Fireside Chat Supercloud Data + AI | Supercloud 3

foreign ER Dave vellante kicking off day one of two days of coverage Security Plus AI is the topic and we're here with Doug Merritt formerly the CEO of Splunk coming out of retirement he retired now the Sea of aviatrix uh Cube alumni a friend of the cube Doug thanks for keynoting and kicking off supercloud three I'm honored to be here really thank you for bringing me back I knew it wouldn't be long um if you'd be back in the game took some time off congratulations on taking that time off and now the Sea of aviatric Steve mullaney we've been covering aviatrics you know pre-covered they had an event they stay with the first ones really talking multi-cloud before that became kind of a thing they saw the software side of it we know Steve you're taking the helm take it to the growth what's the what's the attraction what what made you pull come out of retirement yeah that's good it's good question I I honestly thought one I didn't have any idea how exhausted I was after the eight year run at Splunk so it was fascinating my wife like two months in commented how many days are you gonna sleep for nine hours um it's like yeah I guess I was I was running pretty hard there for a while um and I thought I I affiliated with a couple of great VCS I was doing a bunch of sidecar investing I said I stepped on a couple boards doing advising I thought that could be really a great way to stay in the game and give back but not be on that hot seat of yeah when you are an operator of any sort any leader and definitely the CEO like you are on 24x7 and it's hard to sleep at night sometimes because there are things going on that you're worried about and all my VC friends and other people that had kind of chosen this dabbling side which was more me than a VC it's like you know the best part is I can sleep at night it's the operator's problem like I hand it to them and they lose sleep and I just wake up in the morning for y'all to do next and that was a nice artifact but what I found over a year and a quarter is when you do that even within the Venture Capital Community you're more or less an individual player your individual Partners there are people that come together but your deal daily activities are kind of you are trying to govern your time and and there isn't that vision mission purpose and constant team and there's not that really deep customer contact there's not super deep product contact you get in and do the best you can as a board member or when you make an investment or advisor but it's not the same as I am I'm not the chicken chicken in the breakfast I'm not just laying the eggs like I'm committed to this breakfast and that what I found 9 10 11 months in is because I love my family I'm one of those guys that actually likes and loves my wife and love to spend time with her and my kids but I just I really missed being on the field and being part of a team sport and you got a great run there at spelunk obviously went public and all the great success data now security and multi-cloud aviatrics growing companies so it's somewhat pressure cooker but not too you're gonna ride that grow that so it's early pretty much for the company yeah being a private company is great that was one of my criteria is it'd be be nice to start private and see if we can take take the company public but a lot of so when I decide okay let I should jump back in like I miss being part of the team then the criteria of what kind of team you're going to join becomes really important and Steve and I have known each other for probably 10 15 years he was he spent a lot of time in Los Gatos that's where I lived before moving to Austin a few years ago and watching his career Journey especially when it comes to networking he's been really really good at picking up Trends way before they become successful including nicera and obviously that really successful acquisition with VMware so knowing the team and understanding the category that they're going after is certain certainly important I've learned that that being really close to the board and having a great relationship with the board is super important as well and two of the board members at aviatrix were early board members of Splunk and I'd spend time with them before becoming CEO and then post CEO in that role so my my outside in Steve had raised his hand and said okay I'm the zero to 100 million guy and this is now getting getting close 100 million and maybe it's time for somebody else and they crafted a list and according to Steve and the board members I was taught the list apparently shortly after my uh my my jump from Splunk um and so when they approached a few months ago it and I dove in this has a lot of those characteristics of Splunk it's a little bit early on the trend multi-cloud networking you know obviously a super cloud event it's incredibly important I think for every business out there the last ad I saw 83 percent of major organizations have got a multi-cloud strategy they want to be multi-cloud but the reality for most of us is you started in a cloud and you're porting a lot of last generation workloads that really aren't Cloud native to that cloud that you were in and maybe through Acquisitions or experimentation or a couple of clouds but you don't really have a mesh across the clouds where you've got workload codes seamlessly traversing not just multi-clouds but now we've got intelligent Edge and and aviatrics saw this back 2014-15 and 16 and has made those Investments to actually be there I think it was ahead of the the game here I remember in 2021 we were up on the stage at AWS re invent and one of your investors the early investors was sitting down there and Mulaney and I were up on stage I don't know if you were there and and the investor said it's happening and when he said we said what's happening and we had coined this term supercloud and that's what's happening but to your point Doug it's not like somebody wakes up and says oh I gotta buy a super cloud it's not a product right right it's an architecture it's a sort of maybe a philosophy and so now you've got to get into solutions that actually solve problems which is I presume where you're spending a lot of your time and thought yeah that the what one of the characteristics of Splunk I loved is I called it a blue collar culture that back when they created the index and tried to optimize logs no one even thought their logs were worth that much and to really get to petabyte scale with that data it's just a lot of hard roll up your sleeve and do plumbing non-glorious plumbing work because these things have to work and networking is that same way like it is a very difficult category to do well you're at ring zero if the network goes down all this great stuff we talk about seamless applications real-time customer communication employee empowerment just goes away like you cannot operate your business so very hard to do you have to roll up your sleeves and really understand the domain and be super diligent and doing it effectively and when I look at this multi-cloud piece like we would love to have the ability the clouds continue to do a good job to differentiate them differentiating themselves on what kind of workloads are they optimized for now all of them want to say we can do anything but it's hard you've got to make investments from networking and silicon all the way up to optimize different workloads and if we if this pattern looks like any of the past thousands of patterns in tech there will be you have to to be affected to effectively address any age of your organization you're going to be wisely choose to develop different apps and different workloads where they'll operate best which will likely be different clouds so one of the things we were talking about super cloud I love to get your thoughts because you know being at Splunk you have you saw the data Evolution and Revolution there it continues that's the constant theme in our supercloud narrative is data in all aspects this is Security Plus AI for this topic in supercloud three but network plays a big role in in security data and networking of the two kind of areas you see a lot of action around security whether it's built in as a platform or a tool or tracking packets so networking across multiple environments is a huge deal that's what you guys are doing avatrix what's the role of data in this too because you can bring that data perspective love to get your thoughts and reaction to data and security and networking yeah I think data as you guys have talked about it and we're all witnessing is the the fuel for what's really going to make effective AI work like you need enough elements to train these different algorithms and to start to get more proactive and re and intelligent approaches to what she'd be doing whatever domain that you're in for us and networking the data that we care a lot about is what's happening with the network how do we make the network more resilient how do we make it more secure how do we optimize traffic flows um and again if you look at these multi-cloud environment if you look at the network services from any cloud provider they're still relatively immature and you know they'll continue to progress them our job is to stay ahead of those within each one of those clouds but when you go multi-cloud it gets really difficult so trying to provide that intelligence that resiliency that adaptability the high security across these clouds is is a difficult challenge in addition you know trying to protect the data sources that live so when I look at Tech it's all about layers it's hard for the networking vendors to jump up to be a data plane providers we've got a data plane to transmit networking data across a network but yeah when you look at snowflake or Splunk or data bricks they've got more of a data plane how do I curate data that's that people are going to take advantage of in whatever use case applications plane is very different compute the compute layer is different so sticking within that layer is where people tend to really get lots of momentum and enabling that Network to ensure that at least for the network traffic you've got understanding of what is beginning to who is touching your data what uh were they potentially taking that data we do have deep packet inspection capabilities so there's some interesting things that we can actually infer from that networking layer that stops at a certain layer right you need to partner with the data players you need to partner with the different application vendors to bring so you can bring a whole picture on what's happening with the capabilities and also the security posture across the system so you've got this cross-cloud complexity so thinking about AI what were you doing with AI before specifically and how how has that changed has that changed your thinking with you know the AI heard around the world yeah it's um the large language model uh lemming March like if you are a company today and you're not claiming to do something with llms you're just in trouble because obviously everybody is um but they do have a specific purpose right and and we're still wrestling through what those what that purpose is as a as a as a world and how do you contain that purpose and keep humans safe and that there's like everything else barbells on Joy and fear simultaneously within aviatrix uh we're lucky enough to have an incredible development team um people that were in the MIT media lab back in the 80s and 90s when AI was that first burst we're supposed to take over the world and we're dealing with whole different vectors and Algos and artifacts back then through Google Engineers Facebook Engineers Yahoo Engineers so really adapt with networking really understand data and the different machine learning and and AI capabilities you could bring to networking and it's I I think we like every other domain llms will have a play in networking when you're trying to think about understanding attack surfaces that things are a more language oriented or can be translated to language how do you optimize Palace policies across these very complex networks and be more proactive and resilient those types of things I think llms we're playing with everything that we can think of right now and to see where across the different use cases we can what types of AI we bring and where they're going to add the most value but right now going back to how early we are in this multi-cloud world just getting secure and resilient transport between clouds in a seamless basis is that most companies really really wrestle with that it's if you've got an app that spans two clouds and ensuring that that app performs the way that it should and is secure the way it should and you understand traffic routing it's it's a non-trivial task and you don't need an llm to to do that work you need an effective data plane and control plane and a way to both observe what's happening and invoke policy anywhere that that traffic flows across different clouds across different Edge providers back to your proprietary old data centers like data data and networking is Flowing up so there's some AI in there it's just not generative AI necessarily it's yeah I mean I I think yes there are I I think the world is still wrestling with or or visualizing how do I use llms and then as you guys know the choice of which models to begin to use is off the charts and the open source exploding world is it's moving so quickly um it's interesting you know on the latency side physics obviously networking physics is everything latency is key when we talk to infrastructure folks they're Skeptics when it comes to AI wow it's BS but they when they see configuration stuff that's mundane no-brainer that's automation then it's not so much AI but they see it playing there but one area they do see hope and Prospects is observability data mountains of data around Telemetry um you've been in that market that's changing and growing more and more data points coming in whether it's Network logs or network traffic patterns or application Telemetry yep and everyone's hoarding data right now I mean no one knows what to do yet but how do you see that observability piece coming in and that and I mean the interesting part is every layer of the tech stack has got observability so there's a whole observability framework within aviatrix which is who our co-pilot offering that's different than the way the datadog would talk about observability like we we use data dog observability capability for our development team and for the applications that we roll out so we all have the opportunity to do a better job of parsing through mountains of data to try and find the patterns that are existing with the way that our systems are behaving the way that we want them to and don't want them to and again llms I think could do a really effective job given a constrained data set and the right training and the right guard rails around it to both observe those patterns but then to begin to iterate on the appropriate ways to tune and optimize what you're doing and it's when I see where I think a lot of efficiency will be injected and cost structure workers might become significantly more advantageous to customers is the human component on that like what data do I grab and what metric do I create and how do these metrics tie together and what alert do I then generate from that that is it's a very expensive human component I need really thoughtful talented folks and they need to curate that entire data Pipeline and what to do with that data I think LMS can like they are with with basic coding right now and basic SEO material I think it can really impact the speed efficiency and quality of that I mean that's one of those areas that we're looking at so not so much necessarily taking action but allowing humans to have you know curated data so that they can take the action yep and then eventually probably taking some action too but right now I'd be nervous right now I'm going to do this you want me to do this I like some checks and balances well Doug great not good to bring down great to have you on here I got one question for you break our editorial team leading up to super cloud 3 has been asking this question of a number of folks and when I first heard it I said ah it's kind of but it's really an interesting question the answers that we've been getting so will AI ultimately be more beneficial to attackers or Defenders what would be your answer um I think if we follow human behavior I think the attackers are going to arm themselves more aggressively first and I think it will Propel The Defenders to really really up their game more quickly and then I pray that it becomes more powerful to Defenders over time um but if we're we're in another just crazy arms race I think that just got compressed oh my gosh the power is it's it's insane for the good and the bad well it's been great to see I want to ask you one final question about avatrix obviously coming out you got you mentioned you want to have a vision and be part of a team private company so it's a little bit you know not as pressure packed what is your vision for aviatrix as you lead that team and grow that ticket the next level okay Steve took it to the 100 million Mark you're going to take it to public that's the vision but your vision's North Star what's the aviatrix thinking how do you see this playing out so everything that you guys are evangelizing with supercloud and so many of you other podcasts and and broadcasts go back to the power of how do you connect people and try to do that in a transparent and audible way so that we can get all this amazing benefits from technology and LMS are no exception like without connecting everything together to get that visibility there is no benefit of generative AI there is no way to to actually roll out gender of AI what I view avatrix as as being behind is we're all about Connections everywhere that are transparent and resilient and secure and I think without a cloud native architected solution that is that as agnostic to the clouds in a landscape it's really difficult to drive those connections it's even more difficult to drive that transparency and resiliency and security it's interesting we were mentioning on the opening a perfect storm in your career have you seen anything like this before Dave and I were speculating the hype cycle an adoption curve and spending is almost like on top of each other you're seeing the convergence of old new some have a Tailwind some have a headwind it's interesting time what's your as a career Tech leader Explain This Moment In Time the patterns are super similar I think we saw this with Mainframe and client server to first internet generation multiple os's that you've the architectural shifts that we've seen from the 60s to 70s I think follow are following that same pattern but I think the crazy part that you guys do such a good job of trying to capture is the compression of time it's happening so quickly and it's happening across all layers of the stack so quickly and I think because things like llms tie together all these different usually separate categories and separate motions because they're using the same basic GPT framework and the same language thinking to really blend how these categories would be isolated and move more slowly that acceleration is is what I think most of us are seeing back it's like where like how quick what's going to happen next in fact Jeff Jonas was on the discussion with Dave on breaking analysis he's former IBM are doing sensing a big data startup he was joking about the AI hype saying companies are getting term sheets from VC starts getting internship in the VC before they get their money their model is obsolete yeah I know I know yeah well you're seeing open you're seeing open source I mean the the the scale you know what else too there you talk about the layers and you go back to the 80s and 90s that's when you know the Mainframe blew apart and the industry competition started to occur along layers whether it was Intel and semiconductors C8 and disk drives or whatever database or that old ISO seven layer model yeah right it still exists to a degree but there was some thinking that cloud would change that that things would become more Consolidated but it seems like llms and AI are going to increase the granularity of the stack do you buy that 100 even Cloud solving that like we've been told that in every generation yeah clouds make it significantly more complex like the the beauty of Amazon and and Microsoft and Google is just three of the cloud vendors is they are so efficient that they've now generated hundreds of unique Services every service has their own API calls they've got their own abstraction layers they're trying to manage those and they're all different across every cloud so what I've seen with every generation is it gets more complex because we're getting more refined and why does DB engines track 27 different database categories today when I started there was hierarchical Network and relational and that was it it was and relationship was a new the new thing that was going to solve the world and now we've got Ledger and vector and graph and everything you think of because when you get to billions of people you need specific capability and and focus and then you need to tile these things together so as we expand our technology we're going to nicheify for sure and llms is I think what blows was so hard for us to digest mentally is there's so many unaddressed categories that need to be addressed I was talking to someone that's a property manager there today whatever that Austin is I've got so many friends in different verticals and just Tech he goes you know there's no package if you property manage like 10 Properties or four packets if you're an HOA that's trying to manage them there's no solution there there's for some reason we've got a cutoff line of around 40 homes or individual you know one home management it's like well I'm sure there'll be one in six months because with an LM you can now create a HOA or Property Management package so I just I think the diversity that we're going to see is going to go through the roof but we need it to because we don't have our needs met in you mentioned or you mentioned the OSI model and we talk about a lot about open source and how that's fueling this Perfect Storm and The OSI model was the open systems interconnect that created that seven layers TCP was a key aspect of that absolutely and that that broke down remember when we were breaking in the business IBM had sna Network operating system deck had deck net proprietary nasas Network operating systems and that was the their proprietary vendor we kind of sometimes say you got the cloud AWS has its own stack Azure has its own Stacks so is the super cloud OSI model coming yeah where open has to happen I think it has to happen that's as a and again it depends where a corporation is today with Splunk we were the majority in AWS on purpose like we need a reference operating system which the clouds are to develop our stuff against if we're going to move everything into the cloud and break it apart and and we just can't do it simultaneously across three and I see so many companies there so within that world maybe you can just use the native cloud services native networking cloud services these folks have but they're still a pretty big gap that from what they're providing as far as transparency and Remediation and so I you know we're trying to add value there as avatrix but these it's so different across these different clouds but as a company I I can't for me to spend all of my energy on parsing and identifying how to be a super cloud provider or how to take advantage of a super cloud I they need to spend time on features and functions and what to do with llm is to serve their customers better and and I don't think that that networking layer is where most of them will get most of their value as a large I.T Shopper super Cloud 2 we had Walmart on yeah they can afford to do it we had Uber on a breaking analysis they can afford to do it but most companies can't yeah I think it is going to have to has to move to This Cloud secure model Ai and I think you know we call it the super stack and you get super Computing the physical layer I mean OSI model kind of references today but not perfectly you got physical layer yep you got some sort of interoperability layer middleware and then you got the application so you got super Computing super cloud and super apps absolutely that's going to be we see that and and how do you prepare how's the company prepare today I mean Main Street I.T that doesn't have the Uber staff is it managed Services how do companies compete knowing that the attackers are coming absolutely AI is coming you got a surge of AI new capabilities you've got attackers how does how does a normal company compete it would be very very difficult and I think you wind up turning to trusted vendors to do lower layers in your delivery so you can focus on the upper layers to serve your customers and help your employee base be effective and manage your partners and the stuff that really matters to drive the p l um awesome well Doug thanks for coming on and keynoting our supercloud three great to see you I'm honored back in the game back in the arena as they say with aviatrix put a quick plug in for Aviation we've got 30 seconds uh for for all of you out there that are seriously trying to develop Mission critical workloads in any cloud and are beginning to think about how do I not be held hostage with one cloud and they're they're awesome vendors but but you need to be Diversified look up aviatrics where we will help you on the net work optimization side and the different corollaries around that awesome Doug Martin here supercloud I'm jeopard Dave vellante stay with more coverage I've got a great agenda today we'll be right back with our next guest foreign [Music] foreign

2023-08-24 17:17

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