Welcome to the tech in 20 minutes podcast where you will meet new tech vendors and learn how they can help your business. At Clark Sys, we believe tech should make your life better. Searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven't heard of before. Hi. I'm Max Clark, and I'm talking with Olin Scott who is the senior vice president of worldwide channels for Aryaka.

Olin, thank you for joining.

Thanks, Max. Happy to be here.

So, On, what does Aryaka do?

Gosh. Most synthesized, we provide next gen cloud networks. We fall into the SD WAN space, but I feel like that's an oversimplified descriptor of what we do. So we provide next generation cloud networking.

In terms of, like, what problem do you solve or how would people say, no, I need a next generation network and Aryaka is somebody I wanna talk to?

The primary problem that we solve, what I always tell people is that our superpower is application performance, right? So the problem that we solve for the layperson is when you're working on your computer or your mobile device or or what have you for any business application, the performance of those applications.

So if I'm not a network engineer or monitoring network throughput, you know, the symptom that I would look at or kind of think about in the back of my head is, oh, outlook is slow or my ERP is slow or I've got an office that we need to open up somewhere far away from me and and what's their experience gonna be like?

That's exactly right. And recent global pandemic really threw an exclamation point on this, which is increasingly businesses are moving these applications to cloud compute environments, right? So you know you said outlook, right? People are going to Office 365, people are taking their telephony and they're going with Microsoft Teams or 8 by 8, right? So increasingly the business applications that organizations use, they don't reside on servers sitting in those companies offices anymore, right?

They're either in private clouds and data centers that are increasingly far away as people try to decrease their data center footprints or they're in SaaS environments in cloud environments just like the applications you and I use in our homes, right? So everyone as they move to these cloud compute environments, these applications were not were not really built to run on legacy, I guess for lack of a better word, on legacy network architectures. So we've created this cloud architecture right this global cloud architecture to make these cloud compute applications behave in in the manner that people have grown accustomed to over the last decade when the applications were running on servers under their desk right? It's probably the best way to characterize that.

I mean cloud is a component of it so application access to a cloud or SaaS application and you also have, you also do an MPLS augmentation or replacement as well for companies.

We do, and I think those 2 are very interconnected, right? So an MPLS network and I'm trying to say so I'm not talking to the the technology people of the world, right? An MPLS network connects your offices, right, they connect your offices all over the planet but and there are ways to connect it to different clouds but if I have my business applications that reside some in AWS and some on a Microsoft Azure platform, maybe my ERP package is coming from Oracle's cloud. Businesses use multiple clouds in fact we did a recent state of the wan or state of the wan report state of the wan survey and greater than 50 percent of businesses were using in excess of 10 clouds, right? And a significant number were using in excess of 50.

So when I say clouds, I mean a cloud based application or a SaaS application, right? So there's numerous numerous SaaS and clouds being leveraged not just 1 or 2 by virtually every enterprise. So having an MPLS network doesn't really solve for all of those problems but at the same time internet doesn't really solve for reliable performance, right? There's always most businesses and this is getting into a little bit of tech talk and I don't mean to do that but most businesses think that there are 2 solutions there's this MPLS network or there's the internet, right? MPLS is not optimized for cloud applications and or applications or saas applications right from 1 and the same and internet does not solve for consistency or reliability.

So is there an option 3, right? And option 3 is what Aryaka brings to the table which is this software defined network that you access via the Internet, but then it's all private. Yeah. That's where it has a significant impact on application performance.

I mean, so let's start with the Internet. You know, I have an office, and we move our application, you know, Office Office 365 or CRM or ERP, whatever it is, into voice or into a cloud provider or SaaS provider. And it's not great. You know, why wouldn't I just go and say, hey. You know, we've got a 100 meg Internet connection.

Let's upgrade that to 500 meg or a 1000 meg or get multiple whatever circuits and solve the problem that way. I mean, does doesn't that solve the problem?

The honest answer is sometimes, right? It's just not a reliable solve and I love that characterization because that is exactly what every every heck not only every non IT person but a whole lot of IT people right think that the solution to a performance issue. So I don't like the way that my application is behaving so the answer is I'll throw more bandwidth at it. And there are some applications there are increasingly a lot of applications that are sensitive to things like latency and jitter and those are just technical terms for things that inject delay or inconsistency into how data flows, right? Sometimes it's not the data has to flow extremely fast it just has to flow extremely consistently, right?

Like like some several applications will tolerate a bit of delay as long as the amount of delay doesn't change every second, and that's what you can't control on the internet, right? But if you run that on a private network, a private software defined network, then you can control that delay, which will make those applications like the one you just talked about like voice, right, behave quite frankly extremely well.

What makes Aryaka unique at solving application performance, you know, and increasing the user experience. I mean, we look at SD WAN as a space and we talk about, well, there's other SD WAN vendors selling appliances that get installed. Why should somebody think about Ariaka and what do you do that makes you different?

So it's a couple of things. I'll make this as succinct as I can because it's not a short answer and by the way that's probably our biggest challenge, right, is that it's not a, is it's it's multiple things, right, that you have to address to ensure application performance. What many SD WAN competitors or vendors, fail to contemplate is that the 2 WAN options are not always one of them is not always ideal, right? If it's MPLS that's not cloud optimized, right? It's not when I say cloud optimized it just means it's not really well meshed and connected to all of the sundry different cloud platforms and SaaS providers that are out there.

Internet is not really entirely controllable, right? It's not it's once you get out there it's it's the wild west, right? Now we we're spoiled a little bit in North America. We have very excellent net our internet infrastructure quite frankly that will solve in many many many use cases. The challenge is for when it doesn't, right?

So what again what another SD WAN provider does is it makes an intelligent real time decision between WAN one and WAN two. What Aryaka does that other SD WAN providers do not is one we have our own intellectual property, our own WAN optimization stack that we run and it does things like multi segment optimization. All that means is if you're traversing data across great periods of distance it normalizes that latency as I was talking about earlier as well as doing application acceleration. So it doesn't just pick the best path for those applications but it effectively compresses and it puts a treatment on the application to be to make them behave better. And And then the other thing that we do that others don't is our customers only use internet for the last mile for the piece of the network that is from their business location to our nearest SD WAN gateway, right or our nearest application gateway and we've got these all over the some people say pops right, you hear people say pops, we've got these all over the world so our pops place us within 20 milliseconds of 95 percent of the world's knowledge workers.

That's the only part of their data that's traversing internet and then at that point it jumps on to a private layer 2 backbone where we have complete visibility and control of those applications. So that's a lot of words Max, but effectively we don't just pick the best path out of WAM 1 and WAM 2 but we also put treatments on the applications and then we run the entire thing on a private backbone and both of those things let us control the application behavior and ensure a positive customer experience.

On your private backbone, your pops provide a a unique benefit for Aryaka in that, as you said, you're you're 20 milliseconds to the end user. And so, you know, it's not about traversing oceans anymore when people need to connect their offices or their their branches or their their users. This also meant that you became known as the company to solve problems related to crossing oceans more than, you know, let's say, what a traditional SD WAN or the space really becomes. And so how how do how do you react to that and and where does Aryaka really fit and who are your ideal customers? Like what does that profile look like?

Yeah I really appreciate that question because this has been a bit of a conundrum that we've put a lot of energy into over the last couple of quarters, Max because you're right we are I'd even go as far as to to liken to say people would often try other solutions because we were not known as being inexpensive, right? We could solve any application performance issues, right? And you would come to us when nobody else could fix it, right, because there is no doubt that we could but it was probably going to cost you and hopefully my CMO won't shoot me for saying it that way but if you had an issue in South Africa or in China or anywhere I could fix that application performance issue. So as a result you know better than half of our customers today have a location going into China or somewhere in the Asia Pacific. An enormous amount of our revenues on a percentage basis are are made up of international multinational clients and our brand was really that if it was 50 or 100 site WAN in North America but 5 were international, you might hire us to do those 5, right, and bring it back to your North American headquarters and somebody else that would be and I'm going to do air quotes right that would be good enough and charge you half the money would get that regional piece.

So we love that brand. The brand is great that nobody can solve an application performance issue better than Aryaka. Problem is that brand is quite limited right and you leave a lot of opportunities to address intra region concerns for your customers and our customers have asked us to solve those. They want us to solve those issues for them. They like the the white glove managed service, they love the application performance, they love the elimination of all of the complexity, they just don't know that it's quite worth it for some of those smaller intra region locations.

So based on feedback from our customer advisory council and our partner advisory council we basically deconstructed the Rolls Royce right the rocketship solution if you will and we made certain elements of it a la carte because we want to be able to to solve an entire global network for our customers. So now if you're dealing with a bunch of sites that are within North America or within Europe or just within the Asia Pacific our price points are 70% less than they were just 3 4 5 months ago because in those locations customers aren't leveraging that global intercontinental core, they're just staying in the region so we sort of de burdened the price points and I'm oversimplifying it but effectively we made a whole bunch of that stuff a la carte so that we have broader applicability.

Well I mean let's talk about that specifically. What are you know what are the components influence pricing and then what does pricing ranges kind of be? I mean you know it's a it's a broad question but I think it's helpful to understand what you're talking about.

There's 2 things that we do. 1, well it's almost 1 and the same, we maintain this global layer 2 core. So we have this fully meshed global layer 2 core. It's not and that's important when I say you know the technical audience would appreciate the fact that it's layer 2 it's not a carve out inside of somebody's IP network or a fast track within another internet network or an MPLS network. This is a native layer 2 right network that we've that is ours right we've subscribed to these wavelengths or these IRUs and we we maintain that network.

We also size that network because we've got tools right that give us great visibility into the applications and the traffic on our network, we size our network at Global Core to support the full burden of every customer's max subscription, right? And as a as a former optical network engineering, you know, guru yourself, you know that that many would argue we've over engineered that network, but it's a way that we can guarantee application performance. We could probably get away with less, but but we wanna be able to you know, there's a reason why we got n p NPS scores in excess of 65. Right? And that's a big part of it.

So maintaining that core is probably the biggest single ongoing operating expense, but it doesn't make sense to to burden the cost of somebody that's got 60 sites in North America with that particular burden. And there are other inputs, but I think that one's by far the most relevant.

So I mean, from a customer perspective, when I'm looking at pricing for for sites or, you know, how much would this cost me, you know, it's a factor of how much bandwidth do I need at a location and whether or not that bandwidth needs to diverse your network or not. So when you say regional, like in in the United States, if I was just, you know, bouncing back and forth between a few different states, that wouldn't necessarily go across your backbone. It could just traverse the internet. I mean is that is that accurate?

Well that's exactly right and that's part of that big change we made in the last couple of quarters. So in the past I have a box, it's the simplest way to say this, I have a device that runs my software, I put it your location and that box will support 150 mega traffic. In the past, I would have taken that 150 mega traffic and pointed it right at my core. Right? And and for your for your web browsing or for, you know, basic, like, less critical applications or app let's not even say less critical let's say applications that perform just fine on the internet that's overkill right that's an elephant gun to the problem so now we just we'll we'll let the customer the the device still supports 150 meg you may use internet right for a 140 megadat you know your the 80% of your applications may just use the internet and you may say I'm going to take these 5 applications I'm just going to take my SAP HANA and my Microsoft Teams because those are the 2 that misbehave right for me on the internet I'm going to point those across to Aryaka's core and subscribe to just 5 meg or 10 meg of that core and that dramatically brings down your price point very dramatic.

In fact all you pay for is that little bit of extra private core bandwidth.

Awesome. So it becomes more of like a surgical application. You're saying, okay. We we now have this in place, and we can monitor, and we know we have this application issue we need to address. And, okay, let's take and send this application across Aryaka and deal with it, make it really nice and wonderful, and then everything else can just do path selection, you know, across internet links.

That's right. And then and what we've also did was we made it, you know, I guess the best way to liken this is all of these family plans that you see for mobile service, right, they date back to the, days I'll do commercial for MCI back in the days of friends and family, right, where you pull everything together. I'm dating myself, but that's how we how we let our customers subscribe to that core bandwidth as well, right, so so they can, you know, you can just subscribe to one amount for the entire global enterprise, and then everybody can tap into that as they need to. So if one particular location means a whole lot, one day or one week or one period, then they can tap into that.

Can you give me an idea? I mean, we talk about customers being, you know, global companies that are, you know, half hard to reach places. Who is who are your customers? What I mean, what's the profile? What are the sizes?

And now as you've changed your delivery model and being able to support non pop based traffic, you know, how does that change things for you and where do you see as your ideal to you know customer size going forward?

Yeah it's it's a great question. So we have almost 40 percent of our base of customers is manufacturing, right, no surprise there, right? So multinational superpower for the Asia Pacific equals you know manufacturing so we have always crushed it in that space. We do really great in technology and internet companies, companies who are effectively selling something that that is an application that has to perform, right, we do tremendous with them. Professional services, right, law, accounting companies where the performance of their applications and what their customers experience is far more important than saving 10% right on the next lowest price solution.

Those are the those are the spaces where we've made our bones right in the last half a decade. What we're really seeing and what's super exciting because it tells us that our strategy from how we productize this is working is that we've actually earned a couple of, I can't name them yet because they're kind of working through that process, but we've earned a couple of really sizable, you know, 100, 200 plus location retail awards. And I would have told you that was a real litmus test for us because I would have told you 6 months ago that that retail was the antithesis of the space where we're going to be successful because that's an industry that operates on razor thin margins and and typically speaking is especially price sensitive right in their branch land. But what we've been able to do is show them that we can be as competitive as anybody at the branch win, but how we differentiate is that we have these add ins that are there just in case. Right?

It's nice to do that. You know, okay. I can get the best price with the Internet only at my edge, but if I do need something else or if something does behave a little finicky down the line, I have somewhere to go. Right? I have things I can add in.

I mean, so that that's kinda interesting because you talk about application. We we focus on, like, SAP HANA or Office 365 or these other common things. But in retail, you're talking about point of sales terminals and inventory control systems. And the ability to transact fast at a cash register really makes a big impact. I mean, how many customers you can service, what their in experience is.

And it's less about, in that story, you're not talking about what your employees' experience is. It's what your customer's experience is interacting with your employee in your store. I mean, that's

That's right. It makes a difference. Right? And there are, I mean, there are some there are some point of sale systems that'll cash some of those transactions for you for some period of time, but that's if they go down. When they're working, cashing doesn't matter.

It's how fast are they transacting, right, and how long is that line getting? So you're exactly right.

Yeah. The the worst thing you can have happen to you as an in a network is not that the network goes down, is that the network is slow.

You have to be a network person to appreciate that, but you could not be more accurate. Right? Is there I mean, people have these things that they put in place for when it breaks. What about when it doesn't break, but it just isn't working either?

What's the engagement process like? I mean, if if we're looking at SD WAN and we think Aryaka would would be a good solution here, I mean do you have a evaluation and proof of concept? I mean how would people actually look and say does this actually make a difference for us and this is how we want to go forward?

Generally speaking, our customers come to us through one of our partners. We're a very channel or partner driven organization and our partners have a level of expertise with the right way to engage with Aryaka and and the right use cases and fit for our solution sets, but all of them are empowered to give our customers a proof of concept. We call them a proof of value and we see that for a large preponderance of our I mean why wouldn't you, right? We do it we do them for most customers free of charge. We just want there to be a significant level of engagement from our customers, right?

So when they have an application where they think this is gonna solve their need or or, you know, fit the fit the requirement from a WAN transformation standpoint, we'll generally help them stand up a couple of locations just to kick the tires and make sure that it delivers, and I'm really proud to say that when we put those proof of values in place, typically speaking, we'll put them in place and we'll we'll call it 30 days. Obviously, some big enterprises ask for longer, but invariably, they put them in place and within 3 or 4 days, they call us up and say, alright, we'll take it. Right? And that's pretty interesting because that doesn't happen with everybody. So we really like I mean, we we convert, I wanna say, like, 92% of customers that go to proof of value.

That's incredible. On, thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.

No. The pleasure is mine. Thanks, Max.

Thanks for joining the tech in 20 minutes podcast. At Clark Sys, we believe tech should make your life better. Searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven't heard of before. We can help you buy the right tech for your business. Visit us at clarksys.com to schedule an intro call.