As I celebrated my half-year anniversary at Infoblox, I was delighted to present at our annual Analyst Day in San Francisco on June 1, where I shared our strategy, our customer success stories, and our goals. Here’s a condensed version of what I had to say.
At Infoblox, we thrive on complexity. Anytime there’s complexity in the network control plane, that’s where we shine with our industry-leading products for DNS, DHCP and IP address management, the category we call DDI. Just look at the statistics on how complexity is growing.
Various firms peg the number of active Internet users and IP devices at well over three billion. That’s pretty amazing and it doesn’t look to be slowing down, with estimates of the growth of those numbers as high as 25 percent per year.
The research firm Gartner estimates the Internet of Things will grow from 4.9 billion devices in 2015 to 25 billion devices by 2020, a 39 percent annual growth rate. This adds a huge amount of complexity as these devices – such as wearables, smart homes, self-driving cars – interact. We believe these “things” will redefine how we interact with our environment and how we construct our networks.
Unfortunately, the threat landscape is growing as well. Symantec estimates there were more than 317 million new instances of malware in 2014, up 26 percent. That’s almost a million new malware threats per day.
DDI is at the foundation of all of these trends. When you have more users and devices, you have more domain names and more IP addresses. The more you have, the more you need a robust IP address management (IPAM) application. This is a great opportunity for Infoblox.
Many of our customers today realize that without DNS, they might as well send their employees home. Without DNS, customers can’t access services. Without DHCP, you can’t hand out IP addresses. Without IPAM, you can’t keep track of it all.
Many customers are already discovering these truths. Here are some examples:
Law Firm. A global law firm was so concerned about the possibility of data exfiltration and document loss that it closed its network to external lookups. It also had multiple teams managing internal DNS, external DNS and DHCP, which was complex, costly and error-prone. It replaced its previous DNS vendor and now has highly available DNS and DHCP, supported by single-pane-of-glass management that presents all its IPAM data in one place. The firm expects significant reduction in operating expenses by deploying our enterprise-grade DDI.
Manufacturer. As I met with this global company, it was in the middle of a mystifying malware outbreak from within its firewall. The company was having difficulty identifying where the malware was coming from and which devices were infected. I suggested it download an evaluation license for our Infoblox DNS Firewall software and run a security assessment. Within 24 hours, the company had a report showing multiple instances of malware and cryptologgers in its system, and by the end of that week, the company had become a DNS Firewall customer. Our sales cycles aren’t always that short, but that’s one of my favorite stories.
Technology Company. Another global customer was deploying separate private clouds to support multiple business units, and wanted a single DDI solution for multi-vendor cloud deployment using the VMware and OpenStack platforms. The extent of its deployment meant that it could not use a manual DDI solution; it needed a solution with the kind of automation Infoblox provides. Now it can do VM and cloud provisioning within minutes, rather than hours or days.
Regardless of all this success, we aren’t going to rest on our laurels. We’ve made a significant R&D investment in DDI. We also have high aspirational goals: to make our software development more agile; to make our company smarter by being more data-driven, to improve operationally, and to grow significantly over the next few years.
We are also working to broaden our capabilities in the security space, especially when it comes to machine learning; to use our knowledge of virtualization so we can help customers take advantage of software-defined networking; and to become the de facto standard of excellence for DDI in the cloud.
In short, Infoblox has the opportunity to become a go-to vendor for getting network complexity under control.
If you want to watch my full 30-minute presentation, the replay is available here.
