>>long from Las Vegas. It's the Q covering a ws re invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web service is and in along with its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome back to the Cube. We are in Las Vegas, Lisa Martin with John Wall's. I'm very excited that we're kind of color coordinated >>way. Didn't compare notes to begin with, but certainly the pink thing. It's worth it if >>you like. You complete me. >>Oh, thank you. Really, Joe, I don't hear that very often. My wife says that >>you tell that we're at the end of day one of the coverage of A W s three in bed. Good day, though. Yes, it has been very excited. We have a couple of guests joining us for our final segment on this. Please welcome. We have Bill Gerard CTO of Digital Transformation and Scale solutions at Intel Bill, welcome to our show. >>Thank you very much. Happy to be here >>And one of our friends. That's no stranger to the Cube. One of our former host, Bobby Allyn, the CEO of Cloud Generate. Bobby. >>Thank you. Thank you for having us. >>Guys, here we are. This there has not been a lull in the background noise all day. Not reinvent day one. But Bobby want to start with you. Talk to her audience about cloud genera. Who are you guys? What do you do? And what's different about what you're delivering? >>One of the first things is different about Claude Generous where we're located. So we're in Charlotte, which I call Silicon South. So we're kind of representing the East Coast, and we're a company that focuses, focuses on helping with workload, placement and transformation. So where you don't know whether something should go on from off grim. If you put it in Amazon, which service's should have consumed licensing models? Pricing models way help you make data driven decisions, right? So you're not just going based on opinion, you're going based on fact. >>And that's challenging because, you know, in the as, as John Ferrier would say, No Cloud Wanda Otto, which was compute network storage, it was the easy I shouldn't say easy, but the lift and shit applications that enterprises do are these workloads should go to the cloud. Now we have you know what's left over, and that's challenging for organization. Some of the legacy once can't move. How do you help from a Consul Tatum's down point that customers evaluate workloads? What data are they running? What the value that data has and if they are able to move some of those more challenging applications. >>So part of the framework for us, Lisa, is we want to make sure we understand what people are willing and able to change right, because sometimes it's not just about lower costs. Sometimes it's about agility, flexibility, deploying a different region. So what we often start with his wit is better look like you would assist us with life for your organization. And so then, based on that, we analyze the applications with an objective, data driven framework and then make sure the apse land where they're supposed to go. We're not selling any skewer product. We're selling advice to give you inside about what you should do, >>Bobby, I think. And maybe Bill to you could chime in here on this. If you give people a choice, What does this look like? What you know, What do you want? I don't want to do anything right. I want to stay put, right? But that obviously that's not an option, But you I'm sure you do get pushed back quite a bit from these almost the legacy mindset. And we've talked a lot about this whole transformation versus transition. Some people don't want to go, period. So how do you cajole them? Persuade them bring them along on this journey? Because it's gonna be a long trip. Yeah, I think you gotta pack a lunch. >>It's a good point. I think what we've seen, most of them have data experience that this is a tried and elements didn't get the results that they expected. This is where you know, the partnership that we have with call General. Really? You know that data driven, intelligent, based planning is super important, right? We want to really fundamentally health organizations move the right workloads, make sure they get the right results and not have to redo it. Right? And so part of that, you know, move when you're either past scars or not used to what you're doing. Give him the data and the information to be able to do that intelligently and make that as fast as they can. And you know, at the right, you know, experience in performance from a capability perspective. >>So so many businesses these days, if they're not legacy if they're not looking in the rear view mirror, what is the side mirror site? Objects are closer than they appear, even for Amazon. Right? For all of these companies, there are smaller organizations that might be born in a cloud compared to the legacy two words. And if they're not looking at, we have to transform from the top down digitally, truly transform. Their business may not be here in a year or two, so the choice and I think they need to pack a lunch and a hip flask for this because it's quite the journey. But I'm curious with the opportunity that cloud provides. When you have these consultation conversations, what are This? Could be so transformative not just to a business, but to a do an entire industry. Bill talked to us from your perspective about some of the things that you've seen and how this next generation of cloud with a I machine learning, for example, can can really transfer like what's the next industry that you think is prime to be really flipped upside down? >>Well, the good news is I think most of the industries in the segment that we talked to have realized they need to some level of transformation. So doing the business as usual really isn't an option to really grow and drive in the future. But I do think the next evolution really does center on what's happening in a I and analytics. Whether it's, you know, moving manufacturing from video based defect detection, supply chain integrity. You know what's happening from a retail was really the first in that evolution, but we see it in health care in Federal Data Center modernization, and it's really moving at a faster pace and adopting those cloud technologies wherever they needed, both in their data center in the public, cloud out of the edge. And we'll start to see a real shift from really consolidation in tow. Large hyper converts, data centers to distributed computing where everything again. And that's where we're excited about the work we're doing with the Amazon, the work we're doing with Eyes V partners to be at the capability where they need it, but I think it will be really the next. Evolution of service is everywhere. >>Never talk us through an example or use case of a customer that you're working with, a cloud genera with intel and and a W S. What does that trifecta look like for, say, a retailer or financial service is organization >>so that that looks like this? ELISA. When we when we talk about workload placement, we think that most companies look at that as a single question. It's at least a five fold question. Right there is the venue. There's the service. There's the configuration, the licensing model and the pricing model. You need to look at all five of those things. So even if you decided on a DBS is your strategic partner, we're not done yet. So we have a very large financialservices customer that I can't name publicly. But we've collaborated with them to analyze tens of thousands of workloads, some that go best off from some that go best on for him. And they need guidance and coaching on things like, Are you paying for redhead twice your pay for licensing on him? Are you also paying for that in the cloud? There are things that maybe should be running an RT s database as a service. Here's your opportunity to cut down on labor and shift some of the relationships tohave, toe re index and databases is not glamorous or differential to value for your business. Let's take advantage of what a TBS does well and make this better for your company. One of the things that I want to kind of introduce to piggyback on your question. We lean on people process technology as kind of the three, the three legged horse in the Enterprise. I want to change that people process product or people process problem. We're falling in love with the tech and getting lazy. Technology should be almost ubiquitous or under the covers to make a product better or to solve a problem for the customer. >>Well, maybe on that, I mean automation concern to come in and make a big play here because we're taking all these new tasks if you could automate them that you free your people, your developers to do their thing right. So you raise an interesting point on that about being lazy and relying on things. But yet you do want off put our offload some of these nasty not to free up that creativity and free up the people to do what they're supposed to be doing. It's a delicate balance, though, isn't it? It is. It is. This >>is where I think the data driven, you know, informed decisions important. We did a lot of research with Cloud Jenner and our customers, and there's really four key technical characteristics when evaluating workload. The 1st 1 of course, is the size of the data. Where is the created words They use Words that consumed the 2nd 1? Is the performance right? Either performance not only to other systems around it or the end user, but the performance of the infrastructure. What do you need out of the capability? The level of integration with other systems? And then, of course, security. We hear that time and again, right? Regulatory needs. What are we having from top secret data to company sensitive data? Really Getting that type of information to drive those workload placement decision becomes at the forefront of that on getting, you know, using cloud gender to help understand the number of interfaces in and out the sides of the data. The performance utilization of the system's really helps customers understand how to move the right workload. What's involved and then how to put that in the right eight of us instance, and use the right ideas capabilities, >>and you and you both have hit on something here because the complexity of this decision, because it's multi dimensional, you talked about the five points a little bit ago. Now you talked about four other factors. Sue, this is not a static environment, No, and to me that as you're making a decision, that point is what's very difficult for, I would assume for the people that you're interfacing with on the company level. Yes, because it's a moving target for them, right? They just it's it's dynamic and changing your data flows exponentially. Increasing capabilities are changing. How do you keep them from just breaking down? >>I don't want to jump in on that, because again, I'm going to repeat this again. That my thesis is often technology is the easy part. We need to have conversations about what we want to do. And so I had a conversation earlier today. Think of Amazon like a chef. They could make anything I want, but I need to decide what I want to eat. If I'm a vegan and he wants steak. That's not Amazons fault. If they can't cook something, that's a mismatch of a bad conversation. We need to communicate. So what I'm finding is a lot of executives are worried about this. There were Then you're going to give me the right the wrong answer to the right question. The reality is you may have the wrong question. First of all right, the question is usually further upstream, so the worry that you're gonna give me the wrong answer to the right question. But often you need to worry that you're getting your starting with the wrong question. You're gonna get the right answer asked the right question first. And then you got a chance to get to the final destination. But >>and then he in this multi cloud world that many organizations live in, mostly not My strategy could be by Emma A could be bi developer preference for different solutions. A lot of Serios air telling us we've inherited a lot of this multi cloud and technical debt. Exactly. So does not just compound the problem because to your point, I mean you think of one way we hear so many different stats about the number of clouds that on average enterprises using is like 5 to 9. That whole world. That's a reality for organizations. So in terms of how the business can be transformed by what you guys are doing together, it seems like there's a tremendous opportunity there. But to your point, Bobby, where do you start? How do you help them understand what? That right first question is at the executive level so that those four technical points that Bill talked about Tek thee you know, the executive staff is all on board with Yes, this is the question we're asking then will understand it. The technology is right. Sold >>it. It's got to start with, Really? What? The company's business imperatives, right? It can't start with an I t objective. It's it's Are we moving into new markets? Do we need thio deploy capabilities faster? Are we doing a digital customer experience? Transformation? Are we deploying new factories, new products into new regions, and so really the first areas? What's the core company strategy, imperatives of the business objectives? And >>then how >>does I t really help them achieve that? In some cases, it may be we have to shift and reduce our data center footprints way have to move capabilities to where we have a new region. Deployments, right? We've got to get him over to Europe. We don't have capabilities in Europe. We're going to Asia. I've got a mobile sales force now where I need to get that customer, meet the customer where they're doing, you know, in the retail store, and >>that >>really then leads quite simply, too. What are the capabilities that we have in house that we're using? >>How are >>they being utilized? And he's using them, and then how do we get them to where they need to be? Some cases accost, imperative. Some cases and agility, Time to market and another's and we're seeing this more often is really what are the new sets of technologies? A. I service is training in forgetting that we're not experience to do and set up, and we don't want to spend the time to go train our infrastructure teams on the technology. So we'll put our data scientists in there figuring out the right set of workloads, the right set of technology, that we can then transform and move our applications to utilize it really starts, I think with the business conversation, or what's the key inflection point that they're experiencing? >>And have you seen that change in the last few years that now it's where you know, cloud not cloud. What goes on Cloud was an I t conversation to your point, Bill. And then the CEO got involved in a little bit later. But now we're we're seeing and hearing the CEO has got to be involved from a business imperative perspective. >>Share some data, right? Uh, so, you know, a couple of years ago, everybody was pursuing cloud largely for cost. Agility started to become primary, and that's still very important. A lot of the internal enterprise data modernizations were essentially stalled a bit because they were trying to figure how much do we move to the the public cloud, right. We want to take advantage of those modern service is at that time, we did a lot of research with our partners. He was roughly 56% of enterprise workload for in their own data center. You know, the rest of them Republic Cloud. And then we saw really the work, the intelligent workload discussion that says we've had some false starts. Organizations now really consistently realize they need both, you know, their own infrastructure and public cloud, and we've actually seen on increase of infrastructure modernization. While they're moving more and more stuff to the cloud, they're actually growing there on centre. It's now roughly 59% on Prem today for that same business, and that's largely because they're using more. Cloud service is that they're also even using Maur on premise, and they're realizing it's a balance and not stalling one or starving one and then committing to the other the committing to both and really just growing the business where it needs to go. >>Strategic reasons. All right? >>Yes, well, there should be four strategic reasons. There aren't always back to your question about which question asked. One of the questions I often ask is, What do you think the benefits will be if you go to cloud? And part of what happens is is not a cloud capability? Problem is an expectation problem. You're not gonna put your GOP system in the cloud and dropped 30% costs in a month, and so that's where we need to have a conversation on, You know, let's iterating on what this is actually gonna look like. Let's evolve the organization. Let's change our thinking. And then the other part of this and this were clouded or an intel come in. Let's model with simulation looks like. So we're gonna take those legacy work clothes unless model containers. Let's model Micro Service is so before you have to invest in transformation to may not make sense. Let's see what the outcome's look like through simulation through a through M l and understand. Where does it make sense to apply? The resource is, you know, to double click on that solution that will help the business. >>I was gonna finish my last question, Bobby, with you saying, Why, Cloud General? But I think you just answered that. So last question for you, though, from from an expectation perspective, give me one of your favorite examples of customer whatever kind of industry there and that you've come in and helped them really level, set their expectations and kick that door wide open. >>That's tough, many >>to choose from. >>Yeah, let me let me try to tackle that one quickly. Store's computer databases. Those are all things that people look at I think what people are struggling with the most in terms of kind of expectations is what they're willing and able to change. So this is kind of what I leave on. Bill and I talked about this earlier today. A product is good, a plan is better. A partnership is best. Because with the enterprises of saying is, we're overwhelmed. Either fix it for me or get in there with me and do it right. Be in this together. So what we've learned is it's not about were close applications. It's all kind of the same. We need help. We're overwhelmed. I want a partner in telling Claude Juncker the get in this thing with me. Help me figure this out because I told you this cloud is at best a teenager. They just learned how to drive is very capable, but it needs some guard rails. >>I love that. Thanks you guys So much for explaining with Johnny what you guys are doing together and how you're really flipping the model for what customers need to be evaluated and what they need to be asking. We appreciate your time. >>Thank you for having us >>our pleasure. Thank you. for John Wall's I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching the Cube at Reinvent 19 from Vegas. Wants to go tomorrow.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi, and welcome to a special presentation of CUBE Conversation. I'm Stu Miniman and we're here in our Boston-area studio, happy to welcome to the program first-time guest Brian Kelly, who's the Co-founder and CEO of CLoudGenera. Brian, thanks so much for joining me. >> Stu, thank you so much for having us here. >> All right, first of all Brian, we always love. We get you know a co-founder on the program, you got to bring us back to kind of the why. You know, why was CLoudGenera formed? We've had a chance to dig into it but CLoudGenera, there's cloud in the name, there's generation. Tell me about the company, the name, and a little bit about your background. >> Be glad to. So like most great companies, our company was born of the market's necessity. We saw trend happening as many businesses we're shifting the way they manage their IT and the trend took the form of this buzzword cloud. And so you know CLoudGenera as a company absolutely helps businesses figure out their most efficient path towards leveraging cloud technologies. But our value proposition is actually greater than that. Our business exists to help companies determine the best IT services to support the needs of their organization. >> Great. Well luckily cloud's simple. Enterprise IT, we just have a button we press, and everything works awesome. I think the reality is though, nobody ever gets rid of anything. Changing applications is really tough and it's a really complicated and super fast changing market out there. So maybe, drill in just a tiny bit and explain what it is that you do and why that's a little bit different than some of the other things happening in the marketplace. >> Sure. Well the big easy button does exist, when you push it nothing happens. Maybe it makes a funny sound. As the name would suggest, CLoudGenera specializes in the formation of clouds and to the point that you made, this is not simple, this is not easy. Cloud is not a target state. Unlike virtualization, which was a target state, cloud is really an operating model. And also as you highlighted, there's so much variability and complexity associated with cloud. Am i talking about infrastructure? Am i talking about platforms? Am i talking about software as a service? Cloud for us can be any of those things. It can be you managing your infrastructure. Can be somebody else managing your infrastructure, all the way up through your apps. And so what our business aims to do is to demystify all the variability and complexity associated with making cloud decisions. Really it's about helping people figure out where to place their workloads and what we commonly see is that the migration does not generate success unless you've considered how to optimize your workloads in advance of selecting a new execution venue. So as a business our software, our technology, helps customers to determine how do I optimize my workloads, regardless of whether or not I'm going to move them. And ultimately, how do I get the best value for my spend at IT services as I'm contemplating cloud as a model for hosting my apps? >> Yeah, so every vendor I talk to out there, if I'm a cloud platform vendor or if I'm an infrastructure vendor, they all have these tools that say hey, here's how the experience is going to be on our platform. Maybe it compares against a couple of things out there but you're not pushing hardware, you're not pushing platforms. Explain how you fit into kind of the ecosystem and you're not just, when you say cloud it's it's not just public cloud, it's you know, talk a little bit about the spectrum of things that you support. >> Okay, be happy to. So first, what I would say is that when you look at a vendor strategy, their strategy is to drive you to adopt their technologies, their solutions. And so any of the tools that they're bringing to market, any of the services that they're bringing to market, are biased towards the outcome that they're trying to achieve. This was actually when I say CLoudGenera was born of the market's necessity, the market really needed a solution that was agnostic and unbiased to the outcome. Something that would be so bold is to recommend not doing anything if that was the best option available to your business. That's really what makes CLoudGenera special. We are the best place to go in the market to get that unbiased agnostic viewpoint that's tailored to your needs as an organization and guides you to the right vendors and the right solutions. >> Yeah. It's interesting you think about like there's consulting companies that would get involved and send a bunch of people and help you through your journey. We talked about there's been lots of tools out that have poked at this but there's a big elephant in the room and it's a little tough to kind of figure out where to start. So I just want to, talk a little bit about kind of the breadth and depth of what you do. How do you keep up with all of these things? I mean, while we were talking I'm pretty sure Amazon released one or two new features. And the next time Intel comes out with a spin, you've got a billion SKUs that you have to update. So how does this impact you and how do you help keep up with it? >> So Stu, this is really what creates the longevity and value proposition for my business. The market is changing at breakneck speed. To your point, the major providers both in data center as well as in cloud have probably released a half a dozen new services for the market to contemplate just in our conversation. So CLoudGenera addresses this in a couple of different ways. But all of it born in automation and intelligence. And so we have a cloud research function as a part of our platform that is continually ingesting the data around what the market can offer. So this could be services you could consume from public cloud providers like the Microsoft Azure, the Amazon EC2, the Google Compute as an example, but we're not an infrastructure play. We actually move up and down the stack. So if you want to look at platform as a service solution like Cloud Foundry as an example, you're moving towards no SQL, as an example, for managing data. Do I do that is infrastructure? Do I do it as a platform, as a service? Right, what level of service is available in the market? Our automation, our intelligence, gathering that market data is the big value for our customers because through that automation we give them something that have avoids their need to spend a lot of money on consultants or to spend a lot of time internally trying to assess what the market can offer. And then most importantly once you have that data, how do you turn it into insights? How do you take that data and make it actionable for your business based upon your needs and the requirements of your workloads? So that that's a big part of our secret sauce. A big part of our IP. We stay current with the market so that you don't have to. And what's interesting about our business is that we don't just do point in time comparisons. In fact, we sit on historical data and trends, both how you can modernize in your data center and how you can leverage cloud services and that data set is over four years large, I like to say, not four years old. And so in that way we can even predict where the market is headed so if you're if you're leveraging us or doing this manual as opposed to leveraging our automated methods, we've got the recipe of how to make good decisions and really it is staying current on the market. That's the only way that that you can address it. Love to touch on another aspect of the question you asked, which is consultancies. If there's one thing that we're disrupting in the market, it is the ability to do this analysis at scale. Many of our clients tell us that it's cost prohibitive to hire an army of consultants to come in and assess their current capabilities and then attempt to map that to what the market can offer. If you're using a manual method powered by labor, you're likely going to have an answer that reflects the market ninety days ago, 180 days ago. CLoudGenera gives you the power at your fingertips to get those sort of insights immediately. And when I talk about disruption, it's really doing in minutes what normally took months. it's also a fraction of the cost, Both productivity and labor as well as the true costs if you're leveraging consultants to do this sort of analysis. and so in that way we can scale to servinG customers that are as large and as complicated as the Global Five. We can also scale far and wide to serve many customers in the market at the same time. Again, it's because we're using algorithms. We're using data science. We're not trying to solve this problem with labor. >> Yeah, I love that and you talked about, it's not just about the platform, you're looking at what we've said for years. Customers need to look at their data, they need to look at their applications, and that's where you need to start. I'd like you to talk a little bit about your users because you know, talked to so many companies, it's like oh, they've tried either building their own in-house solution or going to a service provider or going to a public cloud and they get one or two apps. Some critical one or some real important or some cool new one and then they're like okay, I've got hundreds or thousands of other apps and trying to figure out how they do that, you got to use some intelligence. You need to use some, you know, it needs to be driven by software. It can't be some big process that I'd have some consultancy or a thing like that. Do you have some customer examples you can bring us through or talk to how that typically works? >> Yeah, absolutely. I'll share a few patterns that we see in the market. One pattern and it doesn't have a bias towards a particular industry vertical or a particular size of customer. But there's an illusion out there in the market that you'll be able to lift and shift your workload from your data center to Amazon's data center, as an example, and then magically that's going to take care of all your problems. Amazon's going to manage your mess for less. Well, the harsh reality that customers are finding is that while Amazon, as an example, might be an excellent provider of IT services for your business, if you're not optimizing your workload to leverage that provider, you're not going to get the benefits that you'd hope. And so one trend we see commonly in the industry and it's a mistake we hope folks make, whether they leverage our service or they solve this problem some other way, is you know please don't try to do the lift and shift. In fact, another big trend we see in the industry of companies that have gone that route is they do what we like to call repatriation. Where they made the full-fledged push into migrating their workloads to a new venue and ultimately to figure out that the lift and shift was not successful for them. And the larger the client, the more pain they've experienced because the more money they're spending on IT and the harder that gets. >> Just to poke at that a tiny bit and I know we don't have a lot of time to dig into it but it's if you lift and shift and that's the step one of doing, I need to break something apart, I want to refactor some pieces, and eventually know I'll get there. But is that okay and are there paths to get there? Or are you saying hey, you want to sort those pieces out first before you get to the cloud? >> There's some use cases where lift and shift absolutely has a benefit, absolutely has a value. If you're dedicating IT capacity and it's dedicated towards something that's used sporadically, well just the usage model alone, you could potentially get a benefit out of a lift and shift. You're getting the benefit of the optimization just by being able to leverage the elasticity of cloud. But beyond some of those low hanging fruit use cases, we actually see this as a detriment to many company's success. I like to use the analogy of a moving company. The last thing you want to do is pack the box, pick up the box, move the box, and then move it three or four times before you actually get to the destination. That's what lift and shift is really doing. You just pick up what you had in your data center, you put it in somebody else's data center, and now you're in a foreign land and you're going to try to break that thing apart and re-engineer it there. That's actually going to be a lot harder in practice than what we've seen as more of a better option, which is optimized where you are. If you're if your target state for the next innovation is to get to containers, figure out how to containerize before you make the migration as an example. If your endgame is to move from a database on infrastructure to a platform as-a-service, well optimized that databases deployment, optimize that workload before you attempt to transition it to the path. So I would say nine times out of ten, you're probably going to want to treat an application workload before you attempt to move it someplace else. Otherwise, you're just going to be lifting and carrying that box several times. >> Yeah, it unfortunately reminds me of anybody that's moved and you know, you move someplace and three to five years later you run across that box and you're like why did I even move this to my environment. I've outgrown it, I don't need it. I could have either gotten rid of it or done something else with it. Last piece of the technology I want to cover for today is we've talked a bunch about the public cloud, you do a lot with service providers and with the in-house data center stuff. Maybe talk a little bit as to what you cover. Public clouds, there's a few really big ones but there's so many service providers. What do you engage with? What do you cover there and in the data center there's just, I can't imagine how many options there are. What's the scope of what you cover? >> So this might be a little controversial for some folks because if you read the the trade rags, cloud is the answer. Whatever cloud may be, moving to cloud is the answer. Our philosophy as a company is that public cloud is not the only game in town, nor will it be the only game in town in the future. We believe in companies investing in technology to get the best value for their spend. And as a result there's a continuum of options that we see existing far into the future and those include regional data center providers. Frequently we see them being value-added because they can offer a level of service that's not yet been implemented in public cloud. Who's going to manage the stuff that an Azure doesn't manage, as an example. These regional providers, these service providers, many of whom are evolving to do managed services and other people's data centers, not just their own, are going to play a key role in this next wave of technology. And so again, these regional providers, we see them being very important for delivering the service level that customers expect. There's also and this is a very prominent topic right now, there's concerns about data privacy and data sovereignty. While the hyper scalars have done a great job of building a global footprint, they still have gaps. And so if companies are concerned about GDPR in Europe, as an example. If they're concerned about PIPEDA up in Canada, as an example. These regional service providers have the compliance capabilities, they have the protection already in place to not just deliver a high service level but also to deliver a solution that can be lower risk for your business. And so that's really where we see service providers fitting in the market and we see customers having the right mix of public cloud and service provider powered infrastructure. As well as for large companies, they may still have the buying power, and they may still have the level of expertise in house, so like my Fortune 50 clientele but you could even take it down probably to the Fortune 500. Where it's more cost-effective for them to still operate in their data center. Today, because we're a data-driven company and we live in the data and the insights it provides, still the majority of the workloads, either for service level security or if you're a large company, the economics to run IT are still better suited in data center. We don't know that it's always going to be the majority in your data center. We see this evolving as the public cloud providers continue to mature, over the last few years they've matured greatly. But again, we see a continuum of options for customers to consider. We think those options will get smaller but we still think you're going to have a purpose to consider in your data center, in a regional service provider, as well as considering a hyper scalar for your needs. >> All right. Brian, last thing. Need to get speeds and feeds on CLoudGenera. How many employees you have, how many customers you have. Can talk anything about the funding? And tell us about this looking south. >> The Silicon South. Well, let me start there. One of the things we're very proud about is being a company that's headquartered here on the East Coast and specifically in the South. That said, we're already a global company. We have customers around the world. There's well over a thousand subscribers of our cloud assist technology, which is where you can both model future uses of technology as well as load in your existing inventories and analyze your business at scale. What I would share again about the Silicon South is that we're one of these cool companies that is helping the southeast kind of rise up as a technology center. Not one of the normal places that folks think of as innovation hubs but very much in the Carolinas in particular, we have a market that's on the rise with very smart data scientists, very smart developers, and very strong business leaders. And so that's one of the things we are very proud of as a company. There are 22 employees in CLoudGenera today. As I mentioned, we have a global footprint in terms of customers. I gave you a stat just around our cloud assist product. One of the cool things about us is that we serve both the consumer, so that would be the enterprise that's trying to figure out what to do with their technology investments. We also serve their suppliers. We will not bias ourselves so they can't bias the output of our software but what they can do is leverage our software to guide their customers decisions. In fact, our relationship with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are relationships where they know sometimes our software will recommend an outcome that they can't monetize but they still choose to work with us and they still choose to recommend us and in some cases, leverage us for their clients to make sure their clients are getting the best value for their spent. >> Well, Brian Kelly, Charlotte North Carolina based CLoudGenera. Appreciate you joining. Thanks so much for sharing with us some of the nuance and complexity that you're trying to help enterprises glean through. We'll be back. Check out lots more coverage at theCUBE.net. So many shows where companies are trying to sort through this very complicated space. So be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all the videos. Wikibon.com where we're digging through with our analysis on our team. I'm Stu Miniman, thanks so much for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Speaker: From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's TheCube. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and this is a special Cube conversation here in our Boston area studio. Happy to welcome to the program Bobby Allen, who's the chief technology officer and chief evangelist at CloudGenera. Bobby thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu, thanks for having us. >> Alright so Bobby we had a great conversation with your CEO Brian Kelly talking about CloudGenera, helping customers if, in my own words I'll say, there's this great mess of the cloud and service providers and data centers and things are changing all the time. And here's a great tool to help people understand this. Now, I've had people asking me for years, it's like "Hey, I've got my app, "or I'm building a new app, where do I do this?" And I've always said well, there are certain things that are really easy. If it's going to be up for a really short period of time, and it's something there, it's like you're not going to spend the time to rack and stack and build and do this. hey, Cloud was great for that. And on the other end of the spectrum now, the public clouds might disagree, but if I have something that's just like it's going to be cooking along and it's not changing and it's there, the rent versus buy analogy once again goes towards kind of doing it in a hosted or my own data center. But there's a whole lot of stuff in the middle, That is, well, it depends. There's there's this uncertainty in the world and that's where you live, so bring us in a little bit as to some of the thinking as to how CloudGenera helps and where let's get into it. >> That's a great question Stu. So, we feel like the market is actually changed, in the sense that information is coming faster and faster, there's more and more information that people are inundated and honestly overwhelmed by. And so when people ask us for more information, we typically tell them you don't need more information in our opinion, you really want to move from information to clarity to insight, "What should I actually do?" And so to go back to the real estate analogy you talked about, I think people think of cloud as a house. Cloud is at least a neighborhood if not a state, and you need to figure out where should I live within that state or that neighborhood. So, let's take AWS for example. AWS is a vendor that has many, many, many services, but also different flavors of how you can run things. So before people would look at CloudGenera as a company that can compare different execution venues. Do I want to run this in Amazon or Azure or Google? Still we increasingly get people that want to understand which flavor of Amazon should I do? Do I do the multi-tenant, do I do the dedicated, do I do the VMware cloud on AWS? And those are all valid choices for us. And so for us, we don't really care where a customer wants to evaluate. Let's define what you need and map that to the relevant or interesting options in the marketplace, and then take the guesswork out of it so you have some data-driven decision making. >> Yeah, I love that because I have been covering Amazon for many years, and boy I go to the show and it was like "Alright, I thought I got my arms around Aurora and now there's the serverless based Aurora, and there's 17 different database options inside of Amazon so, oh boy," and then, right. Let's not even talk about all the compute instances. I think it's more complicated to pick a compute instance in the public cloud than it is if I was going to put something in my own rack these days. >> Bobby: Yes, yes it is. >> So, but that being said I want to for a second before we talk about the public cloud, talk to your viewpoint, how are you helping customers in kind of the service provider to data center world. And because that's a complicated and very I have to say fragmented space. >> It is. >> How does CloudGenera help there? >> So CloudGenera deals with the consumers, so ones who actually want to benefit from the technology themselves, but also from the service provider side. So if you're Joe's Cloud Shack, or regional cloud provider or Vmware service provider, anyone who is offering technology services, you may want to know number one, how do you compare with the large hyperscale providers, and then number two, how can you showcase your valued proposition next to those. So maybe Amazon and Azure and Google are on the top of peoples' minds, but how do your services compare to those? So in our platform you can actually show a Joe's Cloud Shack next to an Amazon next to something like a Synergy or SimpliVity. So options inside and outside the data center that you thought about and then ones that you didn't can all be kind of presented in a fair way, so you take the guesswork out of how they compare to each other. >> Yeah, it's interesting. One of the big raging debates we've had out there is, "Oh I wish I had a cloud concierge." And it's like well, it's not a utility, and therefore, I could stand up something in my data center or I could put a Paz in my environment or there's so many layers in the stack and so much nuance that it's the paradox of choice I think that most people have. So, maybe walk us through a customer. When do they tend to come to you, what are some of those patterns, and what are the things that really help get accelerated when they use a platform like yours? >> So, some of the things that people think about are they have workloads that they want to move maybe they want to exit a data center, or what really happens commonly is there's a new leader in town. New CIO comes in, "We're going to have a cloud-first strategy." And we're not opposed to that. The biggest principle for us is do you understand why you're doing, and whether this is the right time, the when? Because if you don't do the right thing at the right time for the right reason there's a hole in your strategy. And so what we look at is, okay what is it that you're trying to move or change or transform, What are the things that are interesting to you or strategic, and then let's look at putting those things together. Now when you define what you need, you shouldn't define what you need in terms of where you're going, right. I don't decide my venue based on the airline I want to get on, I decide I need to be in Vegas for this conference at this time, and then I see the airline that can get me there on time for the best price, hopefully. And we take that same approach when it comes to helping customers. Let's talk about what you need in a vendor agnostic way that's divorced from the options in the market. Because your needs are not impacted by Amazon or Azure or HPE or Dell. And so then, after we define your expectations and your requirements let's map those to the things that you're curious about, or that your leadership says are strategic, and then let's make sure that we understand what we call the concept of logical equivalence. The spirit of your requirement may be called x in one provider and y in a different one, are they really the same as a tomato to-mah-to, or are they really two different types of, excuse me, services or entities altogether? So let's, let's evaluate then, how well your needs are met by these different vendors. Is it just a semantics issue or are these really two different things? Yes, they're both different types of block storage but the requirements are different. The latency is different, the redundancy is different, the pricing is certainly different. How close are these things to meeting the spirit of what you asked for? And the other parts too that I'll just offer that we see a lot is people are concerned overly about cost. How much does it cost? And we feel like the problem is not a problem of cost, it's a problem of value. People go to look for cost calculators but really what they need are value calculators, right? I take a Porsche and an F-150. An F-150 is a bigger vehicle but the Porsche is more expensive for a reason. There's a different experience than just space. And so the reality is people don't mind paying more if they know what they're paying for. Transparency is really the key. >> On that cost piece though, how much of the total equation do you look at? So I think about, my data center there's everything like the power, space, and all those pieces, if I go to a service provider, if it's my stuff, if I still have to manage it, versus some of the operational expenses. How much of kind of the, I hate to say total cost, but how much of that spread do you look at? >> We try to be pretty comprehensive, Stu. So, if you go to a public provider for example you're not paying for power but you're paying for a certainly hourly charge typically on an (mumbling) basis that accommodates a lot of the things that I'll say are platform or hypervisor and below. Now where I think a lot of the other people that are in this space maybe fall short, and our opinion is that they don't look at things above the hypervisor. If I move a workload to an AWS, they may have some great services I can take advantage of. The labor and the licensing and the other considerations that we consider to be carryover costs are things that I still need to accommodate. If I put a workload in Amazon, someone still needs to patch the OS, maybe manage the database, maybe audit security. Those are things that have labor and licensing and software considerations that we try to look at. So we try to be as comprehensive as possible, but we also look at SLA, we also look at security, so you may need to bring another manage services or consulting or software packages to fill those other gaps, so we try to be as holistic and comprehensive as possible. >> What other kind of patterns and data do you bring for CloudGenera? So thinking things either from a vertical standpoint or kind of size of company. I just think there's been certain movements in virtualization and containers and the like where there's been kind of that data and how do I understand what's going to make sense for me, so. Does CloudGenera get into any of that? >> We do get into some of that. So we try again not to force anything down someone's throat. We try to look at where you are, but also understand that there are some patterns. So for example, when we talk about different industry verticals it's very aligned to security and compliance for example. So we know that there are certain providers that are interesting but not ready for primetime because they don't have HIPAA, high tech, high trust, things that are typically relevant for the healthcare industry, so we're very quickly able to say this is something that may not be right for you just yet. Or if you have certain regional concerns, maybe you're looking at GDPR in Europe, you're looking at IRAP in Australia, we can, again, typically guide them to, this provider has some very interesting services but they don't have the security or the SLA that you need. So we try to do that to kind of whittle it down. The other thing that we're seeing though, Stu, is that honestly, many enterprises are biting off more than they can chew. They try to do too much at once, and so some of the things that we talked about, even off camera, is I would ask the question "Does the industry have a POT problem? "Are we trying to do too much at once?" And when I say POT I'm using that to represent the acronym of, to me, three pieces that we need to break this down to. Number one is parity, number two is optimization, and then number three is transformation. Many enterprises in our opinion are trying to eat an elephant with a spoon. They have no idea how to get there and they really don't understand what is too much in terms of the cost, and so when they're evaluating how much they can handle, how much change is too much, in terms of people, process, and technology, the thing to us is, what does parity look like? And that may mean a lift and shift in some cases, it may not, but you at least have to define what success looks like if you take what you're doing in your data center and move that somewhere else. But then, the middle ground is optimization. How do I take the spirit of what I'm doing, move it to that venue and then kind of clean it up or optimize it a little bit, and then once I'm there and I can evaluate the unintended consequences of change, what are the things that I didn't think about? The impacts to my people, the retraining, the other software package I need to put in place for monitoring and management, and so forth. Once I have a handle on that, then I can finally move from optimization to transformation, but that's not, that's not glamorous. That's not interesting. People don't want to talk about that. They want to go whole hog and change everything all at once and we get into trouble doing that. >> Bobby you've given me flashbacks. I worked in the storage industry for a decade, and migrations, you still kind of wake up in the middle of the night, screaming a little bit because it's always challenging, there's always all of those things to work through. You think you've gone through all of your checklists and then, oh wait, something didn't work. Database migrations, big discussion going on there. From Wikibon David Floyer has just been like, it's so many horror stories. People get there but it's, if you don't have to, maybe you don't want to, but there's so many reasons why you want to, so, I guess I want to highlight, we're not telling people not to change, and moving faster and getting on board, some modernization's a good thing, everywhere. You've got a virtualization environment, there's lots you can do today that we couldn't do two or four years ago. So, how do we get over this POT problem then? >> I think part of it is, so again going back to the moving analogy, if I'm going to move, Stu, it would be foolish for me to move without getting an estimate. And there are times when an estimate should be able to come in my house and tell me "It's actually better for you to sell that piano "than to try to move it, 'cause it's not worth it." I would want someone, if I were CIO in an enterprise today, to tell me, "Don't waste your time focusing on this, "this is really where you need to focus your time "because this is going to be the Pareto principle "that saves you the time and the money." The reality is bringing someone who's benefited from the land mines and the pitfalls, so in our opinion, bringing whether that's an SI, consultancy, a data service company like CloudGenera that's benefited from a lot of the things we've seen in the industry, don't hit things on your own that other people have stumbled on, right? Benefit from others' mistakes to allow you to take a look at the whole thing. So the challenge that I think we're having, Stu, is that we're proficient in talking about these things, there aren't enough use cases in terms of mature of cloud transformations to really look back at anecdotal data this comprehensive. We're still figuring a lot of this stuff out, and I know people don't want to hear that, but that's my opinion. >> So, Bobby, is there some place when I'm filling out these forms that I put in here's the skill set my team has, and a little alarm goes off and says, "Hey, time to do some retraining, some reskilling, "maybe bringing on some new people "to handle some of these new areas." How do you handle that side of it? >> I think part of it is honestly, and this may sound a little trite, I think people that are willing to raise their hand and say that we need some help or that "We don't have this all figured out," or that "There are some things that we need to bring in "a little bit of help to help us get that estimate "before we look to move everything," that's really the skill set you want to have. People that are not saying, "I'm the (mumbles) "juggernaut of everything cloud," because those people don't exist yet in my opinion. There are people that have pockets of expertise in things that they have really deep knowledge about, but we need to mix that with, I think, a healthy appreciation for the fact that there's still a lot of things that we're learning about together. The other part of that, Stu, is it's a community and it's a network. You may know storage migrations, I may know database migrations, let's put our heads together about how we can work together as an enterprise and make sure that we minimize impact to the users, because at the end of the day, that's really the challenge, is not to do a cool project, it's to deliver value to the business, and that's what I think we're loosing sight of with all this cool technology sometimes. >> Alright, so Bobby you've got over a thousand people using the tool. What are some of the big areas that people are like, "Oh wow, this is the stuff that's saving me "either lots of time, lots of money, saving my business, "and heck if I'm running the show, keeps my job"? >> I think storage is a big one. So people are oftentimes unaware that there are so many different ways that you can run storage in a given provider. So Amazon for example has four to six different ways you can just run block storage in their particular multi-tenant cloud, and people aren't aware of that. So there's a case that we did for a major bank. We showed them that a terabyte of storage in Amazon can run from 300 dollars up to 26 thousand dollars depending on the level or performance that you want to hit. Egress is another one, so what does the network behavior look like in those applications? Because people often will estimate the resources but not the traffic. What are the estimates to have a level of parity around security. So I don't have HIPAA compliance or SOP compliance in this particular provider. What is it going to take me to get to that level of parity that I need to have, because if I save money, Stu, but I have to spend all that on my lawyer because my data got accessed, then I've still got a problem, I've just kind of moved that down the road. So lots of things out there that I believe we're hiding in plain sight. Again, information is out there that we just don't have the filters to find. What I would say is a lot of people think that cloud is a commodity, we're not there yet. There're providers to this day, I can't give any names to protect the innocent, but the same service is literally triple in one provider what it costs in another one for almost exactly the same service. And there're examples like that that have been out there for years, we just can't see them. >> So, Bobby, last question, if somebody wanted to get started with CloudGenera, is there like a trial version, or how would somebody get involved? >> Yeah, so a couple things that are really interesting. So there's a try now button on our website that lets you kind of answer a few questions and actually get a sample mini-assessment, download a sample report, and actually see the type of analysis that we provide, number one. Number two, CloudGenera is a software company but also a services company. If you want to purchase the software, great, and we actually have trials that we can set up for you to do that. We also do what we call proofs of value. If you want to engage our team to come in and do five to ten applications to see how those might look with our analysis, and then they go at scale and look at your whole CMDB. We want to make sure we're meeting the needs of the business and not trying to boil the ocean if they're not ready for that yet. >> Bobby Allen, CTO and chief evangelist to CloudGenerate, thanks so much for joining me. So much happening in the cloud world. Be sure to check out thecube.net for all of our coverage, as well as wikibon.com for all the research. Thanks for watching theCUBE, I'm Stu Miniman.