Karl May, Co-Founder and CEO of Vello Systems, discussed the company’s unique take on networking, converged infrastructures, DevOps, and other major trends with theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante, live at Splunk .conf 2013.

“What Vello Systems does is provide the software platform to abstract all of the hardware underlay,” May explained. “We see the network as a system bus, we then use that as the plugin for compute and storage elements that go directly into that network and build apps on top of it.” The software pulls data from the network, the compute, the apps, and all other components of the environment.

This take on networking “allows you not to use the network as a collection of devices, but as one big system,” May said. Companies that have focused on virtualizing networking, “do not care about underlying fabric, they built these overlays,” May said. “We really focus on the underlay.” While Nasira is focused on building the overlay for Vms, we are building the underlay infrastructure to support network applications and solutions.”

Targeting DevOps as customers

Commenting on the DevOps trend, May said, “the DevOps teams turn out to be the customers we go and sell to. It’s really the DevOps type of groups within these organizations that have bought from us.” The members of these teams are really trying to assemble solutions based on a variety of open standard components, which they will then customize for their applications. “If you look at what we provide, we’re selling essentially a Linux distribution, consequently, you have the ability to give an organization the possibility to build their own solution.”

Asked about the company’s customers to build solutions themselves or buy converged infrastructure solutions, May said there were several types of customers. “You are going to find very, very large customers who have the expertise of the Googles or Facebooks out there,” who are making investments, and are even outsourcing the development of custom hardware platforms. This is a segment of the market that “is very well into rather using its people than invest in high valued products tailored for their purposes.”

The next group is in the middle, and these companies prefer to work with system integrators “to help tie things together,” May pointed out. And then the mid market, where  converged system is the preferred solution. “They want a nice system that is all tied up in a bow that I can deploy my applications on,” but they do not want to pay the price of all the elements, he explained.

Talking about Vello Systems’ Splunk demo, May said, “If you can learn from your application environment, you can make better decisions” about how the infrastructure responds to apps. The company demoed FarSight, a solution that analyzes data from the network, compute sources, from the apps. “What we demonstrated for the first time, we can automatically remediate problems,” using FarSight.