The Move Away from Hardware and Into the Cloud: A Conversation with Ido Susan

Welcome to the Bloomberg Markets podcast.
I’m Paul Sweeney alongside my co host Matt Miller, Let’s get into the cloud right now.
We’ve got Ido Susan with us, founder of DriveNets.
He had founded Intucell, acquired by Cisco and worked for them for a while, but now he’s back out there building a bigger company.
You’ve got, you know what, $200 million dollars in funding already.
Yes.
So what are you doing at DriveNets, what’s your main focus after coming out of into Cisco?
Our goal is basically to change the network and the internet infrastructure, design and build and operators of today supporting our customers, like the operator AT&T.
And also to reduce the cost per bit and to create new revenue because the way that we are consuming the network as consumer enterprise is different, and changed dramatically while the network didn’t. And we are here to support and then drive the transformation to the cloud.
You would think that a lot of that would have been accelerated through the pandemic.
But somehow we look at our country and we’re still pretty woefully behind, is that fair to say?
if you, you know, we operate worldwide so the US Market is advancing in this area but I think the borders between consumers and enterprise does not exist anymore.
Our home, it’s our new office and if the operators will not be focusing too, all out fiber to the home, 5G, wifi six capability – then we will not be able to work, to study from home and to support the demand.
Yeah I’m looking for houses right now in the tri state area. And every place that I look at takes pains to point out there’s room for a home office. It’s recently been rewired, you know, or if it hasn’t, it just stays on the market for 150 days and nobody, nobody wants to buy it.

How is it competing,I know, with your former employer with behemoths like Cisco and Juniper and these gigantic companies. How do you get,I know you recently got a contract with AT&T.
How do you get contracts with these huge clients when you have to compete with, you know, the biggest goliaths in the world.
First of all, as you mentioned Cisco acquired my previous company and I’m not forgetting where I’m coming from. It is an amazing company and also the rest of the incumbents in this industry.
But because I come from Cisco, I know how it’s hard and almost impossible to change that.
You are doing business because you need to support the stock, you need to run after the quarterly revenue and to do transformation to your technology and the way that you’re selling can create value to the customer. It’s very hard. So, we are here to challenge money.
It’s not our drive anymore and we are here to transform the network industry, a big industry and to create value and the customer like AT&T and others are looking for startups like us that will help them to disrupt the way that they operate and build their network in order to again create new revenue and to reduce costs.

I’m wondering also with the shift to the home office, what the cybersecurity concerns are, I know that’s a huge issue that a lot of employers are struggling with.
Yes cybersecurity, it’s a big threat all over. It’s not related only to home but to our mobile and to our privacy. We see a lot of challenges. I think the way and the opportunity for uh the operators to help to protect our privacy and to help to drive more security to any type of device that we are connected to, whether if it’s IOT, mobile, home, you name it.
it’s a big opportunity and I think I cannot share too much but I can tell you that they are working on it and this is one of the revenue generations that they’ll pay to have in the next coming years and of course it will benefit all of us.

I know we had recently a US infrastructure bill of $550 billion dollars in new spending, and has earmarked a pretty sizable piece for what you’re doing and I’m sure other countries also are going to be spending money to try and improve the infrastructure.
How much of a boost will that give you over the coming years?
It’s a huge boost.We see it, as you mentioned, it’s not only here in the states, but it’s all over, it’s worldwide, and it’s help s our customer to moderate their infrastructure and to think out of out of the box. And also for us we’re getting big and very nice contracts to move ahead.
I think it’s just the beginning, I think more and more money will go from government to this infrastructure because everybody understands that if you want to move ahead with any segment, if it’s health care, if it’s education, if it’s you name it, you need a very robust infrastructure, networking infrastructure to support the demand of the traffic. and the way to do it is with technology like ours and others as well. We help to convert it to be a cloud-based solution, software based solution. So I think it’s just the beginning Yeah, absolutely.

I’m still working on upgrading my electric panel to 200 AMPS and after I get past that then I’ll boost the cloud computing power of my house.
So thanks so much for joining us.
Ido Susan there, he is the founder of DriveNets coming out of
Intucell and Cisco talking to us about the move away from hardware and into the cloud that we’ve all taken part in over the past few years but we need to accelerate