Guest: Jeff Gray (LinkedIn, Twitter)
Company: Gluware (LinkedIn, Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

Gluware is a software company focused on delivering intelligent network automation for the cloud-native era. With more and more enterprise businesses looking to automate manual tasks or DIY scripts, Gluware is there to help.

The company recently announced a $43 million growth funding round, led by Bain Capital. This new round of funding is all about extending the company’s reach, so sales and marketing will greatly benefit from the influx of cash. Gluware also intends on doubling down on security orchestration capabilities as well as Robotic Process Automation (RPA), further abstracting Gluware and creating drag-and-drop low-code/no-code capabilities that span both current networks, as well as ChatOps, and being able to tie into the tapestry of automation.

Security is on the mind of Gluware CEO and co-founder, Jeff Gray, when he talks about the role of networking and security in the modern cloud-native world. To this, he said, “The amount of drift that’s happened throughout the tens of thousands of network devices per enterprise is actually scary.” Gray then addresses the importance of automation and security when he says, “Being able to go out and discover the actual state, look at the vulnerabilities, and then be able to fix those vulnerabilities at scale instead of sending teams of humans that would take constant time and constant repainting of the house. You can’t even finish repainting your house before the next vulnerability comes out. This patching and this closing of the doors, only automation can do this.”

Gray adds to that by bringing network automation into focus, saying: “Our 4.2 release is about doubling down once again on security.” For that, Gluware is making their config drift and audit application even more robust, as well as real-time Syslog notification.

According to Gray, the future of Gluware includes network RPA, robots and automated tasks,  visualization and topology, what-if analysis, looking at things from a visualized perspective for faster root cause analysis, and automated site documentation.

The summary of the show is written by Jack Wallen

Topics covered in the interview:

• Quick update on what’s new at Gluware, the company?
• What’s driving the need and demand for automation?
• Importance of network in the modern economy and cloud-native landscape and why we should talk about it.
• Tell us about the latest funding round.
• What are the areas you will be investing into?
• Every company wants security; we talk about practices and Shift Left, but how much is happening in reality vs paper?
• What role does networking play in security as the network is the gateway to anything and everything.
• What does it all mean for Gluware as an intelligent network automation company?

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Swapnil Bhartiya: Hi, this is your host Swapnil Bhartiya. And welcome to another episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk. Today we have with us once again, Jeff Gray, CEO and co-founder of Gluware. Jeff is great to have you back on the show.

Jeff Gray: Nice to be here, Swapnil.

Swapnil Bhartiya: There is so much to talk about today. Of course, the funding is not the biggest thing, but if I ask you, if you just quickly tell us what’s been going on at Gluware these days, so that we can talk about all these developments that are happening at the company.

Jeff Gray: Right. So Gluware is a software company that’s delivering intelligent network automation for the cloud era. And as you can imagine, it’s a very exciting time as enterprises are looking to automate their currently manual tasks or their DIY self build scripts and we’re helping enterprises across the globe automate their networks and delivering value to customers worldwide.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Can you talk about what is driving this need [inaudible 00:00:59] enterprise customers depending on whichever size it is to automate, because what I do feel that automation is going to be the key, for whether you look at cloud native workloads or whatever it is, you cannot do a lot of things manually. So talk about what’s driving this demand.

Jeff Gray: Well, there’s security, clearly and there have been a lot of hacks and attack vectors and ransomware you’ve seen throughout the press and you’ve written on yourself. There’s also the outages that have been happening. There’s some notable outages, the Facebook outage just a couple weeks ago, lost the company a lot of value and took down a lot of businesses that depend on Facebook, for example. And so it’s really the pressure that is now on the network and either the manual processes or the self build DIY scripts. And they’re just breaking under a lot of the pressure. And so there’s an urgent need to bring more intelligent automation in to serve the business. So that’s really what’s driving the need for this technology.

Swapnil Bhartiya: When we talk about networking, when we talk about cloud, of course, storage, networking, compute, but networking is never the shiny object there. But the fact is, if you shut down all the roads, the whole trade, whole economies, civilization will collapse. Actually the… Whether you talk about silk route or any other civilization road is what, so network, I look as roads, so you can have a highway or you can have narrow, but you need both of them. So talk about the importance of network in the modern either economy or cloud native landscape and why we should talk about it.

Jeff Gray: Well, network is generally forgotten about until it’s not there. And so just like your example of the road, you drive on the road every day and you don’t really think about it because it’s there. And if that road’s gone, it’s very, very hard to do both day to day, as well as very urgent and important business and commerce and once again, going back to the Facebook outage that brought it mainstream. People haven’t thought about network automation in a long time. And the fact that Facebook went out and they are one of the best in world’s most renowned DIY self-build shops. All of a sudden network automation comes into the mainstream, both for current infrastructure as well as cloud. And so one layer of automation across growth as you break the on-prem seal has become even more important.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Excellent. Now let’s talk about company, you folks and of course, as you funding around, give us some details about it.

Jeff Gray: Sure. So we have announced a $43 million growth funding round led by Bain Capital. And we’re very, very excited about the partnership with Bain and the right investors to grow this. I think it’s a testament to how mainstream network automation has become, this is now mass market. Every enterprise that is regulated or has a network over even a 100 devices really needs automation from both an outage reduction perspective as well as a compliance and security perspective, enterprises are just not able to keep up. And so this investment is a testament to the importance of this technology in the marketplace.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Excellent. Can you talk about what are the areas where you will be, of course, using these funding to invest? What are the areas that are looking at growing?

Jeff Gray: Sure. So predominantly sales and marketing to starts because we already have this technology that’s been proven with major enterprises across the globe, fortune 500s, as well as global 2000s. And so this is about having more reach and getting this technology out into the market and all the corners of the market. The other use of funds of the technology is to double down on our security orchestration capabilities. That’s become much more important.

Also, driving network, RPA network, Robotic Process Automation, further abstracting Gluware and creating drag and drop low code, no code capabilities that span both current network, as well as cloud, as well as ChatOps, as well as being able to tie into the tapestry of automation, like the [ServiceNows 00:05:15] of the world and third party, ITSM platforms. The other piece is driving AI. And because of Gluware’s unique position where change is processed through Gluware, we have the ability to derive both cause as well as context. And so building our AI capability and doubling down on what we’re doing on the AIML side will give enterprises much faster root cause analysis and bring in the concept of self operating into networking, very, very exciting time.

Swapnil Bhartiya: You talked about security. We have been talking about security a lot these days, there are two aspects. One is that we do talk a lot about it. Everybody wants security, but how it’s going in practice. If you remember a few months ago, I think it was August when NSA and when more government agency, they released a whole guidance around, Kubernetes Hardening that they captured a lot of things, which also kind of reflects that at least set the federal level, they are taking these threats as you initially mentioned, a lot of attacks are happening. So talk about these two aspects that we love to talk about. Everybody wants security, but what is happening in reality because you folks actually deal with the real workload that are there.

Jeff Gray: Well, there’s the traditional, let’s say cybersecurity and threat detection and looking for attack vectors. The other piece is responding and making sure that you’re not leaving the front door or the back door open. And the network is a real problem for many enterprises. They’re looking more at like compute more at inside the cloud or inside the data center. But the amount of drift that’s happened throughout the tens of thousands of network devices per enterprise is actually scary, Swapnil, when it comes down to it. And so being able to go out and discover the state, the actual state, look at the vulnerabilities and then be able to fix those vulnerabilities at scale instead of sending teams of humans that would take constant time and constant repainting of the house. You can’t even finish repainting your house before the next vulnerability comes out. This patching and this closing of the doors, only automation can do this.

Now, the other piece is that that network automation from a security perspective, we are doing every day for our customers. Our 4.2 release that we announced that at Open Network User Group is about doubling down once again on security right now. So that is multi vendor CVE with, from the [NIST 00:07:50] database vulnerability. So across different vendors, also making our config drift and audit application even more robust. So that’s rolling down as well as real time Syslog notification, anytime there’s a change, being able to notify Syslog server. So that’s the reality of what’s happening. And then in the future, as we move forward with our security orchestration, it’s a lot more on firewall, a lot more on security policy, that’s coming.

Swapnil Bhartiya: When you’re talking about, everybody likes to talk about security. We also used to talk about, we still talk about zero trust network. So network was, again, becomes the gateway for a lot of…. If you are talking about either a scam or unauthorized access, so you folks can also be gatekeepers. So what role can network itself play, especially automation, that’s where they initially [inaudible 00:08:42] or security to secure because as we are moving more and more towards cloud [inaudible 00:08:47], it’s a complicated word, you don’t even know how many pieces are there and there. So network can play big roles or do you think that’s a wrong kind of statement?

Jeff Gray: No, I think it’s absolutely correct. And the truth of the matter is attempting to roll out a zero trust architecture across both a network that exists as well as modern, let’s say Greenfield technology that you would bring in. It’s extremely hard to do manually. And if you look at different next statements and all of the policies that you need to roll out throughout the network to get to as far as close as zero trust as you possibly can, it’s just so difficult to do that from a manual perspective or a scripted perspective where you also need to keep all the code up and make sure the code doesn’t break.

And so maintaining all of that self build coding if you will, it’s hard to keep your eye on the ball, making sure that all the zero trust policies are in place and they’re verified. And they’re absolutely there as well as keeping up all of your scripting and make sure your scripts are up and running. We’ve seen multiple customers that started this process and some of the teams have left. And now they’re back to manual and manual is not an answer for what enterprises need when they’re trying to keep all the doors shut and locked and not get hacked. So this is a very, very important point that you brought up.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Right. So as you just mentioned the role of networking itself for security and other things that we talked about earlier, how do these change in the market kind of also affecting Gluware, how the itself is evolving? Does this change dynamics in the industry itself?

Jeff Gray: Absolutely. Well, first of all, we’re listening to our customers and we, as I mentioned, have major blue chip fortune 500 global 2000 customers, and they depend on us and we have developed a trusted relationship where they tell us where we need to go and we focus our resources to solve their problems. That’s actually how 4.2 was released and doubling down on security because this is what they need it. And it’s very exciting that we have this type of relationship with our customers to be able to do that. Now, the longer term items, network RPA, further abstraction where it’s more about rolling robots out into the network and allowing them to do automated tasks, the visualization and topology, what-if analysis and looking at things from a visualized perspective for faster root cause analysis and automated site documentation. That’s very important, where we’re going in security policy orchestration.

And then of course, everybody wants AI, but what does that mean on the network? And as I shared, because we have that unique position, so close to the network elements, whether physical or virtual we’re in a very interesting spot to be able to look at context and so trends, and then being able to make recommendations, was that a good change? Was that a bad change? We recommend you do this change moving forward and also self operating on a use case based capability. So as many little pillars of self operating as you can derives an overall self operating net effect for the businesses. So I know that was a bit of a long answer, but we’re evolving along with what our customers need is the short answer.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Jeff, thank you so much for once again, taking time out from your schedule. And of course, talk about this funding, the changing market, the role of networking, which is really important. We should talk more about that. So thanks for sharing those insights. And as usual, I would love to have you back on the show and I am excited to… I’m looking forward to our next conversation. Thank you.

Jeff Gray: Thank you, Swapnil. It was wonderful to be here and looking forward to the next conversation as well.

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