Prosimo CEO: The Networking Incumbents ‘Aren’t Looking At Cloud Networking The Same Way’

‘We're really not seeing the incumbent players in this mix, the networking players that we all know are not in these conversations yet. They're not looking at cloud networking the same way. They're looking at it as SD-WAN extending into the cloud,’ Ramesh Prabagaran, co-founder and CEO of Prosimo, tells CRN about the company’s progress this year and its plans for 2024.

Multi-cloud networking upstart Prosimo knew that many enterprises were looking to radically simplify their infrastructure when it got its start in 2019. Since emerging from stealth mode in 2021, Prosimo has been hard at work addressing the needs of its customers by collapsing multi-cloud networking, security and application performance to make life simpler for enterprises and channel partners.

Ramesh Prabagaran, co-founder and CEO of Prosimo, spent time at Cisco Systems in a product management role and prior to that was a founding member of then-SD-WAN specialist Viptela before its acquisition by Cisco. The entrepreneur knows that while born-in-the-cloud companies are good at taking a consolidated approach to things like application performance, enterprises, which are sometimes dealing with hundreds of applications, multiple cloud providers and remote users, don’t have the same luxury.

These customers more and more are turning to cloud networking specialists like Prosimo to bridge the gaps between their multiple cloud environments, while offering secure connectivity. At the same time, Prabagaran said the startup is beating the competition—mainly, the networking incumbents that are viewing cloud networking as a way to extend what they are already offering by adding SD-WAN and Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) to the mix.

Prabagaran spoke with CRN about what he and his team worked on in 2023, the trends driving multi-cloud networking, the company’s competition and what the channel can expect in 2024.

Here are excerpts from the conversation.

Tell me what you spent 2023 working on.

You would expect that going into mid-December [things] would be quiet, but we've actually been having lots of good customer conversations fueled by a few things. There's quite a bit of focus on cloud. That's one area where spend still hides. A lot of customers are looking at, ‘How do I solve for different challenges with respect to cloud networking?’ The common themes that we have seen across this year—one is there's been a lot of focus on adopting cloud-native technologies for what's provided by AWS, [Microsoft] Azure and GCP [Google Cloud Platform] and so forth. Those get the customer to a certain point and then they hit somewhat of a brick wall of sorts [with] scale. So if suddenly the number of workloads goes from 50 to 1,000 that you need to migrate, you get hit by a bunch of challenges. Or some of them are fueled by, ‘I'm bringing in an additional cloud region. Maybe the predominant presence is in the U.S. but now I'm bringing a different region into the mix.’ And so that's causing a bit of a challenge. Maybe it's a different region or different cloud altogether, maybe I'm on AWS and I'm bringing in Azure, so we have like, five or six of those types of triggers that we have seen that immediately lead to really looking at what cloud networking could mean for me.’ Long story short, what that essentially means is there is a bunch of unsolved problems on top of what the hyperscalers have built that customers need in order to essentially deliver on what they care about to their internal enterprise constituents. There are multiple application teams wanting to move fast and develop in the cloud. There is a central cloud platform team and within that, there is a cloud networking team and their goal is to help make sure that the application teams move fast. Now in the process of doing so they make some assumptions. They empower the application teams to do a bunch of things, but they inherit a whole lot of mess as a result. And so a bunch of things that are not solved by the hyperscalers now suddenly start to become enterprise problems. Within that, we have seen that if you are a born-in-the-cloud company—if you're like Airbnb and Uber and so forth—then you know how to crack it because you've done this the right way from the ground up with the architecture. You can button all the operational pieces together. But the enterprises, to begin with, have multiple decades worth of applications they're bringing into the cloud. On average, we have seen like 500 to in some cases 8,000 applications that some of these [companies] have. And so they have to cater to each of the individual requirements of those applications and all of this actually compounds into a bunch of interesting challenges that's kept us busy. There were a lot of enterprise deployments through 2023.

What are some of the trends you're seeing that are pushing enterprises to adopt cloud networking?

If I were to break down what some of the things that [enterprises] are realizing have value that they're willing to pay for, one big area is cost itself. The things in particular within cost that come up time and again with all customer conversations is cost visibility, which is for cloud networking, in particular, is how are they utilizing the resources and who's using what, which app team is using the most, which application is using the most, all of the nice things that aren't visible and natively provided by the cloud provider. Equally important is cost control. Now that they have all the visibility, [they want] help optimizing on the cost. We've seen a new person in the room in these conversations, which is the FinOps [person]. The finance [person] used to be somewhere in the corner of the room last year, but they are having a really influential seat at the table right now. We were asking a bunch of finance [people], ‘What do you care about the most?’ And a common thing there is forecastability. They say, ‘It's great I get to see the bill, but that's looking at it in the rearview mirror. What I need this for is forecastability. I need to know that I'm not going to burn through that cash in the bank.’

The second one that I would say has caused a lot of head-scratching has been the noise that has been created by AI coupled with real tangible use cases that have come aboard as a result. I think everybody had this mad frenzy towards AI. But if we were to peel that back to why do we care about it sitting in the network, it really boils down to, there's an AI engine sitting in the Tier One region of a single cloud. But your data is in multiple places. AI works well when the data it needs is actually pretty close to the engine itself. But now, that's not a one-and-done problem because we've seen enterprises use not one AI engine. Even us as a 50- to 60-person company, we use three models across two different clouds. We've seen the emergence of, ‘I have AWS Bedrock I use for this, and I have GCP Vertex I use for this’ and they're all feeding off of data that's in completely different places. So, that's caused some interesting networking challenges, which also has led to a lot of cross-cloud challenges. Multi-cloud networking in the past was usually, ‘I have my data center, I have some workloads here, some workloads here, some workloads here and I make sure that all these guys can communicate.’ Now we're seeing a lot of East-West cross traffic. ‘I have AWS workloads that need to talk to Azure and have an Azure database that needs to access GCP, and so forth.’ So, there's a lot of cross-cloud stuff that's happening and it’s one where if you're not able to make it work, somebody's screaming at the networking team.

The final one, I would say, is there's a crossover point where it used to be the data center was kind of the center of focus and cloud was an attachment to that. That shift over the last few years has happened already where cloud is carrying a certain number of workloads and data center still has its number of workloads. But I would say in some really large enterprises—we're talking about some really large retailers, financial services and manufacturing companies—where the crossover point to cloud becoming the center has kind of happened. And that's happened in the last year or so, more applications are in the cloud than are in the data center. When that shift happens, these guys are looking at it as they need to design for cloud-first and then bring two islands together. Now there's a bunch of things being designed for cloud in particular, and then I have my data center and to bring these two islands together right now … I need to build a backbone, I need to build a network, we need to bring security elements, I need to bring Zero Trust architectures into the mix sense. That also made another interesting shift, essentially, between cost, cross cloud, AI-driven operations and also kind of kind of cloud becoming the centerpiece of sorts that we've seen.

How are you beating the large networking incumbents?

The incumbents, the large companies—and I've spent my fair share of time with these guys as well— they’re looking at it as, ‘What is the dominant motion right now?’ And the dominant motions in the networking industry are really two [things]: One is SD-WAN and the other one is Zero Trust Network Access, or ZTNA. They are looking at it as, ‘How can I extend this so that I make my cloud networking relevant?’ We're coming at it slightly differently where we are making cloud the centerpiece of all of this and saying you need to build the architecture for cloud-first. Then, we are essentially marrying the two islands together. Why are we able to do that? Because I don't have a horse in the SD-WAN race. I don't have a horse in the SASE race either. So, we are building multi-cloud networking and providing a proper bridge so that the two islands can exist. The incumbents have been looking at extending their existing stuff into the cloud, which has its own set of challenges because different technologies are different.

The cloud providers themselves have built a lot of really good foundational capabilities. I don't need a router in the cloud, I can just use the one that was provided by AWS or Azure or GCP and that's really good and solid. And I get the geographical presence, I get the compute, I get all of that. So, how you build that for cloud actually is quite different. We are a small company. We have probably 60 to 70 active customer engagements and we're really not seeing the incumbent players in this mix, the networking players that we all know are not in these conversations yet. They're not looking at cloud networking the same way. They're looking at it as SD-WAN extending into the cloud.

What are your priorities for 2024?

We really want to make our plays by being the startup that we are and the number of customers that we really serve—we want to focus on making those guys happy. The [priorities] way at the top would be cost. Cost control, cost, visibility, forecast stability, all that is going to be really, really at the top. The second one is the whole cloud as backbone, zero-trust architecture that needs to be brought in in order to kind of do things for cloud so that I can cater to the developer velocity required, that's going to be pretty key. So, we continue to focus on innovation and using, fortunately now, AI models to help with that. The two primary things that customers are really struggling with right now are around cost and the overall architecture. So, those are going to be our primary areas of focus. Fortunately, many of these enterprises are at the bleeding edge of adopting cloud and so through that, they tell us all the challenges that they're running into and so we build to that because we are privy to that. The paying customers are driving us in these directions, which will propel us into the right places.

What can partners expect from Prosimo in 2024?

Amazing things, actually. The last 11 enterprise deals that we closed have all been led by partners, which was very different than last year. You have [companies] like Trace3 and Presidio—your primary networking partners who are in the forefront. And then you have large service providers as well. And so, we have service providers, not the telco side, but rather kind of the B2B side of it that are taking the technology and essentially going to market to their customers.

Let me give you the easy button. You bring your applications. The layer below, which is how do these apps all talk to each other? How do I bring in network connectivity and make that work, the managed services, all of that are providing revenue-generating opportunities for [partners]. And so, we have seen a scale of one-to-one in terms of dollars on implementation and practice compared to actual capabilities. So we provide our capabilities and technology, and implementation and practice, in many cases, are one-to-one in terms of in terms of dollars, and so huge opportunity for partners to either provide cloud practices and advisory services. We provide an assessment report that many partners have taken and embedded back into their advisory offering. So, they go to customers and say, ‘I have a tool here’ and they can go run that tool, whether it's paid or unpaid, that's left to the partner, but that gives them a whole lot of insight into here are the areas that we want to focus on as far as cloud transformation goes. So, huge opportunity across the various types of partners like your traditional networking partners, service providers and the global systems integrators as well. Systems integrators are knee-deep in many of these. They've been brought in for cloud migration and app development, but infrastructure is a problem that they need to solve as well. So, across the three cohorts, we have seen quite a bit of focus and activity.