Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Prem Jain and Soni Jiandani, Co-Founders of Pensando Systems (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit about where are the open problems that you are not working on but there could be other entrepreneurs with unique expertise who can solve the problems you are seeing.

You probably have a hundred ideas that come to you. You have chosen to work on Pensando, but there are probably many other ideas that deserve somebody working on it. What are some of those?

Prem Jain: One area is artificial intelligence. There’s a lot of hype that went into AI in the last few years. We have the capability of streaming the data. Think about something that has an AI engine built into it. They can look at that particular flow and tell us if there is a security issue on that particular flow or there is an abnormality.

The paradigm of security used to be based upon signatures or whatever people have figured out over the last 10 years. The new thing is, as long as I’m communicating, can I figure out if the person is the right person? Then based on what’s going on, figure out what they’re trying to do to make sure they’re not unauthorized.

We provide a lot of data in troubleshooting. Can they look at it and say, “By running into this particular engine, I can pinpoint exactly where the problem is.” What everybody is facing is to pinpoint the problem in the network as quickly as possible and doing it as accurately as possible.

There are a lot of opportunities in security. We are only sitting at the infrastructure level. Things will get integrated. There are a lot of things going on in terms of encryption and compression. We have designed our architecture so that if somebody has a great compression technology, we can integrate.

The other level of innovation which is needed is making sure that the hybrid cloud works in a very seamless way. We thought that we can play on both sides of it. Then there’re people who are doing the software only applications. Assuming that the cloud vendor is not using the technologies we are using, there’s also an opportunity to make sure that you can integrate and make sure that we provide a seamless integration solution. Then there are a lot of areas which are needed in terms of algorithms development.

The main thing is, what is the fastest way to converge and find the problem in a very fast way? We are providing a lot of hooks underneath. We are giving opportunities for companies to become part of the ecosystem and help out.

Sramana Mitra: Are you going to do a PaaS strategy?

Prem Jain: Not in the cloud itself. We are providing a platform as a service as long as they use our technology. Even if they don’t want to use our stack, they want to develop their own stack, we are open to that. 

Sramana Mitra: My question is more in the sense of if you’re providing hooks, you probably want other developers to build on your hooks. 

Prem Jain: Absolutely. Those examples that I gave you, those are the hooks. They can leverage it. 

Sramana Mitra: What is an example of something that you want somebody else to build on top of your platform using these hooks?

Prem Jain: One thing is, we are creating a data lake model. We’d like to have somebody who can correlate that particular data so we can consume it ourselves as well as it can be consumed by the end user whether it’s for troubleshooting or security.

Soni Jiandani: The second example is, I’m a telco and I want to move all the functions to a virtualized platform. We are highly programmatic and we provide a platform development kit. We have customers who have the ability to license our platform development kit and move all the functions into a virtualized environment. 

Prem Jain: That example is Airspan. It’s a great example for anybody who’s doing CMTF in the cable industry. We have virtual CMTF. They can come back and say, “I can use it for accelerating those services. That’s a compliment to the cable industry.

Sramana Mitra: I enjoyed listening to you. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Prem Jain and Soni Jiandani, Co-Founders of Pensando Systems
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