#267 Nabil Bukhari: Exploring the Future of AI-Powered Enterprise Networking with Extreme Networks

What does the future of enterprise networking really look like? In this episode, Extreme Networks' Chief Product & Technology Officer Nabil Bukhari joins Craig to explore how AI, autonomous agents, and platform thinking are transforming the core infrastructure of modern businesses. From managing mission-critical networks to building agentic systems that collaborate, troubleshoot, and scale autonomously - this is a deep dive into how connectivity is being redefined from the ground up. Whether you're a tech leader, CIO, product builder, or simply curious about how infrastructure evolves, this conversation reveals where the enterprise is headed next. Check out Extreme Networks: https://www.extremenetworks.com/ Stay Updated: Craig Smith on X: https://x.com/craigss Eye on A. I. on X: https://x.com/EyeOn_AI (00:00) Preview (01:02) Introducing Nabil Bukhari & Extreme Networks (05:24) Why Global Connectivity Is Still Accelerating (07:54) How Enterprise Data Flows Across Modern Networks (12:34) Networking for AI vs. Built-in AI (14:12) Platform One & Agentic AI Systems Explained (21:20) Human-in-the-Loop, Over-the-Loop, and Above-the-Loop (23:35) Why AI Guardrails Must Be Baked into the Architecture (27:33) Introducing the ARC Framework (31:15) Persona-Based Interfaces for NetOps, CFOs & CMOs (33:25) The Problem with Chatbots (36:06) Enterprise vs. Public Networks (38:38) Global Connectivity Infrastructure & Use Case Variability (44:29) How Secure and Resilient Are Enterprise Networks? (52:24) In-House AI for Critical Infrastructure

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We think of AI not as a product, but we think about AI as a capability of the platform. You can't really compare a consumer-grade AI agent to an enterprise-grade AI agent. They're very different. This is what I was talking about, the machine-to-machine.

• 0:15Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah.

• 0:16Speaker 00

  But the goal there is, before anybody gets too scared of it, is that for us, we are developing it in such a way that the concept of human in the loop is there, the concept of human over the loop is there, and the concept of human above the loop. The ability to audit AI and the ability to explain AI, that is absolutely critical. And I think the systems that are built without it are most probably not going to be successful in an enterprise environment. The value of AI increases exponentially as it has access to more data. But the risk of AI also increases exponentially as it has access to more data.

• 0:58Craig S. Smith?

  So, Nabeel, great to have you back.

• 1:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. Well, Craig, as always, it is it is great to be here. Thank you so much for having me on the show. My name is Nabeel Bukhari, and I mean, you can see that on the on the screen, but it's good to repeat that. So I work for Extreme Networks and I play multiple different roles at Extreme. So I'm the Chief Product Officer, I'm the Chief Technology Officer, and I'm also the General Manager of all of our subscription business. But the role, the way I describe it, I am the person who likes to just get shit done. So whatever needs to happen, you know, I am there. So a little bit about Extreme. You can think of us as, we are probably the biggest pure-play networking and security

• 1:47Speaker 00

  company for the enterprises. What does that actually mean? That means enterprises today, at the core of their business, is the requirement for secure connectivity. They need to connect their people, they need to connect their devices all across their enterprises, they need to connect their data, they need to connect their applications, they need to connect to their customers and their partners and stuff. Modern businesses are built around pervasive, secure connectivity.

• 2:17Speaker 00

  And in order to provide that secure connectivity for all of these elements that I talked about, there is a whole set of technology that goes into it. From, you know, hardware like switches and APs and SDN devices and stuff, and a whole slew of protocols and operating systems, and then a very massive and ever-expanding management system. So all of them combined together, pretty complex technology, that provides that connectivity on which the modern business run. And quite frankly, Craig, it's not just the modern business that runs on that. I think the modern society runs on it. Because even in our daily lives, imagine a world where we can't connect through internet to anything, and we can't imagine that world.

• 3:00Speaker 00

  So there it is, we are extreme. And we connect when it comes to enterprises, people, application, devices and data, no matter where it is, and we do it securely.

• 3:11Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, and you were saying how in daily life, I mean, we're all connected. Do you do anything with the the public internet? Or is this all on closed networks?

• 3:23Speaker 00

  So we typically work on enterprises. And then some of our areas are kind of public facing. For example, we're very big in the stadium and entertainment business. So if you go, if you go out to any of the stadiums, be it, you know,

• 3:41Speaker 00

  be it the baseball stadiums, or the football stadiums, or games, or NASCAR, or, you know, if you're on the other side of the Atlantic, and if you're going to a Liverpool game, or a Manchester United game, or you're in Germany and you're going to Olympic Stadium to see something, then when you're in there, when you connect to the wifi, that technology is provided by us. So, so a lot, similarly, if you go to Gosh, I mean, any of the big airports in the world, if you go to, those run on our technology. Some of the biggest airlines, they run on our technology. So, um, public does connect to our technology a lot, but there's always somebody else in the middle. We, we don't really go directly to the consumer ourselves.

• 4:25Speaker 00

  Um, but a lot of the big companies or environments that you and I go to as just general citizens, uh, they run on our technology.

• 4:34Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, and uh, the, you provide both the hardware and the software and the cloud, right?

• 4:42Speaker 00

  Correct, full stack solution, all the way from hardware to the software that runs on that hardware. And then most importantly, these days, the most important thing is the management and the monitoring and the troubleshooting of all of these environments, which is all based out of the cloud at this point in time. So those are the three layers of the stack, the hardware, the software, and then the cloud software component.

• 5:06Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, and presumably this, uh, you've been growing for a while, but at some point, it's would seem like everyone's got their solution. Uh, I mean, how much more of the world needs to be networked, or how much more of the?

• 5:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is. So that's a great question, you know, like people, like in, in our environment where we sit, we would think so that, hey, by this time, pretty much everybody must be connected. But the reality is that's not true. Um, you know, there, the number of, there's still, the number of people getting connected is still increasing. And then when you think about from an enterprise point of view, the amount of devices that an enterprise has, that is just continuously increasing. Because devices are not just your and my laptops and cell phones. Uh, think about I O T devices as well. So everything is now connected. Like you go to an airport and, you know, the LEDs that are in the ceiling, even they are connected to the, to the internet.

• 6:06Speaker 00

  You know, we're getting to a world where, uh, more and more and more devices are connecting to the network. And that number is just growing exponentially and it's not showing any signs of slowing down. And the last part is the data. There is more and more data being produced and there is more and more data being connected. And then especially with the advent of things like AI and stuff. Now more data needs to be connected for AI to do something interesting on top of it. So that requirement to connect data and connecting that securely and with the permissions that you want, that is just getting started. I mean, we've been talking about data in the enterprise sense for like fifteen years,

• 6:50Speaker 00

  but it feels like that was child's play compared to what is ahead of us. So I think the requirement for this connectivity across people, you know, data and devices, there is no sign of slowness in it, not for another ten years.

• 7:07Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, and when an existing network starts adding sensors or IoT devices or new interfaces for employees, I mean, every employee that comes to my now house now has a device. I always ask them who made it and they never seem to know. But, you know, where they're entering information and it's going somewhere. How does Extreme, when you build a network, where does that data flow?

• 7:46Craig S. Smith?

  Do you, is that part of what you guys do that you connect it to a data lake or a?

• 7:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that's a great question, Craig. It depends on what you're doing, right? So there's always a source and a destination for any data flow. Like, for example, right now, if I get on, you know, whatever, I'm on a Mac. So if I get on the Safari and I click the buttons and I'm visiting a website, right? Or if I'm using, you know, YouTube or whatever, then that flow starts from me and goes all the way to the servers of that company, which is typically all in the cloud. It's all cloud at this point. That's one kind of a flow. So in enterprises, you will hear that enterprises are using SaaS applications more and more. Think, um, you know, them using Zoom or think them using, uh, you know, Salesforce Cloud

• 8:37Speaker 00

  or using Oracle Cloud or whatever have or G Suite or, you know, Office Suite from Microsoft and stuff. Those are all applications that reside in the cloud. So more and more, you're connecting people's devices to their cloud. So that's one kind of connectivity. Where do we fly in? We don't own the devices. We don't own the SaaS cloud of those applications. We are the fabric in the middle that takes the data from here to there in, in the right SLAs and the right security and everything. So that's one flow. The other set of flows are that there's a huge amount of applications in enterprises that are not yet cloud based. And we call them internal applications and they run in the data centers of these enterprises.

• 9:19Speaker 00

  And I'm going to just use the term data centers because technically data centers can be running in the cloud as well. But let's just not go down into that complexity. Let's just say that they run into enterprise data centers. So that's the second part, connecting, you know, your users to those data centers. And the last one, I'm going to categorize that as machine to machine communication. Now, the interesting part is that this is the part that is exploding right now. Because when we talk about things like AI and we talk about, you know, all of the new deployments that are happening around AI. We talk about like a trillion dollar investment and stuff.

• 9:59Speaker 00

  They technically all fall in the machine to machine data and communication. So think about, you know, massive model generation for AI, you know, a huge amount of inferencing and training and stuff. So that is the category where it's just certain machines and system talking to other machines and system. So we are in that networking as well. So very broadly speaking, those are the three big categories that I can define when it comes to enterprise networks. When you come to a consumer side, then I would say 90% of that is just going to, you know, essentially websites in the cloud. But on the enterprise sides, those other two are pretty, pretty heavy as well.

• 10:40Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, on the enterprise side, uh, I mean, you were talking about, for example, from my computer to YouTube servers.

• 10:50Craig S. Smith?

  And I don't know in that case, but but in a lot of enterprise, they're capturing all that data. Uh, so, so what do you do on your side? Is it just depends on what port you're plugging into and and

• 11:07Speaker 00

  That that's that. Those are the policies of the enterprises. We we don't dictate it one way or another, right? It's just like our goal is to provide that technology in the middle. If you, as a business, happen to be one of those businesses that want to look at every single thing that your employees do, you can do that. Uh, or if you are one of those employees who are saying like, hey, you know, as long as you're connecting to uh, the work stuff, this is what it is. Everything else, do whatever you want to do. Uh, that's your policies because technology does not differentiate between the two. Uh, technology allows you to do either of those. Uh, that's a corporate policy. The beauty of our technology is that you can implement whatever your corporate policies are

• 11:49Speaker 00

  on that technology. So, so there's a very clear distinction between what the technology does and what the policies ask it to do. And we don't like to get involved in the policy side of the equation. Uh, that for companies and and in in the case of the government, that's the public policy part. Yeah.

• 12:06Craig S. Smith?

  How has um, the the introduction of, I mean, you were talking about machine to machine. Now we have uh, agent to agent uh, um, systems or networks. Uh, how do you, uh, do you get involved in that? Or or it doesn't really matter whether it's an agent that's connecting to the network or or some dumb laptop.

• 12:34Speaker 00

  So, um, so I'll answer it two ways because one is providing the networking for all of these AI workloads to run on top of it. So that's obviously hundred percent networks are.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  Right now, one would expect that the GPUs are probably the most important component, and they might be right on that. The compute side is pretty important, but as the scale of it grows, networking starts to become more and more and more critical in that. So, we tend to call it, that is networking for AI. So, well, how do you create networking? Think about data centers. How do you create massive data centers for AI? And how do you create networks where, you know, you can run edge AI and so on and so forth? It's a lot of big words there. But the reality is, that's a networking component. But then on the flip side, so we are absolutely in the middle of that. The other side is that we ourselves have management systems that are agentic in nature, and we push out, you know, agents that do multiple

• 13:31Speaker 00

  different things, you know, in terms of network management, or in terms of network monitoring, or business planning, and so on and so forth. It's massive. So in that case, we are the ones that are producing those agentic AI systems. We are the ones that are essentially productizing these fully autonomous AI agents that people would work. So these are two very separated things. Now, in a company like us, both of those exist. So while we are the network for AI, we are also the ones producing AI, and we are, we are kind of in the forefront of both of these. Like, for example, when it comes to the AI itself, think about agentic AI, or think about like chat

• 14:14Speaker 00

  bots, or think about like multimodal interfaces and stuff. Probably in our industry, we are probably the farthest along, because we think of AI not as a product, but we think about AI as a capability of the platform. So you, I always say, when it comes to AI, I don't think products, but think platforms. So it is already embedded in our platform. We call it Platform One. It's already embedded in there. It has huge amounts of capabilities, and you and I as a user can really interface with it in three different ways. We call it the interaction patterns. You can talk to it. That's the conversational interaction and we are very used to it. That's what we all got exposed to when it came to chat G P T, right?

• 14:58Speaker 00

  You go into a chat bot and you're talking to it and great. That's a conversational interface. The second one is a multimodal interface and we are also used to that on the consumer side as well. Like, oh, you can ask it to create pictures and videos. Now, in an enterprise environment, you're probably not asking it to create videos. Uh, but there it becomes like, uh, reports and graphs and, um, you know, all those kinds of stuff. So that's called a multimodal interface. And the last one, which we are probably the farthest along than anybody else is fully autonomous agents that do something useful in an enterprise environment. And you can't really compare a consumer grade A I agent to an enterprise grade A I agent.

• 15:41Speaker 00

  They're very different because in the consumer side, okay, you know, you can have it send an email for you or, you know, do things like that and, you know, it's doing it on behalf of a consumer. So, you know, consumers have very lax, you know, privacy and security concerns if you will these days. Uh, but when it comes to enterprises, these are doing mission critical functions. All right, and they have a huge set of guardrails around it based around what permissions does the agent have? Then it is who ran the agent? If I run the agent versus you run the agent? And if my permission level is much lower than your permission level, then the agents that we run shouldn't be able to do the same thing.

• 16:25Speaker 00

  Now, these are things that are not even present on the, on the consumer side, but you have to really think through those on the enterprise side. Then data access really becomes important. You know, you hear in the news that, oh, somebody just put like your I P into chat G P D and then it got exposed and stuff. So how do you take care of that? And then the last one is. Is it going to be all the agents from Extreme? No, there'll be other companies that'll create agents as well. So what is the structure of agents talking to other agents? There's a, that's a very, very new thing. So I know Anthropic have the MCP and I think Google just announced a recent one as well. So that's still being developed.

• 17:06Speaker 00

  But all of this space is contained in our products. So we are, we are, we're pretty at the forefront of this and helping the industry kind of make up their mind and really consolidate and settle down on that. And that's really the fun stuff.

• 17:22Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, actually, first of all, can you give an example of an Extreme network agent talking to another agent, whether it's within Extreme's?

• 17:37Speaker 00

  Environment or not, right? So yeah, so great. So let's just take an example and I'll take relatively simpler examples because, you know, I want to make sure everybody in the audience can get it and it doesn't require, you know, very specific knowledge of networking. So think, so I'll say one statement and that will help us with this example. When you're thinking about agents, think job descriptions. Agents are very similar to the job descriptions that we are typically used to. For example, if you go into an enterprise or if you're buying something from an enterprise, you are typically used to two different kinds of roles. One is somebody that is advising you on what to buy and, you know, what are the, you know, good qualities of it?

• 18:22Speaker 00

  How do I compare this versus that? So think of it as an advisor. And the other one is when something goes wrong and invariably it goes wrong, you call a service agent, right? And today, in today's world, both those two are human, right? Now, when you think about the agentic AI, they work very similarly. So called is the advisor agent and called is the service agent. And now they're not human, they're just happen to be AI based. And they work exactly the same way. So in our environment, the advisor agent is present in your environmental list in platform one, which is your console. And it is constantly giving you tips and tricks. And it's like, hey, by the way, in your network, blah blah is happening. Maybe you should look at it. Have you considered doing this? Have you considered doing that?

• 19:02Speaker 00

  So now think about that as an agent that is constantly reviewing everything and giving you ideas and options, how to do this thing better. It's like having, you know, a consultant on your left shoulder 24 by seven. And the good thing is that these are not, you don't have to pay that consultant too much. So that's one agent. Now, service agent, it kicks in when something happens. Something went wrong, you know, like people in your company calls you and say like, hey, in, in, in my building in Chicago, I'm not able to connect. Or my Zoom is working really slow in Minneapolis or whatever, right? Now, when that happens, that's where the service agent kicks in and it goes behind the scene. It picks up that ticket.

• 19:46Speaker 00

  It says like, oh, what the problem is? It thinks through it. It goes and does a lot of troubleshooting and then realize, ah, this is the problem. And can actually go and fix that problem. And if it cannot fix that problem, then what do you typically do? You call the tech support and you open a ticket. So it can open the ticket for you as well. Then what do you do? Every two minutes, you follow up with the IT person. Is it fixed or not? It can do that for you as well. So that's the way to think about agents, what they do. Now, in terms of their communication, think about it this way. The advisor agent can invoke the service agent. Or the service agent can invoke the advisor agent.

• 20:29Speaker 00

  And when you start thinking in those ways, it starts to get pretty overwhelming and pretty crazy, but it is full on job descriptions and agents that are talking to each other and accomplishing something. And there's a whole concept of agents creating teams dynamically behind the scenes to get something done. Like, for example, in our environment, when a service agent wants to accomplish something, it will go in and it will pretty much pull other agents into its team. It will create a team, it will plan that team, and then it'll accomplish what it needs to accomplish, and then then disband the team.

• 21:10Speaker 00

  And all of this is happening behind the scenes, all of this is happening into the platform. This is what I was talking about, the machine to machine.

• 21:19Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah.

• 21:19Speaker 00

  Patient, but the goal there is, before anybody gets too scared of it, is that for us, we are developing it in such a way that the concept of human in the loop is there, the concept of human over the loop is there, and the concept of human above the loop. And those are totally different conversations. But the idea there is that you can always insert anywhere a human in the loop and you say, before you do this kind of an action, get approval. Human above the loop is all about, you know, whether it is readability of it, observability of it, like, you know, explainability. These are all concepts in AI, right? So the idea is that, yeah, you can observe the AI doing thing, but there's nothing in the AI that is black box and you cannot understand that, right?

• 22:04Speaker 00

  And then above the, above the loop is really like where you define the agency of the agents. So it's a fascinating world, Craig, and all of this is happening today.

• 22:18Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, we'll go ahead. Were you gonna say something more?

• 22:23Speaker 00

  No, no, no, please go ahead. Yeah.

• 22:24Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. The, uh, this, these teams of agents and, and, uh, in the network, that, that all of this data is flowing through.

• 22:36Craig S. Smith?

  It's, do you have a visualization? Because it, it really increasingly is, is like, uh,

• 22:49Craig S. Smith?

  you know, I mean, that's what the, that's why we use the term web, but this increasingly dense web of connections. And one of the things I'm interested in is when data flows through such a network, a very complex network, and agents are, say, an agent has a certain permission and it's accessing certain data and using it to get something done with another agent. How do you track where that data is flowing? I mean, how do you know that it's not? Someone left some.

• 23:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:31Craig S. Smith?

  Some switch open and it's flowing to another agent that then.

• 23:35Speaker 00

  Absolutely, absolutely. And so the way to describe is that that's not the job of the network per se. So we don't build it into the network. We build it into the architecture of the agents itself.

• 23:45Craig S. Smith?

  I see, yeah.

• 23:46Speaker 00

  But we are sitting on both sides, right? Uh, so from a network point of view, if you and I are agents, let's assume we are AI and you're not humans. And if you're talking and if the network is supposed to allow you and I to talk, then it will just allow you and I to talk. It doesn't really know whether we are talking about, uh, you know, AI or we are talking about, you know, um, how to bake a cake, right? So it doesn't know that. And that's not the purpose of the network. So network is there to provide that communication. Now, what we should be talking about, what we are allowed to talk about, what are the guardrails around our conversations? What is the permission and what is the agency? Agency means how much can we actually do?

• 24:28Speaker 00

  And at what point in time is like, no, this is outside of my agency. Now I gotta go to punt it to another agent or to a human. All of those are built into the architecture of the AI itself. So this is the difference between just going and building a chatbot, which quite frankly, at this point in time, anybody can do. And I laugh about it. Anybody that has forty five minutes to spend on YouTube can actually build a chatbot. There's so many videos out there. Uh, between that versus building these enterprise grade systems, that's the difference. So when we are adding AI into all of our cloud management and stuff, we are building it ground up with guardrails,

• 25:11Speaker 00

  with permissions, with RBACs, you know, with agencies. Um, and these are the most important and the difficult part is. So while from a network point of view, we don't care, but from a cloud management or a cloud software point of view, we absolutely care. And all of those things are built into the system. And that's, that's why, um, if you ask me, the whole concept of like, hey, we're gonna put. Chatbot in every application out there, that that's just so wrong. Wrong in the sense it's not even useful. It it's kind of the hype part of it. And mostly we'll get through that in the next year, year and a half. And and it will really come down to AI becoming the core capability of these large platforms.

• 25:56Speaker 00

  With all of these guardrails and checks and balances and and most importantly, the explainability part of it. Built into it because in the end. We don't, we will get to a point very quickly in the next like couple of years, if not sooner than that. Where the human trust will be at that point where we will allow AI to do a lot more things for us. Humans are just very trusting by nature, right? So we're already seeing that on the consumer side. It will happen on the enterprise side as well. And that's great. There's a lot of productivity in there. But what we want to make sure is that when needed.

• 26:35Speaker 00

  We can have the system explain. How exactly it did what it did and why exactly it did what it did. So the ability to audit AI and the ability to explain AI. That is absolutely critical. And I think the systems that are built without it. Are most probably not going to be successful in an enterprise environment. And I quite frankly, think that. Building AI that is not explainable is is probably not. Not a good thing. I'll leave it there.

• 27:06Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, and you sound like you're talking about the the unified management across all of the different.

• 27:16Craig S. Smith?

  Nodes and and connections. And and do you have, is is there an AI lever, la- la- layer? That's managing that. That's doing that management across all of that.

• 27:33Speaker 00

  Absolutely. So we we have. So we have many, many, many, many different, you know, things that we do in the cloud. Some of it is managing the network. Some of it is, you know, troubleshooting network. Some of it is reporting. Some of it is security products. Some of it is just business analysis and stuff. So there's multiple different capabilities. And there's AI embedded in all of them. And AI is always embedded in the following way. And this is, this is. My thought process in the way I wrap my head around AI is the following, because in the end, it's not about just, hey, let's just stuff more AI into into into things. You you want to accomplish something. So what is it that you're trying to accomplish?

• 28:15Speaker 00

  And a very easy way of wrapping your head around it is what, you know, I coined a couple of years, two, three years ago now, the ARC framework. So what does that mean? Which means that start with what is it that you want to accelerate? You know, it's like, hey, I do this thing every day and I would love to automate it. I would love to accelerate it. I would love to spend less time on it. Okay, that's something that you want to accomplish. AI is very good at accelerating things. Second thing is, what are the hurdles and what are the bad experiences that I have that I just don't want to have? I want to just replace them from my stuff. Like, think, you know, all of us calling, you know, support for some company and sitting on the music hall, that elevator music for like two hours.

• 29:00Speaker 00

  Nobody wants to do that. AI can be applied to remove those kind of portions. And the last one, the C stands for create, which is creating new experiences. Thing that were previously just not possible. Now, think about, you know, what is happening in the medical space, right? Where where new diagnoses are being done or, you know, in pharma, where AI is being used to create new peptides and and proteins and stuff. So that's like a creating something completely new. So that's the way to think about it. Because in the end, after talking for twenty, thirty minutes about all this crazy technology, my fundamental belief is that the phase in which we are right now for AI,

• 29:42Speaker 00

  AI is there to accomplish something for the human at the end of the chain. And that human can be a consumer that's using it. It could be somebody sitting in the enterprise that is using it. It could be the public sector using it. But there is a human sitting at the end of the chain. And the AI is developed and must be developed and productized to bring some value to that person. And you can generally categorize value in this ARC framework. Either I'm accelerating something, something good for that end user. I'm replacing some pain points and some bad experiences, or I'm creating brand new value for the customer. And and this is really, after talking about technology so broad, bringing it down to earth,

• 30:24Speaker 00

  you know, because we need to have that check on on the on the technology itself.

• 30:31Speaker 00

  Otherwise, it's tech for the sake of tech and we don't sit in academia. We don't do tech for the sake of tech. You know, we do tech for productization, which has to result in some value creation.

• 30:43Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, you were talking about explainability and presumably you have AI-driven insights into what's happening on the network. Is that? Can you talk about that? So, so a systems engineer at a big company or a network, I guess, is it the systems engineer, the network engineer?

• 31:16Speaker 00

  So it could be the system engineer, it could be network engineer, it could be SecOps person, it could be cloud ops person. And quite frankly, more and more, it could be the CMO, the marketing folks, because they generate a lot of their marketing campaigns based on data. It could be the CFO, because the cost of networks is high, so CFOs are directly involved in it. And quite frankly, it should be the CEOs and the boards themselves. As I said, the modern business is anchored around connectivity. So it is everybody's business. You know, it is not about that just pushing it down to that NetOps person and just let him or her figure it out. So with that in mind, we have something for everybody. We have this concept of a persona-based platform.

• 31:58Speaker 00

  So the thing is, if, let's just say, I am a network person, if I log into it, it will show me the pieces of information that are needed to do my job. It will tell me what is the status of my network, what are the alerts, what do I need to do that? The advisor, as I described, agent, it will tell you like, hey, maybe you should pay attention on this, maybe you should pay attention on this. And the service agent will come in and solve your problems for that. But that is if I'm NetOps person. You log in and you're a CMO, right? Or you're CFO. When you log into our system, it will show you completely different things, things that are needed for your jobs. It might, if you're CFO, the AI might show you that, hey, I have actually analyzed all of your spend

• 32:39Speaker 00

  and I have projected it forward, and these are the places where you can optimize it. And if you are a CMO, it could come in and say like, hey, I've been actually, you know, looking at the trends in your stadium, or I've been looking at the trends in your, you know, big venue, and these are the trends, and these are some of the insights on your user behaviors. Now, that is something that is entirely and massively useful to a CMO to build something on top of it. So that's the future of AI. The future of AI is not chatbots, right? It's a good introduction to it. But in order to get to that future, AI has to be married and embedded to platform-wide systems. It cannot be done in applications, right?

• 33:25Speaker 00

  I always, you know, kind of laugh about this, that, you know, when these cellphones came out, the smartphones, we went in this world of, hey, there's an app for it. Everything that you wanted to do, there was an app for it, right? And then there were like 100,000 apps, and then you have like 5,000 apps on your phone, and then you use like three of them. And then we started creating apps that will go and remove apps from your phone. And then 10 years later, fast forward, and we've gone to a world where there's a chatbot for it. I mean, you go in and every application, every website, every place has a chatbot for it. And we have just essentially that siloed, fractured pieces of information that were

• 34:07Speaker 00

  split amongst apps are now split among chatbots. So we haven't really progressed, right? It is just we have changed the name, right? So now the problem is not called applications, it's called chatbots. So how do we move past that? And in order to move past that, we need to think platforms, platforms that bring data from multiple places and can consolidate that into pipelines with the right amount of security and permission control built into it, and then run AI on top of it. The value of AI increases exponentially as it has access to more data. But the risk of AI also increases exponentially as it's accessed more data.

• 34:51Speaker 00

  So then how do you solve this conundrum? You solve this conundrum by creating this full-fledged platform systems that take care of access control, agency, explainability at the core data level and then expose it through multiple AI interfaces. I know I'm defining a pretty big world, but that is the future and the near future. I'm not talking five years from now. For example, right now, we're in the process of releasing all of this stuff as we speak. So some of it is already out, some of it is going to be out pretty soon. So I almost don't want to say that I'm describing the future. I'm describing the present.

• 35:35Speaker 00

  And the present looks like this, not a collection of eighteen hundred chatbots.

• 35:41Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 35:45Craig S. Smith?

  The, how much of your network, when you build a network for an enterprise, is on the public Internet? And how much do you have to put in place?

• 36:00Speaker 00

  So.

• 36:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, so when you think of enterprise networks, they are not really public networks. So they attach the public networks to get you to Internet access or cloud access and stuff. But when we talk about an enterprise network, it is owned and operated by the enterprise itself. So these are not public networks, right? So where our technology can be used for those enterprise networks, or it can be used for public networks, you know, public entities like Verizon or AT&T, like think telcos and stuff, they can use our technology as well. So can big banks and airports and stuff, which are enterprise-owned and operated. So our technology is applicable to both sides, right?

• 36:44Speaker 00

  It depends upon who buys it and what do they use it for. So the technology is pretty much the same across the board between public networks and enterprise networks. The difference between them is how they're used. So if you go to. If you think about cell phones at public networks, it's like, but they're kind of not. You can only attach them if you're a subscriber. A public network would be you go to the library and it's free Wi-Fi. Okay, that's public network, but that's also owned and operated by the department that owns that library. So the whole idea of public networks is really based on who can access it.

• 37:25Speaker 00

  A network is always owned and operated by some entity. And in some cases, it could be the government and in which case they can open it up for all citizens. So from a technology point of view, there's no difference between public and and private networks. It's the same tech.

• 37:43Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, I what I'm what I'm thinking about is that is if you have a multinational corporation with the same systems across all locations and a wide area network that that that employees use or that you know, parts of maybe AI agents are using. Within a campus, you would presumably lay cable.

• 38:24Craig S. Smith?

  But then when that campus talks to another campus halfway around the world, you're on a public.

• 38:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. So so it's very interesting because there are multiple ways to do that. So let's just assume that there's two sides that are some distance away. It could be other sides of the country or across the continents. Either way, there's some distance away. There are multiple ways to connect those two things together. Let's just say these are two different buildings on the same university campus. You can lay the fiber yourself and you can connect them. And in that case, you own the wide area network because that's the cable that you laid there. Let's just say that is in the same metro area, right? So I'm like, okay, I'm in Seattle here. So there is a building in Seattle and there's a building in Bellevue, right? So then there are entities that provide metro connectivity and I could use them to connect it.

• 39:20Speaker 00

  You could actually do, now let's just say I'm in two different continents. Well, there are massive service providers that provide transatlantic. Let's just assume it's across the Atlantic, transatlantic communication, right? And you can say like, okay, I can buy circuits from there and I can connect those circuits. In some cases, I might not buy circuits from them. I might buy a very higher level connectivity with them, in which case they will operate it for me as well. So there's all sorts of different variations that exist. But there's always the van, the wide area network is owned by some entity.

• 39:57Speaker 00

  In most of the cases, it is some sort of a telco out there, right? So that owns it. And then there's layers upon layers of, of ownership and management. Because the fiber in the bottom of the ocean is owned by some other entity. And, and they might be leasing it to another telco that has the circuits on top of it. And then somebody else might be taking it and providing services on top of it. So it's, it's diff, and then there's regulations around it. So every country slightly does it differently. So it's not a clear cut answer on that, right? And enterprises, businesses use all of them based on their size, based on their geographical locations, based on the costs that they want to employ.

• 40:42Speaker 00

  You know, and, and quite frankly, based on what their use cases. Like, for example, if you want to run, you know, your financial systems between here and London, you're probably going to go buy a private network, right? You just because you want, you cannot afford it to go down. If you are just simply sending email between here and the London office, well, you don't need any circuit. You just need an internet connection. Right now, there's a whole slew of variations in the middle. There's the SD van and there's all that kind of stuff. But it really depends, it comes down to the use case. And that's the whole point, as I was mentioning earlier, and networks are complicated. There's so much technology, there's so much, you know, stuff that exists inside.

• 41:27Speaker 00

  It's very complicated and that's why it's such a big industry. And that's why there's such big names in there. But in the end, the purpose for a company like us is to simplify all of this complexity for the end user. We want to deliver that good experience, no matter what circuits they're using behind the scene.

• 41:46Craig S. Smith?

  Right. Who are the, I mean, Extreme is a big player, but who are the the competitors? I mean, does each, does Europe have a dominant player? Does China obviously doesn't let people into operating networks?

• 42:08Speaker 00

  So there are global players, like for example, we are a global player. You know, typically we compete with the likes of Cisco or HP, Ruben or Juniper. So these are big public companies like us, they're global, they're present everywhere. Then there are regional players as well. You talked about China as a China would have Huawei, you know, or Zee or, you know, spaces like that. But in the networking world, it's not a very fractured space. There are, there are a few global players. And then there's a lot of small niche players as well, and there's always new ones coming up. But generally, there are a few.

• 42:49Speaker 00

  Big global players like the ones that I named and there is few big, very large regional players. Um. I would put Huawei in there because Huawei obviously is in China, but it also sold in portions of Europe as well. And in portions of Asia as well. So it's, it's, I would not consider it as a country specific player. I will consider it as a big regional player. It's a very large company. Um. So that, that's the way it's kind of spread out and then and then there are players that are on the enterprise side and there's players on the telco side. Like for example, if you think about telcos, then you'll start thinking about companies like Ericsson and you'll start thinking about companies like Nokia, Samsung and stuff.

• 43:30Speaker 00

  So that's a slightly different portion of the network. That's mostly on the cellular side. Um. So so by the, by the industry that you're looking at, which portion of your networking, there are typically a few global players and a few regional players. That's how the market is set up in most of these spaces. Yeah.

• 43:49Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. Um. How insulated are, are these corporate networks from uh, from public infrastructure? And I'm just thinking, you know, if you're a bank, global bank and you have, have to,

• 44:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:10Craig S. Smith?

  you know, have transactions spinning all around the world and there's a war in some region and um, you know, the local telco goes down. I mean, how,

• 44:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:25Craig S. Smith?

  how insulated can you be?

• 44:28Speaker 00

  That's a great question, Craig. And, and there's no simple answer to that, but I'll try to categorize it into a couple of brackets and then we'll talk through that.

• 44:37Speaker 00

  One area, the way you're describing insulated, one is your, your resiliency, your, your business continuity that, hey, if, if this telco goes down, then what happens? And, and those are built in your BCP plans, like so business continuity plan. Networks are typically very resilient for larger enterprises or for enterprises. Uh. The recommendation for all enterprise is to think about their VCPs so that any one issue should not be able to bring down your network because remember, networks are your business. If, if you can't connect, you can't transact, right? And you can't do business. Um. So from that point, if you, uh, networks are generally very resilient. They're built with that kind of continuity in mind.

• 45:17Speaker 00

  The second definition of insulated would be, well, how insulated they are from bad actors, right? Talking an example of a bank or something like that, there's always, you know, some sort of an attack going on, like people are trying to break in, hack into it, or ransomware, what have you, and that really falls into the cybersecurity space. So that's really is how secure they are. And enterprise networks are generally very secure. Well, I should say, we hope that they're generally very secure. What's the exact condition of them, you know, that that varies substantially across enterprises, but that's where a lot of this security stuff kind of comes in. You'll, you'll know, you'll

• 46:00Speaker 00

  hear things about network security and cybersecurity and XDRs and UTMs and CMs and all that kind of stuff. So that really creates the secure perimeter around the enterprise network. Now, of course, just securing your perimeter is not the right thing. You do security at the level of application and data and everything, but to simplify this, you are first looking at the resiliency or the continuity, and then you're looking at insulating it from bad actors, which is really the security apparatus. The last one, what I say is access. Access means like, you know, enterprise networks are not like you and I cannot just walk into a bank and just connect to the bank wifi.

• 46:41Speaker 00

  We are not permitted users, if you would, right? So that's the access part of it. The access part of it is kind of built into the network. So think of an enterprise network is for the people of that enterprise, either the employees or the suppliers or whoever they want, whoever they deem as somebody that can access it. So those are the three big areas that can fall in, in the insulated part, as you kind of described that. And three very different things, and enterprises have to think about all three of them every day, because those three things are constantly evolving, constantly changing. There are new threats, and there are new solutions,

• 47:24Speaker 00

  there are new technologies. So very dynamic spaces, very dynamic spaces.

• 47:29Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. And so how is your business changing?

• 47:36Craig S. Smith?

  Uh, these days, I mean, I imagine we talked about agents that's changing things. Uh, but also, how, how is the density of of global networks changing? I mean, I would imagine that if you could visualize with

• 47:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:56Craig S. Smith?

  You know, red laser or something, all connections around you, it would be surprisingly.

• 48:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, so

• 48:07Speaker 00

  that, that, that's a really interesting visual, you know, that made me think of like those spy movies where you

• 48:12Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, right.

• 48:13Speaker 00

  You're out of their lasers going everywhere.

• 48:14Craig S. Smith?

  You're trying to pick through them. Yeah.

• 48:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Uh, so, um,

• 48:22Speaker 00

  so I'll answer it in a couple of ways. So, um, the hunger for bandwidth is, is unstoppable. Uh, so the amount of data and the bandwidth that is required globally is just, it doesn't abate. It just continues to grow and grow and grow and grow. So that's one aspect of it. The second part, as I said, is the number of entities or endpoints that are connecting to it. So devices, data, applications, that continues to grow. The third part is people's expectations also continue to grow. I can, and I'm sure you and I can both remember when we used to like connect to the internet through a dial-up modem. And, and we were like, oh, sitting there and

• 49:02Speaker 00

  and if you could get like a 56 kilobits, you know, signal, we would be very happy, right? Now, people expect, you know, that everything is available everywhere in 4K without any interruptions and, and nobody wants to wait on anything. So people's expectations are exponentially growing as well. And the last part is obviously as a networking company. As things become more and more and more complicated, users on the other hand, their expectations are that we would make things simpler and simpler and simpler for them. And that's the dichotomy of this industry. On one side, the underlying technology is exponentially more difficult.

• 49:45Speaker 00

  But the but the expectation of the user is exponentially simpler. You know, I give this example all the time. I love cars. So, you know, back in the day, the original cars, you can you can like still see like, oh, you know, here's like a essentially an engine on four wheels and then you there's a crankshaft and and you know, and you're doing it. The cars were very simple. They were literally like a gas engine and and just four wheels. That's it, right? With like a seat on top of it. They were very simple from a technology point of view, but the the whole experience of owning this, running this and stuff is very complicated and not very from the pictures and and the and the accounts that we read, obviously, it was not very fun.

• 50:26Speaker 00

  Look at the modern cars. They are, I mean, they don't even have engines inside them, you know, the electric ones. But they are full-fledged data centers i- in the car. They are so complicated that people like you and I, we don't even know what's happening in there. Forget about like trying to fix it and stuff. So it is immeasurably more complicated technology in the cars, but see what happened with the experience of buying, owning and driving a car. That became simpler and simpler and simpler and simpler and simpler. And now we are at a point where you can just sit in the car and tell it where to go. How we're almost there, right?

• 51:04Speaker 00

  So that's really the the the arcs that are going in different direction. Technology is becoming more complex. Our expectation of its experience is like we want it to be simpler and simpler and simpler and just do the thing. That is in every industry, networking is no, no exceptions to that. So that's really how we see this moving. And that's by the way, where why AI has caught so much imagination of people. First, it is interesting. It is really cool.

• 51:33Speaker 00

  But it bridges that gap. It bridges the gap between something that is so complex like AI, versus something that just speaks to you like a human and it's super easy to speak to. And that's why it has caught our imaginations as a species. So it's a great microchasm of what is happening across the board. Technology is becoming more complex. We wanted to act and behave simpler. I think that kind of defines the age that we live in.

• 52:01Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, that's right. And, and I would guess that, that the networking industry is going to become increasingly dependent on, on AI. I mean, not simply for convenience, but.

• 52:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. And the good thing is that since we are one of those key technology industries, so we are not dependent on anybody else. We build our own AI. So I would say that the networking industry is incorporating AI more and more and more to deliver that experience, to deliver that ease of use, to do things faster as networks become faster and more complex. It is quite frankly, beyond the capacity of human operators to constantly run them, you know, really well. So that is where we are helping those operators as well to be able to scale and, and function at that level and that speed. So

• 52:58Speaker 00

  it's so, we are actively embedding AI into every aspect of networking. But the key there is, and I'll, and now I'll speak just for, for my own company, because I can't speak for other companies, but, but for us, our goal is to embed it everywhere, but do it responsibly. Do it with the right guardrails, do it with the right controls in place, do it with the right, you know, human in above or over the loop, as I described earlier, and do it in such a way that you don't lose the explainability, because you don't want the global networks to be like, I don't really know, this AI is running the network and I have no idea how it is doing that. That will be a scary place, right?

• 53:43Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah.

• 53:44Speaker 00

  So embed it everywhere, but do it very responsibly. I think that would be a good summarization of it.

• 53:51Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, and presumably if you're building the AI in-house, you're you're better off because

• 53:59Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:00Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah.

• 54:00Speaker 00

  Hundred percent. I mean, we we ground up, you know, we we like to have, you know, our fingerprint on everything because networks are mission critical. You know, they're not just like, imagine a world where you don't have Wi-Fi. I mean, the whole society will come crashing down. Not not to create a hyperbole there, but but still, networks are very, very mission critical to the society, to the businesses, and just to all of us. So, yeah, our goal is not to just throw just random any AI on it. So we take a huge amount of pride in in developing in-house in the right way. Yeah.