Welcome everyone, this is Founders on Fire podcast and I'm delighted to welcome our Cloud Traveler since the winner, and Sakaram who is the President and Co-Founder of Appstroke. Good morning to you. Hello. Good morning.
I'm excited to be here, like from the opportunity. Well, excited to have you with us. I'm very, very interested in you guys because obviously you're bringing your brought new concept to market, this intent-based networking, and I'm very also curious about your, you know, your Founders team because obviously there's yourself who's got an incredible pedigree and then you've got your CEO, David Cheriton and also Sasha Rakovich. So I'm curious to ask you a little bit about that whole side of things.
So yeah, but first off, it would be great to understand more about what actually is intent-based networking. Yeah, sure. So yes, Ethan based the Network Inc is an approach that we pioneered back when we came out of stealth in 2016. Now it's an industry term, which we've seen many established vendors use it.
What it is is, think of it as powerful automation and as part of automation essentially think of abstraction, right, of infrastructure. And our focus to now has been the data sensor network, but ultimately what you're doing is that you're taking out, you know, taking away all the manual tasks and instead placing them with software that is providing powerful automation of the tasks that architects and operators are doing, they in and they out. And the key concept here is that you're separating the what from the how. So what is it that you're trying to achieve?
Generally, you're trying to deliver on connectivity, reachability, essentially these are policies that you're implementing. You have some goals regarding compliance and security and quality of experience. And so essentially with the way intent-based networking works is that as the operator or the architect, you're describing those types of goals, objectives, and then the software that takes care of translating those goals into implementation by configuring all of the devices or all of the systems underneath that together will then deliver on this goal. And not, and then it doesn't stop there.
You also have to gather all the telemetry and ensure that ultimately the network is delivering on this goal. And the infrastructure is delivering on this goal. And usually I use this technology of the self-driving car and ultimately the goal here within 10 days networking is autonomous operations, where the software is essentially doing the bulk of the work of automating your network. And if you think of a self-driving car, you know, it's not about changing the way the car is designed, right?
And similarly here, we're not changing the way the network is designed. You know, we just follow standards and industry practices, best practices. But what we're doing though is that we are collecting a lot of telemetry the same way with a self-driving car. The software can't work if it doesn't get awareness of its environment through all of the telemetry that it's gathering.
And then we're building the software that takes into account the user intent in the case of the car. It's, you know, I'd like to get to this destination for us. The concepts I've described. And then essentially, then the software is taking on all the complexity of then, you know, marrying the intent to the operational state of the network to deliver on your intent.
Go here. Absolutely. So that's that in 10 days networking. And we can get into the pain points as to why they just need that if you'd like.
Well, complexity is never a great thing to deal with when you've got lots of other objectives. That's exactly right. And I think that especially, you know, in today's world where, you know, technology is paramount, right? And organizations are digitally transforming, right?
And they business, the business requirements is driving a requirement for infrastructure to transform, right? And then, you know, I think what what Gardner has said is that if you don't transform your infrastructure, your three times more likely to fail in your digital transformation initiative. And the reasons are clear. I think that if you lead it in infrastructure, that is more distributed to your end user, but also you need to be responding to change a lot more quickly, right?
And so, and so, and so, and so, there are new business requirements that come up every day that essentially change what we call your intent, essentially what you're trying to get out of your network. And, you know, you may want to be adding a rack or be adding a new application or new users, and every time you do this, you need to make changes to your network. And, you know, in doing so with this new requirement, operators and architects are experiencing this painful trade-off, especially operators, right? Between, on one hand, agility, right, the ability to respond quickly to those requests, and on the other hand, reliability, right?
So, you know, you could try and change quickly without the proper tools or the proper software to meet your business demand, but then what you're risking is causing outages, right? And so, and we've still really have seen many stories over the years of catastrophic outages caused by operators making changes quickly to meet those, you know, business driven deadlines. And so, reliability becomes an issue. And, of course, the primary source of failure is this human error that's, you know, with a human attempting to make all of those changes quickly to meet those deadlines.
And so, so that's, you know, that's if you try and make changes quickly, well, the alternative then is to make changes really slowly, but then you're impacting your ability to respond to the business needs, right? It's, you know, that's what we see. It's coming for enterprises to take weeks, you know, up to six months, in some cases, and dozens of people, right, involved to make a change because of all the procedures, approval, stack reviews, et cetera, you know, required to ensure the level of reliability that is that they need. And so, ultimately, it leaves the operators squeeze between the business and the process, including all these manual actions and approvals.
Right. So, so, you know, that's one of the pain points, it's kind of like this tradeoff between agility and reliability. Right. The other pain point is this constrained vendor's choice.
You know, back to see in a lot of customers, or a lot of organizations that just use one vendor, right? And this, you know, of course, it results in best of read and no best of read and then non competitive bidding, right? So, you know, procurement is affected, you know, essentially, they can't have multiple options where they can break costs down. And the real people that the real organizations have had this lack of flexibility or single vendor or have this constrained vendor's choice is that it takes a lot of time and investment required for operators to gain training, get training on those multiple vendors.
And so, instead of making this investment, they'd rather just use, you know, one vendor and have that expertise with that just one vendor. And I'd say, you know, last but not least architects, now, if you look at the architecture side, these are kind of architecture paid points. Yeah. There is a, there is a speed in pain points and, you know, take away from an architecture standpoint, the business requirement comes in, you need to build up a new data sensor, right?
And it needs to be done by this, by this deadline. And, you know, it takes, you know, though it takes a long time, map to manually deploy and activating infrastructure from scratch once the business requires it, which, which ultimately can result in business delays, right? So, if you look at all these problems, so we're talking about agility, we're talking about reliability, lack of, you know, lack of options of constrained vendor choice and that speed, ultimately, the overall theme is that it's a people problem, right? It's a human capital problem.
You want to use your human capital in the most effective way and certainly, you know, doing things manually is just not the right option. And so, what you need is an integer technologies essentially don't help with this trade-off between agility and speed on one side and then reliability on the other side. And so, what we saw is this need for this powerful automation solution that covers all of the zero they want all the way to do plus, so that you can meet all of those requirements and address these pain points. And that's essentially what App Store was founded to deliver.
And I think, you know, the big idea here is this, you need this, this realization that what you need is a tool that both architects and operators use, right? So, the architects use it to, to automate their design and their builds of their of their infrastructure and then network infrastructure and then the operators use it to operate that including, you know, troubleshooting, including making changes, etc. And so, it's breaking these architects and these operators together in this very effective, with this very, in the sense, very, you know, kind of streamline solution that allows them to effectively address those pain points and then ultimately with the smallest number of architects and operators, they can become a lot more effective at responding quickly to the business demand while maintaining his high levels of reliability. Brilliant.
Thank you. That was very useful. They've got a much better understanding of that now. So, anyway, from the technology itself, looking more at the journey that you, David and Sasha have been on as the founders of App Store, what would you say have been some of the challenges that you've faced and hopefully overcome?
Right. So, we're, you know, we're built a business from scratch and so essentially, this, you know, startups have, you know, I think every founder will tell you that every day you wake up, right, there are problems and challenges to solve, right? So, you know, essentially, it requires this extraordinary effort and this, you know, massive amount of energy by everyone, right? To get to our execute essentially on the vision and translate this vision to reality.
You know, so if I were to, you know, pick, you know, one example, I'd say, you know, one challenge with it, which I thought that for us was a company defining was when, you know, we had a lot of interest from a particular company in the early days of App Store. This was our first organization that was going to deploying production and they had their own deadlines. It was our 1.1 product, right? And so it was a very early version of the software and they had made some, they had made some requirements, they had some requirements that they wanted us to deliver on, which one of you needed to make changes to the software and at the time, you know, because it was an early version of the software, we were still, you know, in testing and that where, you know, if you, quite a few bucks, it's still in the process of resolving, right?
And so, you know, when you look at it, you know, it was like, how are we going to get from this point where we are now to, you know, delivering a production ready version of the software for this customer in their environment that essentially is in the run their network, right? So within, it was, you know, that was, we had a month, right? It was four weeks. And to me, it was amazing how the team came just together.
So tightly, you know, and so, intently to deliver on this challenge. And ultimately, it was a very stressful month, but we delivered and the deployment was successful. I just, I will always remember it as this beautiful company defining moments. Well, you've just answered the next part of the question is what you're particularly proud of.
So well, don't you wrap that up? Well, yeah, certainly that was, that was something that was certainly proud of. And again, I think as a startup, as every time you need to go, that is something that you achieve, that was part of the original plan, you know, you feel really proud of it. Certainly for us, you know, that was our first customer deploying production.
That another moment was when we, when one customer deployed beyond the initial deployment and then scaled it out to hundreds of racks. And, you know, it's a huge difference to deploy, you know, in its own environment, right? And then, when I take it to, take it to scale, right? And then that's the scalability of the solution that bests, and first of all, it's a validation that that's what we're doing matters, right?
That they so it's so much value that ultimately they're going to be scaling it to the rest of their environment. But then, you know, it gives us validation that also that it was the right thing to spend that's much time on building the right architecture so that we are able to scale. And then when that deployment happened, and you see that the technology is essentially able to scale that becomes like a moment of one relief, but also a pride, right? That's why we are able to scale this technology and address our most demanding customer needs.
Brilliant. Brilliant. And he talked about another thing, which was validation and that obviously the customer validation is incredibly important, but you know, obviously you've won awards. That's one of the reasons we're chatting today.
And I know that's another problem. Of course, right? I was a reason word. We're excited about that.
And of course, we've also more on other records. Right. Indeed. Richard, after isn't it that you get continuous validation from external parties, which is wonderful.
So I mean, is it something we always wonder, you know, how important is that to an organization, particularly in those early days when you are asking people to, you know, make miracles happen in a month, right? And sometimes there'll be low points within that. Certainly, others have said that, you know, getting something like an accolade, of, you know, like the tech trial blazes and others that you've had, you know, helps lift those spirits and just gives everybody an opportunity to celebrate, you know, that their work is being recognized beyond, you know, obviously the customer satisfaction that they get from people. Yeah, absolutely.
There's no question. I think we see a lot of value in that. And we're always very, you know, grateful and humble when we get to these accolades. And then we, you know, we, we internally celebrate them.
In fact, you know, we, we know, all of the physical kind of awards we have, right? Like the statues and the play, blacks and so on, they're all displayed, you know, at our office when you, when you get in, right? And so every employee when they get in the door, they see them, right? Every customer sees them, right?
So we certainly see a lot of value in those awards. And so it's an honor to be recognized in the industry. So we have, we personally, as an app shop, for speaking to ourselves, we've always put the priority in applying for industry awards and we've truly valued the importance of these industry associations, right, to help us with creating awareness and to a much broader audience. I mean, I'd say awareness is always a key goal, right, for organizations, you know, for startups, right?
At the end of the day, when you restart about, you know, when we're in the starting, a company that all the only people that are aware of it are the founders, right? And that's the two years while you were stealthing through your initial development site. And so yeah, exactly. And then when you're out, I think it's always a challenge to go out and create awareness.
So we need, you know, the type of customers that have those pain points to essentially, to know that after address those pain points. And I think that industry awards are a great way to create this awareness to this much larger audience. And it's also industry validation, right, for our third party group of judges, right? That's not, you know, us saying it's, you know, experts in the field, third party neutral experts that are, that are giving us those awards.
And so it's super helpful again, especially at the early stage, it gives us a credibility, further credibility in the broader market amongst our customers, our partners, and also from the truth, extend points, you know, for a, for an ordinary startup, such as Appstra, having the right people and the right talent is always critical and it helps there as well. Yeah, definitely, definitely. So left to wrap up, you know, obviously we've basically incredibly difficult times at the moment, you know, all personally and also professionally and from a startup perspective, obviously, that's no different, although I'm sure there are additional challenges. But generally speaking, what, what a policy you giving to sort of your counterparts in other startups?
What would you say to them about, you know, ensuring that you continue to build on the success you've made so far? Yeah, absolutely. This is a great question and, you know, we've, we've, we've, we haven't been in this before, for a long time, we have, as the founders, a lot of experience with downturns, right? You know, the last big one was, of course, 2008.
And, you know, to me, the way I see it is that, you know, there, there is a lot of opportunity in downturns if you play them right, you know, I think that a lot of great leaders or great companies today emerge from the economic times. And, you know, in a sense, by doing the right things, you can emerge as a future leader. And so I think that, you know, the, to achieve that, I think the, the first thing is, and that's not surprising, but it's really a focus on the execution, right? You know, the way I like to describe it is turn up the TV, right?
And, you know, not maybe the TV, but social media or whatever your news sources are and just essentially focus on delivering, right? You know, there is, ultimately, you know, a downturn gives you time to build in all of the product features or the capabilities that your customers required and that you have never had a chance to deliver on, right? Because you just caught up into the end and the other day out. And so it's an opportunity to invest on the, living on these capabilities.
You know, the other thing is that if you're in the economic downturn, it's kind of like levels of playing field, especially I think in this one where everyone is stuck home, right? It almost doesn't matter if you have 10,000 salespeople, you know, meeting with customers versus you staying home. You had a captive audience, right, of customers that are looking at this as an opportunity to get educated on new technologies. And so at the start, you can leverage your ability to be agile and just adapt to this new situation and then, you know, and then, and then without offerings that then, you know, attend to this captive audience.
So for example, for us, what we've done is that prior to this whole crisis, we had launched our AWS Academy. It essentially is a certification on intent-based networking. So if you want to learn about intent-based networking, AOS Academy is the place to go. And so what we've done is that when we saw this crisis, what we said was we need to do our part and we made it free, right?
And we're seeing tremendous interest hundreds of engineers essentially using this opportunity to get educated, certified on intent-based networking. And so this is an example of us essentially seizing the moment and essentially doing something mutually beneficial to the industry and to upstroke. The other thing is, of course, one has to be smart, which won't expense us essentially, you know, investing the critical areas again, raising awareness and building building the product. And setting up the right incentives, right?
As I said, you know, we know that cash is tight. And so providing opportunities for customers to learn or to deploy without having to reach to their cash, I think is something that we're doing, free product training, free consultations with our sales engineers, et cetera. Yeah. One of the actually noticed on your LinkedIn profile that you've actually been through your own Academy.
So you have sampled your own education. Yes. I had to get certified on the product and the technology and the approach that we you know, that we promote certainly yes. I'm actually excited to hear that you've noticed.
Well, then we get it. That's my job to go and have a look at what you guys have all been up to recently. And I thought, what about that? I went to wait to get a quick through and had a lovely people certificate in fact, about two certificates.
So I mean, I think that's great advice. And I think, you know, one of the things around this is it's great to speak to you. You know, you've had a fantastically exciting journey, you know, challenging journey, banks from the point of view of your customers and just, you know, getting a startup off the ground in the first place is, you know, an amazing achievement. So congratulations, Bill Matt, and congratulations again on winning your award.
And thank you for joining us on the Founders on Fire podcast today. Thank you. Brilliant. I've enjoyed chatting with you.
I enjoyed that as well. Thank you very much. Have a great day. Brilliant.
Lovely. Thank you very much. Bye. Bye now.
Thank you. Bye bye.