Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ajit Gupta, CEO of Aryaka Networks (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You’re saying that the public cloud is what it is and it’s a mess administratively because there are too many disjointed entities with no one player with any economic incentive to straighten and streamline things. The acceleration is all happening on the B2B side with players like yourself and on the B2C side like your previous company, and also internally in Google and Facebook. They are accelerating their own content network. That’s really how the Internet is developing.

Ajit Gupta: Right, in bits and pieces. People are doing what they can to the extent they can. They are recognizing the international laws and boundaries. Some countries in Europe want their content to be stationed within their geographical borders but at the same time, their companies are global. How do you transport this huge amount of data from one continent to the other continent? That is where we come in by saying, “There is an intelligence that we have built. We can make that experience much better.” You’re right. Companies are making individual efforts, but I don’t see a world where the public Internet will give you the same benefits as a private network like Aryaka offers.

Sramana Mitra: Right now, you’re doing Aryaka and you’re completely focused on that. If you would look at the problems out there that another entrepreneur or you in a different incarnation were to look at, what problem would you try to solve?

Ajit Gupta: I have spent the last 15 years thinking about networks. I can’t seem to get my head outside this area.

Sramana Mitra: I’m actually asking you in that context. You are obviously a world expert in that area. I’m asking you for more of an assessment of the network situation especially with this whole content acceleration, private network, and public network. Where do you see open problems that you can build a company around?

Ajit Gupta: I don’t know about the expert part but I’m certainly learning in that area. Thank you for that. Within the network, there are still a lot of moving pieces. There are a lot of consolidations that can happen. If you look inside an enterprise and if you look at the data center, they have boxes for firewall, WiFi, and security. There’s so much evolution that is going to happen in the network side. Just from our perspective, we started off by saying, “This is a private network. You can accelerate all your internal traffic.” Then we realized that our customers are asking us, “Can you also accelerate outside the firewall?”

This takes us back again to my Speedera world. Given that the core concepts are very similar, we launched our application acceleration. Now we have one single network for both inside and outside the firewall so you don’t have to go work with Akamai. You don’t have to go work with Riverbed. You don’t have to get MPLS from AT&T. You can come to us and solve all those three different needs and more with one networking solution. In a very small way, what we are doing is combining these three different multi-billion dollar industries into one.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ajit Gupta, CEO of Aryaka Networks
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