>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon CloudNativeCon Euope 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing foundation and eco-system partners. >> Welcome back to the Fira here in Barcelona, Spain. This is theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2019. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host for two days of coverage is Corey Quinn, and we're excited to have on the program a first time guest, but a company that we've known for quite a while, Daniel Lopez Ridruejo, who's the CEO and co-founder of Bitnami. Just announced recently that Bitnami is being acquired by VMware. Daniel, thanks so much for joining us and congratulations to you and the team on the 'exit' as it were. >> Thank you very much, gracias. It's an honor to be here. >> Yeah so we had Erica Brescia who's the co-founder of yours on theCUBE seven years ago. Back then I was trying to figure out exactly what Bitnami was and where it fit in this whole world. Maybe you can just bring us up to speed for those that maybe don't know, and there's all these people in the enterprise space that might not know your community that the dev space knows real well, as to bring us back the who and the why of Bitnami >> Yeah Erica is my co-founder and we have been building this together over the years. It has been quite a fair ride and, we started Bitnami as an offshoot of our previous company called Bedrock in which we made software easy to install. And then we realized that a lot of what people wanted to make easy to install on Linux was Open Source software, so we started working with companies like MySQL and SugarCRM, Splunk really early on when they were only four or five people, and over time we decided to do the same thing as an Open Source project for all those other tools and projects that didn't have a way to make them easy to install. We started as Bitnami.org, we wanted to emphasize that it was an Open Source project, was never going to be a company, and it didn't turn out that way. >> All right so, we got a lot of things to cover, but help us connect the dots as to those early you know, dot org, it wasn't a company, to a company having the dev space to, we're starting down the path towards the enterprise, which seemed to be a natural fit as to what happened today. >> Yeah so going back to your original question of why we wanted to make, was always being driven. There is all this marvelous Open Source software out there that is super difficult to use for a great majority of people, and we just wanted to lower the barrier to make it easy to use, and that's what got it started. We never expected the success. It turns out we went from a hundred, to a thousand, to ten thousand to hundreds of thousands of downloads, and you know, we're super popular with developers. We have literally millions of developers using Bitnami, and as part of that evolution, we started working with the cloud providers. We drive a significant percentage of usage for Amazon, for Google, for Microsoft, that's what makes it valuable to those cloud vendors, and as the next stage of the company, we wanted to go directly to the enterprises in which we already have a lot of developers in those same enterprises, but when you go move to production, you know that it's a lot of red tape, a lot of gates that you have to go about compliance and security, and that's where we're taking the company to. >> Nine, ten years ago I stumbled over you, over your company or I guess project at that time, and it was the second best way I ever found to run WordPress. The first of course is, don't run WordPress. I'm very serious. Don't run WordPress. And I'm curious now, with the acquisition of Bitnami, what is the longer-term vision for how this fits into a more cloud-native landscape. Is it continuing to just be the, well not just but, is it continuing to be the application you get from a catalog and it's up and running, is their a containerized story, is there something else I'm not seeing? >> No, that's the core of Bitnami, and that will continue to do that. What has evolved over time is that initially you could download an installer and run it on your Mac. And then we were one of the first early adapters of AWS, so we created all these AMIs and when, you know, people were thinking that we were crazy, that Amazon was a company that sold books, but you know, what were we doing? We kind of saw where it was going early on. And then as Kubernetes came along, we were really, really early there as well, and we were one of the early partners of these around Helm. We provided a lot of the Helm charts. Right now we may have dabbled a little bit on Serverless, So whatever comes next, we will be there and our goal continues to be the same thing, which is to make awesome software available to everyone. So independently of the underlying platform, that's where we're focusing, so, the core mission is not changing, we're just omitting that, and going after the enterprise, more red hat enterprise Linux, you know, more OpenShift, more multi tier, high availabilty, more production features. >> All right so, you talk about all those pieces, and you talk about linux and everything there. I want you help connect, how does that tie into VMware and what you see them doing today because, sure Linux has been something that could live on a hypervisor for a long time, but in many ways there's been struggles in competition between VMware and them and the Linux community in the past, but, you know, we're starting to see some of that change and maybe this helps accelerate some of that change. >> Yeah I think there is a couple of companies, Microsoft and VMware, that were completely different companies than five years ago and probably the decision would have been different for us like five years ago versus what the company is today and where they're going. For us VMware is, the holy grail of acquisition is 2 plus 2 equals five, and that's hardly the, you know, there's a lot of acquisitions that don't go that way. For us it was a very thought out decision and it was, I think it was clear for us in the sense that we have a very big footprint with developers, they own enterprise IT, we wanted to go enterprise, they wanted to go into developers, they understand Open Source, they understand distributed teams, yeah. >> Maybe, I'd love to hear your insight as to that developer community, because when I walk around the show floor, you know, there was that struggle between the enterprise and the developers, and now, the storage world, we need to get CI/CD and all these things and they're like "uh, we don't know how to get there" . And over the last few years, it seems there's been a blurring of the lines, and more enterprise is embracing it, Open Source is a big piece of that, so is it, as you said, five years ago this wouldn't have happened, but now it feels like we're ready for that next step of the curve. >> Correct. And all of that is because of this standardization, that Kubernetes is allowing, you can standardize business practices, and your seeing a consolidation, the CI/CD wall. And it's like, things that used to be very exotic now is business as usual. And it's a parallel, you know, I started using Linux in '93, when there was not even a concept of a Linux distribution, you have to do all these things just to get a prompt, but over time people have standardized, you know I remember there were like, 50 or 60 Linux distributions; StagWare, SLS. And eventually, everybody converged on Red Hat enterprise Linux. I think something similar is going to happen, we're just midway there, in which you will not have KubeCon because Kubernetes will be something transparent that is boring. So, we're not there yet, but at some point Kubernetes will be boring and there will be layers on top of that where all the action is. Or will be. >> From my perspective, coming from a small startup background, it seemed to me that VMware was always one of those stodgy, boring companies I didn't have much time for and lately there've been a series of high profile acquisitions, Heptio, Wavefront, CloudFront and now Bitnami, and it's really changing, almost without me noticing, my entire perception of their place in the modern evolving cloud ecosystem. >> I think so, and that's one of the things that attracted us and I talked to Victoria about it, get to spend a bit of time with the CEO, with the people at the high level. For us it was very important. But again, one thing we haven't mentioned is that, for the most part we have been bootstrapped. We have been profitable, we only took a little money from Ycombinator when we were already profitable. So we have choices. Sometimes our BC funded peers don't have that choice, so it was a very meditated decision, and for me for these kind of acquisitions, when a much bigger company joins forces with a smaller company, the strategies need to be aligned. And to me, VMware realized that the world, a few years ago, that the world is going to be moved to cloud, the world is going to go towards Kubernetes and containers. And the acquisition of Heptio, the acquisition of CloudHealth, told us that they're serious about that and that we can fit right in and take advantage of that transformation they are going. And so far it's working really, really, really well and that's part of what made us decide to go in this direction. >> Yeah Daniel, what can you tell us about things, once this actually does close, what will that mean for the brand? What about relationships with, you mentioned Heptio? But not only Heptio, Pivotal obvously is a big player in this space. How does all of that line up? >> With Heptio and other units like the marketplace's other groups, we were already working with them before the acquisition, with Heptio, with ksonnet and a bunch of other initiatives. We're just going to double down on that, and they want to keep Bitnami, they want to keep the brand, they want to keep the team. If anything we're going to get more resources, and again, that was the fact that they didn't want to touch something that is working. We have been partners for, I think, seven or eight years. We have gotten to know each other over that time and built that trust that is needed. In a way nothing is going to change. We're going to have the same team doing the same things, we're just going to have more access to their userbase. Which is what we're going to do. We started down this path because we were raising money to build an enterprise sales force, and at some point we decided, okay, this doesn't make sense. We're going to give away all this chunk of the company to get access to the enterprise, or to build a sales force to get access to the enterprise, when we can be part of VMware and get that for free. >> You've mentioned a fair bit about what's going to change as far as you getting exposure to new customers, effectively broadening into additional markets. What does this mean for your existing customers who are, in some cases, whenever you're a customer of a small-ish company, and there's an acquisition, it sometimes is natural to be a little concerned of, do I need to find a new vendor? Do I need to find a new provider? And frankly, there's nothing else like you that I've ever seen on the market. >> No, that's a really good question. For us, what is a little bit unique is we have millions of users, but we only have a handful of customers. So our customers are AWS, Google, Microsoft, Oracle. So it was very important; VMware is already a vendor to all of these; and so far everybody is going to stay and we're just going to continue and deepen the relationship. And that's one of the things that made this attractive. So for customers, nothing is going to change. And we're just going to continue to deepen those relationships. And again, that was important. Had we gone through some of the other options there would have been a lot of very outward conversations to have and that is not the case. >> Yeah Daniel, how about the developer community itself. It's just had millions of downloads out there. We understand how some of the reaction can be. >> Yeah, everybody is like, is VMware going to be the evil company that's going to touch that? And I think so far the feedback has been extremely positive, including even Hacker News, right, which is shocking. >> And those people don't like anything. >> I've been high Hacker News since the very beginning and it can be harsh. So it was something I was monitoring how people. And so far it has been very positive and that's only not a testimony how much people like Bitnami but also again, VMware acquire Heptio and everything's great. We talk to a lot of the people at Heptio, you know, hey how are things going? How has it been? And everybody loved it there, so for us it was something that gave us a lot of reassurance that all these other companies with a lot of Open Source DNA were being successful there and gave us reassurance. Time will tell. We'll see one year from now where we are, but so far everybody that we have talked to, all the conversations have been great. >> So Daniel you have a very interesting viewpoint on this whole ecosystem, we work with all the cloud providers. Any commentary you'd give of, you talk about that midway point of maturity? Where do you see things today, where do you see them going? What do we need to fix as an industry? >> Well it's very difficult to predict where things are going I just think that at this point it's very safe to say that it's going to be a multi-cloud war. That was not like three, four years ago. It seemed like it could be a repeat of the '90s in which Microsoft own ninety-something percent of the market share. And there was a lot of things that didn't make sense. Right now at least Amazon, plus a bunch of other clouds, are viable, and if anything they are growing. So a lot of companies like HashiCorp, like VMware. Companies that support this multi-cloud environment, not all of them, but all of them are very well positioned to thrive because it's not going to change any time soon. The other thing I think that is safe to assume is, we are going to have more artifacts than ever, so companies like Artifactory, I think they will do well. As any companies have to do to do with security. We're going to have more security issues, not less. But in the long term that's as much as I can predict. >> All right, well, Daniel, thank you so much. Congratulations again, and we look forward to seeing you at VMworld. Where we'll have theCUBE there. It'll actually be our tenth year being at Vmworld. >> Awesome >> So we're excited and always happy to talk to, especially the startups some great news here. For Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks as always for watching theCUBE.