Speaker 1: 00:03 Welcome to the tech in 20 minutes podcast where you will meet new tech vendors and learn how they can help your business. At Clark Sys, we believe tech should make your life better, searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven’t heard of before. I’m Max Clark, and I’m speaking with John Hogan, VP of sales with Bigleaf Networks. Hi, John. Thanks for joining.
Speaker 2: 00:24 Hey, Max. Thanks for having me today.
Speaker 1: 00:26 So, John, what does Bigleaf do?
Speaker 2: 00:29 Bigleaf is an SD WAN company, software defined networking in the wide area network. Basically, it means we bring intelligence to Internet connectivity so that companies or or even homes that are leveraging the Internet as a lifeline can have applications work correctly. We prioritize traffic. We provide seamless failover when there are 2 or more Internet connections. We load balance.
Speaker 2: 00:52 We just bring a better experience to the Internet overall.
Speaker 1: 00:56 I mean, SD WAN has become this marketing term that’s used by a lot of people. Right? So, I mean, how much of your product is SD WAN as it relates to the marketing term, and how much of your product is a, you know, a service delivered that you control both ends to?
Speaker 2: 01:12 Yeah. That’s a good question. SD WAN is not even a formal term at this point. It is a marketing term, and it can mean different things to different people. For example, some people would define SD WAN as a security solution along with Internet intelligence.
Speaker 2: 01:29 Our version of this technology does not incorporate security. We’re a little different than many other SD WAN vendors in that respect. And there’s some reasons that we do that. But because of that, we often define ourselves as intelligent Internet for lack of a better term. It’s frankly how we went to market originally in 2014.
Speaker 2: 01:47 Internet optimization is what we called our service. This was before SD WAN was really a marketing term. So it’s a good question, and and I’m sure over time, SD WAN, that definition will formalize and become more of a standard. But until then, anytime I hear SD WAN, I’m just thinking somebody’s adding intelligence to Internet connectivity and potentially site to site connectivity as well.
Speaker 1: 02:09 So what problem is Bigleaf solving, and how do you solve it?
Speaker 2: 02:14 Yeah. We were really created to solve the challenge of site to cloud connectivity. The Internet was built eons ago, without anybody intending to run major business applications over the Internet. So it’s inherently a challenging environment for real time applications like Zoom sessions or or voice over IP. So we’re able to take what it would otherwise be a dumb pipe and, you know, prioritize important applications like phone calls and video sessions, eliminate things like packet loss, steer around problems like packet loss by hopping between connections and and keeping sessions live.
Speaker 2: 02:56 So we really take that dumb pipe environment where you don’t have any level of control or really no ability to ensure an experience, and now layer on a platform, an intelligent platform to really ensure an experience for customers that are running applications.
Speaker 1: 03:13 So for a nontechnical person, what’s a symptom of this? How would they know if this is a problem that they need to solve?
Speaker 2: 03:19 Yeah. You’re on a phone call, a voice over IP phone call, and you’ve got some choppiness. Your call drops. You’re on a Zoom session and there’s some, you know, lagging. There is, you know, you’re seeing the spinning wheel on your computer with Office 365 or any other SaaS application.
Speaker 2: 03:40 Your connection goes down, period. Internet connections go down on a very regular basis, whether it’s a very expensive fiber service or it’s a lesser expensive coax from your cable company, those connections can go down. So it’s anytime your applications on your computer are not working smoothly.
Speaker 1: 03:59 So going back to something you said earlier, you know, before the SD WAN term, you called yourself Internet Optimization. Bigleaf is not a service that’s a MPLS replacement or an MPLS augmentation service. I mean, you really are something different entirely in that in that world of SD WAN. And a big part of that is how you deploy your gateways and traffic between your appliance to the customer’s location and your gateway. Can you talk about that a little bit more, what that actually means in real world, and and how does that give you an advantage, you know, in in making the Internet experience better for your customers?
Speaker 2: 04:34 Yeah. Again, our focus is is site to cloud. So in order to gain full control of cloud based traffic, we had to build a gateway infrastructure in the core of the Internet, basically. So we have 7 gateways in the US, 3 in Europe today. They sit in major peering centers around the country.
Speaker 2: 04:53 So we actually build a tunnel from the customer prem to our gateway that is sitting in a major peering center, and then we’ve got direct peering with thousands of different cloud applications. So if you’re running an Office 365 session or Azure or AWS or, you know, your VoIP service from 8 by 8 or RingCentral, we are physically controlling that traffic from the customer premise to our gateway and then handing off directly to that cloud provider. That end to end control is what gives us the ability to do things like prioritize applications in both directions, provide a seamless failover experience, load balance very intelligently. So it’s really that gateway infrastructure that we’ve invested in that brings us that site to cloud capability that others don’t have. There are SD WAN companies that don’t have a gateway infrastructure at all.
Speaker 2: 05:43 All of their intelligence is built into a device that sits at the customer premise. That means they can say they do prioritization. That’s absolutely true. But that prioritization is in one direction on the upload. They don’t have any ability to control the download side of a cloud based session the way Bigleaf can because of our gateway infrastructure.
Speaker 1: 06:01 So outside of this requirement for MPLS, like, who is a good customer for Bigleaf, you know, and, you know, who are your customers?
Speaker 2: 06:10 Yeah. Small mid market is certainly our focus. We don’t incorporate security into our platform. That makes us a little bit different. We did that intentionally to allow for for much easier deployments.
Speaker 2: 06:23 When you try and do more things, you give options, but you also bring complexity into the equation. By taking security out of the mix, we we get by with a 5, 10 minute self installation by very nontechnical people. But the way I like to put it, a general manager in a pizza shop could plug in some cables into our device and and get us set up very quickly.
Speaker 1: 06:44 I so there’s a good chance that somebody listening to this has never heard of Bigleaf before. I mean, how long have you been around? How big are you? You know, what’s what’s some stats that you would give out there to, you know, counter that?
Speaker 2: 06:55 Yeah. We founded in 2014. So we’ve been, in business for about 6 years. We go to market exclusively through partners, through an indirect channel. We don’t have a direct sales force.
Speaker 2: 07:07 So our way of going to market beyond word-of-mouth is working with independent IT consultants, telecom agents, managed service providers. And we’re we’re for those that do know us, again, by making the choice to not incorporate security, we’re known to be very easy to install. We have a much more automated way to achieve the things we’re trying to achieve. For example, things like prioritization and failover. Other vendors would require manual policies to create that capability.
Speaker 2: 07:39 Their ability to do what we do is very similar, but how it’s performed is much more manual with other platforms requiring IT professionals to set it up. In our case, we’ve got algorithms and software that do things in a much more automated fashion. So, again, that that pizza shop owner can plug in our device, and their VoIP traffic is gonna work immediately. Their point of sale is gonna be protected, and it just makes for a much more user friendly experience for small to midsize customers that don’t have huge IT staffs.
Speaker 1: 08:09 So how does Bigleaf price its service? I mean, what’s the selector that somebody says, and what is the knob that gets turned that influences how much this costs?
Speaker 2: 08:16 Good question. It is basically based on the bandwidth needs of the customer. We have packages ranging from a a 20 meg service in the low end to a 3 gig service on the high end. Just because somebody has a gig coax connection into their office doesn’t mean they necessarily have to go with our gig package. What we like to do is right size our offering to the actual usage pattern of the customer.
Speaker 2: 08:42 And one way they can identify that if they don’t already know that is put our service in for a couple weeks, track their usage pattern. You’ll often find somebody with a a pretty cheap gig connection from their cable provider only spiking at 70 megs, a 100 megs on the download. So they can go with our 100 megs service and, again, rightsize our offering and our price point to their usage pattern, and they they can upgrade later if they need to.
Speaker 1: 09:07 So, the world has changed a lot recently with COVID, and we’re now in a post COVID world and a distributed workforce, and work from home has become a a very important thing for a lot of companies relatively overnight. What does Bigleaf do to make that experience better for people that are at their homes and now working from their homes?
Speaker 2: 09:26 One of the things I have enjoyed about working for a a smaller company, we’re we’re about 60 employees today. My history is working with very large companies, 100 and thousands of employees. We can be nimble. When when COVID hit, we were able to respond very quickly by putting our development team on the task of creating a home office offering. Within less than a week, we were able to put something together that is designed for the home.
Speaker 2: 09:55 So as employees are shifting to work at home activities, we can now ship out a router that is designed to work with a single circuit, which most homes have. Again, 3 to 5 minute setup that doesn’t require any technical expertise. An accountant working from home can plug in the device and get it set up very quickly. I did it in my own home in 5 minutes. I am not a technical person.
Speaker 2: 10:18 If I can do it, anybody can do it. And automatically, your Zoom sessions, your VoIP calls are getting prioritized over your Netflix and and Hulu and gaming with your kids in the background. What’s important about that, I think, is many of us believe that what we are going to be seeing in the coming months years is some kind of permanent shift to more work at home behavior. How much that will happen is debatable, but I think most would agree that as we get comfortable leveraging these communication technologies in our homes, we’re going to start to see less of a need to go into the office. And that just drives home the need to have that lifeline, that Internet connection into your home be a more intelligent platform, not a dumb pipe that treats a Netflix session the same as it does your Zoom session.
Speaker 1: 11:08 So, I mean, with a single circuit, you’re not talking about routing around a network, let you know, congestion or latency or packet loss. I mean, if your home cable company is having a problem at 8 PM at night, you know, there’s limited that you can do with that. What you’re talking about is making sure that, you know, a video game console doesn’t affect your ability to actually work and be on the phone. You’re prioritizing business traffic over nonbusiness traffic for home users.
Speaker 2: 11:32 Yes. But one thing that’s not well known about our service that I think we need to better articulate is we are doing some things to steer around and reduce packet loss with carriers. For example, my Internet connection coming into my house is a 100 meg connection, but it’s a best effort service. It’s a variable throughput service. At 3 in the afternoon when there’s people in the neighborhood using this connection, my 100 megs circuit could be getting 80 megs at any given moment.
Speaker 2: 12:01 Our tunnel mechanism in real time adapts to that. So if my circuit’s getting 80 megs instead of a 100, which it’s rated at, we’re only allowing enough traffic to go through that line that it can support at that moment in time, which at that time is 80 megs. What that does is it prevents packet loss from taking place in CenturyLink’s core routers, who’s my Internet provider. So we are literally reducing packet loss in that case that would normally occur and potentially screw up your Zoom session. The other thing that we’re doing is, again, we’re managing traffic from the customer premise, in this case, my house, to our gateway.
Speaker 2: 12:38 That traffic is going from my house to the cable head end of my provider and then riding upstream providers to our gateway. In the case of Comcast, for example, they might be leveraging level 3 as their backbone provider. If level 3 is having an issue, we can see that in our network and we can steer around that and go to another backbone provider that’s not having trouble at that time. So we’re in real time able to steer around backbone problems on the Internet without anybody knowing that we’re doing that behind the scenes. So I know that’s a long way of saying we can actually prevent some problems that occur from carrier packet loss.
Speaker 1: 13:19 Awesome. So, I mean, you should probably also let’s talk about your reports because, I mean, after installing Bigleaf, right, the idea is these things are just going to be better. How does somebody know if you’re actually working or if this is benefiting them? I mean, other than getting a bill from you each month.
Speaker 2: 13:35 Yeah. Part of the intelligence that we’re offering is visibility. So with every Bigleaf service comes our Bigleaf app site, which is a portal that you can access to see real time metrics on packet loss, latency, jitter, throughput, usage patterns. If you and I were having a challenge with this conversation right now, I could pop into the app site. I have Bigleaf installed in my house, and I can see, yeah, I’ve got packet loss from my carrier, which is causing that problem.
Speaker 2: 14:02 If I don’t see that, now I know that my circuit’s clean. Maybe I’ve got a Wi Fi issue. It just helps with troubleshooting.
Speaker 1: 14:10 Hey, John, one last question before I let you go. You know, if a business is interested in Bigleaf, can they try you before they sign a contract? Is there an evaluation period? What does that look like?
Speaker 2: 14:20 Absolutely. We have a 30 day money back guarantee on every order form. So every customer is encouraged to try our service. If for any reason in those 1st 4 weeks, they aren’t satisfied, they would just ship the router back. We wouldn’t charge them anything.
Speaker 2: 14:33 For customers that are looking at very large deployments, dozens and dozens of locations, we always let them try us out at a few sites, make sure everything’s working correctly before we we do any kind of wide deployment. So there’s always a way to try the service, vet it out, make sure you’re comfortable before you’re committed
Speaker 1: 14:49 to anything. Awesome. John, thank you very much for your time.
Speaker 2: 14:51 Yeah. Thank you.
Speaker 1: 14:54 Thanks for joining the Tech in 20 Minutes podcast. At Clark Sys, we believe tech should make your life better. Searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven’t heard of before. We can help you buy the right tech for your business. Visitus@clarksys.com to schedule an intro call.
