How does a young company compete against a behemoth competitor with an 80 percent enterprise marketshare?

“We look for the agents of change,” said Plexxi, Inc.’s CEO Rich Napolitano, referring to the company’s strategy for attracting customers looking for novel IT Solutions. Despite speculation that Cisco Systems, Inc. will eventually acquire Plexxi, Napolitano seems quite confident steering the company on its own path to success.

He told Dave Vellante and Paul Gillin, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, that there is a new kind of developer who thinks very differently about infrastructure — the cloud architect. According to Napolitano, cloud architects take a top-down view to solving specific problems rather than starting at the hardware level.

Napolitano added that the ease of use Plexxi provides is attractive to customers who want to focus on their enterprise/their application, instead of IT. “It’s really about allowing people to build, say, private clouds that are as easy to use and consume as public clouds,” he said

Do more paths mean better networking?

Napolitano said that Plexxi networking utilizes thousands of paths, and this diversity is key to its agility in coming up with the solutions their customers want. He uses the analogy of a trip from Boston to New York where you know of maybe three of four paths. “But there are probably thousands of ways to get there,” he said. “What if you could know that, and what if you could dynamically change your pathing? That’s the nature of what we’re doing, which is very different than anyone else.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s on-site event coverage

Photo by SiliconANGLE