CostIQ – Rod Stuhlmuller, Aviatrix

This is Textron TV. Hi everyone. Welcome back to another tech strong TV.

Segment here. I want to introduce you to rod rod stalmudder. And I hope I got that right.

Hey Rod. Welcome Hi, how are you? Good, so it's great to have you on I should mention rods with aviatrix and he's gonna explain to us the company as well as a little bit about rod.

And we'll go from there. So Rod, give us kind of your story. All right.

Well, you know, I've been a networking guy for a long time going back all the way to synoptics and Novell, you know, some old names that you may have. I heard of them. Yeah, but most recently I you know, I was with nasira doing software defined networking that was acquired by VMware and became NSX at VMware.

And then I joined aviatrix here recently as we're we're really doing very similar things. But instead of virtualizing the data center, we're virtualizing the clouds and doing Cloud networking. Got it.

When did you join aviatrix? If you wouldn't don't mind, I joined about almost four years ago. So about three three a little little more than three years ago.

I joined with Steve. Mullaney who was also the CEO of nasira and then he joined back in at that time in 2019 because we really saw, you know the world changing, you know, we've been talking about Cloud for a long long time. Right but Enterprises hadn't really gone to the Cloud yet.

They weren't serious about going to the cloud. They were trying things. But about three years ago.

They really started going to the cloud and all the sudden, you know, there was some need for some Advance networking capabilities that just wasn't there as part of the basic constructs actually, you know, and then you know covid happened in that I guess kind of put an accelerator on that whole Cloud migration digital Transformations Etc. When you talk about kind of advanced Cloud networking and we're gonna get into our regular Topic in a bit, but you peaked my interest what what kind of advanced Cloud kind of capabilities are you talking about? Well, really a lot to do with how simple it is right in in the cloud most of the time you're having to build things based on basic constructs and doing things like for instance updating route tables manually and it's very complex and it's different in every single one of the clouds.

So if you learn how to do it in AWS and then you have a multi-cloud environment and you need to do it in ensure that becomes even more complex to be able to do things. So what we do is we upgrade the native constructs and make them the same in each one of the clouds. So now you get consistent networking capability the way you build networking consistent visibility consistent security and consistent automation.

So for instance, we have a single terraform provider so you can write one infrastructure is code module. It works across all the clouds. Love it.

Very cool. We're going to talk today though about Cloud cost transparency and this is You know, there are two I think the two worst bills to try to decipher in the world. Are your cell phone bill?

Because though they've gotten better. I'll give the cell phone carriers credit. They've gotten a little better.

and then your Cloud Bill Cloud bills are I mean, it's very easy to see what the bottom line number is, but trying to figure out how you got there. Is crazy but good. Yeah, I was gonna say there are some tools out there Cloud Financial Management Systems things like apto and flexera and others that do a good job for the finops teams to take let's say your AWS bill or your Azure Bill and break that down to the accounts that things are charged you right?

So now you know that all these engineering accounts used all of these different instances and you can add all that up and you know that gets charged to to engineering what they had a real trouble with and we kept hearing from our customers was how do they deal with share resources? So let's say you have a Cluster of Next Generation firewalls that you're sending traffic through and there's a whole bunch of different groups that are using this next Generation firewall cluster, but you don't have a way to take the cost of that shared resource and accurately Define who's using it. So what it does typically is they either have to absorb the cost themselves, right or they peanut butter it across everybody and give everybody an equal charge for that shared service.

But now HR says, hey I'm not using as much as engineering is using so what we're doing because we are the network that all this stuff has to go across is we allow you to Define that shared resource and then look at exactly who's using it which accounts in engineering or using an adding it all up and saying hey engineering is using 50% of that. Thorson HRS only using 10% of that resource. So now you can accurately distribute those costs in a way that the the cost centers are accepting that they yeah, that's about how much we use.

So is you know, I'm listening to you and I'm thinking of myself is this more art or science? Yeah, it's actually more science. Right?

It's the ability to have you know, the actual data that says these accounts are using this shared resource and we're taking it further than that looking at what other things are going on. One of the things that we heard a lot from our customers is that egress charges are something that they really have a hard time getting a handle on and this is because the cloud providers make a ton of money on saying hey, we'll let you come into the cloud. But if you exit back out of the cloud, we're gonna charge you on a participate basis, right or if you go between regions or if you go between availability Zone, there's all these little places where you're exiting one part of the cloud Network going either out of the cloud Network or into another part that they're racking up the bill.

So we're looking at being able to track Those things down so that we can give intelligent insights to say Hey, you could move this resource from one region to another and not have to exit to to get to it because you're doing that, you know once a week you're sending a big database file across or whatever it is. And because we see what's going on on the network, we can actually give intelligent insights about how things could be moved in order to optimize costs. excellent I guess you know put I'm your customer.

Find out. Well, first of all. Did I say to myself look I already invest in one of these fin-op Solutions and they're good, but they're not giving me everything.

I need to really understand. Where you know where this money's going, how do I allocate it? And right so I I guess I come to that conclusion.

How do I think of aviatrix is the company that's going to help me with that? Well, I think what we are finding is that it's not that people are buying aviatrix specifically for this cost capability. It's it's that they're looking at improving their entire network operations their ability to support business critical applications.

And this just becomes an added capability that the infrastructure itself is delivering and allowing them to to achieve some of these goals that they're being asked to achieve especially from the finance perspective these days people are being pressured to show exactly how these Solutions are being used. It used to be kind of the Wild West go out and spend what you need in the cloud. But now as people are moving these business critical apps into the cloud and people are focusing on you know, how their resources are being used people are looking for ways to reduce the costs.

And so that comes down to really being able to Monitor and understand. And how they're being used. But the way that people find aviatrix more more often than not is that they find that the the networking capabilities in the cloud have limitations don't give them the visibility that they need don't have multi-cloud Solutions.

So they they are then looking for ways to overcome those challenges and that's that's how they find aviation. I got you because that's what I thought as well. Because you know that that seems to be I mean the cloud training costs transparency.

To me is is it a must-have or nice to have right and you got to make sure you got must apps. Yeah, right if you're gonna have a successful company, and and that's I guess the way it should be. Let me ask you a question.

You know, we talked about the migration of the cloud by Enterprises about three years ago and continuing during covid one of the questions. Oh comments. I've been hearing from when I talk to people is you know, how the macro economic conditions affected.

Digital transformation how they affected Cloud. What are you seeing over there? Well, I we're seeing it accelerate actually, I mean, these are things that that you know, this cloud is continuing to grow people are migrating out of their data centers into the cloud and nothing's slowing that down.

Certainly the macroeconomics are going to you you're seeing custom. Our customers are laying off a lot of of people but in terms of their infrastructure and the way they're trying to make their businesses more efficient through leveraging things like Cloud for agility and speed and and supporting business critical applications like sap, none of that slowing down at all. interesting good You know what?

We never mentioned the website did we I'm sorry, and I want to get more information. com. We've got some really great resources there to find out what we're doing.

Also. We've got a really great program for training. We call it Ace which is aviatric certified engineer.

You can think of it the way you know a ccie for Cisco was back back in the day. We have multiple levels of of training. There's something called the associate Ace training that is the first level.

com, please and we've got about 18,000 people who have gone through that training today. Wow, I've really good feedback because it's not just about aviatrix. It actually helps you understand how you do networking in AWS in Azure in Google and Oracle and and then kind of pulls it all together at the end.

It says okay if you're trying to Do this in a multi-cloud environment? Here's how you need to think about it. I love it.

com for us AV? I a t r i x Aviation it basically is a female Aviator, right? Okay.

Yep. The company was originally founded by a female engineer out of Cisco. And so when they originally named that that's where it came from.

Love it. Hey Rod. Thanks for coming on and being our guests on Tech strong TV today.

Good luck with Aviation. Come back and visit us now. I appreciate the time.

All right, man, bye-bye. We're gonna take a break on Tech strong. We'll be back in just a moment with another guest.