Gary Sevounts has a long history in cybersecurity and is currently CMO at cloud networking and security company Aryaka. He talks to Red Herring about the shift to cloud-based applications, MPLS and Aryaka’s focus on software service, networking and connectivity.
You released a report recently that highlighted the fact that global private networks offer over four times faster application response times than those on the Internet. Could you explain to me the advantages and why more firms should be using companies like your own?
We did research that shows that nearly 50% of applications have moved to the cloud. If you can’t guarantee the quality, reliability and speed of over 50% of application traffic, the performance is so bad that it’s unacceptable. So the report we’ve done (the SD-WAN report) actually looks into that problem and…two factors: one is called application response rate, which is how fast the app responds via Internet. The other is the variance between different geographies: today it’s responding in 10 milliseconds, tomorrow it may be responding in 10 seconds – so there’s variance. We looked at one year of the traffic and came up with percentages of variance – obviously the higher the variance, the worse it is.
The applications for corporations that used to live in data centers, that you have to install on your laptop, and it was a huge infrastructure associated with it, the costs, now it’s all in the cloud, right?
Global enterprises by definition have offices, partners, employees all over the world, and for the applications that are mission critical, it’s really important for those apps to have a very quick response rate. If you’re waiting even a minute for your screen to refresh it’s not going to work because if that happens, you’re gonna eventually introduce weeks and months of delay in production and in revenue.
This was working really well until about five to ten years ago, when the applications were in data centers. So what enterprises did, they used this thing called MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) that was sold by telcos, and it’s a private connection that is reliable, secure and fast, that is much better than the connection over Internet because it’s private.
You don’t share the highway with anybody else: it’s just for your company so you can guarantee the performance, you can guarantee the security to a degree, and the reliability. The service will be there at the same level at any time because it’s yours.
What makes Aryaka unique in this respect?
The Internet by default is unpredictable. It’s sort of like living in London and saying, “Hey, in London I’m gonna guarantee delivery of perishable goods within one hour, anywhere in London.” That may work 60-70% of the time, but the rest of the time when traffic is jammed you’re not going anywhere. It’s a public structure: you don’t control it.
We have built the first and only global SD-WAN. We built a cloud-native private network that is a dedicated superhighway for a company’s cloud applications. we have built 28 POPs (Points of Presence) around the world, with the premise that those POPs are within 30 milliseconds or less to connect for 95% of global business users and we have built software defined tech, like SD-WAN optimization, advanced routing, visibility monitoring portals, we’ve built all that into our solution that is delivered from the cloud.
How do you expect that to evolve in the next year or so? What’s the company’s main objective right now?
Our main objective is rapid growth with the right financials and customer service and quality. The IPO will come when the timing is right, so it could be 2018, but we’re definitely marching toward that.
How did your partnership with Deutsche Telekom come about and what did that allow Aryaka to do?
Deutsche Telekom looked at us as a strategic partner. They could partner with us to deliver the global SD-WAN to their customers, that’s the potential they saw in us as a very unique company – nobody else has that capability. They invested in us, and we welcome that investment. We used that for extending our global service globally and in sales and marketing efforts.
Is SD-WAN is reaching its peak? The tech seems to be going through its purple patch of uptake: do you expect that to continue in the next year or two – and which kind of companies are adopting SD-WAN quicker than others?
SD-WAN tech is very popular right now. What’s interesting is that two years ago there were just a handful of SD-WAN providers, but now the IT organizations recognize the importance. We’re seeing most telcos partnering with one of the vendors and having an SD-WAN offering in their portfolio .
What’s driving things is that there’s two types of SD-WANs – the regional SD-WANs, all the Internet-based ones, plus MPLS. They’re regional, because they only can deliver regional cloud connectivity.
And then there are global SD-WANs. Those are the enterprises that are looking for global solutions, and that’s where Aryaka comes in. Unless the company has a fully private cloud-native network, they won’t be able to offer a global SD-WAN. Telcos don’t have it, they have MPLS network but it’s not cloud-native. Aryaka is in the unique position to be the only global provider of global SD-WANs.
Do you expect that competition will increase or better itself in the next couple years or do you remain confident that Aryaka’s solutions will remain unique for the foreseeable future?
We believe we have a very unique differentiator in at least two areas. One is that we built a global private network which took a lot of money, effort and know-how to build. We’ve also patented the technology, so they wouldn’t be able to replicate that without violating patents.
The second is the networking technology that we have developed ourselves is also unique to this model of the global SD-WANs like the optimization; network visibility; the SD-WAN; the dynamics. It’s is all designed for this model to deliver from the cloud as a service. It’s all purpose built, that would be very hard to replicate.
Our company combines three DNAs: the software service, the networking DNA and the third is the connectivity. Those are the three things no other company has right now.