbers, we get about 2 and a half x average compression.
Syed:10:58
That means that your multi if you bought a 10 megabit link, you're probably getting a 25 megabit average performance. Let's say 20 for now, 52 x. Right? But, actually, what's happening is that 20 megabit is coming from some of the applications actually getting a 10 x increase. So let's say I'm reading a file, let's say, from a a a cloud node or or a SaaS node.
Syed:11:23
That file is coming through with a compression ratio of 80% or 90%. And when that happens, the person's actually getting that data rate of 50 or a 100 megabits per second for that file. So the user experience is far above the average compression. It's actually it's made up of several spots of very high compression, which is really, something that a person clicking a file, once you get on with it, if it happens fast, that's the that's the value. Right?
Syed:11:57
I mean, it's not so much, oh, I saved so much bandwidth. It's really how much time did I save because the transfer happened more quickly. Right?
Max:12:05
So that's a really interesting point because when you when you think about it, right, there's you talk about global capacity and global networks. How long you know, how big is the pipe into South Africa? Do you have a contention, you know, into South Africa or into to Latin America, whatever the endpoint is? Right? So how long does that transfer and do you actually have the capacity?
Max:12:24
When you look at you know, North America or Europe or even parts of Asia, you have relatively high bandwidth access for the end user. So the end user or the branch, we have the luxury of of relatively inexpensive bandwidth at most locations now, you know, in the United States. But there is a big difference though in terms of instantaneous file access. If you're clicking through a CRM, doing order entry, doing ERP, how long does it take to transmit? I mean, if you've got 200 milliseconds, you're saying you're gonna save, you know, 10 x compression, you don't have to round trip that entire thing.
Max:12:52
I mean, that is a big change for the end user, what they're experiencing. I mean, it's it must feel like almost like it's on their local node at that point, that they are actually in the branch interacting with the application.
Syed:13:03
That's and that's exactly the experience. That's the Nirvana or the El Dorado of WAN optimization, right? I mean, you get as close to it as you can.
Max:13:11
A lot of SD WAN is positioned as MPLS is expensive and you should come to SD WAN because it's cheaper. I look at SD WAN for a lot of places as SD WAN is more about control. Maybe you didn't want to have an entire global network under one logo and and not be able to go out and achieve or or bid and gain access to different local loops. We see a lot of places now where local loops from an on net provider in a building are very inexpensive. Almost you know, I mean, it's it's getting into it's getting silly in in how it you know, how cheap these local loops could be.
Max:13:42
But if you're on an MPLS vendor with a global network, you don't have the option to say, okay, instead of paying x $1,000 for this node, we're only gonna pay a couple $100. So I I think SD WAN's value proposition is shifting for some people, but then you start talking about these other issues of how do you optimize it, how do you secure it, how do you bring it across globally, and and what's your security profile look like? And how do enterprises deal with that? And how do you help people accomplish that shift from we we know we have a private network because it's MPLS, and now it's something a little different. What does that mean for us in a security posture?
Syed:14:17
You know, I think you sort of hit on the, some of the Achilles heel of SD LAN, if you will. Right? I mean, almost every customer who's come off MPLS has had a pretty good stable network, stability, stability, stability. That's it. Right?
Syed:14:31
And suddenly they're exposed to the internet. You go to every branch, you put a little firewall, bad things start to happen. Bad things in the sense, things you never thought of, like, oh, somebody's oversubscribed the link, and the internet starts choking, and your active your performance drops, right? So you gotta take care of a lot of those things. Then the security, as you said, right?
Syed:14:52
Every place is now a honeypot. There's no I mean, there's no honeypot in the data center. There's no honeypot in the cloud. It's everybody's a honeypot, right? So that's 2.
Syed:15:01
And number 3 is it's not that easy to actually convert from MPLS to Internet because if you have 500 sites around the globe, you probably have 500 ISPs, maybe 400 ISPs. Right? And you want a redundant connection at every site. That's 800 ISP. Okay.
Syed:15:17
So that's a lot of ISPs. Right? How do you get there? It's almost a nightmare unless the person you're working with understands that transformation. It's literally a transformation.
Syed:15:28
Right? So you get plenty of bandwidth cheap, but you gotta take care of so much of other stuff. It's a planning, logistics, security, and and, Ariaka, we've we've taken a a different path from a lot of people. I mean, I think there's there's multiple ways of skinning this gap, right? One is you're cost sensitive.
Syed:15:48
2nd one is you're security sensitive and performance sensitive. So all of these, a a large enterprise cannot afford to say, look, I'm just gonna use whatever security is available at the branch and split my edge and allow anything and everything to get in. So they're really going to be more a best of breed security perimeter, right? They're gonna say my perimeter is going to be Palo Alto, it's gonna be a Cisco, it's gonna be a brand name of some kind, Zscaler, right? And then there's those who's gonna say, look, I'll just take integrated security.
Syed:16:15
It's a checkbox item for me. I'm, you know, I'm probably busted anyway, so I'm not gonna worry too much about it. Right? So we cater generally to the former. And in that situation, it's a it's a little bit more of a a major transition and, you know, things like you have to accomplish this transition from MPLS.
Syed:16:32
The MPLS networks are they've evolved over time. If you go and look at the configurations in the BGP, your rules that have been put up and so on and so forth, you've got to understand it. Right? It's not as simple as, hey. I'm gonna just plunk this box in here, throw that box out, and we're done.
Syed:16:47
It never happens that way. Right? So, strangely enough, we focus a lot in making a BGP very strong. So we have the ability for us to say, I can put 50,000 routes on a little box. That's what we strive for.
Syed:17:00
How do we do it? Of course. We don't have to do it the way everybody else does. We can do it all in the pop. Right?
Syed:17:05
And we only have to leak the routes that are required at the site. You see, when you're doing a transition, it's really hard to sit and resummarize all the subnet. Right? I mean, this is well before you come back and say, oh, I gotta get my applications to be split across this. Right?
Syed:17:19
First, you gotta transition the network, then you split the application. Right? That's that that sequence is something people don't let themselves, and shouldn't let themselves think into thinking, hey. It's gonna be easy.
Max:17:30
Well, I mean, so let's talk about this for a little bit. What what does a transition from MPLS into Aryaka look like? I mean, from from a planning and a deployment standpoint or from a a cohabitation, you know, if we're gonna keep, you know, MPLS needs to stay for however much time either because it's contracts or you wanna overlay or it's just you've got hundreds of nodes you have to put in place and bring across. You know, enterprises, how do they approach this?
Syed:17:54
We look at, I'd say, 2 different kinds of customers. Customers are solving a single pain point. You know, I've got a problem in China. I've got a problem in Santiago. I've got a problem in Brazil.
Syed:18:03
Can you connect them into my network? Great. In that situation, MPLS stays exactly as it is for the rest of the places, right? Or they use Internet in the US. Now the broader customer we're talking about, the the people who are really doing a WAN transformation, they typically see for a 500 site network let me just take a rough number, 500 site.
Syed:18:23
And and keep in mind, the MPLS guys, they started off with always for mesh. They put constraints on you. So you have to scale to 500, sites before you can start your first site. Otherwise, it's a nightmare, you know, trying to just do the routing over and over. So we just allow it to go straight to 500 sites from each site.
Syed:18:41
Right? Now the first thing that a person thinks of is what's my security posture? Alright. Oh, am I gonna have split tunneling at all the sites? Split edge.
Syed:18:51
Right? If I do, okay, what's my firewall policy gonna look like? Then what are my MPLS contracts? Alright. My MPLS contracts expire.
Syed:18:59
You know, as with anything else, they've got renewed. They've got MACD changed and so on and so forth. So the endpoints don't actually coincide at all. Right? So usually, you start off with maybe a 30, 40 site.
Syed:19:10
And then once you procure the Internet, you make a plan that says, you know, over the next, say, 18 months for a 500 site network is a reasonable amount. I mean, if you've done it in 3 months because a person had a completely coincident, MPLS contract removal as well as they already had Internet, those are the 2 things that are right. The the long pole is typically internet availability, the logistics of getting it set up. Now, and typically what you do is you say, okay, I've got these 2 networks. 1 is an Aryaka network, 1 is an MPLS network.
Syed:19:39
And there are many ways of doing this for us, right? And then you start migrating sites from the ARIA from the MPLS network into the Aryaka network as and when a contract expires, and these two networks peer at, like, you know, maybe a half a dozen big data centers. And MPLS remains on the other side until all of the sites are migrated across. And, you know, sometimes what happens is there are gonna be some data centers that they they retain their MPLS on forever. I mean, there's there's no need to change something when you have 8 data centers, you know, in the space of 400 miles.
Syed:20:10
Why do you wanna go around ripping that up and putting Internet in between there? It doesn't make sense.
Ashwath:20:15
Right? Yeah. Just to add, the way the migration happens is we identify locations, the hub locations, where both Arriaga network and MPLS network coexist. And then you start migrating the sites from totally from MPLS to Arriaga. And then the connectivity which they have to the other MPLS sites are through those hub sites until the full migration is happened.
Ashwath:20:38
And some sometimes there are locations which are which should be there at MPLS, and won't be migrated as well.
Max:20:45
Let me talk you through a couple different architectures just so I can understand this better in my my own mind. When you think about an MPLS network with Internet at the edge and sort of branch, right, there's usually a 1 or multiple Internet providers coming into usually a firewall device, which is then coming you know, connecting into some sort of internal network equipment, so some kind of switch infrastructure or whatever. And then attached to that is whatever the WAN router is for the MPLS circuit. Right? And then it's it comes into IP address propagation.
Max:21:15
So what's actually routing? What's the routing protocol? How do you actually advertise IPs across across this network? But, ultimately, something knows that if I'm inside the firewall at this branch and I wanna talk to this corporate resource, here's how I traverse the MPLS network. When we look at SD WAN from an Internet optimization standpoint, the SD WAN is installing outside of the firewall.
Max:21:35
So that way, the Internet circuits can plug into it, and it can do path selection, take path a, take path b, you know, Apple you know, whatever whatever those decision points are for that SD WAN, but it sits outside of the firewall. With Aryaka being an MPLS augmentation, alternative, you know, replacement, you know, what I mean, that that terminology kinda gets a little fuzzy quickly. How do you do both Internet optimization and selection across Internet circuits, but as well sit behind the firewall and let corporate traffic traverse where it needs to traverse and not egress across the firewall.
Syed:22:07
So in a typical network, you're gonna see the audio app appliance, the ANAP as we call it, having one leg towards MPLS, one leg towards the firewall. 1, I wouldn't say, one arm because and at the back end, it's talking to the large L3 switch or the, let's say, a transit router of some kind. Right? And we're doing BGP towards the router, and we're doing BGP towards MPLS. And we are doing application based selection between the MPLS and the Internet parts.
Syed:22:41
Right? That junction box will be you could configure policy in it to say let these applications take the following. That's one form of integration. Another is to just say we'll at least until a point in time where MPLS itself is I mean, if it's a transition or if it's coexistence, what I said works. But if it's something where you're going to transition completely out of MPLS, then the fastest way to do it is that the ANAP actually does BGP onto one network and our own routing towards the Internet and our PoP network.
Syed:23:12
And so you you like what we said earlier, you could be doing it slightly differently where the LAN traffic is is going to different sites based on routing itself, not so much of an application policy. That's the fastest way to integrate. Right? Later, you add the application policy and say what part do I select which is better for this application. But you don't want to put you know, have 2 moving parts at the same time because all the other sites of MPLS, which are still MPLS only, don't understand application.
Syed:23:40
Right? So you could do it both ways, but I'd say the simplest way is you use routing till the point in time where you have enough sites which are actually connected together by both parts. And then you use application with on those parts and routing elsewhere.
Max:23:54
So a lot of the analysts are predicting massive reductions in revenue globally on MPLS backbones. So the carriers have been pushing into their own flavor of SD WAN pretty aggressively for a while to maintain, I would say, stickiness with the customer as well as not cannibalize their own revenue too much with other providers. As this space has gotten more crowded, how have you dealt with that? I mean, what's what's been the response from Aryaka? There's, you know, lots of other now just box vendors with some sort of orchestration coming off of, you know, a web page.
Max:24:27
Right? So there are cloud SD WAN appliances pushing into market that really don't have a lot of I mean, actually, they don't have a lot of don't have basically any of the Aryaka, you know, flavor and sophistication to it. So what's that cycle like when you're talking to customers and people are actually getting a little bit deeper into this?
Syed:24:44
That's a very good point. I think it it is one of the most confusing aspects because SD WAN has become anything and everything to everybody. Right? You know, we we have to focus on a couple of things. One is we are a managed service.
Syed:24:58
We wrap that end to end service as a managed service. Right? You can take a lot of good examples, customers who are happy. You're gonna find that it's about reduction of complexity and having I mean, I think SD WAN in a lot of ways makes things much more complicated at the edge. Right?
Syed:25:12
Because now you've got a the IT person has to understand applications. Hey. Which application is important? I don't know. Every application is important to some extent.
Syed:25:20
Right? You can't say it's off. Right? So we try to put a wrapper around that whole complexity portion and say, look. Your cost I mean, at the end, why do you have multiple networks?
Syed:25:30
You have redundancy of other flexibility to cloud, all of that stuff. You get all of that. Cost is an important aspect. The balance between high quality and low cost. Right?
Syed:25:40
It's something your application mix is indeterminate. I think you asked a question about how much bandwidth do you need. I don't know. World is changing. Right?
Syed:25:48
So a lot of that is really has to be it's easy to get there. You have some good tools to make some estimate, but we have to be flexible. I think that's that's our story. Right? And the other thing is for us, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for the customer to learn a lot of new technology to adopt it.
Ashwath:26:10
The other piece to it, like, how we have evolved and how we have started offering Internet only path as the option for some some customers who were able to just, consume it and doesn't really necessarily have long distances and going across the globe. So, essentially, don't need the port itself to connect to and then have that level of optimization. But that goes back to the value of the managed service that they can consume that service right away. And whether they are, presence globally or they are essentially in a region place, so we can we can have both the flavors available to them.
Max:26:51
So so let's actually, let's dig into the Internet only because this is a relatively recent announcement from Aryaka. So core service connection from the ANAP, the appliance on the edge and the branch to a local pop accelerated across the backbone wherever the egress point is to application. Right? So if that egress point is to another branch location or data center that that the enterprise controls or if it's to a cloud provider, you know, the point everything in between a and z is is your network. So as an Internet only path, you're removing the PoP from that selection.
Max:27:23
You're just talking about Internet optimization only. Is that is that correct?
Syed:27:27
So sorry. I don't have to take one thing there. I mean, I think let's go back a little bit. Right? The PoPs remain in the network.
Syed:27:33
Right? PoPs are still a controller, and we really don't have an internet only option as in manage and configure the ANAPs. It's still configured centrally. It's still managed by us, right? The internet is a path, and it's a question of are you putting 100% of your traffic on an internet path between the ANAPs or you're putting 10% or you're putting 0%.
Syed:27:52
Right? That control is what our, controller and and policy management takes care of. Sai, do you wanna
Ashwath:28:00
And and the value like, if you want to differentiate us against anybody else providing the similar solution, the value is that we have the pop architecture available to us. Right? Okay. When do you want to have some of the applications if need to be can go over the accelerated path, which is our own area code path. And at the same time, there could be some applications, data replication or something like that, which which essentially do not may not require the accelerated path.
Ashwath:28:31
So that's how we would be when we really have to differentiate on top of being a managed service offering and and a consumption model, you you still have your strength as your, the core architecture, which you can offer to the customer versus any other box vendor which will just purely rely on, Internet.
Max:28:56
Hi. I'm Max Clark, and you're listening to the Tech Deep Dive podcast. At Clark Sys, we believe tech should make your life better, searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven't heard of before. With thousands of negotiated contracts, ClarkSays has helped hundreds of businesses source and implement the right tech at the right price. You're looking for a new vendor and wanna have peace of mind knowing you've made the right decision?
Max:29:15
Visit us at clarksys.com to schedule an intro call. So long term impact of to businesses from COVID is still I mean, we're we're still in the guessing phase. It's gonna be a little while before we really know. But what we see right now is this rapid acceleration of digital transformation and digital workflows. You know, where do the applications sit if they're still sitting in a branch?
Max:29:37
Are they sitting in a data center? Are they being moved into a cloud platform? How quickly is that being done? Then we get into this idea behind, you know, is it a distributed or work from home workforce? Are they going back into branches?
Max:29:47
What I mean, so that there's a big there's a big question mark of what that actually means and a lot of people making predictions. I won't make any. But as you look at this transition from an on premise application to a cloud hosted application, I mean, that's everything. I mean, the entire world is going that direction. It's just how quickly do people get there.
Max:30:06
And that changes some of the equation we talk about MPLS and how I would imagine Arioch is looking at the future for supporting application, application performance for end users. I mean, what's what's your sense around this? What are you guys expecting, and and and where are you headed in this in this, you know, area?
Syed:30:25
So very interesting. I think that sort of goes right back to our roots, if you will. Right? The idea was to allow a customer to add a, let's say, an AWS node through a Direct Connect into their own network And, in fact, experiment on what compute actually what which of their applications move out there. It's not that easy for a person to say, hey.
Syed:30:46
I'm gonna take this application and run it on AWS and make a prediction as to how much it's actually gonna cost them or how much money it's gonna save them. It's actually, and I'll tell you that we've had customers who, tried both Azure and AWS because we're a multi cloud. We have connections into both. They bring up both. They say, hey.
Syed:31:01
We're gonna run a 6 month trial where we migrate these applications to both of them concurrently and try them out in both places. And actually, one customer said, hey. You know? At my scale, I find that my data center is actually cheaper, so I moved it all right back. So I think it's not about just moving it.
Syed:31:17
It's all it's about the ability to be able to move it to one node, to a different node, or back. And I think that, if you will, is our strength. Right? And it all relies on the fact that it takes you about 24 hours. You give us your subscription ID on, on Azure.
Syed:31:32
In 24 hours, that subscription, that node, that that VNET is is in your network and accessible. Right? That makes it pretty you know, within 24 hours, you're up there, and then, you know, you can start migrating your application and see how it behaves. So you start migrating a few users usually. Right?
Syed:31:50
So, of course, on the SaaS side, it's a little different. That is a little bit more, it's happening all the time and the movement is, it's because you don't wanna manage the application. I mean, you're gonna move to Concur. You're gonna move to Salesforce. You're gonna move that's a given.
Syed:32:03
And it's happening. It's happening faster. You're gonna move to Zoom. You're gonna move to, the application you're using, which is absolutely fabulous. But
Ashwath:32:11
SquadCast.
Max:32:12
They are.
Ashwath:32:13
So at the end of the day, I'll just add the the flexibility which is available in our architecture where we already have Direct Connect to AWS, ExpressRoute to Azure, Fast Connect to Oracle. So the connectivity was always there, and then that flexibility which customer sees, and they can go ahead and give it a pilot. Like, okay. They're gonna start with a pilot. They're gonna go ahead and put some application hosted in the cloud, but having a private connectivity to their network via their network.
Ashwath:32:44
So they are not using the Internet to consume that particular application. So that that flexibility is, what people like.
Max:32:53
I I you touched on something, which is this this, there's a misconception, I believe, that the cloud is cheap. And in many cases, cloud is way more expensive than traditional infrastructure. Cloud is flexible. Cloud is global. Cloud is, you know, changes your operational overhead and management points of what you have to actually focus on and what you're touching.
Max:33:12
You know, are you in a hardware refresh cycle? Do you are you managing generators in a data center facility? You know, these sorts of things change. Cycle? Do you are you managing generators in a data center facility?
Max:33:15
You know, these sorts of things change pretty significantly with cloud, and the ability to scale changes significantly with cloud. You know, and and I think that's it's interesting because that is a similar parallel when you talk about MPLS versus not. You know, when you traditional b to b sales is, hey, we have a service. It's it's better than the other thing, but it's also cheaper. You know, that becomes an entry point.
Max:33:36
And but the problem a lot of times when you start looking at it's cheaper, the cheaper is a value proposition. It doesn't mean it's better. It doesn't mean that it's more performance, and it doesn't mean that you're gonna have an issue with productivity. And I've I've seen plenty of environments personally where changes were made because they were, quote, better and cheaper, but productivity suffered. And it was it actually cost the company a significant amount of money.
Max:34:00
And I have never heard a conversation with Aryaka that's been around, we're cheaper than MPLS. It's we're better than MPLS, and you're gonna get a lot of performance benefits out of this. And it's it's I I think it's an excellent excellent positioning for you to be in and to really focus on. It's, it's not a story a lot of people are are talking about.
Syed:34:19
Thanks a lot. Yeah. You know, I I think you put it in a nutshell really well. It's all about the real true cost cost of ownership. TCO is a is an overused term.
Syed:34:28
I shouldn't be using it, but at the end, there's a lot of as you said, the bill may be lower. The number of people running around to make the damn thing work shouldn't be so much that, it's a headache. You know, you have downtime. Yeah. Your windmill went down, but, and we've had customers who actually migrated from, MPLS into a an Internet only based solution and then a public company, well known public company.
Syed:34:53
And they really hit a wall because the productivity went down. They were using, a large company's, multipoint VPN solution. And and then they actually had to abandon that and they were trying to get MPLS back and it it was gonna take them 6 to 12 months to get MPLS back in all the sites. Guess what? They tried us for a few of the critical sites.
Syed:35:12
Now they're a customer in all of their sites and this you know, the the CIO is a person who comes and tells us every time. He said, hey, You really saved my butt because at the end, we were really at a point where, you know, you have to make financial disclosure saying, hey. You know? I'm sorry. I made a mistake.
Syed:35:26
My network being down caused financial impact. Right? At that point, you've got to realize that it's not an experiment. You can't I mean, you know, your cost is is it's easy to say, hey. It's cheaper.
Syed:35:38
But is it really gonna be cheaper to a company, or is it cheaper to the WAN bill? That's alright. Produce your WAN bill. Kill kill the company. That's alright.
Max:35:47
So, I mean, Aryaka pricing component, the biggest piece of this boils down to how much traffic is accelerated across your private network, across your pops. And when you look at that from a conversation, you say, okay. You know, enterprise, you have 500 locations, and these are your applications that you're running, and these are the the the geographic spread that you have on them. But how much bandwidth are you actually using for application a that you care about and application b? How do you help people understand that and then size that and make decisions about, you know, this is what's gonna traverse our network, and this is what's gonna be optimized across our network, and this is what your expected price to use a service would be?
Syed:36:28
So a couple of things. Life's full of surprises. Right? So, yes, we do a fairly good job of analyzing what a site is doing, and there's people who can look at it and come back and say, this is what we recommend for you. Right?
Syed:36:40
But what people have to realize is the reason they're moving out of that MPLS network in the first place is because they were planning some other transition completely. And that transition, for example, was, oh, I'm moving to Office 365. Guess what? Office 365 is no longer going to be on that network. Right?
Syed:36:58
In fact, it's going to go through our network directly to your Office 365 nodes. Right? So I think you can size it well, but it's only a first part. You have to be flexible so that you can change the sizing and say, look. I mean, you're still consuming 50 megabits of the site, but it's no longer going to a data center.
Syed:37:16
It's now going to an Azure node. It's going to your, Office 365 Edge node. Right? So change is the biggest part of SD WAN. MACDs are everything.
Syed:37:27
Right? We convey one thing that, you know, we're working with the customer, and we're not out there to to overcharge them. We're also not there to give you a false estimate to saying, hey. It's gonna be free. Right?
Max:37:38
I mean, it's hard to compare costs, you know, and and make that one to 1. But, you know, from, people don't like uncertainty when they're when they're buying or budgeting. Right? That becomes like this I mean, it's a pretty this big leap of faith. Right?
Max:37:51
The closest parallel I could make to that is somebody looking at 95th percentile billing in a data center for the first time. You know, if you haven't had experience with understanding what 95th percentile actually is and how does it bill and how does it structure and, like, oh, by the way, it actually is probably really good for you. But if if you just look at this saying, I'm gonna have a variable bill and I have no idea what to tell my, you know, finance approvals are. I mean, that's that can be scary to walk into that situation if you have no history with it. I I actually love the point that you made there before, you know, let's say, I go here about the you know, there's another transition underfoot, and so there already is a ton of uncertainty.
Max:38:23
And I don't think people talk about that. You guys don't really highlight that a lot in these planning, you know, and initial integration or initial contact conversations.
Syed:38:32
Yeah. That's that's actually really the hard part.
Ashwath:38:34
Yep. So on the bandwidth sizing perspective, definitely, it's it's going to be an estimate. And we typically, the way we look at it, we look at it what's your current WAN is? Are you using MPLS or you're on Internet with MPLS? Are you using having an any optimization going on?
Ashwath:38:52
What what is your current usage overall? And then looking at the applications, and as Ashwat said, if there is any strategy around migrations. Like, are we, are they going into adopting any new applications? And what will that usage gonna look like? So considering the number of users, the type of applications, and what's how the existing networks look like, So these combinations, we we will go ahead and put an estimation on how much bandwidth they are going to use per site.
Max:39:26
Something we touched on briefly was this idea of, you know, customers that have a big MPLS network already, but they maybe have a problem site. Santiago, Cape Town, Shanghai, you know, you pick these markets where it's notoriously poor performance for a global network. And so a company comes and says, we have this very specific problem. We wanna solve it, and we've identified that you're gonna solve it for us, but we don't wanna we're gonna leave everything else alone. I would imagine that once they're on your network, that that conversation shifts pretty quickly.
Max:39:53
I mean, what is that how does that look for, you know, on the average? I mean, is it frustrating that that's how people view you as a company of, like, oh, we're gonna solve this esoteric, weird, difficult to reach geography and, you know, but that's all we're really thinking about? Or how do you want people to think about Aryaka, and and what should be the impression that we leave?
Syed:40:15
First off, more than 50% of our net new bookings every quarter comes from existing customers. So what would really what that tells us is that our customers are pretty happy with that service, and they wanna buy more. Right? So when you said somebody wants to lead with a couple of points out and they say, hey, you know, that's all we're interested in today, that's fine because the easiest time to talk to a customer about doing a bigger transition, especially a sensitive customer, is after they have experienced another problem being solved and the support begin, right? Until they have that, for a large customer to make a big decision is almost impossible.
Syed:40:51
I mean, it's going to be do nothing because it could get worse, right? So foot on the door, if the customer's happy 6 months down the line, the next MPLS node that comes up for renewal, we're up there. But the difference is they have experienced what we do, both in terms of application performance and in terms of, you know, finally, CIOs worry about problem. Problem occurs, how fast can you fix it? Downtime, all of that stuff.
Syed:41:18
Right? How much how are we willing to step onto the table, and not say, hey. You know, it's not my problem. It's somebody else's problem. I think all of those actually when they experience our support, which is it's my problem until we can find who can solve it for you as opposed to go away.
Max:41:36
How much of this is managed by you, and how much this is managed by the customer? I mean, is it you're giving the customer portal and say, here you go. Have at it, and go configure things like crazy? Or are you saying, hey. We're gonna configure this for you.
Max:41:46
And if you wanna make changes, talk to us. I mean, what's that you know, where where does the line start and end?
Syed:41:52
So sort of combination of the 2, we do support all the configurations you want. But by and large, most of our customers say, I'm pretty happy if you configure everything and manage it. Right? Tell me if there's some big changes. Let me have the ability to see the changes that got done, see the effect of the changes, the application visibility, and so on.
Syed:42:11
And, you know, should I absolutely need to make a change and I need to make it you know, I wanna try, hey. I wanna add some of these changes routing in this node and then change it back. I should be able to do it. Right? So we support all of it.
Syed:42:23
And I would say that the uptake of self management is probably 5 to 10%.
Ashwath:42:29
In most of the cases, customers are happy how we do the default configurations and they will identify the applications what are important to them. And then based on that, we're gonna go ahead and configure it. But in some 5 to 10% cases, customer would like to go ahead and identify and have some level of control, which we have provided in our portal, the the management portal which we offer. And and we are adding those, features enhancements as customers are asking for more control. We are adding those, on a regular basis.
Ashwath:43:01
And that also gives the fact that if you look at other managed service providers versus versus how we we offered, the solution, we own our technology. So our feature velocity against customer request is much faster, and we can respond to customer needs much quicker. And that's that's the value which I see when it comes to Aryaka providing managed SD WAN service.
Max:43:27
So there's been some merger and acquisition activity recently, and we're gonna probably see a lot more. You know, this is gonna accelerate. Big names are buying other big names for big dollars. But part of this is is creating and and and further fuzzing the line. So you talk about, you know, we talk about SD WAN as a marketing buzzword.
Max:43:45
You know, we we're always saying, you know, there's all this constant line of new marketing buzzwords that come in that become Gartner categories, and then we can track. And everybody has to claim that they can do those buzzwords. That way, they can get on that checkbox when when corporate buyers are out looking and procurement departments are are shopping. Are you expecting to see that transition as well? I mean, are you guys gonna expand out with this?
Max:44:05
And and maybe be more specific. I mean, the lines between what was the SD WAN and what was the firewall are starting to become blurry. You know, this this now this concept of this SD WAN appliance on the edge connecting to a cloud based or federated firewall is starting to become more prevalent in in industry and blur. Where do you view this thing evolving? And and are you going to do you think you're gonna follow that line or you're gonna stay where you're at?
Syed:44:30
So I think that's the probably the most challenging question of the day. Rest of it was technical. Now it's really the crystal ball. Right? Mhmm.
Syed:44:37
So our customers tend to be, very security conscious. So we've been focusing on customers who feel, you know, they have a lot of intellectual property. They they they lead with what's my security policy? What's my posture first, right? And and for those people, change in security is a lot slower.
Syed:44:59
I mean, they're not gonna say, oh, I'm gonna try this new firewall. It's available, federated in the cloud, and let's hope for the best, right? So I think the change is gonna be slower. We have taken 2 tacks on this. We do have our own perimeter firewall and so on inside a device.
Syed:45:12
We don't market that because finally most of our customers are going to be using, a best of breed, a brand name firewall of some kind. We do work pretty well with Zscaler and anybody else who's in the cloud. We are sort of more of a you the customer makes their security choice. Right? How is that, and and as you said, you know, we are also concerned.
Syed:45:31
Hey. You know, everybody says I've got it all integrated. Just come to me. Right? So far, we haven't seen our customers being highly excited about that.
Syed:45:39
They are looking at that more with a piece of of some fear saying that I'm not gonna put my crown jewel somewhere there and have them stolen. Right? So how will it play out? It's it's a concern for me every morning. I mean, I don't know.
Syed:45:52
Right? I would say that we are adding functionality. We are working pretty closely with the other security vendors to see at what point we can actually make one you know, a better job of integrating the the function so that they're better manageable. Right? The important thing is you can have the best firewall and a couple of locations on which your policy is incorrectly configured.
Syed:46:13
You only need one place to get into the network. Right? I think that it will converge. It'll come out over maybe the 3 to 5 year time frame. I don't I think something like, this COVID shutdown and so on and so forth is actually gonna slow the transition down.
Syed:46:28
It will speed up one thing. It'll speed up the need for a managed service model because IT people wanna have the control on the concept, the architecture of the network, but they're not necessarily going to be physically present everywhere, right? And and so that's also changing. They wanna be able to do everything remotely. So I think, there's gonna be a trend towards more of a software defined network, less of CLI, less of physical control of devices, and so on.
Syed:46:55
But in terms of security and, it's in convergence, we see that happening, but it's a little further out. And I think that the the mass market might move more quickly, but the larger enterprise the mid to large enterprise are going to take the time about that until the security brands actually mature in those spaces.
Max:47:12
I think what makes me concerned every time I see an acquisition is, you know, there's not very many companies that do very good jobs with acquisitions or end up with an end product that's, you know, the sum is better than the parts. And and it's always kind of curious to watch and wait. You know, it's just like you have to hold your breath and just pray that everything works out perfectly because, you know, obviously, the company buying the other company bought them because they were doing something good for a reason. And then you just kind of hold on and hope that it's gonna stay good when it gets finished. You know, COVID's gonna be really interesting.
Max:47:42
The the the transition and the speed up, you know, we see I mean, historically, the the negative term was we talk about, like, IT staff and admins and engineers as being box hookers, and I understand that. Right? Like, I love routers. It was fun getting on a big some big iron and configuring a big box. I mean, it was there's always something exciting about you have to get forklift.
Max:47:59
I mean, like, literally, on a some kind of pallet lift, put a device in because it was it was awesome. After you do that a little while, you realize you don't really care anymore. I mean, it's still cool, but the organizations, I feel like, have matured to the point where the company wants productivity to be up and application accessibility and availability. And and these are the conversations that you end up in. Like, why is the application down?
Max:48:23
Why was the network down? Not like, you know, are you pushing the buttons, but, like, does it actually work? And, you know, that transitions into a conversation I have a lot with people of, are you taking vacations? When was your last vacation? You know, do you wanna take vacations?
Max:48:38
And I I think that shift has come, you know, I definitely feel it. I don't feel like people are taking vacations as much as they should be, but the desire to take vacations is definitely there for sure for most for most of the IT staff in in traditional ways now. You know, closing thought for you, really. You know, we we've talked about this in a couple of different ways, but but let's ask the question succinctly. You know, how do you want people to think of Ariaka?
Max:49:03
You know, if if if you're gonna say, you know, this is the problem that we solve, you know, this is how we make your life better, this is where we fit in this puzzle to make your life better, you know, how would how would you want people imprinting that in their mind?
Syed:49:18
I think, if you want a high quality network with application performance like you're sitting on the way on the LAN, And you want that experience that the transition to that world, a smooth one where somebody is making sure that, I mean, they've been there, they've done it, so they're able to help you make that transition smoothly and get you to the other side. I think we're the people for that. I'd rather leave the technology out of it because, you know, trying to talk about why technology solves somebody's problem sort of makes that person have to really understand the value of the technology. Right? Some of them will, but a lot are simply gonna say, just make sure I can sleep at night.
Syed:49:58
I don't wanna be called. And, actually, there's one of the CIOs who who we work with who told us that exactly. He said, look. Ever since I put Aryaka in, I sleep at night. Another CIO told us just recently, he he's quotable, he said that with this whole COVID transition, they were able to over the COVID situation, they were able to transition to a 100% work from home force in no time, smoothly, no problem.
Syed:50:22
Why? Because they were with Aryaka. Because we were already doing the remote hands and and managing the keeping the network up. And and they're a cargo company, so they have the business has not suffered a lot. It's actually done pretty well.
Syed:50:34
They've actually gone up. But they were able to make the transition fairly smoothly. So I'd say that's another thing. With us, we are flexible. We are already ready for all of these, problems.
Syed:50:44
Syed, do you wanna have a
Ashwath:50:45
Yeah. Definitely. 1 of, the CIO who told me, and I I I took that that, okay, that's really the way we should be perceived is, like, we are not just another vendor. We are more of a partner. And we are we are extended IT team, which can worry about your WAN network versus, like, you are taking care of the WAN.
Ashwath:51:08
So you can go ahead and think beyond WAN and start looking at your application, how you are modernizing your business applications while we take care of your network. And we make sure we enable that under the hood.
Max:51:23
Awesome. Any closing thoughts that we haven't touched on that we should get in here?
Ashwath:51:28
I think merger and acquisitions, Ashwat, I think we didn't touch on that. That's another value which we offer. Like, when customers are acquiring businesses and how we merge that network seamlessly because the network is already available. Right? For us, these are additional sites.
Ashwath:51:47
And then even if we have some companies disintegrate as well, like, they have to divide themselves into 2 different business units or whatever. And we have done those successfully as well. And it's the beauty of software defined essentially. Everybody is connected to our core network, and we just have to make them multi tenant. Instead of a single tenant, we can make them multi tenant.
Ashwath:52:08
And when they come in as 2 different tenants, we can merge them into a single tenant. And that's all the beauty of this, architecture.
Max:52:16
I think that's a great explanation for the what I view as the real value out of SD WAN. Right? It's control and flexibility. You know? So when we talk about SD WAN, what you really wanna get out of it, it's control, flexibility.
Max:52:26
And so what you're talking about in terms of, you know, I make your life better pillars, don't worry about your WAN, we'll take care of it. Don't worry about your application performance, we'll make it better, including the crazy far off locations that are always gonna be a a nightmare for you. You know? Good luck with this network in Shanghai, but we're gonna make your life better there or in South America or South Africa or whatever it actually is. And as your business evolves and changes, we're gonna make these changes easy for you to accomplish as well.
Max:52:54
I mean, that's that sounds like a really powerful, you know, statement and conversation to to have with somebody of being like, we can help you actually manage your business and not worry about these things.
Syed:53:05
Yep. Alright. Thanks. I think we should, snap that up and, read that back. I mean, that's really good.
Syed:53:12
Yeah. That's that sounds,
Ashwath:53:14
Summarized it pretty well. Yeah.
Syed:53:16
Yeah.
Max:53:16
Awesome. Well, guys, thank you very much for your time. It's been a pleasure.
Syed:53:20
Thanks a lot, Mike.
Max:53:21
Thank you.
Syed:53:21
And, you know, yeah, we hope to have a we can go deeper dive in, the next conversation on some more technical stuff. I know you're waiting to jump into a few of those. Right? As you touched on the data deduplication. Yeah.
Syed:53:32
But yeah. Thanks a lot.
Max:53:33
I'll I'll take you up on that for sure. Thanks for joining the Tech Deep Dive podcast. At Clarksons, we believe tech should make your life better, searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven't heard of before. We can help you buy the right tech for your business. Visit us at clarksys.com to schedule an intro call.
