Advancements in tech continue to affect the economy at large. Digital transformations within corporation settings are putting pressure on enterprises to move away from traditional modes of infrastructure and adopt new flexible models, fast. Adapting in this new digital landscape can be challenging for many tenured businesses, but it is crucial to their survival.

“The world is changing. … Consumption models are being turned on their heads. That has a tremendous impact on the underlying infrastructure … how compute works, how storage works and, fundamentally, how network works,” said Ujwal Setlur (pictured, right), founder and chief technology officer of Pensa Inc.

Setlur and Steve Dietch (pictured, left), vice president and general manager of Pensa, are working to help companies keep up with the demands of the digital transformation by remodeling fundamental infrastructures to be faster, more agile, and better able to withstand the changes tech will bring to market for the foreseeable future.

Dietch and Setlur spoke with Peter Burris, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California, to discuss the role of virtualization in the networking industry and why enterprises must change to adopt more flexible systems (* Disclosure below).

A shift toward agility

While the demand for virtualization is apparent, delays in adoption are primarily due to the challenges involved in the fundamental shifts to decades-old systems. “Virtualization is not a simple thing. There’s … a lot of new technologies, new protocols, new standards being written,” Dietch said.

Moving from traditionally rigid, siloed infrastructures to ones that are programmable and elastic while maintaining full functionality is a process service suppliers, telcos and carriers are struggling to face on their own. “They’re under enormous pressure … based on the speed of business, the speed of innovation, cost optimization, and they’re seeing massive demands from an apps perspective, from a mobility perspective, from a data consumption perspective,” Dietch stated.

While the transition process itself is still a work in progress, Pensa’s approach to virtualization involves decoupling software from hardware and putting it in a virtualized environment on top of industry standard hardware that offers agility, flexibility and cost savings down the road, Setlur explained.

“You can’t think of it in the old terms of ‘here’s an app, and here’s an infrastructure.’ You really have to intimately tie them together, and that’s where the world needs to go,” he said.

Though challenging, the resultant shift is worth the efforts. Virtualization provides a more agile base from which to operate, enabling businesses to work more smoothly and adapt more quickly to internal and external changes for years to come.

“If you want to launch a new service based on the old model, it could take you a year. … Who knows what’s going to happen a year from now as you try to launch something. … You want to have the flexibility to actually fail,” Dietch said.

Despite adoption complexities, Dietch and Setlur are adamant that shifting to virtualized infrastructure is a necessity for participating in a modern economy. “In today’s world where it’s all about agility, flexibility, speed, and cost optimization, a rigid, siloed infrastructure is not going to get you where you need to go,” Dietch concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Pensa Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Pensa nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE