In another interview on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s John Furrier welcomed Peter Levine and JR Rivers to discuss the place a new start-up can hold as networking transitions from the traditional model to Software Defined Networking (SDN).

Levine, a General Partner with the VC outfit Andreesen Horowitz, commented that when he is looking for new opportunities he observes the entrepreneur’s ability to deploy new technology in a reasonably efficient way with low cost. Typically, however, deployment has proven to be very expensive. The trend toward automation is helping to lower the costs associated with the previous method of manual configuration of on-site servers.

Levine sees SDN as the next renaissance in the marketplace.

Rivers, Co-Founder and CEO of Cumulus Networks, stated, “When you look at the physical networks, a customer wants the best network they can get for that dollar. Enterprise and cloud networks are capacity bound.” When Rivers started talking to his partner set they understood the fundamental thesis is that compute used to be kind and applications were on the side. In today’s current market, the application is taking over. The future will see the development of applications that couldn’t even be conceived of today.

Furrier directed his next question to Levine, wondering just what the VC set looks for in this ever changing marketplace. According to Levine, “For entrepreneurs, we look for the ones that have a secret; something from their past that makes their idea truly unique.” He claims the secret behind Cumulus was Rivers ability to unlock Linux for the secret of networking.

See Levine and Rivers full interview on theCube below:

Levine continued, “I think the world is moving to an environment where there are lots and lots of small servers aggregated to provide compute and network. It changes the future of the data center and what that looks like.” He believes on premise enterprises will want to copy the blueprints set up by outfits like Facebook and Amazon for their own storage and networking needs.

This means the data center as we know it is not going away anytime soon. In the future, the data center building will become the server itself. That, according to Levine, is the new footprint.

Rivers sees network virtualization as a tool to be used as a means to an end. By monitoring your servers, one can then just layer network virtualization to layer workloads across the substrate of compute.

Cumulus Networks is a relatively new player in the field. Currently they have 20 customers they have deployed with. Their fundraising, to date, has brought in approximately $15M in funding.

SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE is broadcasting live this week from the VMworld Conference in San Francisco. Be sure to join us live or watch any of the rebroadcasts on our YouTube channel.