(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to this Cube special presentation of Cube On CloudStartups with AWS Showcase. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. This session is the accelerate digital transformation and simplify AWS with autonomous cloud operations with Venkat Krishnamachari, who's the CEO and co-founder here with me on remote. Venkat, good to see you. >> Great to see you, John. >> So this is a session on, essentially DAY2 operations. Something that we've been covering on theCUBE as you know, for a long time. But the big trend is as DevOps becomes much more mainstream, intelligent applications or agile applications, have to connect with intelligent infrastructure and your company MontyCloud has the solution that literally turns IT pros into cloud powerhouses as you guys say, it's your tagline. This is a super important area. I want to get your thoughts and showcase what you guys are doing as one of the hot 10 startups. Thanks for coming on. So take a minute to explain real quick. What is MontyCloud all about? >> Great, thank you again for the opportunity. Hey everybody, I'm Venkat Krishnamachari. I represent mandate team at MontyCloud. We are an intelligent cloud management platform company. What we help customers do, is we help them simplify their cloud operations so they can go innovate and develop intelligent applications. Our platform is called DAY2, because everything after the day one of going to Cloud, needs a lot of expertise and we decided that's a fun area to go solve for our customers. We solve everything on starting DAY2 from simplifying provisioning, to management, to operations, to autonomous cloud operations. Our platform does this for our customers so they can innovate faster and they can close the cloud skills gap that is required to empower the developers. >> Venkat, I want to get your thoughts on DAY2 operations. There's been a trend that people talk about for a long time. As people move to the cloud and see the economic advantage of certainly with COVID-19, the market has said, "Hey, if you're on cloud native, you win." Andy Jassy at re:Invent last Keynote really laid out how companies can be proficient in becoming cloud-scale advantages. One of them was have expertise in cloud. So everyone is kind of doing that. You're starting to see enterprises all build the muscle for cloud operations. That's day one, they get started. Then that's kind of the challenges and the opportunities kick in when you have to continue in production. You have things that go on in the software. The underlying scaling infrastructure needs to be scaled out or all these kinds of things happen. This is what DAY2 is all about, keeping track of and maintaining high availability, uptime and keep the cost structure in line. This is what people discover. If they don't think properly about the architecture, they have huge problems. You guys solve this problem. Could you explain why this is important. >> Sure thing, John. So cloud operations, as you described, it's a continuous operations and continuous improvement in cloud environments. What efficient cloud operations does for customers is it accelerates innovation, reduces the risk, and more importantly, all the period of time that they are using their applications in the cloud, which is future, reduces the total cost of cloud operations. This is important because there is a huge gap in cloud skills. The surface area of cloud that customers need to manage is growing by the day. And most importantly, developers are increasingly and rightfully so, getting a seat at the table in defining and accelerating company's cloud journey. Which means, now they're proposing, microservices based application, container based application. Traditional applications are still in the mix. Now the surface area becomes a challenge for the IT operators to manage. That's why it's very important to start right. See, we ask this question to our customers. Having listened to our customers as hundreds of them, one thing is clear, when we ask this question to our customers, ever wonder why and how large scale companies like AWS are able to deliver massively scalable services and operate massive data centers with fewer people? Because it's automation. And it's important to think about, as you scale, automate a way things that must be automated, eliminate undifferentiated heavy lifting and help your developers move fast. All of this is vital in the day and age we live in, John. >> Yeah, I want to double down on that because I think this idea of integrating into operations is a critical key point for where success and failure kind of happen. We've seen with cloud, certainly IT departments and enterprise is going okay, cost optimization, check. Get cloud native, getting the cloud, lift and shift, I thought it through, I put some stuff in the cloud and then they go great, now I need resilience. I need resiliency, and I want to make sure things are now working okay, water flowing through the pipes, cloud's working. Then they say, "Well this is good, I got to need to integrate in with my own premises or edge or other things that are happening." Then they try to integrate into their core operations. McKinsey calls this the value driver three, integrating into core operators. We heard from them earlier in the program here at this event. This is key, it's not trivial to integrate cloud into your operations. This is what DAY2 and beyond is all about. Talk more about that. >> Yeah, that's a great point. And that's something that we've been working with customers to hands-on help learn and build it for them, right? So the acceleration of cloud adoption during the pandemic and ongoing adoption, it's going to shift the software security compliance and operational landscape dramatically. There's no escaping it. Cloud operations will no longer be an afterthought. DevOps will integrate with CloudOps. It'll provide a seamless feedback loop so that a box can be found sooner, fixed sooner, and uptime can be guaranteed. I'll give an example. One of our customers is a university. During the pandemic, their core examination application went down and they couldn't fix it on time because of lack of resources. For them, it's vital to have adopted cloud operations sooner but the runway they had was very little. Fortunately, we had the solution for them there. Within a week, they were able to take their entire on-prem application online, not just take the application but provide an autonomous cloud operations layer to their existing IT team with our platform, upscale them, and then about 14,000 students took their exams without any disruption. Now this customer and customers such as themselves have come to expect that level of integrated cloud operations into their application portfolio. It's important to address that with a platform that simplifies it. >> Venkat, real quick. Define, what is autonomous CloudOps platform? What does that mean? >> So let's take an example here, right? Customers who are trying to move an existing workload to cloud bring a traditional set of application. Then customers who are born in the cloud build microservices or server less based applications. Then there is containers. Now, all three the person surface areas that customers, particularly the IT teams have to manage. With the growing surface area, with the adoption of infrastructure as core, it becomes more nuanced to think about, how do we simplify? And in simplification comes automation. When a developer provision certain resource, previously, they used to be filing a ticket. Central IT team has to respond. Developers don't want that anymore. They want to innovate faster but at the same time Central IT team wants to have some governance in play. The best way to get out of the way of developers is automating it. And providing autonomous cloud operations means developers can deploy newer workloads faster, but with a level of guaranteed guardrail on security compliance and costs that sets them free. This is what we mean by autonomous cloud operations, closing the gap in skills, closing the gap in tooling, empowering your developers without thinking about the traditional model but enabling them to do things that's more in a rapid pace. That's what we mean by autonomous cloud operations. >> You had a great market opportunity. I think this is obviously a no brainer. As people say in the industry "cloud is scale is proven". Even post COVID if people don't have a cloud growth strategy they're pretty much going to be toast. McKinsey calls this a trillion dollar at a minimum not including potential new use cases, new pioneering applications coming. So pretty much, well the verdict is there, this is cloud. I got to ask you about MontyCloud as you guys have a business. Give or take a quick minute to explain the business of MontyCloud, some vitals or how people buy the product, the business model. Take a quick minute to explain MontyCloud business. >> Sure thing. John, see, our entire goal is to simplify cloud operations. Because what we learned is what seems to be complex about cloud adoption is that everybody is expected to be an expert on everything in the new era, but most teams are not ready to run efficient cloud operations at scale, as the cloud footprint is growing. This means we have to redefine certain conversations here. We talk directly to infrastructure architects, cloud architects, application owners. And in general, we talk to people who are leading their IT digital transformation for their companies. What we are enabling our customers is, they must demand that the traditional operation model must change to enable newer application patterns. For this, we are expecting customers want to standardize things, right? IT leaders are beginning to say, "All right, I got to standardize my provisioning, standardize my operations, reduce the heavy lifting that comes with infrastructure's code, and enable the business team and the application team to work closely together." The best way to do that is to go solve this problem with automation. So our platform is able to go help such customers, particularly leaders who demand digital transformation. With clear KPIs, our platform can help them ask the why question easily. And then our platform can also go perform, the how part of automation. That's what we solve. Those are the kinds of customers we really have been working with, John. >> So if I'm a customer, how do I know when I need to call MontyCloud? Is it because my cloud footprint is growing which is a natural sign of growth, or is it because I have more events happening, more things to manage? When do I know I have the need to call you guys? What's the signal? What's the sign? >> So we call it the day one mindset, and also the DAY2 mindset. Customers deciding to go to cloud on day one, should think about DAY2. Because without thinking about DAY2, it can become very expensive, right? When a customer's thinking about digital transformation, could be a lift and shift or it could be starting a new application pattern in the cloud, we can certainly help starting right that day because there are a couple of things they have to do, right? They have to standardize the cloud operations which means setting up the cloud accounts, setting up guardrails, enabling teams to go provision with self service. You want to start the right way. So we are happy to help on the day one journey itself and we can automate DAY2 along with it. So standardizing infrastructure operations, standardizing provisioning, security, visibility, compliance, cost. If any of this is an important milestone that customers have to achieve in their cloud journey, we can help. >> By the way, I would just point out that we were just talking on another session around lift and shift is not a no-brainer either if not thought through and remediated correctly that cost could go through the roof. I mean, we've seen evidence of lift and shift fails just because they didn't think it through. Just to your point. I mean, that's not a no brainer. Quickly explain why lift and shift is not as easy as it looks. >> Sure thing. So lift and shift is great to get started, but why sometimes it fails is that the connotations about wanting to keep your Opex down while giving up CapEx is at odds with each other, right? Cloud is great for reducing your Capex. But ongoing operations, of the DAY2 operations, can add a lot of burden to the operational expenses. What customers find out is after moving to the cloud, the cost overruns are happening because of resources that are not provisioned correctly, resources that should not be running. Wild Wild West kind of scenarios, where everybody has access to everything and they over provision. All of this together end up impacting customers' ability to go control the Opex. Then digital transformation projects are looked at from three different angles at least, right? Cost is definitely one, security is another, and then the ongoing operational tax with respect to monitoring, governance, remediation. All three when it simultaneously hits our customers, they look at lift and shift and saying, "Hey, this was cheaper on prem." But actually in the long run, this will be not just cheaper on the cloud, it can also be more efficient if they do it right. We can talk about some examples on how we help some customers with that helpful, John. >> Well, I want to get into the cloud operations, the whole dashboard in cloud operation administration. Is there anything that you could share because people are wanting more and more analytics. I mean, they're buying everything in sight. I mean, cyber security, you name it. There's more and more dashboards. No one wants another dashboard. So this is something that you guys have a strong opinion on how to think this through. Because again, at the end of the day, if you're instrumenting your network properly and your applications, your intelligence, things are changing, where's the data? Take us through your thinking around that. >> Sure thing. You are spot on. Nobody wants another dashboard that is just spewing data at them because data, without context is irrelevant in our mind, right? We want to be able to provide context, we want to be able to provide data within the context. And the dashboard to us means a customer that's looking at it, an IT leader looking at it should be able to ask the why question without working too hard at it, right? Let's bring up our dashboard. I would love to show and tell, although it's a dashboard, it is a tool that can enable IT leaders do things differently. >> John: Right, here it is. This is it right here. Okay, so this is the dashboard. Take me through it, what does it mean? >> Venkat: Yeah, let's (indistinct) right? The chart in the middle is the most important piece there. What we help our leaders, IT leaders do is, all the fullness of time of cloud adoption, we know the cloud's footprint is going to grow. The gray chart in the back, the stock chart represents the cloud footprint. As the cloud footprint continues to grow, we would like our leaders to demand that their security issues go down, their compliance issues go down and their costs to become more and more optimum. When leaders demand this, they can make things happen and our platform can help reduce all three and leaders can have this kind of dashboard to ask the why question. For example, they can compare one department with another department, ask that why question. They can compare an application that is similar in one department in another department and ask the why question, why is it more expensive? Why is it having more compliance issues? This is the kind of why questions our dashboard helps our customers perform and ask those questions, and they don't have to lift a finger, right? This entire dashboard comes to life within few minutes of them connecting their cloud accounts, where we provide visibility into operational issues, trend lines of data on how much consumption happens. And over a couple of months, they can see for themselves, make overall operation cost going down. Is my IT infrastructure now in cloud more resilient? And doesn't take more people to do it or am I able to turn on MontyClouds DAY2 bonds to go start reducing that burden or the period of time. This is what we mean by putting the power of autonomous CloudOps in our hands for customers. >> And this is what you mean by the IT powerhouse for the cloud. Is this on Amazon? So if I want to consume the product, what do I need to do to engage with you guys? What does it mean to me? Am I buying a service? Is it native? Is there agents involved? Take me through, what do I need to do? >> It's a great question. We are born in the cloud startup, which means we are super thankful for amazing technologies like Amazon infrastructure as core and the venting platform that's out there. So our platform is fully hosted, managed SaaS platform. A customer does not need to do anything but log onto montycloud.com, click a bunch of buttons, and connect their database account. They get started in under five minutes, self-service. And as they go through the platform, the guided experience where they can get to that dashboard I showed you in just a few clicks. They can get visibility, security posture assessment, compliance posture assessment, all in those few clicks. And when they decide to start using the platform more to automate and leverage the bots, they can always buy into additional services in the platform. So it's a easy to use get started in 10 minutes tops, if you will, that kind of platform >> Okay, great stuff. I want you to take me through the intelligent application flywheel that's going on here. So I can imagine that as the flywheel of success happens. Okay, got some intelligent apps, I see the dashboard, I'm getting some more visibility on the value creation, unlocking more value, new use case, all the things that happen in cloud, all good. And then I start growing, but I got builders trying to build more applications, more demand for more applications, more pressure on the infrastructure. The next question's, how do you guys simplify the cloud operation equation? Because I got to add more VPCs, I got to do more infrastructure, is it more EC Two? It can get complicated. How do you guys solve that problem? Because if the cloud footprint starts to grow because of more intelligent applications, how do you guys make it easier and simpler to scale up the intelligent infrastructure? >> Oh, that's a great question again, John. I'm going to go into a little bit of a detailed slide here. But before I do that, let's talk about two customers that we helped, right? This slide on the left, talks to those, both the customers. So what we have learned working with customers is, they have to build cloud accounts, manage cloud regions, user onboarding. Then they have to build networking infrastructure. Then they have to enable application infrastructure on top of the networking infrastructure. Application infrastructure could mean they want high-performance computing workloads or elastic services, such as queuing services, storage, or traditional VMS databases. That's a lot to build in the application infrastructure with infrastructure scope. On top of that, our customers have to deal with visibility, security, compliance costs. You get it, right? The path to intelligent applications is not easy because cloud is powerful, but it's broad, and the talent required is deep. We are able to say, how can we help our customers automate everything below the intelligent application layer. If we can do that, which we do, we can now propel our developers to go build intelligent applications without having the of also managing the underlying infrastructure. And we can help the IT operations team become cloud powerhouses because they get out of the way and enabled. Give you two examples here, right? One of our customers is a fortune 200 large ISP. They have about 10,000 servers in a particular department. And previously, when the servers were on premises, they had about a four member team managing compliance for it. When they lifted and shifted these servers into the cloud, the same model they wanted to... There are leaders that asked "Why should we continue with the same model?" They wanted MontyCloud. Now there is a DAY2 compliance board that's running, managing the 10,000 servers automatically watching on for compliance drifts, notifying them in a Slack channel, gets approval, remediates and fixes it. They were able to take those four folks and put them on the intelligent application side, I suppose to continuous infrastructure management site. Another example, a fortune 200 global networking company. It's an interesting situation, John. So on cyber Monday, they wanted to go big of obviously the cyber Monday was very important for them. The Thursday before cyber Monday, their on-premises data center and application went down and their teams wanted to move the application to cloud. And the partner that we work with, that brought this challenge to us saying hey, this fortune customer wants to go to cloud and we have this weekend. Well, we were able to go guide the partner and with our platform they were able to not only take their application from on-prem to cloud, they set up the cloud infrastructure, the networking, the application layer, the monitoring layer, the operations layer, all of that within a day. And on Monday that application delivered three X sales for this customer, without that partner or the customer being a cloud expert. That's what we mean by putting that kind of power in the hands of customers. >> Yeah, and I want to go back to that slide 'cause I think there's a second section I want to look at because what you just referred to is, I think this builds into the next comment on the right-hand side, this DAY2 kind of console vision here. The idea of getting in the weeds and getting into the troubleshooting of say, that cyber Monday example is exactly the non agility scenario, right? Because, if anyone's ever worked in tech knows when you have to get to root cause on something, it can take a while, right? So you need to have the system architecture built out. So here, classic cloud architecture on the left moves to a simple kind of console model. That's kind of what you guys are offering. Am I getting that right, Venkat? Is that kind of how this works? >> Yeah, that's kind of how it works, but the path to that maybe, a quick explanation though. We look at what's on the right--- >> Put that slide back up, let's get that slide back. Okay, there it is. >> Venkat: So what's on the right side here is, every layer on the left requires specialized talent and specialized tooling. That's all customers are currently experienced in the cloud. They either have to buy into a expensive monitoring tool or buy into an expensive security posture management tool. They have to hire, you know... It's hard to find cloud talent, right? And then they have to use infrastructure as code solutions. Sometimes that is, that can get more complex to maintain. What we have in MontyCloud is that, every layer there, they can provision by clicking away. For example, when they provision their cloud accounts setting up AWS best practices, budget guardrails, security, logging and monitoring, they can click away and do it. Setting up network infrastructure like VPC is setting up AWS transit gateway, VPNs, there's templates they can click and do it. The application infrastructure, which is a growing set of application infrastructure. Imagine this John, if a developer can come in and request the IT team they would like to set up an RDS database, right? The IT team can now with DAY2, can provide the developer options of, do you want it in dev stage prod? And do you want snapshots, backup, high availability? These are all check boxes and the developer can pick and choose and they can provision what they want without additional help from the IT team. And the IT team does not have to automate any one of those because it's pre automated in our platform. >> Yeah, this is the promise of infrastructure as code. You don't got to get in to the architecture and start throwing switches and all kinds of weird stuff can happen. Someone doesn't turn off, they don't enable auto-scale and they tested for this they forgot to revert back. I mean, there's a zillion things that could go wrong, human error, as well as automation. So once you set it up, then you provide a consumable developer friendly approach. That seems to be what's happening. Okay, cool. All right, well Venkat, this is fantastic. Final minutes we have left. I want to get your thoughts on the momentum and the vision. Talk about the momentum that you guys have now in the marketplace and what's the vision for the next five years. >> Great, it's a great question. From a momentum perspective John, we take an approach of, let's work with customers and understand that we can solve some problems for them. We've been working backups with customers. We have customers that are startups, that are born in the cloud, we have customers that are enterprise customers who are having a large footprint on-prem. Then we have everybody in between like university customers who are transitioning off. So what we did is from a momentum perspective, we worried more about, do we understand the talent gap and the tooling gap that exists across the board of all customers? Because every customer, once they go to cloud, they look to achieving the same level of efficiency and simplicity like modern cloud companies. A traditional company that moves to cloud wants to act and behave like the one in the cloud customer. For us it was very important to understand a variety of customers, a variety of use cases, and then automated away. So momentum is that we are able to go help a customer that is a Greenfield customer to go to cloud easily. And we're also able to go help brownfield customers, ensure they can reduce the total cost of cloud operations on an ongoing basis. So we've been seeing customers of all sizes, even helping customers of all sizes move fast. And there's a bunch of case studies out there in our website. We are a startup, so we've been able to help those customers and earn their trust by delivering results for them. So the momentum is that, we are able to go scale up now, and scale up fast for our customers without us being in the way, technically. Or customers can go to our platform help themselves and accelerate the platform. That's the momentum we have. From a future perspective, you asked, where things are headed, right? There are a couple of things. First things first, it's important to not just predict the future, we got to create it, right? About two years back when we founded MontyCloud, the question my team asked me, my CTO asked me is, what really matters in cloud ranking, right? So we said, all right, this is provisioning automation management. Yeah, they all matter. But what seemed to really matter is there are three things that matter. That's how we came to... One is events. The cloud itself is an eventing machine, right? More than ever, the cloud infrastructure emits events at every turn, every resource, every activity is expressed as an event. So we made an early bet on building an event driven platform from the ground up. We are the only platform that is even driven. Every other platform is seen to try and solve problems which is awesome to have, but they take an approach of an API based model or an inference into log based model. So the future, we believe, belongs to eventing model because it's lightweight on the customer's infrastructure, it goes easy on the cloud providers. More importantly, it gets the customer as close as possible to when the event happens, right? That's very important, to be able to be even event-driven. If you noticed Cloud Native Foundation came up and announced recently cloud events is the right way to deal with modern SaaS platforms. We've been in cloud events from day one for us, right? So the future is in eventing model. >> And that's where the data angle, I think, connects here for this event and why you guys are a hot startup is, observability, all these things. It's all about a event driven infrastructure. It's all events. It's monitoring, it's management, it's data. At the end of the day, the data is the instrumentation, is what it is. Developers are coding. Media's data. Everything's data. Everything has to do with data. You guys have a unique approach. Venkat Krishnamachari, thank you for coming on. Appreciate it, and thanks for sharing your story here at the AWS Showcase. First inaugural Cube On CloudStartups, part of the 10 hot startups categories. Thanks for sharing. >> Thanks for the opportunity. And we hope to help a lot more customers, simply for the cloud operations and innovate with some intelligent applications that's going to change the world. >> Check out Venkat and his company all on Twitter, on Facebook, they're on every channel, all the channels are open, of course. theCUBE we're bringing you all the hot startups, extracting the signal from the noise. I'm John furrier. Thanks for watching. (Upbeat music)

(bright instrumental music) >> Well, thank you for joining us here as we continue our series of CUBE Conversations on the AWS Startup Showcase. John Walls here on theCUBE again, glad to have you with us. We're joined by a couple of guests today. I'd like to introduce them to you. I'm joined by Venkat Krishnamachari who's the Co-Founder and CEO of MontyCloud, and, Venkat, good to see you today, sir. Thanks for being with us. >> Good to see you, John. >> And also with us is Kandice Hendricks. Who's the delivery architect at GreenPages and, Kandice, thank you for your time as well today. >> Thank you. >> But, Venkat, I'd like you to lead off a little bit just for our viewers who aren't too familiar with MontyCloud. Share with us a little bit about the origins of your company and the services that you're providing. >> Sure thing John, thank you for taking the time. MontyCloud is an autonomous cloud operations company. our origins rest in thinking about our customers from a cloud perspective on what can cloud do for customers. We've been in the enterprise background workspace for a long time. Me and my team members, we have been part of larger companies like Microsoft, AWS, Commvault. So in our journey, what we understood is anytime there is a technology shift that's happening, customers that are able to leverage that technology in a simpler way, are able to innovate better. We realize cloud is so powerful, but sort of complex. We figure it's a, with great power comes great responsibility. And with cloud there's a lot of shared responsibilities that come to customers. We asked this question, how can we help our customers deliver on their part of the shared responsibility in a much easier way than the current situation is, so they can innovate faster and move their business forward. So MontyCloud was born out of understanding larger platform shifts that happen around us all the time, and how we can help customers thrive on that environment. >> We're talking about customers and it's kind of these conundrums that they find themselves in as they're trying to make these big shifts and they have a lot of concerns. GreenPages, one of your clients, and Kandice, I'd like you to come in and maybe tell us a little bit about GreenPages and then I'm going to shift over to how you got to MontyCloud and about that relationship. But first off just give me the 30,000 foot level on GreenPages. >> GreenPages being also a consulting firm working with our clients to solve complex issues as well for security compliance and any of the cloud adoption migration needs. We've been in business since 1992 and I've had the pleasure to work with MontyCloud for quite some time now. I know I've been here just a few years at GreenPages and have been with MontyCloud from the start. And it's just such an awesome team work that we have together solving some of those issues for our clients. >> Venkat touched on a few of those, and they're concerns that I'm sure you share with many other companies, you know, about compliance studies of operation, about TCCO, right? You've got a lot of things on your plate. What were your concerns and what were your goals that you took to MontyCloud and you said, we want to get here, help us. >> So Green Page just started out like as more of VMware player, really strong in the VMware marketplace and it slowly adopted into a CSP and offering more cloud native solutions and problems. But one of the things that really drove us to MontyCloud was their skill levels was far beyond what we could provide as consultants. Like we had the administrative skills but not as strong on the development side and MontyCloud just shines when it comes to the development side and really assisting us and being a great partner with what we need to achieve those goals with our clients. >> So, Venkat, the autonomous CloudOps, this transformation toward this service that you're providing, take that in pieces, if you would, about just how that has evolved and how you define autonomous, in this case, and what are those components? >> Sure thing, thank you, Kandice. It's been fantastic working with GreenPages as well. So, John, I'll take a small example of how GreenPages as a partner, you know, we look at them as a partner in a way to help customers. What Kandice is alluding to is the cloud development aspects. What we figured is MSPs, IT departments across large scale enterprises, all of them are trying to get their internal teams to consume the cloud better and modernize their infrastructure, and build intelligent applications. In all three aspects, we learned that there's undifferentiated amount of heavy development that every team has to do. We started thinking about how can we automate that, and when we say, hey, we can develop for our customers, we truly develop an autonomous approach. Our platform automates those development aspects for customers such that when a customer wants to go to cloud, wants to set up the guardrails, want to set up their self-service provisioning and get to intelligent applications, for every layer, we have developed a repeatable, reusable platform that fills the gap, like the gap that Kandice was pointing out, is the gap in cloud skills and cloud knowledge and cloud development skills. We augment our platform, which fills the gap, and also the tooling gap that comes along with cloud, both of that we've been able to work with partners like GreenPages, and several customers and give them the power of cloud automation with a platform approach back to them. That's what we've been specializing on. >> Venkat, when you talk to a customer and not just GreenPages but customers in general, are there common concerns? Are there challenges that everybody seems to have or think, you know, big buckets security would be one compliance is a cost, obviously, but what is it that you hear from customers, and then in turn, how do you then transform your company, or to meet their needs? How have you kind of reconfigured your approach to address those concerns? >> Sure thing, John. See, our platform is called MontyCloud DAY2. Here's why, or maybe that background might help. We know, day one mindset matters when it comes to digital transformation and technology adoption. But what we also know from experience is day two comes after day one, and most customers are under prepared for the cloud operations that they need to deliver. Ever wonder why large companies, such as Amazon AWS is able to operate a massive data center with just few people? Is able to deliver global scale services with fewer engineers behind it? The power of automation that large companies use is not readily available to customers who are also consuming the cloud. So we looked at that problem space and said, how do we help? And what we learned from hundreds of customers conversations is that there are three things that seem to matter and three things that digital transformation leaders are doing better. We understood those three important things and started automating them. So every customer that's taking the cloud journey can benefit from it. The three things we gathered are, first, most customers are trying to do undifferentiated heavy lifting when it comes to consuming the cloud. For that, they are looking to simplify deployments. Leaders in the space are simplifying deployments, enabling their builders, developers, to move fast without them worrying about the underlying infrastructure. So simplifying deployment is a number one thing that we have understood that's important to solve. The second thing is visibility. Having a visibility into what the cloud footprint is automatically puts leaders in a spot where they can ask questions about, now that I got visibility, what's my compliance posture? What's my security posture? Where do I spend money? Where do I save money? All of that rests on top of a continuous visibility framework. So leaders do that really well. The third thing we understood from customers that they do well is keep an eye on day two, keep an eye towards reducing the total cost of cloud operations, not just the cloud bill. You see, when you go to the cloud, initially is you test the water with couple of applications, things work and businesses grow. Now, the consumption grows higher. You really want to have more and more cloud powered workloads which means the footprint is going to go larger. What we don't want is as the cloud footprint grows, you don't want the cloud bill to be inconsistently growing. You don't want to security compliance and operational overheads to grow along with the cloud footprint. You want those lines trends to drop while the footprint grows, which means the approach that leadership position that customers take is how do I think about my total cost of cloud operations, and who can help? So these are the three areas we spent time understanding and automating. That's the approach we take, John. >> So, Kandice, back when Venkat was talking about Day2 I saw you smile a little bit, right? 'Cause I think you do have this kind of like now what moment, right? You've given me all these great capabilities. We have a whole new tech, our life is great, now what? You know, what happens tomorrow? Day two, which I think is genius. So let's look at GreenPages. What was your day two experience or your now what experience in terms of now that you've been handed this bright, new, shiny well-oiled machine, if you will, concerns that you had about maintaining, sustainability, about adding new apps, adding new services, microservices, all these things, that might be, you know, with different technologies that weren't there before? >> Right, so I'm very familiar with MontyCloud DAY2 platform and it's incredible, especially for the small businesses, it's really trying to adopt that enterprise level automation and simplicity. So that's what DAY2 provides. What our relationship with GreenPages has enhanced is their ability to improve and innovate on their DAY2 platform, because a lot of the projects that we've worked together as a team have built the ground, you know, some of the refactoring and the enhancements of their DAY2 platform which they've had for quite some time So our partnership in that development has helped drive some of the underlying functionality of the DAY2 platform, if that makes sense. >> Sure, and, Venkat, as we know, cost is key, and that is the bottom line, right? You know, help me be more efficient, help me be more compact, but help me save money, right? So at the end of the day, how have you addressed that? How are you providing these additional values at lowered costs in terms of what the client can see at the end of the day? >> That's a great question, John There's a little bit of fogginess in cost, right? What we repeatedly see is cost of cloud bills but cloud bills are usually shockers. People are not getting used to that yet. The consumption economics has changed the capex model to opex model. While that is great, if you don't understand where you're spending the cost, that's a challenge. There's a whole slew of startups and companies helping understand the cloud bill. We took an approach of not just the cloud bill being the problem, right? That is a challenge of a skill gap. Customers wanting to go to cloud need to go hire a lot of specialized talent. That's hard to combine, to get their cloud operations started the right way. We've seen customers go into cloud and only realize this is not working. It's the Wild Wild West in terms of growth. So they do a V2 version of their own cloud again. So we see challenges, whether it's a skill gap that's adding to cost. Then there is cloud bill, obviously. Then there's a tooling gap. Traditional solutions that are not built for the cloud and built in the cloud, don't lend themselves very well for cloud operations. Security is a good example. Compliance is a good example. Ongoing routine automations is a good example. In all three cases what we find customers repeatedly do is they have a chance of either building it themselves, which is expensive and hard to maintain, or they go after specialized tooling, which again brings you the host of integration problems. We looked at it and said, how do we help customers use cloud native tooling? For example, there are no third party agents in MontyCloud DAY2. There is no need to go buy a third party security or compliance or governance tool. We looked at cloud native offerings from Amazon, for example, and we automated them at a higher order and put that power back in the customer's hands. Which means what our customers were able to do is from connecting to MontyCloud, to setting up a cloud operations that is continuously going to reduce the total cost of operations. They can go from zero to that state in couple of days by themselves, within hours, they'll be productive, and they don't have to go close the skill gap. They don't have to buy a third party tooling, and then ongoing basis, they're going to get all the benefits of what AWS provides, in terms of cost optimization, which our platform can contextualize and give it in the customer's hands. So there are many layers you have to cut cost and understanding that's very important to us. And it's been very helpful to talk to our customers and innovate on all the layers on their behalf. >> Well, you certainly, I think you've hit all the big pieces, right? If you've lowered the costs, full visibility, simple deployment, it's a winning combination, and congratulations on that, and thank you both. It sounds like you've got a pretty good thing going, GreenPages and MontyCloud, and we wish you continue to success down the road. Thank you both for joining us here on theCUBE. >> Thank you, John. >> Thank you, Kandice, thank you, John. >> You've been watching theCUBE conversation here on AWS Startup Showcase. I'm John Walls, your host, and thank you for joining us. We'll see you next time around. (gentle instrumental music)

>> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Day2IQ, brought to you by Day2IQ. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at the Day2IQ headquarters. They used to be called Mesosphere. They rebranded the company. They've got a much bigger focus than just Mesos and supporting Mesos. So we're here to get the story, really talk about enterprise's journey to cloud native, and we're excited to have our first guest. He's Brian Kenyon, the chief strategy officer. Brian, great to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> Absolutely. So DayQI, Day2IQ. >> Correct. >> I'm going to get it eventually, by the end of the day. Interesting name. What does Day2IQ mean? Why did you guys rebrand the company that? >> Yeah, absolutely. So we were formerly known as Mesosphere, and the technology that we founded the company on was an open source package called Mesos, so the name naturally had a very close tie with Mesos and Mesosphere. So as we looked to rebrand the company and really enter the market with some of the changes we've seen in the evolution of cloud native, we focused on where customers were having trouble, where they were focused on operations, how they were going to take these concepts and these great ideas that were pervasive in the concept of cloud native and make them institutionalized and operationalized inside their companies. And what we found was, you know, day zero is when you played around and tested things, and day one is when you got it installed and stood up, but day two is when you really focused on the operations. How do I make this enterprise-ready? How do I make this fit my business? All of that happened on day two and after. So we saw that as a pretty natural way to focus our energy and focus our market penetration on day two. >> Right. And you also expanded beyond just kind of the Mesos ecosystem into some other areas, in containers, in Kubernetes, also data. So you guys are taking a little broader approach than maybe the company had at the original launch. >> Yeah, absolutely. And you've heard from one of our founders already and you spoke to our head of engineering. So I'm the newest of those, right? I joined in February, so I'm just, you know, almost 10 months in. So when I joined, I spent a lot of time meeting with our customers, talking to partners, talking to other folks and vendors in the space, and what we saw was there was a massive shift happening from where cloud native started maybe three, four, five years ago to where it is today, and one of the biggest changes has been around the emergence of Kubernetes, which has turned into a de facto standard for containers in cloud native. And so as we've evolved and moved into this D2IQ name, as we've started focusing on meeting our customer, we've obviously taken on a bigger stance inside the Kubernetes community and the Kubernetes product lines. >> Right. So what did you see? I mean, you're a long-time security executive. You've been in strategy and security for years and years and years. What did you see in this opportunity with a small start-up to get you to leave kind of the safe, comfortable, pretty standard corporate job into jumping back into this-- >> Nobody's ever said security's safe, so that's awesome. >> Well, safe certainly in terms of job security. (mumbles) my goodness, a big shill out there these days. >> It is, it is. >> But what did you see? >> I saw the future, is really what I saw. When you really took a step back and you looked at where compute was going and how organizations were starting to adopt new application methodologies, new application architectures, it was very clear that cloud had taken on a big portion of that and the concept of cloud native and open source technologies was becoming more and more prominent. And so as we looked at this, not only did we see a unique opportunity with the cloud native space, but if you fast forward a couple years, customers are going to be coming back around and starting to have conversations around security. How do I secure this? What, how do my CISOs and my operational folks in security understand this and how do they really start to apply the same controls and visibility to it? So it was a unique opportunity to get in and focus on where the future of our industry's going. >> Right. So it's an interesting thing with open source, and open source specifically in the enterprise. I think my favorite open source quote is, yeah, it's free like a puppy. You know, it's not free. You need support and you need training and you need a lot of help. So when you guys work with enterprises and they're incorporating more and more open source into their technology stack, what are some of the challenges that you guys are coming in to help them to actually get beyond a simple free download and the latest cool version to actually running in production, heavy duty loads, really important workloads. >> Absolutely. Yeah, one of the biggest shortfalls we see is obviously expertise, right? So there's a massive amount of innovation and capability that can be, can really be captured through open source software. The challenge is, it's all community-based. So folks contribute code, they sign it in, it's available for everybody to use, but how long is that code updated for? How long is it maintained? How do new features get added? What you see is you see a huge spike in interest and enthusiasm, and then just like every other hype cycle, you get to a trough of disillusionment where people move on to the next thing and the next thing in the open source community. And so organizations who want to leverage that innovation, want to focus their operations around open source, either for cost savings or time to market, find themselves a couple years later looking at code that's been abandoned, projects that aren't maintained anymore. We saw this in security with things like OpenSSL, right? One of the largest SSL libraries used across the entire security landscape. There were two people in the world maintaining that code. And so when a massive security vulnerability hit, organizations were scrambling. We want to stop that now for organizations that want to use open source. We, Day2IQ, want to bring our innovation, our expertise, to bring that open source to the customers and make sure that it's enterprise-ready, it's enterprise-supported, and it's enterprise-scalable. >> Right. So you guys have basically three market offerings, if I understand right. You've got a solution set where you're taking the core software and building solutions around it. You've got services, professional services, to get it in, get it up, and probably supported, so I have a 1-800 somebody to call, please, which, you couldn't call those two people in that case. >> Exactly. >> And then training, is that right? So those are how you're basically enterprise-hardening an open source kernel to get to a great solution for the customer. >> Yeah, what I'd also add in there is services. So whether it's advisory services, implementation services, or just kind of more traditional, our focus is really about meeting the customer where they need us. If you look at cloud and cloud native today, almost every customer across the globe is at a different evolution or a different maturity in that journey, and so some are at the very beginning where they're learning. Others are more towards the end where they're focused on operations and how do I streamline this, how do I hire the right folks. So we've taken a product, services, support, and training strategy that allows us to meet our customers where they are in their cloud native journey and assures us that we can provide the right level of expertise regardless of where they are. >> Right. What's been the biggest, of all the challenges that you see when people are getting started, what's some of the biggest challenges that you just see over and over and over again that you know you're going to get walking in the door? >> Over and over, you see training is just a constant, across the entire industry. No matter where a customer is in their evolution or their journey, they're constantly having to train, whether they're hiring and then training folks on the new way of developing or they're taking developers who have been building code and building applications in virtual machines or old monoliths for years that they want to train to this new paradigm. Training is a huge constant. The other piece is people are looking to rationalize their infrastructure. So services, we are in a very services-led industry right now where we can come in and help customers get stock of where are we today and where do we want to go long-term, and then put them on a plan, put them on a program or a path where they can achieve those outcomes, but do it in a way that's not disruptive or adds (mumbles). >> Right, 'cause the complexity just continues to increase. It's funny, you know, both Amazon introduced a piece of Amazon Cloud you can stick in your data center, and Google introduced a piece of Google Cloud that you can stick in your data center, and Microsoft recently introduced a piece of Azure that you can stick in your data center. So kind of this, you know, kind of real aggressive embracing of hybrid and this real embracing of complex setups where you can partition your workload based on where you think that workload should run today is really gaining hold. So the complexity is only going up, not going down. >> It is, you're absolutely right. And I will tell you, what you just brought up is a great example of why the complexity's going up. On-prem is a massively different, materially different environment than the clouds. The clouds are built on a margin, right? They're built on, if I take the same server and do this over and over again, I get repeatability, I get consistency, I get a very finite platform. If you look at how on-prem is, the traditional data center, you buy some servers from Dell, some servers from HP, storage from EMC, storage from HP. You've got all different types of hardware and software in there. So fixing that on-prem cloud is hard, and the clouds are struggling with this because the concept of taking their very clean, vanilla infrastructure and bringing that to the traditional on-premise is failing. That's where we shine. That's where we've built. That's where Mesosphere got their initial start was taking the cloud concept and bring it to the traditional data center. So we're helping clouds extend now by being that on-prem piece that speaks seamlessly with the clouds that our customers choose to use. >> Right. So I think, too, initially, the cloud was seen as a way to save money, and I've seen that evolve over time. It's really much more about speed and agility in your development cycles and getting new products to market. Do customers grok that? Are they still kind of wrestling with the cost savings and this is kind of an alternative way to buy compute and networking and capacity, or are they really moving fast because of the speed and the competitive threats? >> So I think it's interesting, and it varies, but I will tell you just from my lens, I'll say that a lot of customers are confused. They went to the cloud initially because they believe they wanted to be out of the data center game. It was easier for Amazon or Microsoft or Google to manage the data center than it was for their own IT teams. And so they shifted infrastructure up there, and then what they saw was the promises of hyperscaling, the promises of this elasticity. Your application grows as more users show up. They never realized that because those applications were built under a different premise, under a different architecture, and don't leverage the cloud native capabilities. So you're seeing a shift of people who've moved infrastructure or applications to the cloud to get out of the data center are now saying, okay, I'm kind of locked in, but where do I get my operational efficiency? Where do I get my hyperscaling? How do I get that? And now you're staring to see that shift from just using the clouds as infrastructure to more moving towards microservices, containers, and some of the things that Day2IQ helps with. >> Right, right. It's pretty funny, too, right? 'Cause the apps used to have to be built for the infrastructure on which you were going to deploy them. >> That's right. >> That's now flipped upside down, right? Now the app, the infrastructure needs to support the app. The app comes first, the infrastructure second. >> That's right. >> So having an architecture, you got to have the new architecture. As you said, you just can't simply flip the functionality of an old architecture into a new paradigm. >> And then expect you're going to get the same outcomes. >> Right, right. >> Yeah, very true. >> All right, so before I let you go, I want to get your perspective specifically on security, 'cause again, you were in the security space for a long time. Security's a hot space. Everyone says security has to be baked in everywhere. It can't be the castle and moat anymore. So with your security hat on as you kind of see these migrations and you see these new deployments and you see this move to cloud native, what do you think about from security? Are people baking it in enough? Are they thinking about it in the right way? Is it just such a fundamental shift that they need to think about security and really baking it in from the bottom to the top? >> They absolutely do. And I'll tell you what the scariest thing is, if I go through my CISO networks and talk to folks who are on that side of the fence, they're not even educated to this cloud native space yet. They don't really understand how it's happening and how it's evolving and what that means. So there's a huge education that needs to happen in security, but these things need to be bolted on from the beginning. I'll give you an example. Some of the value that comes from operating cloud native is that your ability to push code and push changes is very agile and quick. So it's encouraged in a cloud native type of architecture that a company can make 100 to 200, 300 code changes a day. >> Right. >> Right? When I grew up, you'd make those monthly, quarterly, right? 'Cause you had a whole bunch of testing. And how they push code multiple times a day. If you don't have your security team in lockstep with those developers and operations staff, how quickly can you get out of compliance? How quickly can you erode your security posture? These are all questions that have to be answered, and we're just at the very earliest stages of getting that. >> Right, and we didn't even talk about IoT and edge devices. >> Absolutely. >> Which opens up a whole different kind of threat surface. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah. >> Absolutely. >> All right, Brian, well, thanks for taking a few minutes. Good luck on the journey and hope things go super for you here. >> Thanks for having me. >> All right, he's Brian, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at Day2 headquarters, Day2IQ headquarters in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (techno music)