Pankaj Patel, former chief development officer at Cisco and now CEO of network-as-a-service startup Nile, believes it’s time for enterprise networking to shed its complexity. Founded in 2018 by Cisco’s John Chambers and Patel, Nile reportedly has raised some $300 million in venture funding for its NaaS platform, which provides a cloud-based subscription model for enterprise wired and wireless LAN infrastructure, including hardware, software, and management services.
In his conversation with Network World, the Nile CEO explains how a clean-sheet approach to NaaS delivers zero-trust security, AI-driven automation, and up to 60% lower costs without the hardware headaches. Patel also discusses the origins of Nile, the market trends fueling NaaS, and how his company is using AI to fundamentally change the way organizations consume connectivity.
Q: What led you to launch Nile after such a long career at Cisco?
Pankaj Patel: After 22 years at Cisco, where I led engineering, marketing, and product management—and oversaw about 80% of the company’s revenue and 29,000 engineers and marketers—I knew that if I am starting something I better start by doing something big. I wanted to solve the complexity and inefficiency of networking operations. We started with an audacious vision to remove the human dependence from the management of the network.
For every dollar customers spend on networking gear, they’d spend three to five dollars on operations. That inefficiency has been accepted for too long. I knew there had to be a better way—so I took a clean-sheet approach with Nile. We are aiming to forever change how enterprises and organizations architect, design, acquire, deploy, secure, and maintain connectivity through a service.
Q: What were the market trends that convinced you the time was right for NaaS?
Patel: I saw three major transitions converging: cloud and IoT reshaping enterprise infrastructure, AI and automation maturing into practical solutions, and the rise of “everything as a service,” from Salesforce to Zoom, gaining enterprise acceptance. These shifts made it clear to me that networking was overdue for a reinvention—just like compute and storage had been disrupted by AWS, Azure, and GCP [Google Cloud Platform].
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Pankaj Patel, founder and CEO of Nile
Nile
Q: How does Nile’s approach to NaaS differ from legacy offerings?
Patel: Many so-called NaaS models are really just traditional equipment sales dressed up with financing. We deliver true service—no hardware, no software licenses, no upfront costs. We wanted to uniquely guarantee the network performance levels based on the outcomes that mattered the most to customers. So, this, by the way, is turning out to be a giant differentiator for NaaS for us, which is because we provide the availability, capacity, and the coverage. We reduce the business risk by delivering the complete lifecycle management, more importantly, without the management.
We built Nile to be the first zero-trust network requiring no network operations, offering a pure pay-as-you-use model—per user or square foot. Think of it like Uber: you say where you want to go, and the service gets you there without you managing the vehicle.
Q: What’s the security model behind Nile’s NaaS approach?
Patel: We wanted to shift the dynamic of the network from security worry to security force multiplier with the very first zero-trust network. According to Gartner and others, networking is the surface area where 60%–70% of cyberattacks originate. We architected and designed our service to completely seal that surface area off entirely—no lateral movement is possible. That’s a key reason why financial institutions, healthcare, manufacturing, and retail customers are embracing us. These are environments where downtime is unacceptable, and our service delivers four-nines uptime, backed financially.
We’re also targeting mid-sized enterprises—organizations with 100 users to about 5,000 to 10,000 users—because they’re the most vulnerable. They don’t have the security budgets of a Fortune 100 company, but their needs are just as critical.
Q: How are you integrating AI into Nile’s offering? And what makes it different from other vendors?
Patel: Other vendors bolt AI onto legacy environments—they give you dashboards or chatbot answers, but don’t fix anything. We started with a data-centric approach. We put a very deep instrumentation across all the network elements. We collect tons of data, although, by the way, all the metadata, we don’t collect any private data, and we are learning with all the collected data. We recently announced our Networking Experience Intelligence (NXI) platform, which is truly the combination of our efforts in user experience and considers all the events that can adversely affect the network, and, more importantly, automatically resolve the issues.
Q: How are large enterprises adopting this model? Especially those with legacy infrastructure?
Patel: The very large enterprises such as very large financial institutions like JP Morgan Chase or Citi are not going to change overnight. They still have their private data centers and they manage some workloads through AWS. But these types of large enterprises are embracing NaaS at the edge—branch offices, retail locations, and remote sites. These are places where traditional IT support just doesn’t scale, and uptime is business-critical. We’re seeing strong adoption there because we offer guaranteed performance and simplified operations. They might not completely overhaul their core infrastructure, but they are interested in NaaS for branch and remote locations.
Q: You mentioned Nile offers cost savings as well. Can you quantify that?
Patel: We typically deliver a 40% to 60% reduction in total cost of ownership. That includes hardware, software, lifecycle management—we remove all the operational overhead. We are able to provide the true first financially backed performance guarantee at scale; we have eliminated alerts completely, which will be music to a lot of people’s ears. There are no alerts in this environment because we fix the issues automatically. It’s a true uninterrupted user experience.
Q: What’s the story behind the name “Nile”?
Patel: It started in my living room. My co-founder and I were brainstorming names. He said, “Don’t overthink it—[Jeff] Bezos named Amazon because it was a large river.” So, I said, “What’s bigger than the Amazon? The Nile because it is longer than the Amazon River.” We needed to have a higher ambition than Amazon so I said, “Let’s name it Nile.”
Q: Any final thoughts for CIOs or IT leaders evaluating NaaS?
Patel: The CIO today wants to focus on the software. We don’t want to worry about the lifecycle management. There are much larger initiatives occurring in the world, such as AI, data science, and more. If I am a CIO, I need to free up my resources. I cannot focus on managing my networks and my Wi-Fi. What if you can really free up a lot of my resources and apply resources to those higher-level initiatives? What if I can take resources and relieve and reduce my technical debt in my environment?
Nile for me is a journey, which I viewed as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create something disruptive. And I wasn’t looking to create disruption for the sake of disruption. It was more about creating something that can resolve the insane nature and complexity of networking.
Source:: Network World