How To Write An Article Review Essay, Detailed Instructions

The most effective method to Write An Article Review Essay, Detailed Instructions What is an article survey An article audit is a procedure of fundamentally assessing writing inside a particular field, itâ entails summing up, characterizing and leading correlation among various exploration discoveries. Article survey includes scanning for logical articles among databases to recover applicable exploration discoveries introduced by various writers. The reason for audit is to offer the two understudies and researchers the chance to assess crafted by different specialists in a particular field. Â Using the article audit process, specialists offer basic sentiments about other master research work. Procedures engaged with Article Review Article survey includes introducing your examination of a subject dependent on an article finding to individuals who are acquainted with a particular subject matter. It requests proficient composition with exclusive requirements and a top to bottom introduction of our conclusion. Significant focuses to consider before beginning to audit an article incorporates understanding that an article survey doesn't require new data, yet requires our reaction dependent on another writers work. Article audit requires a basic assessment and examinations utilizing speculations, thoughts and exploration discoveries that are identified with the current subject. A decent article survey ought to have efficient thoughts that manufacture thoughts and present its contentions reliably. Perusing and exploring Before beginning the audit procedure, it is critical to peruse the chosen article to have a superior comprehension of the article content. It is fitting to peruse and re-read the article to recognize a portion of the regular topics depicted in the article. In the wake of perusing the article, it is imperative to pinpoint the key focuses introduced by the writer, Â this basic advance will help recognize the principle article purposes of contention that helps in working up coherent contentions while evaluating the article. Setting up an Outline A blueprint is a key when composing aâ perfect paper, itâ makes the composing simple when introducing articles contentions. Composing a framework includes picking the particular proclamation that presents the fundamental motivation behind the survey, known as the proposition. A proposition articulation expresses the principle thoughts and helps control their stream. Proposal explanations are an impression of our judgment or assessment which can be created from perusing or individual encounters. Building up a proposal proclamation involves introducing the goal communicated by the creator and introducing if the creators expectation were figured it out. Concocting a layout requires the essayist to peruse the article and note down significant realities and some other commitments made by other important examination discoveries. A decent framework needs to distinguish information holes and any logical inconsistencies. Â An framework ought to likewise involve a portion of the inadequacy and qualities of the recognized articles lastly summing up the paper dependent on solid information. Composing a survey Presentation The initial segment is the presentation, the presentation starts with referencing the name of the article. For instance, the article named New proof on the treatment of ADHD by Lucian, Barnes-Holmes, and Barnes-Holmes talks about treatment and the board of ADHD among youngsters. The principal section ought to incorporate a proposition explanation. The other significant focuses during presentation incorporate composing how the article identifies with other exploration discoveries on the particular subject. When composing an article audit, the point should be obviously expressed, refering to the recognized article toward the start of the paper, which is likewise significant. Â Presenting the subject toward the start of the paper will convey to the peruser about the primary motivation behind the composition. The subject should be engaging and should feature the most significant purposes of the article to be checked on. The subject should be definitive, reminiscent or testing. Refering to the article will empower the peruser to realize the particular article being referred to, for instance: Luciano, C., Barnes-Holmes, Y., Barnes-Holmes, D. (2002)? New proof on the treatment of ADHD. Exploration in Developmental Disabilities, 23 (6), 406-421. During a presentation, one will clarify the models the creator utilized while breaking down and furthermore contrasting its discoveries, one will clarify the association for the survey. The body of the survey When composing a survey, the body of the paper should start with a theme sentence that expresses the principle thoughts of the section. Â Starting the section with a point sentence presents the peruser with the thought early. The body of the paper ought to incorporate information broke down or citations, or a lot of examination demonstrating proof. The body of the article should layout the contentions that help the proposal explanation followed by a rationale advancement of thoughts noted when building up the framework. It is critical to cite a few realities introduced by the writer to delineate the fundamental article thoughts. While surveying an article, it is imperative to sum up the entire thought of the article, including what the writer expressed by noticing significant realities and other article discoveries. The following stage is to investigate the article by featuring the articles qualities and shortcomings dependent on your conclusion. It is likewise basic to recognize the writers commitment in the particular field and furthermore feature the holes and any logical inconsistencies found in the article. Â Criticizing an article involves taking an outlook to either bolster or not bolster the writers discoveries. All these ought to be upheld up by certainty and speculations that apply to the point. When picking cites from the article to help your contention, its imperative to choose and talk about materials from the article to demonstrate your point. Citations help in building up a contention about the creators work utilizing your words. End The finishing up passage needs to sum up the perspectives on the article and furthermore rehash the theory proclamation. In this segment, finishing up implies returning to the fundamental thoughts of the article and featuring our assessment of the article. The end likewise presents the chance to give a path forward for additional examination. A compelling end needs to go past outline and welcome the writers endeavors and the criticalness of the article. End causes the perusers to acknowledge how you built up a contention or if the paper responded to the inquiry. Â The end ought to be created from a perusers viewpoint. Toward the finish of the paper, the peruser needs to increase new knowledge from the paper about the subject of conversation. Looking into the draft In the wake of finishing the principal draft of the survey, its imperative to reconsider the composed paper to check for spelling and syntax. Editing needs to erase superfluous and tedious expressions or words and furthermore include any missing data before presenting the last work. Â Proofreading needs to check for mistakes in citations or in references, rationale advancement and furthermore check if the paper has a strong help for the theory articulation. During the survey, significant changes of the substance are permitted before presenting the last work.

Web-base enterprise applications security guidelines Research Paper

Web-base venture applications security rules - Research Paper Example Besides, the task additionally gives certain methodologies and rules that ought to be kept up so as to guarantee security of electronic endeavor applications. In the contemporary business condition pretty much every venture have online presence for giving data, yet in addition for collaborating with key partners, for example, clients, customers and vendors among others through various electronic applications. From web based imparting application to electronic venture, undertakings are continually producing online applications that give expanded access to fundamental data. As of now online applications are viewed as soul of today’s present day ventures as they grant representatives to perform urgent business exercises. At the point when these applications are permitted to get to big business systems, they can without much of a stretch offer data. Prior, when the online applications were created, the data security systems were genuinely easy to force, all things considered, present day undertakings are thinking about various security dangers. Customer driven apparatuses have discharged another pattern of electronic applications which can without much of a stretch be penetrated and can basically avoid the customary venture organize security obstructions (Fortinet, â€Å"Controlling Web 2.0 Applications in the Enterprise†). As organizations are developing, undertakings are getting progressively reliant on online applications, the perplexing units are getting all the more testing to make sure about. A few endeavors secure their system through introducing firewalls and ‘Secure Socket Layer’ (SSL) among others, yet the greater part of the electronic assaults are focussed on the application level, instead of system level and these security strategies can't forestall those assaults. In like manner, the key inspiration for undertaking this investigation is to devise certain rules so as to ensure and make sure about the venture organize. Furthermore, the paper additionally means to examine approaches so as to upgrade the

CP7 Podcast with Kumar Ramachandran from CloudGenix about Wide Area Networks (SD-WAN)

CP7 Podcast with Kumar Ramachandran from CloudGenix about Wide Area Networks (SD-WAN) INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi today we are here with CloudGenix CEO Kumar. Hi, Kumar who are you and what do you do?Kumar: Thank Martin, Im Kumar Ramachandran, founder, and CEO of CloudGenix. What CloudGenix does is generally what we call the Software Defined-Wide Area Network or SD-WAN for short. What we do is transform the way remote offices are connected back to the data center and clouds by allowing customers to use low-cost connectivity by eliminating the need for the traditional complexity of networking and really basing a system that is based on application and policy definitions instead of lots of complexity that seems to rule todays networks from the legacy vendors.Martin: Cool, when did you start CloudGenix and what did you do before?Kumar: So we started CloudGenix in early to mid-2013. I spent several years of my career between applications and networking infrastructure. While I started my career out building applications for companies like Citi Bank, I migrated to networking. I had a long stint at Cisco where among various things I was responsible for remote office networking and branch networking products, which is the space that we are disrupting now.Martin: Cool. Kumar, at what point and time did you think for yourself: Hey, I want to start a company?Kumar: You know for an entrepreneur usually it is a combination of things. I usually like to say that there are at least two or three things that I look for myself. I think that space is big enough and interesting enough to form a company around it.So, the first thing is that I like markets that are very large. The remote office networking, the WAN category is anywhere between $25 billion to $40 billion depending on which analyst and how you count the numbers in terms of total addressable market. That makes it a great opportunity for the team and the investors.The second thing I like to look for usually is that you are delivering a significantly transformative customer value. Usually, I like to think of it as 10x better than any existing solution out there and that is exactly what we did with CloudGenix. My co-founders, in terms of head of engineering as less my technical architects they came up with a way to do networking that is 10x better while being 50% less expensive for our customers. So thats why we decided to found this company.Martin: Great and how did you start out? I mean how long did it take you develop the technology for the MPV version? How did you acquire and convince the first customers?Kumar: That is a great question and a topic that I am passionate about. I like to believe that I am a student of the lean start-up philosophy. I have had the pleasure of taking Steve Blank courses during my MBA at UC Berkeley. Steve Blank is actually the godfather for the implementation model of lean start-up. Its like Eric Ries the person that wrote the book on lean start-up, he was the student of Steve Blank too.Really what Steve brings to the table and the practical implementation th at Eric brings to the table is a model where you look at customer development not as something you do after building a product, but really up front in the process, where in you are building a product with validated information that indeed this product has a great market.When we got started, even though we have deep building experience, we didnt go about building all the bells and whistles engaging in a three-year project to develop an enterprise class solution. What we did is we went to customers to whom we initially showed the slidedeck where we subsequently built prototypes. Made the customer deploy those early prototypes in the labs and the production environments even in some cases. And what that gave us is valuable feedback that initial things we were building were adding immense value to these customer organizations. Right from day one we have been focused on doing three month spent while we have been delivering those products to customers in a very meager manner.Martin: How l ong did this first or initial phase of the customer development take you? How many months?Kumar: It took us about 6 to 9 months to purely refine the product we were building. Compare to a lot of start-ups everywhere, this is shorter time frame for us, its because we were very familiar with this space and the customer feedback was very clear and very strong. What that allowed us to do really is that space of 6 months we narrowed down exactly what we were building, how we were building, which market segments we were targeting, and after that we have just been making sure the product is hardening.BUSINESS MODEL OF CLOUDGENIXMartin: Kumar, lets talk about the business model of CloudGenix. What type of customer segments are you serving what type of value proposition?Kumar: I like to categorize the CloudGenix customers in two ways. One is because we are a remote office solution any vertical that has a lot of funnel in terms of their presence is a target customer for us. So some of the key verticals for us are:retail, you have a lot of retail store locations,healthcare that you have lots of hospitals,banks and financial services,manufacturing,any place where you have funnel.Now Ill give a familiar example of a specific customer and do a little bit of color on the value to that. Columbia Sportsware, one of our regular customers, besides working with them, they really had three big problems. One, their WAN costs were way out of whack with that infrastructure cost. Two, their ability to deliver high definition video, a lot of rich media in-store video. Three, they have operational effort required to keep the network up especially through the holiday season when they need high availability was extremely taxing on the team.We took on all three challenges head on. With CloudGenix they were able to use their Wide Area Networking cost by 50-70%. Second, they now have a network infrastructure all which they can deliver Omni-channel initiators in retail; things like video kios k, things like rich media to the store, etc. Third, operationally because they are providing a highly available model for networking their operational teams have had an exceptionally high performing holiday season dilemma and now we are into 2015 where the marks are for network downtime in the storage has declined while the operational team itself doesnt have to do any manual intervention. All this then goes back to the builders. Infrastructure and IT exist to drive and help the builders.So now what we are now translating for them is:one, better up time for the stores means better sales;two, the Columbia Sportsware to expand like trying to roll out the new stores is reduced dramatically. Now when the business says, we need to make a change or we want to open a store IT is not a bottleneck.Martin: Normally its with technology driven companies there is some kind of very interesting technology in the first place, which is very new, which then translates into business opportunities wher e some industries are disrupted and so on so forth. In your case, it seems to me that this technology is SD-WAN. Can you tell us a little bit about that? What it is and how it is used?Kumar: Okay, absolutely. SD-WAN or Software Defined-Wide Area Network, there are some core principles to it. If you look at the old model of how to build the network you actually have to put physical hardware at every one of your remote locations. Oftentimes, these were custom pieces of proprietary hardware that are very expensive, very difficult to maintain from legacy vendors. Second, you have what is known in networking as really a fragmented system. Think of it in terms of a central big brain creating an operating network. The brain is fragmented across all parts of your system. A fragmented brain is very difficult to manage and very brittle. Third, because the brain is fragmented it relies on extremely expensive connectivity from the carriers.What SD-WAN does with CloudGenix is:We have moved away from the need for using proprietary hardware for networking. You can obtain an update from where ever you want and you can run our solution as software.There is the central brain that builds and operates the network. Due to the need for a lot of complexity that comes from a fragmented model that incumbent vendors put out today.What we are able to do with our customers, we start going to cloud, we start looking for being able to take advantage of fully automated solutions in the CloudGenix model.All that you do as a customer is you come and specify application intent. Now, what does that mean? So you are typically coming in and saying: Okay for this particular application here is my security policy. Here is my performance policy. Here are any compliance requirements that I have. Once you specify that the CloudGenix system will be able to take it and build an operator network on behalf of the customer. What CloudGenix SD-WAN does is eliminate the need for hardware, provide a big centr al brain, and eliminate the need for a lot of traditional networking complexity.Martin: At some point after you started the company you need to think about a sustainable competitive advantage. Something like an IP, patent, economies of scale, or some kind really interesting way of how to reach and serve the customers. What is your sustainable competitive advantage? At what point in time did you start thinking and executing on it?Kumar: The core differentiators of the company really come down to the fact that we are providing an application based model to go build your network. Now there is absolutely nobody in the industry that has successfully done this before. So its truly path breaking innovation on that front that if you think about it in the past anyone had to build a network you literally had to go into the bits and bytes to go build that network. The analogy I like to give in application development is that if you were using an assembly language to write your code you probabl y wont be able to build a model on that site like Google, Facebook, or anything like that. The same is true in networking. Today the language that the networking administrators are given by the vendors is an assembly language. What we are doing is providing a model language to that administrator that the administrator is able to talk the language of business to our system, capture that and our system builds a network on behalf of the administrator. Doing that sometimes requires a lot of technology under the hood that none of the other vendors out there have been able to build in the last few years.Martin: Cool, now I would like to talk to you about some kind of parallel between the networking, natural or biological systems. Can you elaborate on that?Kumar: The old model of building a network is if your brain was completely fragmented. The human body actually has an centralized brain. Our nervous system communicates information that we just get from our body, back to the brain. The b rain makes decisions, sends those decisions back and that is a great model. We all assume to function exceptionally well. Like, my hand have certain independent capabilities: I can pick a pen and that brain can communicate just enough information. I am fascinated with how those networks are being built today rather than in the past.The way networks are built then is really that it is how your brain would be fragmented all over the place and you are struggling to clear that coordination. So now if you have to even pick something with two hands somebody else would have to help coordinate these two hands together. That is why you have a lot of network administrators needing to program and manage the network, which is very brittle.What we have really done is moved to a model that you can have a central brain, a TCN Wireless Network  sees all the devices in the network and orchestrates them. Like the human body is a great example of how these systems work. Large scale networks really ne ed central brains. Now the trick there is to make sure the access to the brain is super fast, the brain doesnt become a bottleneck that you have a large capacity in the brain that you dont have a headache or anything else. Those are all things that we brought to the table as the path breaking innovation. That is a great question by the way.ENTREPRENEURIAL ADVICE FROM KUMAR RAMACHANDRANMartin: Lets talk about your learnings over the last years. So what are the Dos and Donts that you can share with other people who are interested in starting their own company?Kumar: You know by far the biggest thing I would say goes back to the principle of lean start-up. There are way too many companies that we see where engineering teams hunker down, build to an early product and then they see product market fit after that. In fact, this is similar to ours. I see companies and what it causes them to do is waste a lot of engineering resources and time. Money and time are backup to the startup you are finding.In place of lean start-up get a certain validation. I like to say, dont believe the nice between the ears, Steve Blank. Get out of the building, deliver your product to your customers, and get the validation. Getting verbal validation is not enough. Dont be afraid to ask for responsible validation process, absolutely dont be afraid to ask for things back from the customer. Ask the customer to test the product in the lab. Ask the customer for appeal. Ask the customer for something. There is a value to the customer or the customer organization because that is what provides you validated feedback.What you will find is that it doesnt matter how early the product, how early the market, youll find those early adaptive customers that referred to as beacon light, that will tell you if you are on the right track and on the right formation of the MVP.That applies to anyone going down this path that in the end most start-up die of indigestion, rather than starvation. Be very judicious about what you build and how you build it.Martin: What are the main or the key questions you would like to answer during the customer development process?Kumar: During the customer development process, the high level single biggest question is that: Am I solving a problem for the customer for which the customer is going to pay me money or compensate me otherwise? This building process has to be about my assumption as a great engineer will figure out a solution to tough problems. So finding innovative solutions if you have a great team you are going to do that. The question really is that innovative team building innovative solutions for a rich problem set.The single biggest question that will get answered is that if you think that you can potentially solve three or four problems for your customers, get validations against that. If those problems are really that important to your customer even when you dont have a product, even when you are in the prototype phase, you will find that the customer is either investing in you by giving up their time, taking your early prototype into a lab or even cutting appeal for you. But you have to get something from the customer back. If you are just showing slides to a customer and asking the customer for feedback that is oftentimes where a customer is too nice. So it is critical to get to a place that you getting something of value from the customer. That is what we tell you that if the customer feels that you are really solving something worth paying for or are they just being nice by telling you what you are working on is great.Martin: What have the customers offered to you? Was it like cash, payment, or some other type of value?Kumar: You know in our case the thing we asked our customer was to take the product into their labs and spend a week or two testing it, then give us feedback. The only thing more precious for most customers in IT these days is their time. In fact, time is more valuable than even money because they guys are doing so many projects. Sometimes we didnt even ask them to get approval from their managers to work on this project. It is not a side project, but it is really a formal evaluation. What that did in the very early stages is that it gives us very direct feedback. Some of the problems that we thought that we would solve, we had actually customers come back and say: You know, Im not sure that its interesting, but I dont think I want to take the time. And then you knew that that was real feedback. You didnt know the people so the slides were great. The fact that they are not willing to take your product into their lab, you say: Okay, this problem is not worth the time of this customer. So you will find a different customer or find a different problem.Martin: Before you raised your first round of financing what type of validation did you try to show to the investors?Kumar: We were a little early compared to maybe software based companies these days. We did get validation from c ustomers in two ways. One was we built a lot of mockups. We didnt have a functional product because it takes a lot longer to build a functional product. But for some customers we had slideware and then we went a bit further with PMO that we actually built pick through mockups. So the customer could pick through the mockups and get a first-hand sense of how the product would work.Martin: Cool, great, thank you so much for sharing you knowledge Kumar. It was a pleasure talking to you. I wish you all the best and luck with your new business.Kumar: Thank you very much, Martin.Martin: Great, thank you.THANKS FOR LISTENING! Welcome to the 7th episode of our podcast!You can download the podcast to your computer or listen to it here on the blog. Click here to subscribe in iTunes. INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi today we are here with CloudGenix CEO Kumar. Hi, Kumar who are you and what do you do?Kumar: Thank Martin, Im Kumar Ramachandran, founder, and CEO of CloudGenix. What CloudGenix does is generally what we call the Software Defined-Wide Area Network or SD-WAN for short. What we do is transform the way remote offices are connected back to the data center and clouds by allowing customers to use low-cost connectivity by eliminating the need for the traditional complexity of networking and really basing a system that is based on application and policy definitions instead of lots of complexity that seems to rule todays networks from the legacy vendors.Martin: Cool, when did you start CloudGenix and what did you do before?Kumar: So we started CloudGenix in early to mid-2013. I spent several years of my career between applications and networking infrastructure. While I started my career out building applications for companies like Citi Bank, I migrated to networking. I had a long stint at Cisco where among various things I was responsible for remote office networking and branch networking products, which is the space that we are disrupting now.Martin: Cool. Kumar, at what point and time did you think for yourself: Hey, I want to start a company?Kumar: You know for an entrepreneur usually it is a combination of things. I usually like to say that there are at least two or three things that I look for myself. I think that space is big enough and interesting enough to form a company around it.So, the first thing is that I like markets that are very large. The remote office networking, the WAN category is anywhere between $25 billion to $40 billion depending on which analyst and how you count the numbers in terms of total addressable market. That makes it a great opportunity for the team and the investors.The second thing I like to look for usually is that you are delivering a significantly transformative customer value. Usually, I like to think of it as 10x better than any existing solution out there and that is exactly what we did with CloudGenix. My co-founders, in terms of head of engineering as less my technical architects they came up with a way to do networking that is 10x better while being 50% less expensive for our customers. So thats why we decided to found this company.Martin: Great and how did you start out? I mean how long did it take you develop the technology for the MPV version? How did you acquire and convince the first customers?Kumar: That is a great question and a topic that I am passionate about. I like to believe that I am a student of the lean start-up philosophy. I have had the pleasure of taking Steve Blank courses during my MBA at UC Berkeley. Steve Blank is actually the godfather for the implementation model of lean start-up. Its like Eric Ries the person that wrote the book on lean start-up, he was the student of Steve Blank too.Really what Steve brings to the table and the practical implementation th at Eric brings to the table is a model where you look at customer development not as something you do after building a product, but really up front in the process, where in you are building a product with validated information that indeed this product has a great market.When we got started, even though we have deep building experience, we didnt go about building all the bells and whistles engaging in a three-year project to develop an enterprise class solution. What we did is we went to customers to whom we initially showed the slidedeck where we subsequently built prototypes. Made the customer deploy those early prototypes in the labs and the production environments even in some cases. And what that gave us is valuable feedback that initial things we were building were adding immense value to these customer organizations. Right from day one we have been focused on doing three month spent while we have been delivering those products to customers in a very meager manner.Martin: How l ong did this first or initial phase of the customer development take you? How many months?Kumar: It took us about 6 to 9 months to purely refine the product we were building. Compare to a lot of start-ups everywhere, this is shorter time frame for us, its because we were very familiar with this space and the customer feedback was very clear and very strong. What that allowed us to do really is that space of 6 months we narrowed down exactly what we were building, how we were building, which market segments we were targeting, and after that we have just been making sure the product is hardening.BUSINESS MODEL OF CLOUDGENIXMartin: Kumar, lets talk about the business model of CloudGenix. What type of customer segments are you serving what type of value proposition?Kumar: I like to categorize the CloudGenix customers in two ways. One is because we are a remote office solution any vertical that has a lot of funnel in terms of their presence is a target customer for us. So some of the key verticals for us are:retail, you have a lot of retail store locations,healthcare that you have lots of hospitals,banks and financial services,manufacturing,any place where you have funnel.Now Ill give a familiar example of a specific customer and do a little bit of color on the value to that. Columbia Sportsware, one of our regular customers, besides working with them, they really had three big problems. One, their WAN costs were way out of whack with that infrastructure cost. Two, their ability to deliver high definition video, a lot of rich media in-store video. Three, they have operational effort required to keep the network up especially through the holiday season when they need high availability was extremely taxing on the team.We took on all three challenges head on. With CloudGenix they were able to use their Wide Area Networking cost by 50-70%. Second, they now have a network infrastructure all which they can deliver Omni-channel initiators in retail; things like video kios k, things like rich media to the store, etc. Third, operationally because they are providing a highly available model for networking their operational teams have had an exceptionally high performing holiday season dilemma and now we are into 2015 where the marks are for network downtime in the storage has declined while the operational team itself doesnt have to do any manual intervention. All this then goes back to the builders. Infrastructure and IT exist to drive and help the builders.So now what we are now translating for them is:one, better up time for the stores means better sales;two, the Columbia Sportsware to expand like trying to roll out the new stores is reduced dramatically. Now when the business says, we need to make a change or we want to open a store IT is not a bottleneck.Martin: Normally its with technology driven companies there is some kind of very interesting technology in the first place, which is very new, which then translates into business opportunities wher e some industries are disrupted and so on so forth. In your case, it seems to me that this technology is SD-WAN. Can you tell us a little bit about that? What it is and how it is used?Kumar: Okay, absolutely. SD-WAN or Software Defined-Wide Area Network, there are some core principles to it. If you look at the old model of how to build the network you actually have to put physical hardware at every one of your remote locations. Oftentimes, these were custom pieces of proprietary hardware that are very expensive, very difficult to maintain from legacy vendors. Second, you have what is known in networking as really a fragmented system. Think of it in terms of a central big brain creating an operating network. The brain is fragmented across all parts of your system. A fragmented brain is very difficult to manage and very brittle. Third, because the brain is fragmented it relies on extremely expensive connectivity from the carriers.What SD-WAN does with CloudGenix is:We have moved away from the need for using proprietary hardware for networking. You can obtain an update from where ever you want and you can run our solution as software.There is the central brain that builds and operates the network. Due to the need for a lot of complexity that comes from a fragmented model that incumbent vendors put out today.What we are able to do with our customers, we start going to cloud, we start looking for being able to take advantage of fully automated solutions in the CloudGenix model.All that you do as a customer is you come and specify application intent. Now, what does that mean? So you are typically coming in and saying: Okay for this particular application here is my security policy. Here is my performance policy. Here are any compliance requirements that I have. Once you specify that the CloudGenix system will be able to take it and build an operator network on behalf of the customer. What CloudGenix SD-WAN does is eliminate the need for hardware, provide a big centr al brain, and eliminate the need for a lot of traditional networking complexity.Martin: At some point after you started the company you need to think about a sustainable competitive advantage. Something like an IP, patent, economies of scale, or some kind really interesting way of how to reach and serve the customers. What is your sustainable competitive advantage? At what point in time did you start thinking and executing on it?Kumar: The core differentiators of the company really come down to the fact that we are providing an application based model to go build your network. Now there is absolutely nobody in the industry that has successfully done this before. So its truly path breaking innovation on that front that if you think about it in the past anyone had to build a network you literally had to go into the bits and bytes to go build that network. The analogy I like to give in application development is that if you were using an assembly language to write your code you probabl y wont be able to build a model on that site like Google, Facebook, or anything like that. The same is true in networking. Today the language that the networking administrators are given by the vendors is an assembly language. What we are doing is providing a model language to that administrator that the administrator is able to talk the language of business to our system, capture that and our system builds a network on behalf of the administrator. Doing that sometimes requires a lot of technology under the hood that none of the other vendors out there have been able to build in the last few years.Martin: Cool, now I would like to talk to you about some kind of parallel between the networking, natural or biological systems. Can you elaborate on that?Kumar: The old model of building a network is if your brain was completely fragmented. The human body actually has an centralized brain. Our nervous system communicates information that we just get from our body, back to the brain. The b rain makes decisions, sends those decisions back and that is a great model. We all assume to function exceptionally well. Like, my hand have certain independent capabilities: I can pick a pen and that brain can communicate just enough information. I am fascinated with how those networks are being built today rather than in the past.The way networks are built then is really that it is how your brain would be fragmented all over the place and you are struggling to clear that coordination. So now if you have to even pick something with two hands somebody else would have to help coordinate these two hands together. That is why you have a lot of network administrators needing to program and manage the network, which is very brittle.What we have really done is moved to a model that you can have a central brain, a TCN Wireless Network  sees all the devices in the network and orchestrates them. Like the human body is a great example of how these systems work. Large scale networks really ne ed central brains. Now the trick there is to make sure the access to the brain is super fast, the brain doesnt become a bottleneck that you have a large capacity in the brain that you dont have a headache or anything else. Those are all things that we brought to the table as the path breaking innovation. That is a great question by the way.ENTREPRENEURIAL ADVICE FROM KUMAR RAMACHANDRANMartin: Lets talk about your learnings over the last years. So what are the Dos and Donts that you can share with other people who are interested in starting their own company?Kumar: You know by far the biggest thing I would say goes back to the principle of lean start-up. There are way too many companies that we see where engineering teams hunker down, build to an early product and then they see product market fit after that. In fact, this is similar to ours. I see companies and what it causes them to do is waste a lot of engineering resources and time. Money and time are backup to the startup you are finding.In place of lean start-up get a certain validation. I like to say, dont believe the nice between the ears, Steve Blank. Get out of the building, deliver your product to your customers, and get the validation. Getting verbal validation is not enough. Dont be afraid to ask for responsible validation process, absolutely dont be afraid to ask for things back from the customer. Ask the customer to test the product in the lab. Ask the customer for appeal. Ask the customer for something. There is a value to the customer or the customer organization because that is what provides you validated feedback.What you will find is that it doesnt matter how early the product, how early the market, youll find those early adaptive customers that referred to as beacon light, that will tell you if you are on the right track and on the right formation of the MVP.That applies to anyone going down this path that in the end most start-up die of indigestion, rather than starvation. Be very judicious about what you build and how you build it.Martin: What are the main or the key questions you would like to answer during the customer development process?Kumar: During the customer development process, the high level single biggest question is that: Am I solving a problem for the customer for which the customer is going to pay me money or compensate me otherwise? This building process has to be about my assumption as a great engineer will figure out a solution to tough problems. So finding innovative solutions if you have a great team you are going to do that. The question really is that innovative team building innovative solutions for a rich problem set.The single biggest question that will get answered is that if you think that you can potentially solve three or four problems for your customers, get validations against that. If those problems are really that important to your customer even when you dont have a product, even when you are in the prototype phase, you will find that the customer is either investing in you by giving up their time, taking your early prototype into a lab or even cutting appeal for you. But you have to get something from the customer back. If you are just showing slides to a customer and asking the customer for feedback that is oftentimes where a customer is too nice. So it is critical to get to a place that you getting something of value from the customer. That is what we tell you that if the customer feels that you are really solving something worth paying for or are they just being nice by telling you what you are working on is great.Martin: What have the customers offered to you? Was it like cash, payment, or some other type of value?Kumar: You know in our case the thing we asked our customer was to take the product into their labs and spend a week or two testing it, then give us feedback. The only thing more precious for most customers in IT these days is their time. In fact, time is more valuable than even money because they guys are doing so many projects. Sometimes we didnt even ask them to get approval from their managers to work on this project. It is not a side project, but it is really a formal evaluation. What that did in the very early stages is that it gives us very direct feedback. Some of the problems that we thought that we would solve, we had actually customers come back and say: You know, Im not sure that its interesting, but I dont think I want to take the time. And then you knew that that was real feedback. You didnt know the people so the slides were great. The fact that they are not willing to take your product into their lab, you say: Okay, this problem is not worth the time of this customer. So you will find a different customer or find a different problem.Martin: Before you raised your first round of financing what type of validation did you try to show to the investors?Kumar: We were a little early compared to maybe software based companies these days. We did get validation from c ustomers in two ways. One was we built a lot of mockups. We didnt have a functional product because it takes a lot longer to build a functional product. But for some customers we had slideware and then we went a bit further with PMO that we actually built pick through mockups. So the customer could pick through the mockups and get a first-hand sense of how the product would work.Martin: Cool, great, thank you so much for sharing you knowledge Kumar. It was a pleasure talking to you. I wish you all the best and luck with your new business.Kumar: Thank you very much, Martin.Martin: Great, thank you.THANKS FOR LISTENING!Thanks so much for joining our 7th podcast episode!Have some feedback you’d like to share?  Leave  a note in the comment section below! If you enjoyed this episode, please  share  it using the social media buttons you see at the bottom of the post.Also,  please leave an honest review for The Cleverism Podcast on iTunes or on SoundCloud. Ratings and reviews  are  extre mely  helpful  and greatly appreciated! They do matter in the rankings of the show, and we read each and every one of them.Special thanks  to Kumar for joining me this week. Until  next time!