C2C Fortnightly News: Who Doesn't Love a Good Press Release? - NC2C003

Chris Miles: 0:00

Welcome to the Cables to Clouds podcast. Cloud adoption is on the rise and many network infrastructure professionals are being asked to adopt a hybrid approach as individuals who have already started this journey. We would like to empower those professionals with the tools and the knowledge to bridge the gap. Hello, and welcome back to another fortnightly or biweekly or semi-annually, or whatever we're calling it these days Cables to Clouds news episode. So yeah, my name is Chris Miles. I'll be your brief host for today, and then I'm joined by my colleagues, as always I almost said as awfully as often, that's correct as always Tim McConhey and Alex Perkins.

Chris Miles: 0:57

So yeah, without further ado, let's get into the news. It was pretty pretty light news Last couple of weeks. Nothing, nothing too major, but we were able to pull out a few nuggets here that we felt were definitely worth covering. So first one is up from Tech Crunch. We have an article here talking about how the recent cloud security startup, wiz, which is now valued at apparently $10 billion, raises another series of funding at 300 million for series D funding.

Chris Miles: 1:32

I will say I mean the new round of funding didn't surprise me. The evaluation of 10 billion did not see that coming necessarily, but I will say that I think this aligns well with the, the research that's coming in right now about all these, the rise in cyber attacks and everything like that. I remember I was listening also to a recent episode of the chaos lever podcast with Ned Bellavance and Chris Hainer and they were talking about AI, kind of changing the realm of what cyber attacks are going to look like, and I think this I don't know if this is coming off the heels of that, but I could very much see. You know cybersecurity, you know being that continue or being that continued growth market, just because of how that's going to evolve over the next you know, five, 10 years. Y'all stop there. How do you guys feel about this?

Alex Perkins: 2:25

Yeah, 10 billion is a lot of money for a startup. That's the unicorn status, right.

Tim McConnaughy: 2:32

Like that is yeah, already hit you. Yeah, it's crazy.

Alex Perkins: 2:37

I think the this article mentions that they already have 40% of the Fortune 100 as customers. So I get, I mean that, you know, kind of makes sense, I guess, if you look at it from that perspective. And yeah, like like you said, chris, this, this space is going to blow up, and especially with as hackers or you know, I don't know hackers or adversarial hackers be hacking state state actors and all the

Alex Perkins: 3:03

as they start adding AI to their tool set, like, yeah, this is going to ramp up more and more, so not not surprising, but very large numbers.

Tim McConnaughy: 3:11

Yeah, I mean, I mean $10 billion. Like I said, unicorn. I mean you know no IPO, right 10 value $10 billion. You kind of actually wonder, right, so they just went through series D funding got $300 million with a $10 billion valuation IPOs coming. Yeah, Like what you kind of wonder, like why, why'd you bother going through series D?

Chris Miles: 3:34

I think they said this series brings their total funding to about $1 billion. So yeah, it's been. It's been quite a ride.

Tim McConnaughy: 3:41

I mean and and with with that amount of uh, with not only the amount but the caliber of customers they've got, you know, unless they're severely undervaluing their product, how are they? Why would you need the funding? I would wonder, right, Like, so maybe they're just taking it so that you know that that their uh competition can't, you know, and that's still a thing out there, especially now that zero interest rates are gone, right, like actually, that that money is probably quite hard to come by. So, yeah, I'm really interested to see when that IPO is coming and or if they get acquired ahead of time. I mean, with the $10 billion valuation that pretty much puts it out of the realm of of anyway, but uh, you know some of the bigger, bigger players, you know, maybe Cisco's, maybe Cisco will buy it or something, uh, but yeah, no, really interested to see how this goes.

Chris Miles: 4:31

Yeah, and I would say that, um, that adoption they have of the, what was it Fortune 100 that probably leans to? Um, the, the, the ease that it appears there is with their deployment model, as far as it being agentless, and you know, it's very easy to integrate into your environment and give you the.

Tim McConnaughy: 4:50

What's the size of it right?

Chris Miles: 4:52

yeah they're calling it says, and you know, provide you this full graph. I guess the graph is the main thing that they lean on. You know, that's the money maker, that's what they're showing to the sea level, the C suite, and yeah, it seems like it covers, you know, storage, networking, compute, everything. So, yeah, it's not not really surprising, but on the tail of that, so with with that evaluation, we have an article from SDS central also that Shows the recent CEO of Z scalar. I'm not gonna be able to say his name. President Dali rock has recently left the scalar and gone over to is so I can't imagine.

Chris Miles: 5:42

Why yeah, no idea, definitely not following the money. But yeah, so that's just figure. We'd lump those two together because it one kind of orchestrates to the other, right.

Alex Perkins: 5:55

It's. Also he took the COO overall at with right. So it's like the same exact thing, right. He just like lateral move and obviously with that valuation, yeah, I think that's definitely some incentive there.

Tim McConnaughy: 6:09

Yeah, although I wonder. So I mean this is my fault, I don't keep as up on on every cybersecurity company or other companies out there. You wonder. You know he was CEO at Z scalar. Yeah, so I have two questions, right. One is who's backfilling his role as a scalar, and is that you know? And second, like what you know why? Obviously I wouldn't say why with us, because it's pretty obvious we discovered why, why he would go over to his, but does that you know? You kind of wonder, okay, well, was the scalar not taken care of him? Or was this? You know a lot of these he sweets come in like you know, do that contract positions you know, like you're in for two years or something like that. You know, maybe there was a timing thing involved with that as well, who knows?

Alex Perkins: 6:55

Well, that's the. That's the tricky part, right? I mean, we don't know. A lot of this is all speculation, but Z scalar also has like a very large chunk of the market as well. Yeah, one of these articles I don't remember which one, but one of these articles in the that are linked says while was has like 40% of the fortune 100. I think Z scalar has 40% of the fortune 500. So it's like there's a. They both have a huge, huge share. So who knows what's going on behind the scenes there?

Chris Miles: 7:21

Yeah, interesting. Alright. So, tim, you want to go to the next one.

Tim McConnaughy: 7:26

Yeah. So I hesitate to even call this news, but so we'll go ahead and cover it anyway. So there's a press release that Z scalar just in that just put out, and this is one of the things where, like, you just want to like, I don't know, shoot yourself with all the marketing buzzwords, but alright, well, we'll go ahead and try to unpack this. So Z scalar introduces industries. First, zero trust sassy, built on zero trust AI. Yes, you guys heard me right. There is now a thing called zero trust AI. What does that mean? Fuck, if I know. But there is now a thing called zero trust AI. See, I was, I was. I thought zero trust was an actual, was a framework, but it turns out this is a. It's actually something that in enables AI.

Chris Miles: 8:18

So yeah, this is probably akin to when you know products started coming out being called dev ops, things like that. It's like I don't think. I don't think these totally aligned to one another. But you know, whatever, make your money dude. Yeah, this one was weird because that's the thing. Once you probably break this down and they explain the technology piece of it, it probably will be something cool on how they're doing this on the back end. This particular press release just kind of said so much without saying anything at all. I have no idea how this changes anything with regard to Zscaler or SD-WAN or Sassi or anything.

Tim McConnaughy: 9:00

Real quick. Let me just add the. And then I want to see what Alex thinks too. But let me just add the little snippet, if you will, because you think like, okay, cool, well, that's the headline. They're going to explain some part of what Zero Trust AI is. No, they basically just say let me see if I can find that specific. Yeah, so the Zscaler, the leader in cloud security? Again, this is a press release, right? This is not me saying that the leader in cloud security, this is Zscaler saying they're the leader in cloud security, just Zscaler, zero Trust, sassi an industry-first single vendor Sassi solution built using Zscaler Zero Trust AI to help organizations reduce cost complexity while implementing Zero Trust security. Blah, blah, blah. There's no actual. They don't elaborate on how the Zero Trust AI works or how it helps, or basically what it is. They just say it's awesome and we have the only one. This is a press release. Take it for what it's worth. This is very common, as you'll see from some of the other press releases that we'll cover.

Alex Perkins: 10:02

All right, yes, so, chris, I'm glad you at least opened the window a little bit, because I'm not going to defend this.

Alex Perkins: 10:09

But I did do a little bit more, digging past this article, and I think the problem is just the way that they worded this, because saying built on Zero Trust AI, that means nothing. I don't even I don't know who came up with that, but that doesn't make any sense To me. The article. What it's saying is their platform has AI built into it and they're just lumping Zero Trust and their platform and AI together into some weird marketing term called Zero Trust AI, for no reason. What the link basically says is that they have combined everything, so it's like a secure SD-WAN, a secure data center, secure like branch connectivity, like all their products. Now they can combine everything into their own platform, and then there's AI that runs on the platform. So I don't think they didn't do a good job of explaining it in the article and the title definitely is not helping them out, because, like you said it is, if you dive into it, it is. Actually it does seem pretty interesting. This isn't it? This article?

Tim McConnaughy: 11:12

Yeah, I mean okay. So I just joined the technical marketing team at ABA Tricks. So I see stuff like this and I'm just like this is a 100 pure not technical marketing but just straight marketing play.

Alex Perkins: 11:24

This is buzzword bingo.

Tim McConnaughy: 11:26

This is buzzword bingo stuff here and I can't let Zscaler off the hook for it. I agree with both Chris and Alex that the actual technology is very much a you know. Hey, we took all of our stuff, we rolled it together, we added AI on top of it to give us insights to machine learning, all that good stuff Kind of like. I'm sure it's something similar to like Cisco DNA assurance or whatever, where we're leveraging insights, but the way it's worded is just. It's just unforgivable. I need somebody at Zscaler to apologize to the industry for coming up with the term Zero Trust AI, please.

Chris Miles: 12:02

I would love to see someone try to read this article aloud without stumbling, because it is just your tongue. Is getting some work on this thing, boy, it's. There's so many tongue twisters. It's nuts, but yeah, like you said, it's word salad. But at the end of the day, the technology seems like it could be promising. It questions my faith and marketing. What little faith I already had in marketing to begin with. But, like you know, it makes me wonder who reads this and like, yeah, this works, this convinces me to do something.

Tim McConnaughy: 12:33

We got to buy this right now. All right, all right, that's enough, yeah.

Alex Perkins: 12:39

I love it.

Tim McConnaughy: 12:41

Let's move on to the next one. Alex, I think you got this one.

Alex Perkins: 12:43

Yep, so this is a press release from Marista, a company we actually don't talk about too much, right, they have always kind of not really been into the cloud game much, at least from my perspective but they announced their cloud EOS on Equinix Metal and really you got to dig into this one a little bit too. But it's really cool, tim, I don't know if you had something to say about this, but the way they do their SD-WAN now it kind of intelligently meshes between all these cloud EOS instances. To me, maybe this is the first step into Arista expanding out from their traditional markets, which I think has been more like they're trying to win the enterprise and data center from Cisco right, and this is like a step in a direction towards cloud.

Tim McConnaughy: 13:34

Today I learned that Arista has an SD-WAN that makes two of us. I don't know what to say about it. Okay, so the cloud EOS router, basically, I mean. So to be clear, this is not a press release, but I don't know if Equinix would consider this a press release or whatever it's more like a product announcement.

Tim McConnaughy: 13:57

This is now available on Equinix. So this cloud EOS router is just like a catalyst 8KV from Cisco or I forget what. The virtual one is now flew out of my head from Juniper. Yeah, I can't remember the virtual one from Juniper, but it's just, they've taken the tech stack, they've virtualized it and now it's a router that's virtual right. So that makes perfect sense on a sorry, a platform like Equinix Metal, which is where most of those types of deployments go, which is a little bit different than Equinix Fabric. So yeah, I mean there's not much to the actual announcement. Again, the idea that there's an SD-WAN was I was scratching my head. I got to go look this up now. But, yeah, what do you think, chris?

Chris Miles: 14:45

No, I'm pretty much on par with you. It seems pretty par for the course. Seems like this is pretty similar to things already there. Maybe you're just playing some catch up. The integration with Equinix, I guess, does make it a little bit easier to leverage their footprint, but it still seems like the. I hate comparing it to Cisco directly, because that's all you pretty much do when you talk about a RISTA, I feel like, because just legal battles and things aside, but it just seems like it's right there they're competing with that market now, where they've been competing with their data center market for years now. So yeah, we'll see where it goes. Don't see expanding too far into the cloud beyond this, but we'll see what happens.

Alex Perkins: 15:33

I will say obviously, the benefit of RISTA is that EOS is the same operating system, no matter what you're using it on. So it's a little weird to me that this is an announcement, because I think cloud EOS has existed for years and there's like a C EOS there's like a V EOS. It's all the same operating system. Is this just like the?

Chris Miles: 15:55

V EOS. It's just that Equinix now supports it on their bare metal offerings.

Tim McConnaughy: 15:58

That's what it is. It's now on bare metal.

Chris Miles: 16:01

Like I said, the benefit, the major advantage of RISTA is that the EOS is the same on every device. I think this is that's the major benefit of RISTA.

Tim McConnaughy: 16:12

Most people aren't thinking man, I need 10 different kinds of device and I wish I had 10 different kinds of device that had the same software. Most people are thinking man, I need something that's about 10 times cheaper than Cisco.

Alex Perkins: 16:25

Well, I'm just because of that I have to say this, because I hear this all the time. Because of that, because it's one operating system, they actually have the least amount of vulnerabilities compared to anyone in the industry. There's like a CVE graph and there's just like a dot compared to like a giant stack versus everyone else.

Tim McConnaughy: 16:44

Yeah, I mean I'm poking fun here, but I've actually heard a lot of good things about their software. Their software has always been very solid. And when we had PEDON we were talking about the idea of that was it was very invested in, like the cumulus type model where you've got like your software runs the same on any of the hardware you put it on, absolutely. So that's valuable actually.

Chris Miles: 17:06

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's like I said, it's just it's unfortunate that they've they've been put in this bucket. I mean the legal battle you know kind of played into that, but you know that's that's where it's been, and it's hard to not talk about one without talking about the other. But yeah, their product seems solid. Their stands are very vocal whenever, whenever you want to talk about a Rista. So yeah makes sense.

Alex Perkins: 17:30

Yes, absolutely.

Alex Perkins: 17:32

All right, let's move on to the last one. So Arcus this is another post directly from Arcus. So the title is Arcus revolutionizes multi-cloud networking with egress cost control, or ECC is working, to call it, going forward with potential to reduce up to 40% and cloud connectivity cost. Really, this is to me this reads as they have some way. It doesn't go into a lot of detail, but they have some way of figuring out egress costs in like in your routing from from your cloud networks, and they can use that and build some kind of intelligence into it so that you can get the cheapest route, the cheapest egress route. So I don't know, it's interesting post. What do you guys think about this one?

Chris Miles: 18:22

Yeah, another one where it's like, yeah, it sounds cool, but like how are you doing it? No, no, no, made on the bone whatsoever here, like it makes sense, obviously, like you know, even in their documentation or their, sorry, their solutions page, you know, talking about egress costs equating up to, you know, 15% of your monthly cloud bill.

Alex Perkins: 18:43

That's, that's spot on yeah totally legit, it's totally true.

Chris Miles: 18:46

And if you're going to, you know, talk about cutting those down. You know, potentially 40%. I would just like to see some detail on how that's done. You know there's kind of this idea that's put in at least some of their diagrams that I see that like oh well, you know we're going to pick the right egress provider, whether it be you know another cloud or maybe another region or something. I don't know exactly how they're doing this calculation on the back end. I mean someone in my mind. I'm like you're still paying all these other egress costs along the way to get it to that other egress point. I don't know where you're really saving 40%.

Alex Perkins: 19:20

So that's, that's what I would like to see yeah, that's a lot.

Tim McConnaughy: 19:23

Yeah, Is it? The other thing is, aren't the egress? I mean? Okay, so I know that, obviously, per cloud, per region and so on, so on, so forth, that the egress charges are not flat across the board? Right, we all know that. But as far as I know, there's not like this huge amount of variability where we need to run this, this, this calculation and figure this all out with any kind of regularity, right?

Alex Perkins: 19:44

And I guess it depends on your flow. Yeah, exactly, I mean right, it does depend on. The problem is, though, like how do you justify that? Right? Because if they're, I don't know, it's almost like more complexity is better for them in this, but you don't want that anyway. So it's like how does this cut? Can you imagine?

Tim McConnaughy: 20:02

troubleshooting this. Could you imagine troubleshooting this if there's a problem?

Chris Miles: 20:05

You can, only you can only troubleshoot it a month later when you get the bill.

Alex Perkins: 20:11

Oh, and also like the path. Like how do you? That's not the path you want. Like what if? Like the more laced cost path isn't the optimal path. Right, like it's higher latency.

Tim McConnaughy: 20:21

You really want this right?

Alex Perkins: 20:22

Absolutely.

Tim McConnaughy: 20:23

It's. The problem is that the, just like all press releases, this is a press release, if we make it clear, right, because it's on. This is on Arcus's website. You know they're announcing this, this capability, and again, it's pure fluff, right, there's absolutely, like Chris said, there's absolutely no being on the bone here. There's just words about, like buzzwords about how they can save money, but there's absolutely, there's not a diagram. There's not, there's nothing that can explain how they can actually accomplish any of this. I even went looking for videos on their website and, of course, all the videos are all very, you know, showing data centers full of blinking lights and talking about egress costs and how they can save them, and it really didn't help. So, yeah, I mean hey, if somebody from Arcus is listening, feel free, like we would love to understand this, please Love to see how it works.

Alex Perkins: 21:13

Same with any of these, on any of them really anything we've talked about.

Tim McConnaughy: 21:17

We'd love to see it in action.

Chris Miles: 21:18

I was trying to think if there's been any previous examples of like this direct integration with like technology and like cost. I got trying to think if there's been it, because it like this is the first thing I want to be like. Oh well, you get to, you get to write your own press relation, you get to say you're revolutionizing something, but this is the first. Like I'm thinking about it, I was like I actually can't think of another product off top of my head that has directly said that we're making you know.

Chris Miles: 21:43

Routing computational or routing decisions based on cost alone.

Alex Perkins: 21:48

Yeah, there are tools right that can give the you, the customer like this information, but yeah, I don't think there's anyone that's used that information and then productized it, if that's a word.

Tim McConnaughy: 22:00

I mean it's got to be, so it's probably doable. But, like, the thing is that what would make some such a thing actually valuable goes so far beyond just saying, oh well, this is the cheapest way to get out. I mean, we were just talking about it, right, like you have to be able to make to weigh that against other priorities, right, if you're. If all you want is a button that says go the cheapest way, okay, cool, maybe that's like not hard to do, right, but what if? Okay, but what if it fails? Sla, what if it? You know like what if it's too too much latency or whatever?

Chris Miles: 22:30

right, that's a whole other I think the difficulty with this is like if you're if you're looking for the opportunity to save money on certain types of flows, the only thing that's going to take the least cost path is the traffic that no one cares about, right.

Chris Miles: 22:46

Exactly the only thing that's really going to use the low cost path is the thing that people aren't looking at and they're not complaining about. So if you're, the majority of your traffic is not that are you going to be able to really benefit from this at all. I'm not saying it's a bad idea. It seems so like the scales are so.

Tim McConnaughy: 23:04

Very niche, very strange, very complicated. Can't see doing it simple. I don't see it. If they're saying they can do it, they didn't say simple. I didn't see the word simple in here anywhere. That's to their credit. I don't see simple in here anywhere. But how easy and simple it is to do. But yeah, I mean, if it's not simple, then you have to ask yourself what are my? I guess the complexity worth the choose, worth the squeeze on it, right, right.

Chris Miles: 23:27

Yeah, 100%, all right. Well, I think that wraps it up for today. Like I said, pretty light news week. This is releasing on the 14th of February, so last but not least, we want to wish everyone a happy Valentine's Day. Spend some time with your loved one. Hopefully, if you don't celebrate, do some cool shit. You know, do some other cool shit. Love yourself, Take care of yourself.

Tim McConnaughy: 23:56

Love yourself first, exactly.

Chris Miles: 23:58

Exactly. So with that we'll wrap it up. Thanks for tuning in to the most recent episode of our Fortnite review show, which we like to call it now Just kidding Fortnightly Cables Cloud News episode. So with that we'll leave you and we'll see you next time. Cheers, see you, bye, bye. Hi everyone, it's Chris and this has been the Cables to Clouds podcast. Thanks for tuning in today. If you enjoyed our show, please subscribe to us in your favorite podcatcher, as well as subscribe and turn on notifications for our YouTube channel to be notified of all our new episodes. Follow us on socials at Cables to Clouds. You can also visit our website for all of the show notes at CablesToCloudscom. Thanks again for listening and see you next time.