Nile is an enterprise networking company that provides AI-powered, secure wired and wireless Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) solutions designed to automate and simplify infrastructure. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Nile Chief Marketing Officer Shashi Kiran to learn more.
Shashi Kiran’s Background
Could you tell me more about your background? Kiran said:
“I’m an engineer by education and a marketeer by profession. Over the past 30 years I’ve really enjoyed working at the nexus of technology innovation and market adoption, helping global companies build brands, create value and scale growth.”
Role At The Company
What are your primary responsibilities at the company? Kiran shared:
“My primary responsibility is to serve as the company’s chief go-to-market officer. This means sometimes acting as a two-way bridge between the company and the market. I also usually own or influence other areas including defining company strategy, business models or even product roadmaps. I enjoy connecting the dots across different functions to create multiplicity.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Kiran reflected:
“My previous two companies were large global multi-nationals where I had relatively larger teams and different kinds of go-to-market challenges to resolve. Getting back into a startup and exercising a completely different set of muscles, figuring things out from first principles is always exciting and exercises creative juices. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed that.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Kiran explained:
“The soul of the company is like it is a utility for secure networking. We call it secure network-as-a-service (NaaS) for deployment in local area networks (LANs). We have developed highly innovative wired/wireless infrastructure, gateways and edge devices – all woven together as a zero trust fabric with native, built-in security. This is a standardized highly resilient architecture. We also have AI-powered offerings for the entire lifecycle of the customer across Day-0, Day-1 and Day-N plan, design, deploy and operate stages.”
“Together the company’s offerings serve as the “easy button” for secure networking. It brings radical simplicity to today’s LAN environments, especially where companies have lean IT resources, complexity etc., and dramatically reduces the attack surface and increases business velocity making it easy to manage change. All this is powered by AI, and focused on driving autonomous operations across the lifecycle.”
Challenges Faced
Have you faced any challenges in your sector of work recently? Kiran acknowledged:
“One of the biggest challenges is to clearly understand and position the identity of the company, vis-a-vis not a traditional competitor, but an existing operational model and mindset. Nile has taken on an ambitious challenge to not just change the status quo from a technology perspective, but also disrupt the complexity of the traditional operational model. This is not easy to comprehend and can often dilute the value proposition of the company, till customers actually experience the solution going “Wow”. But getting that Wow factor understood upfront with clarity in the initial engagements is not easy. It involves changing mindset internally and externally which is a hard thing to do. This is where my initial focus has been. Solving this helps unlock the company’s true potential.”
Evolution Of The Company’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Kiran noted:
“As they say, making things easy is hard. The company has been focused on making networking easy. It is very important as connectivity is the lifeblood of most organizations and serves as the underpinning for employee productivity, user experience and application performance. Having conquered this mountain, the company is now focused on enterprise grade security in the LAN.”
“Today secure connectivity is an oxymoron. If you’re connected, you better be secure, but it’s surprising how hard that is in legacy environments. Nile’s changed that paradigm. The other aspect is to apply AI to simplify the operational lifecycle from Day-0 to Day-N and radically simplify it. This is where a majority of the complexity and cost burden is. And Nile’s architecture and operational model results in 3X faster agility, over 50% cost savings and better security for our customers and partners.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Kiran cited:
“The company has truly innovated on disrupting the operational model to lead business transformation for our customers and partners. We now have customers across 12 verticals and operate in 30+ countries and have garnered several customers in the Fortune 500 in the United States and large marquee customers globally that are benefiting from this. We have to be grateful for each of these milestones. Along the way the company has garnered a significant number of patents for creating what I call creative disruption, recognition from analysts like Gartner, awards etc. For us every customer that sends back a smiley face that says ‘It just works’ is a major milestone.”
Customer Success Stories
Can you share any specific customer success stories? Kiran highlighted:
“As I mentioned, the architecture is built to unify, simplify and automate. What exists as disparate appliances with management and operational overheads in legacy environments has been unified, simplified and automated with Nile. Customers love this and they derive business agility and cost savings and better security from all this. One recent Fortune 500 customer in the financial services sector, managed to get rid of an external Network Access Controller (NAC) and other items that were costing them several million dollars, as that was built-in natively in Nile’s Zero Trust Fabric. The cost savings from that alone accelerated their ROI with the Nile secure NaaS solution, and OPEX subscription model was a bonus. Who wouldn’t love that?”
Funding/Revenue
Are you able to discuss funding and/or revenue metrics? Kiran pointed out:
“Our funding information is publicly available. As a private company we don’t disclose revenue metrics. However, we’ve historically grown in double and triple digit percentages over the past several quarters.”
Total Addressable Market (TAM)
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Kiran assessed:
“We see this in the tens of billions of dollars from a technology and perhaps even more from the value of the operational simplicity delivered across the Day-0, Day-1 and Day-2 of the lifecycle. A recent Dell O’ro report attributed the campus switching, WLAN and network security to be about 78% of the enterprise networking market, which is our playground. And this is only pertaining to the technology. If we look at its lifecycle operations, then the TAM is at least three to five times as large as the technology. Nile is one of the few companies that can participate in the market for both.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Kiran affirmed:
“We’re very unique in terms of owning the technology stack for networking and security, as well as the AI-powered operational model that is tightly integrated with the technology. In the traditional industry technology vendors mostly build appliances but don’t own the operational elements of the lifecycle. It’s handled either by the customers with an in-house team, or a managed services provider or a traditional telco. These dilute the SLAs and induce significant complexity for the customer.”
“Nile’s model stitches together the technology with an operational model allowing its customers to get the benefits of change management, simplicity etc. Partners also derive significant value as it improves their margin, improves deal velocity and enhances profitability. These are transformational projects and Nile’s model gives them a leg-up over traditional box sellers.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future goals? Kiran emphasized:
“We’re looking at continuing to penetrate the Fortune 500s, large enterprises and expand into other geographies globally. We’re also strengthening our partner ecosystem as we scale for growth. The true measure of our success will be in the number of customers we keep blissfully connected and secure while helping them drive positive outcomes in their business environments.”
Additional Thoughts
Any other topics you would like to discuss? Kiran concluded:
“We didn’t talk much about AI, but it is a strong tailwind for us. We’ve baked AI-Ops across the Day-0, 1 and 2 offerings and also used it to power our service cloud. Customers love that we’ve used all these to solve problems they don’t even know cropped up. It’s magical!”
