What’s Next is a biweekly conversation between SDxCentral CEO Matt Palmer and a senior-level executive from the technology industry. In each video, Matt has an informal but in-depth video chat with a fellow thought leader to uncover what the future holds for the enterprise IT and telecom markets — the hook is each guest is a long-term acquaintance of Matt’s, so expect a lively conversation.

This time out, Palmer spoke with Vishal Shukla, co-founder and CEO of Aviz Networks. Shukla is a thought leader in cloud infrastructure and the application solutions (SaaS/PaaS) space. He has more than a decade of experience building and leading global teams spanning various functions like R&D, product, marketing, SRE/DevOps and customer support for both startups and Fortune 100 companies.

Editor’s note: The following is a summary of what Palmer and Shukla discussed in their conversation, edited for length. To hear the full conversation, be sure to watch the video.

Matt Palmer: I'd love to get your take on where networking is going. Four themes of networking are going to drive the industry in 2024. One, network-as-a-service (NaaS) is finally coming of age, and people are understanding what it is. Two, multicloud networking or distributed cloud networking is also coming of age. The third one is the role of AI and networking and what that's going to do for automation, and how we run it. And the last topic that I want us to spend the most amount of time on today is open source.

Why don't you start by talking to our audience about what inspired you to start Aviz? Talk about where you see it going forward because your perspective and where you see it being important and that it drove you to start a company, I think is really important for the networking world to hear.

Vishal Shukla: It goes to the professional experiences I've had in the past before starting Aviz. I was talking to a lot of customers from a product management or sales perspective. The pattern I saw emerging from talking to thousands of customers was that they were looking for something that provides them with choices and provides them control of some sort on their networks. And also, while they do that, provides them cost savings.

That was in 2016 when Microsoft started SONiC — and of course, they built an awesome team and built an awesome stack on top of it that can realize these three things for them, which I call the three C's: choice, control and cost savings. So when we were talking to customers, this pattern was showing up that if Microsoft can do it, how about us? And I started talking to customers that if there's a shop across the street that provides you these three C's, will you buy from them? And their answer used to be, yeah, why not, if there's an ecosystem behind it?

And then you have to also take care of our multicloud/distributed cloud. And then as time progressed it also started going more toward data. So the idea was pretty clear that you have to provide the open option. And I'm not talking about open networking, because that's a very broad term, and everything is so open, wherein customers can standardize their network with a single operating system, which is more like Linux ... the ecosystem has to be built in a commercial way where all the existing switch manufacturers ... can stand behind it.

Essentially, a stack can be built that can provide customers with the exact user experience and the enterprise-grade support they are getting from their existing networking vendors. So that was the background of this. And we started building a good ecosystem with the existing ASIC vendors and the switch vendors and took the leadership role in the community and then worked with the customers to understand, how they wanted to consume it. We did research on all these three islands and then came up with an integrated stack that kind of glues them together and gives the customers these three C's, essentially creating an offering that paves the path towards standardization and essentially desegregating the data irrespective of where the network lives.

When I say network, it is not just the on-prem network, it could be AWS or Google Cloud Platform. And that is kind of a foundation stone for something that we are seeing right now, AI, because AI needs data. And it needs standardized data cleaned up, and normalized. So that's where we are headed.

Watch the full video for the rest of the conversation between these old friends and colleagues, who also happen to be tech visionaries.