Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Prem Jain and Soni Jiandani, Co-Founders of Pensando Systems (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s actually talk about some of those use cases. One of the questions that I’m wrestling with in my mind is what architecture are we talking about. Is it a public cloud scenario or private cloud scenario?

Soni Jiandani: Initial customer base consisted of enterprise customers like Goldman Sachs. They talked about how they want to move towards building a private cloud that mimics the architectural building block of a hyperscaler like Amazon.

If I am building a private cloud, I want to increase the security posture of my own private cloud. I want to have the ability to push that security at the compute edge across every new server I bring into my corporation, and increase the security posture across my private cloud.

At the same time, I want to have the ability to have full line visibility, telemetry, and observability. What I cannot observe, I cannot secure. I don’t want to lose my observability posture. I want to increase my observability posture in real time while having security running end-to-end across my private cloud environment. 

Sramana Mitra: Is Pensando a security company?

Soni Jiandani: Think of Pensando as a company that’s offering an enterprise customer all the building blocks they would need to build a private cloud infrastructure, which is based off of the same principles of what a hyperscaler would look like on premise.

At the same time, we are selling technologies to cloud companies. These are cloud customers that are looking to build that next generation cloud offering for their customers. We become the infrastructure. 

Sramana Mitra: It is full stack.

Soni Jiandani: It’s a full stack for the IaaS bare metal offering. When I talk about the full stack, it’s the silicone that goes in the servers, it’s the software that runs on that silicone. It is a policy-based management platform that will provide a single place to manage all the policies that you are deploying across that infrastructure.

Sramana Mitra: Who’s the competitor? It sounds like IBM is the competitor.

Soni Jiandani: IBM would be a customer. All cloud customers, whether they are tier one or tier two, as our customers. Enterprises building their private cloud that want to have the exact same architecture as a hyperscaler are our customers. 

Sramana Mitra: The question I’m getting at is competition. Amazon build their own. Google build their own. All these hyperscalers build their own. You are providing that as a full stack solution to the players like Equinix. Who is the competitor?

Prem Jain: The closest one is a company that Amazon bought called Annapurna. They take about five chipsets to solve the problem similar to the kind of services we are providing – network services, storage services, and security services. 

Sramana Mitra: I haven’t followed what Amazon has done post-acquisition. Is Annapurna just powering Amazon or is it being offered as a competition to you?

Prem Jain: It’s only powering Amazon. We are working with IBM and Equinix.

Sramana Mitra: You put the whole system on a chip instead of those five chips. You consolidated the system on a chip.

Prem Jain: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Awesome! You don’t want to do this with Cisco because you want to take the cap off. 

Prem Jain: Our intention is to work with all the ecosystem partners. Any company that wants to leverage the technology, we are open.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Prem Jain and Soni Jiandani, Co-Founders of Pensando Systems
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