In the second part of this interview, Anand Gonuguntla, CEO and cofounder of Centina Systems, tells VanillaPlus what drove him and his co-founders to launch an OSS company against such giant opposition.
The company is now launching a service assurance product for SDN and NFV networks, pre-integrated into ODL and open NFV platforms. (Also see: Expanding service assurance play with Tier 1 clients, integrator partners and new NFV/SDN products.)
INTERVIEW PART 2:
AG: We were at Xtera and I was running R&D. At Xtera we rode the telecom wave, the hockey stick in 2000. Started the business and got the product out, but by the time we got to the market we also saw the burst.
Companies shrunk, we were down to 50 people. I was one of the early guys, one of the first five, six guys that were brought on board. We had a lot of product knowledge and the market knowledge, so I took the role of helping with the product deployment and free sales.
Every time we met an operator that wanted to integrate our solution into their back office we started seeing a lot of inefficiencies in how they did it, how difficult it was. Even with all the deployments the customers did not have the visibility of which customers are affected when and how.
We asked a very humble question; Why is that? They said that’s the Holy Grail if you can solve it and all it took was three customers to say that. (Laughter)
VanillaPlus: It was like a red rag to a bull.
AG: Right, because all the guys had made investments, they wanted the results and they are not yet getting it. A big part of it is not that these tools could not offer that, it required repeat integration services. Repeat upkeep.
When a tool is difficult, when the first investment is made they go gung-ho and implement it, and two years down the line nobody goes to the tool. That’s exactly what was happening.
One of the impetus for us to do it is well we knew we were not innovating in the functionality, OSS was there for eternity. What we innovated was how you deliver, how you manage and maintain, how we empower the users in keeping up to date. It actually gives them a return on their investment on a day-to-day basis.
The founding thing it was really three of us, my other two cofounders were also associated with myself on Xtera and one of them even all the way to Fujitsu. We all had a burning desire to build a business so that, in combination with identifying an opportunity that we could tackle, was good enough.
VanillaPlus: You’ve now got to 65 people, you’re still privately held, no VC cap.
AG: No VC cap.
VanillaPlus: No borrowings?
AG: No borrowings. We are in a sweet spot.
VanillaPlus: What’s the next step? Do you look for a big home?
AG: We are definitely getting a lot of interest from the market, from the partnerships. I think a big part of it is going to be making one of our partners very successful. Make sure we fit into some of the reference architectures that the carriers are building for their SDN and NFV roadmap. If we accomplish it we should be able to find our next step or exit relatively easily.
I believe we’ve proven ourselves through the most testing times in the industry. Right now we need to just build upon our success.
VanillaPlus: Sometimes the greatest challenge comes not in establishing but in growing, do you agree?
AG: Yes, absolutely. About 24 months ago we made the decision to grow and there was exactly that. Founding team, the employees, you look at the entire team and you’ve got to decide if you’re going to position yourself for growth who are the new players you need to bring in? What is the incentive that you can offer to those people to be as committed as the founding team?
We’ve gone through that, in fact I placed new management in the last 18 months in pretty much every single functional area. One of my co-founders retired, one took the role of CTO. We brought in an engineering executive, one sales executive, one support executive for professional services and post deployment. We’re working through all of that.
It’s always down to the people. For the most part we’ve been very fortunate to be able to attract the right talent to the table. Right now that new team is actually performing in the organisation, so I think looking forward it will be a little bit easier than where we were about 24 months ago.
VanillaPlus: Whereabouts are you based and is that where you are looking for the talent?
AG: We are based in Plano, a Dallas suburb. We have a few sales people and most of the corporate management based there. We have some support people as well and a few R&D people, so a sample of every department I would say. Sales, their team is distributed all over; some in Europe, some in Singapore. A bulk of the workforce is also based in Bangalore, India.
VanillaPlus: That’s the R&D side, is it?
AG: Some R&D yes, because we still have some R&D in Dallas but generally the bulk – out of the 65 we have roughly 40 people in Bangalore. We’re looking to grow that team to about 100.
VanillaPlus: In what timeframe?
AG: The next 18 months. Just R&D support, some of the business development related to Asia. We don’t have any one function that’s completely centralised in one location so far. It’s not possible based on the customer base we have and the skill set that is available in each of these geographies.
VanillaPlus: Is it Asia where you see the greatest potential for growth then?
AG: Different things are happening in the different geographical regions. In Asia what we’re seeing is emerging opportunities. They’re launching a new service and they want to somehow manage that service effectively. Few consolidation opportunities exist in Asia now.
In North America we are seeing two types of player. One is more innovative, wants to go and invest in SDN and NFV and things like that. The second category is smaller players, they don’t want to be acquired for whatever reasons. They want to go ahead and make enough investments to streamline their operations. We’re seeing opportunities in both those categories.
A good example for that is interactive service management. A lot of guys are moving away from the TDM-based leads and circuits to Ethernet-based and that brings in a set of challenges that they need to manage. They’re willing to invest in systems to help them just do that.
VanillaPlus: There is a lot of play in your promotional information about working out of the box. Tell us about that.
AG: Historically, the biggest challenge of OSS systems is you install a software and that software needs to go communicate with the network. All of that was a custom development.
With us it’s a plug-and-play. Our Smart Plug-ins simply automate all of that, it’s as simple as dragging an app onto an iPhone. You don’t ever worry about what version of an app you have on what version of an iPhone, it’s the same thing.
Now with NetOmnia smart plug-in simplifies all of that, so they drag and drop and the next thing they have is everything they need with respect to managing that device type.
VanillaPlus: Also you mention a significant amount of customers outside the telecoms space. What other sort of customer success have you had?
AG: All our customers are communication service providers. If they’re not traditional telecoms service providers like a triple play, they’re mobile operators or cable MSO operators. They’re conversion service providers, carrier carriers, enterprise service providers, undersea cable operators. At the end of the day they all provide some sort of communication service.
VanillaPlus: Lastly, you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation the importance of a different kind of SLA (service level agreement) management being one of the drivers for what you are doing. How has that evolved?
AG: If you look at the network, like I said going from TDM to shared network, you have a new set of standards that have evolved for Ethernet service management.
What it means is when you have a large pipe that’s shared by a number of different enterprise customers the enterprise customer demands to see that they’re getting a service that’s promised to them by the carrier.
That means you need to not only measure what you’re offering, you need to test the availability, the jitter, delay on the specific virtual connection. You also need to share that data with the end customer. Imagine if you have a five nines availability you can’t have degradation for more than a few minutes.
It also increased the pressure on the operator to change the visibility window from 15 minutes down to a minute. If they’re at the risk of breaching their SLA they can act on it. It’s really as simple as it sounds, for the impact it creates in the back office is quite dramatic especially if they want to meet the SLAs.
A lot of operators that haven’t had an opportunity to invest, they basically write off on these SLAs. They say, “You know what? Okay, customer you’re unhappy. Here you go, take the service credit.” But, ideally, what the operator would prefer to do is have the ability to prevent the SLA violation, not just report on it at the end of the month and give credits when the SLA is breached.
NetOmnia provides real-time SLA conformance monitoring. In this way, if an SLA warning threshold is crossed, alerts and notifications can be sent out to inform staff that the SLA is in danger of being breached, so the issue can be resolved, thereby preventing the SLA failure and the need for a service credit. In addition, NetOmnia provides customer portals, so the operator can allow the customer to see the real-time status and health of their service and SLA conformance.
Especially if you’re also trying to win new business and other multiple operators are vying for the same business, it becomes a differentiation for you to be able to say, “Look I have this portal that shows you, any time you want, where you are with the SLA.” There is a lot more guarantee.
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