(dramatic orchestral music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick, here, at theCUBE. We're at the Palo Alto studios taking a very short break in the middle of the crazy fall conference season. We'll be back on the road again next week. But we're excited to take an opportunity to take a breath. Again, meet new companies, have CUBE conversations here in the studio, and we're really excited to have our next guest. He's Apurva Dave, the CMO of Sysdig. Apurva, great to see you. >> Thanks, Jeff, thanks for having me here. >> Yea, welcome, happy Friday. >> Appreciate it, happy Friday, always worth it. >> So give us kind of the 101 on Sysdig. >> Yep, Sysdig is a really cool story. It is founded by a gentleman named Loris Degioanni. And, I think the geeks in your audience will probably know Loris in a heartbeat because he was one of the co-creators of a really famous open source project called Wireshark. It's at 20 million users worldwide, for network forensics, network visibility, troubleshooting, all that great stuff. And, way back when, in 2012, Loris realized what cloud and containers were doing to the market and how people build applications. And he stepped back and said, "We're going to need "a totally new way to monitor "and secure these applications." So he left all that Wireshark success behind, and he started another open source project, which eventually became Sysdig. >> Okay. >> Fast-forward to today. Millions of people are using the open source Sysdig and the sister project Sysdig Falco to monitor and secure these containerized applications. >> So what did Sysdig the company delineate itself from Sysdig the open source project? >> Well, you know, that's part of the challenge with open source, it's like part of your identity, right. Open source is who you are. And, what we've done is, we've taken Loris's vision and made it a reality, which is, using this open source technology and instrumentation, we can then build these enterprise class products on top for security monitoring and forensics at scales that the biggest banks in the world can use, governments can use, pharma, healthcare, insurance, all these large companies that need enterprise class products. All based on that same, original open source technology that Loris conceived so many years ago. >> So would you say, so the one that we see all the time and kind of use a base for the open source model, you kind of, Hortonworks, it's really pure, open source Hadoop. Then you have, kind of, Mapbar, you know, it's kind of proprietary on top of Hadoop. And then you have Cloudera. It's kind of open core with a wrapper. I mean, how does the open piece fit within the other pieces that you guys provide? >> That's really a really insightful question because Loris has always had a different model to open source, which is, you create these powerful open source projects that, on their own, will solve a particular problem or use case. For example, the initial Sysdig open source project is really good at forensics and troubleshooting. Sysdig Falco is really good at runtime container security. Those are useful in and of themselves. But then for enterprise class companies, you operate that at massive scale and simplicity. So we add powerful user interfaces, enterprise class management, auditing, security. We bundle that all on top. And that becomes this Cloud-Native intelligence platform that we sell to enterprise. >> And how do they buy that? >> You can, as subscription model. You can use it either as software as a service, where we operate it for you, or you can use it as on-premise software, where we deliver the bits to you and you deploy it behind your firewall. Both of those products are exactly the same functionally, and that's kind of the benefit we had as a younger company coming to market. We knew when we started, we'd need to deliver our software in both forms. >> Okay and then how does that map to, you know, Docker, probably the most broadly known container application, which rose and really disturbed everything a couple years ago. And then that's been disturbed by the next great thing, which is Kubernetes. So how do you guys fit in within those two really well-known pieces of the puzzle? >> Yeah, well you know, like we were talking about earlier, there's so much magic and stardust around Kubernetes and Docker and you just say it to an IT person anywhere and either they're working on Kubernetes, they're thinking about working on Kubernetes, or they're wondering when they can get to working on Kubernetes. The challenge becomes that, once the stardust wears off, and you realize that yeah, this thing is valuable, but there's a lot of work to actually implementing it and operationalizing it, that's when your customers realize that their entire life is going to be upended when they implement these new technologies and implement this new platform. So that's where Sysdig and other products come in. We want to help those customers actually operationalize that software. For us, that's solving the huge gaps around monitoring, security, network visibility, forensics, and so on. And, part of my goal in marketing, is to help the customers realize that they're going to need all these capabilities as they start moving to Kubernetes. >> Right, certainly, it's the hot topic. I mean, we were just at VMworld, we've been covering VMworld forever, and both Pat and Sanjay had Kubernetes as parts of their keynotes on day one and day two. So they're all in, as well, all time for Amazon, and it goes without saying with Google. >> Yeah, so it's funny is, we released initial support for Kubernetes, get this, back in 2015. And, this was the point where, basically the world hadn't yet really, they didn't really know what Kubernetes was. >> Unless they watched theCUBE. >> Unless they watched-- >> They had Craig Mcklecky-- >> Okay, alright. >> On Google cloud platform next 2014. I looked it up. >> Awesome. Very nice-- >> Told us, even the story of the ship wheel and everything. But you're right, I don't think that many people were there. It was at Mission Bay Conference Center, which is not where you would think a Google conference would be. It's a 400 person conference facility. >> Exactly, and I think this year, CubeCon is probably going to be 7,000 people. Shows you a little bit of the growth of this industry. But, even back in 2015, we kind of recognized that it wasn't just about containers, but it was about the microservices that you build on top on containers and how you control those containers. That's really going to change the way enterprises build software. And that's been a guiding principle for us, as we've built out the company and the products. >> Well, way to get ahead of the curve, I love it. So, I see it of more of a philosophical question on an open source company. It's such an important piece of the modern software world, and you guys are foundationally built on that, but I always think about when you're managing your own resources. You know, how much time do you enable the engineers to spend on the open source piece of the open source project, and how much, which is great, and they get a lot of kudos in the ecosystem, and they're great contributors, and they get to speak at conferences, and it's good, it's important. Versus how much time they need to spend on the company stuff, and managing those two resource allocations, 'cause they're very different, they're both very important, and in a company, like Sysdig, they're so intimately tied together. >> Yeah, that last point to me is the biggest driver. I think some companies deal with open source as a side project that gives engineers an outlet to do some fun, interesting things they wouldn't otherwise do. For a company like Sysdig, open source is core to what we do. We think of these two communities that we serve, the open source community and the enterprise community. But it's all based on the same technology. And our job in this mix is to facilitate the activity going on in both of these communities in a way that's appropriate for how those communities want to operate. I think most people understand how an enterprise, you know, a commercial enterprise community wants to operate. They want Sysdig to have a roadmap and deliver on that roadmap, and that's all well and good. That open source element is really kind of new and challenging. Our model has always been that the core open source technology fuels our enterprise business, and what we need to do is put as much energy as we can into the open source, such that the community is inspired to interact with us, experiment, and give back. And if we do it right, two things happen. We see massive contribution from the community, the community might even take over our open source projects. We see that happening with Sysdig Falco right now. For us, our job then is to sit back, understand how that community is innovating, and how we can add value on top of it. So coming back all the way to your question around engineers and what they should be doing, step one, always contribute to the open source. Make our open source better, so that the community is inspired to interact with us. And then from there, we'll leverage all that goodness in a way that's right for our enterprise community. >> So really getting in almost like a flywheel effect. Just investing in that core flywheel and then spin off all kinds of great stuff. >> You got it, you know, my motto's always been like, if the open source is this thing off to the side, that you're wondering, oh, should our engineers be working on it, or shouldn't they, it's going to be a tough model to sustain long-term. There has to be an integrated value to your overall organization and you have to recognize that. And then, resource it appropriately. >> Right, so let's kind of come up to the present. You guys just had a big round of funding, congratulations. >> Yep, thank you. >> So you got some new cash in the bank. So what's next for Sysdig? Now you got this new powder, if you will, so what's on the horizon, where are you guys going next? Where are you taking the company forward? >> Great question, so, we just raised a $68.5 million Series D round, led by Inside Ventures and follow-on investors from our previous investors, Accel and Bane. 68.5 doesn't happen overnight. It's certainly been a set of wins since Loris first introduced those open source projects to releasing our monitoring product, adding our security product. In fact, earlier this year, we brought on a very experienced CEO, Suresh Vasudevan, who was the previous CEO of Nimble Storage, as a partner to Loris, so that they could grow the business together. Come this summer, we're having massive success. It feels like we've hit a hockey stick late last year, where we signed up some of the largest investment banks in the world, large government organizations, Fortune 500s, all the magic is happening that you hope for, and all of a sudden, we found these investors knocking at our door, we weren't actually even out looking for funds, and we ended up with an over-subscribed round. >> Right. >> So our next goal, like what are you going to do with all that money, is first of all, we're moving to a phase where, it's not just about the product, but it's about the overall experience with Sysdig the company. We're really building that out, so that every enterprise has an incredible experience with our product and the company itself, so that they're just, you know, amazed with what Sysdig did to help make Cloud-Native a reality. >> That's great and you got to bring in an extra investor, like in a crunch phase, you guys haven't had that many investors in the company, relatively a small number of participants. >> It's been very tightly held, and we like it that way. We want to keep out community small and tight. >> Well, Apurva, exciting times, and I'm sure you're excited to have some of that money to spend on marketing going forward. >> Well, we'll do our part. >> Well, thanks for sharing your story, and have a great weekend. I'm happy it's Friday, I'm sure you are, too. >> Thanks so much, have a great weekend. Thanks for having me. >> He's Apurva, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. It's theCUBE conversation in Palo Alto, we'll be back on the road next week, so keep on watching. See you next time. (dramatic orchestral music)