>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. (techno music) >> Good morning, welcome to day three of VMworld 2017. This is theCUBE's continuing coverage of this big event in Las Vegas. I am Lisa Martin with my co-host, Stu Miniman, and we're very excited to be joined by a couple of gals in tech. We have Phoummala Schmitt, you are the infrastructure lead for Independence Blue Cross, and Theresa Miller, the founder of the 24x7 IT Connection. Welcome. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> So, Phoummala, let's start with you. You are a very leading female in the technology and software space. Tell us about yourself. What do you do, what inspires you as a female leader in technology? >> I'm currently in infrastructure lead at Independence Blue Cross. I manage unified communications applications, Exchange, Skype for Business. What excites me is the ability to show young women that you can do anything. When I was younger, I was told that I didn't understand math very well, so I couldn't be in IT, well, look at me here. So, it's inspiring. I feel inspired when little girls tell me, I want to do something technical. >> That's awesome, Theresa, what about you? What's your journey been like? >> My journey started over 20 years ago by accident, while I was studying at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. There was an opportunity to study IT. It made sense to me, and I dropped my accounting major just like that as soon as IT came to the forefront. I've been doing technology ever since, and today, now, I have 24x7 IT Connection. We do writing, we do webinars, and we also do IT consulting. >> So, you guys work together with the 24x7 IT Connection. Tell us a little bit more about that. I know that, Phoummala, you mentioned Microsoft, and here we are at VMworld. Tell us about what kind of topics you cover on that 24x7 IT Connection. >> We cover a broad range of topics. I usually cover the Microsoft, Exchange, Skype world. I actually blog for Theresa, but we do a podcast together, the Current Status, and we talk about all sorts of technology, storage, networking, and just the current trends. And we actually do it on video, through YouTube, and we have a glass of wine. We make it so it's like a casual conversation with your friends, you know, you're just chattin' and talkin' tech, like here at the conference. >> Uh-- >> Just to add to that, so, from the blogging and like the approach we use, it really is about what's relevant to us. So, like she said, we're covering end-user computing, it might be Microsoft, it might be Linux. It just depends. We have several female writers and one male, and it's really about what's relevant, what's going on in their world, because then you know it's going on in someone else's. >> Yeah, Phoummala, you've been in the center of a really interesting transition we've been seeing in the marketplace. You know, I think about my career in tech, you know, deploying servers for email, and that whole push. Microsoft, huge push to get everybody onto Office 365. >> Phoummala: Yes. >> You know, where that lives, we talk about, you know, software's eating the world. You know, so, give us that journey of applications for you. How's that change your role, some of the dynamics? Sounds like you might need a glass of wine after talking through some of these topics, yeah. >> Yeah, I actually started in the server world, server and infrastructure. I was racking and stacking servers, deploying VMs, and then, at the same time, I was also managing Exchange, but as my career progressed, I kind of left that storage and server background and decided, you know what, applications. I wanted to focus a little bit more and really embrace the application world. Since I had that server background, that was my job, it just seems I could actually deploy these applications a lot better, because I understand the underlying foundations behind it, Exchange, and the cloud, so, right now, you know the push is to be in the cloud. Where I work, and a lot of organizations like ourselves, we don't go to the cloud yet. We're just not there. So, there is a very strong push. Eventually, I suspect we'll all be in the cloud. I mean, that's just, it's not if, it's when. >> Yeah, so, but I want to dig down just a tiny bit more, because, you know, most people in the VMware community know Microsoft pretty well. The relationship with Microsoft and their applications with virtualization, and now with cloud, is a really interest dynamic, so you've gone against some of what Microsoft said in the past, kind of do what's best for your organization, why don't you explain some of that to our audience, yeah. >> Yeah, so, Exchange. The preferred architecture for Exchange is, or Exchange 2016, 2013, is to be physical servers, with DAS, direct-attached storage, which is, you know, not what most people are. I mean, it's a virtualized world now. I don't know any company that isn't virtualized. So, I've taken the approach, what is the best situation or deployment for your organization. Yes, there is the preferred architecture, but it's not, I don't look at it as the Holy Grail, or the Bible. I look at what is best for the organization. What are your requirements? So, if the requirement is to reduce data center cost, reduce some rack space, and you can't go to the cloud yet, due to other requirements, let's look at alternative solutions that still follow some of the guidance. So, you know, yes, I break away from it, but it's what's best for your business, because not everybody can deploy physical. >> Yeah, Theresa, I have to imagine you cover a lot of this. You know, what's really happening with customers versus, you know, no offense to our friends on the vendor side, but, you know, they always think its what's right, as opposed to the person doing it, knows what is right for their environment. That's one of the challenges of IT, right? There is no one way to do things, so. >> Every organization is going to take a different path and journey, and that might be to the cloud, that might not be yet. That might be a combination, that could be hybrid IT, I think is another term that we keep hearing where, maybe I have some applications in the cloud, and some that will always remain on prem, but it has to match the culture and the fit of the business, or you won't be successful with any IT project. >> So, ladies, we're at VMworld 2017, given both of your thoughts in terms of, we need to do what's best for the business, Phoummala, let me start with you. What are some of the things that you're hearing, are you hearing other peers of yours echo the same feelings and sentiments? >> Yes, when we're out in the field, you know, I'm talkin' to people, and it's, yeah, it's we're not there yet, we want to go there, yeah, but we can't do it, we don't have the infrastructure, we don't have the resources. And oftentimes, you know, our vendors, they, they forget that budgets, there's constraints, you know, resourcing. So, you know, my word to them is be patient with us. We want to go there, we like your products, but there's so many other factors in play, especially when you work for a large enterprise. You know, there's politics, and large enterprises just take time to do things, especially certain industries, healthcare, financial sectors. You have certain regulations that you have to follow, and in order to get to the cloud, or whatever, you know, the latest trend is, we may have to modify certain policies that are in place and then there's a downward effect, because let's say we want to go to the cloud, then you have to go to, you know, your security department. What regulations or what retention policies do you have to change? And that may, you know, that may take time. So, it's not like it's going to' happen today. >> Theresa, same question, but I guess, maybe, no, maybe a different question. In terms of your podcast, have you heard anything here that's inspired the next conversation that you guys want to have with your glass of wine? >> So, I really think, it's probably going to revolve around cloud again, and in terms of, the other thing I keep seeing is analytics. Everybody's talking about analytics. >> Lisa: Yes. >> And I think that's a really interesting conversation, 'cause it means so many different things. The depth, what are you going to analyze? How do you manage that data? So I could see it being a combination of those topics, and even maybe separate. >> Yeah, yeah, Phoummala, you and I were talking before the interview. Think about this community here. It used to be, you know, it was like hypervisor, virtualizing, we were all in this journey to virtualize. Now, it's a little bit fragmented because there's so many different areas. Analytics, absolutely huge people. Security, lots of people going there. This whole cloud discussion, on all the different apps. What are you seeing in the community? What are the topic areas? Is that, you know, is that a challenge to the community? VMware, the VMworld community was a pretty tight-knit community, and now it feels, you know, while there's great connections and great people, it's broken into a few different pieces. What's your reaction to that? >> I mean, I do feel there's sort of a, not a disconnect, but there's so many different aspects, and I think that's just the evolution of IT. We've evolved to the point where it's beyond IT, it's beyond the technical approaches. It is, um, it's almost like it's, IT's just another business department. We're a business. We provide services to the other business units, and it's just that evolution of, we're service providers, all of us. Whether we are in the data center, or we are an apps develop, we are providing a service to somebody, and we have customers. >> Do you find that that's an advantage? We were talking to some guests earlier this week that, I think it was an analyst from ESG that was saying, you know, you can show that certain problems with storage, certain costs, aren't IT's problem, it's a business problem. Is that an advantage what you just kind of talked about, Phoummala, in terms of getting eyes and ears of the business to provide, okay, this is a business challenge, we need to provide the right expertise, the right funding, to support these services that are needed? >> I definitely think so. I mean, just from my own experience. Understanding what the business wants and needs is huge. And then just puttin' yourself in their shoes. What do they need, what can we do to make their jobs better? So that person, you know, clicking the button of submitting our payroll, or, you know, putting a purchase order in, what can we do to make that better? So, you know, it's one of the things I always do when I'm looking at projects. What value is this going to bring for our business? And, I think, that's just the way IT has evolved to. We're not the programmers in the basement anymore, you know, with the lights turned off and just coding away. We're all business analysts now. Because, at the end of the day, it's our paycheck, too. So, these products that we're hearing about, at the end of the day, it affects us, it affects our business, and the bottom line. >> And what is the website of 24x7 IT Connection that people can see and hear the value that you bring to the community? >> It's 24x7, so that's the 24 by 7, and then itconnection.com. And so, like I said, we share a lot of really great stuff. We have something new every week, so it's definitely worth checking out. >> Well, ladies, thank you so much for joining Stu and myself this morning and sharing your journeys into IT, as well as your insights, what you've learned from the show, what excites you, and where people can go to find more information about the expertise that you bring to the community. We want to thank you for watching again. We are theCUBE live from day three of VMworld 2017. I am Lisa Martin, for my esteemed co-host, Stu Miniman, thanks for watching. We'll be right back. (techno music)

welcome back to la we are live in los angeles at kubecon cloudnativecon 21 lisa martin and dave nicholson we've been talking to folks all day great to be here in person about 2 700 folks are here the kubernetes the community the cncf community is huge 138 000 folks great to see some of them in person back collaborating once again dave and i are pleased to welcome our next guest we have suresh ragaram co-founder and ceo of platform 9. sarish welcome to the program thank you for having me it's a pleasure to be here give our audience an overview of platform 9 who are you guys what do you do when were you founded all that good stuff so we are about seven years old we were founded with a mission to make it easy to run private hybrid and edge clouds my co-founders and i were early engineers at vmware and what we realized is that it's really easy to go use the public cloud because the public clouds have this innovation which is they have a control plane which serves as a it serves as a foundation for them to launch a lot of services and make that really simple and easy to use but if you need to get that experience in a private cloud or a hybrid cloud or in the edge nobody gives you that cloud control plane you get it from amazon in amazon get it from azure in azure google and google who gives you a sas cloud control plane to run private clouds or edge clouds or hybrid clouds nobody and this is uh this is what we do so this is we make it easy to run these clouds using technologies like kubernetes with our our sas control plane now is it limited to kubernetes because when you you you mentioned your background at vmware uh is this a control plane for what people would think of as private clouds using vmware style abstraction or is this primarily cloud native so when we first started actually docker did not exist like okay so at the time our first product to market was actually an infrastructure service product and at the time we looked at what is what is out there we knew vmware vsphere was out there it's a vmware technology there was apache cloud stack and openstack and we had look the open ecosystem around vms and infrastructure as a service is openstack so we chose open source as the lingua franca for the service endpoint so our control plane we deliver openstack as a service that was our first product when kubernetes when the announcement of communities came out from google we knew at that time we're going to go launch because we'd already been studying lxc and and docker we knew at the time we're going to standardize on kubernetes because we believe that an open ecosystem was forming around that that was a big bet for us you know this this this foundation and this this community is proof that that was a good bet and today that's actually a flap flagship product it's our you know the biggest biggest share of revenue biggest share of install base uh but we do have more than one product we have openstack as a service we have bare metal as a service we have containers as a service with kubernetes i want to ask you some of the the i'm looking at your website here platform9.com some of the three marketing messages i want you to break these down for me simplify day two ops multi-cloud ready on day one and we know so many businesses are multi-cloud and percentage is only going up and faster time to market talk to me about this let's start with simplified day two ops how do you enable that so you know one of the biggest if you talk to anyone who runs like a large vmware environment and you ask them when was the last time you did an upgrade or for that matter somebody who's running like a large-scale kubernetes environment or an openstack environment uh probably in a private cloud deployment awesome when was the last time you did an upgrade how did that go when was the last time you had an outage who did you call how did that go right and you'll hear an outpouring of emotion okay same thing you go ask people when you use kubernetes in the public cloud how do these things work and they'll say it's pretty easy it's not that hard and so the question the idea of platform 9 is why is there such a divide there's this you know we talk about digital divide there is a cloud divide the public clouds have figured out something that the rest of the industry has not and people suffer with private clouds there's a lot of demand for private clouds very few people can make it work because they try to do it with a lot of like handheld tools and you know limited automation skills and scripting what you need is you need the automation that makes sure that ongoing troubleshooting 24x7 alerting upgrades to new versions are all fully managed when amazon doesn't upgrade to a new version people don't have to worry about it they don't have to stay up at night they don't deal with outages you shouldn't have to deal with that in your private cloud so those are the kinds of problems right the troubleshooting the upgrades the the remediation when things go wrong that are taken for granted in the public cloud that we bring to the customers who want to run them in private or hybrid or edge cloud environments how do you help customers and what does future proofing mean like how do you help customers future proof their cloud native journey what does that mean to platform 9 and what does that mean to your customers i'll give you one of my favorite stories is actually one of our early customers is snapfish it's a photo sharing company it's a consumer company right when they got started with us they were coming off of vmware they wanted to run an openstack environment they started nearly four years ago and they started using us with openstack and vms and infrastructure as a service fast forward to today 85 percent of the usage on us is containers and they didn't have to hire openstack experts nor do they have to hire kubernetes experts but their application development teams got went from moving from a somewhat legacy vmware style id environment to a modern self-service developer experience with openstack and then to containers and kubernetes and we're gonna we're gonna work on the next generation of innovation with serverless technologies simplifying you know building modern more elastic applications and so our control plane the beauty of our model is our control plane adds value it added value with openstack it added value with kubernetes it'll add value with what's next around the evolution of serverless technologies right it's evergreen and our customers get the benefit of all of that so when you talk about managing environments that are on premises and in clouds i assume you're talking hyperscale clouds like aws azure gcp um what kind of infrastructure needs to be deployed and when i say infrastructure that's can be software what needs to be deployed in say aws for this to work what does it look like so some 30 of our users use us on in the public cloud and the majority of that actually happens in aws uh because they're the number one cloud and we really give people three choices right so they can choose to use and consume aws the way they want to so we have a small minority of customers that actually provisions bare metal servers in aws that's a small minority because the specific use cases they're trying to do and they try to deploy like kubernetes on bare metal but the bare metal happens to be running on aws okay that's a small minority a larger majority of our users in aws or some hyperscale cloud brings their vpc under management so they come in get started sign up with platform 9 in their platform 9 control plane they go and say i want to plug in this vpc and i want to give you this much authorization to this vpc and in that vpc we essentially can impersonate them and on their behalf provision nodes and provision clusters using our communities open source kubernetes upstream cncf kubernetes but we also have customers that said hey i already have some clusters with eks i really like what the rest of your platform allows me to do and i think it's a better platform for me to use for a variety of reasons can you bring my eks clusters under management and then help me provision new new clusters on top and the answer is you can so you can choose to bring your bare metal you can choose to bring your vpc and just provision like virtual machine and treat them as nodes for communities clusters or you can bring pre-built kubernetes clusters and manage them using our management uh product what are your routes to market so we have three routes to market um we have a completely self-serve completely free forever uh experience where people can just go sign up log in get access to the control plane and be up and running within minutes right they can plug in their server hardware on premises at the edge in the cloud their vpcs and they can be up and running from there they can choose to upgrade upsell into a grow into an uh growth tier or you know choose to request for more support and a higher touch experience and work with our sales team and get into an enterprise tier and our that is our second go to market which is a direct go to market uh companies in the retail space companies tech companies uh companies in fintech companies that are investing in digital transformation a big way have lots of software developers and are adopting these technologies in a big way but want private or hybrid or edge clouds that's the second go to market the third and and in the last two years this is new to us really exciting go to market to us is a partner partner let go to market where partners like rackspace have oem platform line so we have a partnership d partnership with rackspace all of rackspace's customers and they install base essentially including customers who are consuming public cloud services wire rackspace get access to platform 9 and rackspace working together with rackspace's ability to kind of service the whole mile uh and also uh we have a very important partnership with maveneer in the 5g space so 5g we think is a large opportunity and there's a there's a joint product there called maven webscape platform to run 5g networks on our community stack so platform nine why what does that mean harry potter harry potter so it's platform nine and three quarters okay we had this realization my cofounders and i were at vmware for 10 for 10 15 years and we were struggling with this problem of why is the public cloud so easy to use why is it so hard to run a private cloud and even today i think not many people realize uh and that's the analogy to platform nine and three quarters it's like it's right in the middle of king's cross station you go through it and you enter the whole new world of magic that that secret door that platform nine and three quarters is a sas control plane that is a secret sauce that amazon has and azure has and google has and we're bringing that for anybody who wants to use it on any infrastructure of their choice where can customers go to learn more about platform nine so platform nine dot com uh follow us on twitter platform line says or on linkedin you know and if any of our viewers are here at kubecon they can stop by your booth what are some of the things that you're featuring there we are at the booth we have our product managers we have our support engineers we have the people that are actually doing the real work behind the product right there we're talking about our roadmap we're talking about the product demos we're doing like specific show talks on specific deep dives in our product and we're also talking about some some really cool things that are coming up in the garage uh in the in the next six months can you leave us with any teasers about what some of the cool things are that are coming up in the garage yeah one one one thing that is a really big deal is um uh is the ability to manage kubernetes clusters as as as cattle right kubernetes makes node management and app management lets you treat them as cattle instead of pets but kubernetes clusters themselves our customers tell us like even in amazon eks and others these clusters themselves become pets and they become hard to manage so we have a really really interesting capability to manage these as more as you know from infrastructure code with githubs uh as cattle we actually have an announcement that i'm not able to share at this point which is coming out in two weeks uh in the ed space so you'll have to stay tuned for that so folks can go to platformnine.com.com check out that announcement two weeks two weeks from now by the end of october that's right awesome sharers thank you so much for joining us i love the fact that you asked that question because i kept thinking platform nine where do i know that from and i just googled harry potter that's right from nine and five dying because i didn't automatically make the correlation because my son and i are the most unbelievable potterheads ever yeah well so we have that in common that's fantastic awesome thank you for joining us sharing what platform mine is some of the exciting stuff coming out and two weeks learn to hear some great news about the edge absolutely awesome thank you for joining us my pleasure thank you for having me uh our pleasure as well for dave nicholson i'm lisa martin live in los angeles thecube is covering kubecon cloudnativecon21 stick around we'll be right back with our next guest