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 Suresh Katukam, co-founder and chief product officer of Nile. Katukam has more than 25 years of network and security experience, and a penchant for driving technical innovation. At Cisco, he was responsible for integrating security solutions with private and public cloud-based computing platforms.

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

Matt Palmer: We've talked about trends, about what's changing in the environment. But why is it now that enterprises should really start to think about network-as-a-service (NaaS)? What problems does it really take away?

Suresh Katukam: It's been there for the last 10-15 years. Everyone has been talking about it, and frankly, as you know, it's lipstick on a pig — that's what we call what's in NaaS, right? But you know customers are seeing it, and with all the major transitions that I talked about, they still don't have networks that just work. There's a study by IHS Group and $700 billion productivity loss is because of the IT issues out of that 40%. That's about $280 billion productivity loss happening because of the network issues. And the reason is we kept on building technology on technology. Layer 2, layer, 3, overlays, underlays and cloud-based controllers ... And why is it now important? The biggest reason is customers are saying, “I want my network to just work.”

And why that is not happening is because when you went from on-prem to the cloud, you had to go back to the drawing board when you want to deliver NaaS. You have to design the hardware and the software, the entire architecture to deliver as-a-service. And this is not just about the product and technologies. You're also talking about day 1 and day 2. This goes back to customer scope. Cycle management is extremely hard. It's not just about network design, network architecture deploy, configure, bring it up. But software upgrades, para security patches and end-of-life support.

On top of that, retaining and retraining  IT teams has been very challenging. One of our Fortune 50 customers had one of the leading vendors in a solution and the guy who was managing left the company, and they took four or five months to hire a person. Until then they did not want to touch it, because it's extremely complex. So hiring their talent, retaining their talent has been hard, and life cycle management is very hard on top of that. Customers are still spending a lot of time and money on networking.

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