CEO Corner Series: Interview with Avni CEO, Rohini Kasturi
                     CEO Corner Series: Interview with 
Avni CEO, Rohini Kasturi
In the last few years, the rise of cloud computing and its complexities has 
given rise to a crop of precocious start-ups, causing a gradual but 
dramatic shift in the networking industry.
Most  enterprises,  typically  tied  to  older,  hardware-based  networking 
architectures, are weighed down by vendor lock-ins, computing silos, and 
exorbitant operational costs. The mix of cloud computing into this 
equation has raised serious security, scaling and monumental network 
management issues. This climate has made for a great opening for the 
start-ups rolling out  comprehensive,  secure,  scalable,  yet  simple  
software  defined networking solutions that work with hybrid cloud 
computing environments.
These companies, along with leading, established providers, are crucial to 
ONUG’s goal to bring SDN open solutions to the enterprise. In an effort to 
get a better understanding of the on-going vision of these start-up and 
incumbent providers, ONUG brings you the CEO Corner Series.
ONUG: What market trends and shifts inspired you to form Avni?
Kasturi: Three hot trends, namely the cloud, virtualization and software- 
defined networking, were starting to come together. The public cloud itself 
had matured enough to offer infrastructure services; new software-defined 
data centers, such as the solutions from VMware, were being introduced; 
and topping it, acceptance of virtualization and SDN was becoming more 
prevalent. Addressing the challenges these new trends were creating is 
what motivated us to create Avni.
ONUG: Avni has publicly stated that it aims to enable organizations to 
realize their private, public, or hybrid cloud strategy by transforming their 
data centers to software-defined cloud. In view of that, can you elaborate 
Avni’s specific goal?
Kasturi: We spoke to some hundred plus potential customers, and it 
became clear that their biggest goal was transforming their business to 
operate in the
digital economy. To address their end-user demands, these businesses need 
to deliver their services faster and at a lower cost, making agility, 
flexibility and cost reduction the centerpiece of their IT agenda. 
Although point solutions are maturing, they are unable to roll out their 
applications quickly.
Avni’s Software Defined Cloud platform virtualizes the cloud underneath 
so customers can deploy existing applications on their choice of clouds in 
a few minutes instead of weeks or months. This self-service model, along 
with the analytics-driven automation, allows customers to respond faster 
and implement new business applications across a choice of clouds.
One of our large enterprise customers in the financial services industry 
runs background checks. Previously, it took six to eight weeks for them 
to roll out an application. This process also involves integrating the 
application with network services, like load-balancing and security. To 
accelerate and automate it, we create an application blue-print that can be 
launched, tested and deployed across the enterprise in a few minutes. As a 
result, customers can create their applications in a private cloud, with auto-
scaling, elasticity and  self-adapting  capabilities  while  managing  
applications,  network services and the cloud from a single controller. The 
best part is they are not locked into any one vendor.
ONUG: 2015 is being touted as the year when enterprise IT establishments 
are being hard-pressed to fix their hybrid cloud challenges. Are Avni’s 
solutions commercially available and are you working with other partners 
to provide a comprehensive solution?
Kasturi: We launched in April earlier this year and the solution is in 
production at several customer sites in media, retail and other vertical 
segments.
Realizing the hybrid cloud challenge means customizing applications for 
the cloud, and start building in-house tools to achieve that strategy. The 
other solution is for enterprises to use our platform to define policies to 
take care of it. We are also doing partnership arrangements with HP, Citrix 
and other vendors so they can bring in their network services like 
load- balancing, security and acceleration to the mix. If customers 
have a preference and want to use other vendors’ network services, our 
solution can work with it. This is about freedom of choice for customers.
ONUG: You have offices in India and here. How do you divide your 
operations?
Kasturi: We have a very strong engineering and development team that is 
based in India and here in the U.S. The corporate offices are here in the 
U.S.
ONUG: How do you differentiate from your competitors and what are 
your biggest challenges?
Kasturi: If you meld applications and analytics, companies in application 
performance management could be considered a competitor; and if you 
combine network services and analytics, it would be companies in network 
optimization. We will see overlaps like these for some parts of the overall 
solution, but what you don’t see anywhere else is an end-to-end solution 
like ours that combines network services, applications and cloud together 
with policy-driven analytics and data.
ONUG: Who is your typical customer?
Kasturi: Media, retail and e-commerce customers that change data and 
content frequently are most interested in hybrid clouds whereas finance 
and healthcare customers are interested in deploying private clouds. 
Smaller businesses that do not have their own data centers are the ones 
who are interested in public-cloud implementations.
ONUG: What is your biggest challenge moving forward?
Kasturi: Our biggest challenge is getting customers to adopt this new 
model that does not require existing applications to be retooled to move 
them to clouds of their choice. Creating that momentum over the next 18 
months is going to be key for us.
ONUG: To ONUG, open solutions and vendor interoperability are critical. 
How and when will the industry meet those demands, you think?
Kasturi: The large incumbents are going to drive their existing portfolio. 
However, the new start-ups can change the paradigm and the shift to 
providing choices to customers through open solutions.
Source URL: https://onug.net/blog/ceo-corner-series-interview-with-avni- 
ceo-rohini-kasturi/