(Gentle music) >> Hello and welcome to the Cube here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier here, joined by Platform nine, Amelia Bell the Chief Revenue Officer, really digging into the conversation around Kubernetes Cloud native and the journey this next generation cloud. Amelia, thanks for coming in and joining me today. >> Thank you, thank you. Great pleasure to be here. >> So, CRO, chief Revenue Officer. So you're mainly in charge of serving the customers, making sure they're they're happy with the solution you guys have. >> That's right. >> And this market must be pretty exciting. >> Oh, it's very exciting and we are seeing a lot of new use cases coming up all the time. So part of my job is to obtain new customers but then of course, service our existing customers and then there's a constant evolution. Nothing is standing still right now. >> We've had all your co-founders on, on the show here and we've kind of talked about the trends and where you guys have come from, where you guys are going now. And it's interesting, if you look at the cloud native market, the scale is still huge. You seeing now this next wave of AI coming on, which I call that's the real web three in my mind in terms of like the next experiences really still points to data infrastructure scale. These next gen apps are coming. And so that's being built on the previous generation of DevSecOps. >> Right >> And so a lot of enterprises are having to grow up really, really fast >> Right. >> And figure out, okay, I got to have scale I got large scale data, I got horizontal scalability I got to apply machine learning now the new software engineering practice. And then, oh, by the way I got the Kubernetes clusters I got to manage >> Right. >> I got what's containers weather, the security problems. This is a really complicated but important area of build out right now in the marketplace. >> Right. What are you seeing? >> So it's, it's really important that the infrastructure is not the hindrance in these cases. And we, one of our customers is in fact a large AI company and we, I met with them yesterday and asked them, you know, why are you giving that to us? You've got really smart engineers. They can run and create the infrastructure, you know in a custom way that you want it. And they said, we've got to be core to our business. There's plenty of work to do just on delivering the AI capabilities, and there's plenty of work to do. We can't get bogged down in the infrastructure. We don't want to have people running the engine we want them driving the car. We want them creating value on top of that. so they can't have the infrastructure being the bottleneck for them. >> It's interesting, the AI companies, that's their value proposition to their customers is that they don't want the technical talent. >> Right. >> Working on, you know, non-differentiated heavy lifting things. >> Right. >> And automate those and scale it up. Can you talk about the problem that you guys are solving? Because there's a lot going on here. >> Yeah. >> You can look at all aspects of the DevOps scale. There's a lot of little problems, some big problems. What are you guys focusing on? What's the bullseye for Platform known? >> Okay, so the bullseye is that Kubernetes infrastructure is really hard, right? It's really hard to create and run. So we introduce a time to market efficiency, let's get this up and running and let's get you into production and and producing results for your customers fast. But at the same time, let's reduce your cost and complexity and increase reliability. So, >> And what are some of the things that they're having problems with that are breaking? Is it more of updates on code? Is it size of the, I mean clusters they have, what what is it more operational? What are the, what are some of the things that are that kind of get them to call you guys up? What's the main thing? >> It's the operations. It's all operations. So what, what happens is that if you have a look at Kubernetes platform it's made up of many, many components. And that's where it gets complex. It's not just Kubernetes. There's load balances, networking, there's observability. All these things have to operate together. And all the piece parts have to be upgraded and maintained. The integrations need to work, you need to have probes into the system to predict where problems can be coming. So the operational part of it is complex. So you need to be observing not only your clusters in the health of the clusters and the nodes and so on but the health of the platform itself. >> We're going to get Peter Frey in on here after I talk about some of the technical issues on deployments. But what's the, what's the big decision for the customer? Because there's kind of, there's two schools of thought. One is, I'm going to build my own and have my team build it or I'm going to go with a partner >> Right. >> Say platform nine, what's the trade offs there? Because it seems to me that, that there's a there's a certain area of where it's core competency but I can outsource it or partner with it and, and work with platform nine versus trying to take it all on internally >> Right. >> Of which requires more costs. So there's a, there's a line where you kind of like figure out that customers have to figure out that, that piece >> Right >> What do, what's your view on that? Because I'm hearing that more people are saying, hey I want to, I want to focus my people on solutions. The app side, not so much the ops >> Right. >> What's the trade off? How do you talk about? >> It's a really interesting question because most companies think they have two options. It's either a DIY option and they love that engineers love playing with the new and on the latest. And then they think the other option is going to cloud, public cloud and have it semi managed by them. And you get very different out of those. So in the DIY you get flexibility coz you get to choose your infrastructure but then you've got all the complexities of the DIY piece. You've got to not only choose all your components but you've got to keep them working. Now if you go to public cloud option, you lose flexibility because a lot of those choices are made for you but you gain agility because quite frankly it's really easy to spin up clusters. So what we are, is that in the middle we bring the agility and the flexibility because we bring the control plane that allows you to spin up clusters and and lifecycle manage them very quickly. So the agility's there but you can do it on the infrastructure of your choice. And in the DIY culture, one of the hardest things to do actually is to convince them they don't have to do it themselves. They can focus on higher value activities, which are more focused on delivering outcomes to their customers. >> So you provide the solution that allows them to feel like they're billing it themselves. >> Correct. >> And get these scale and speed and the efficiencies of the op side. So it's kind of the best of both worlds. It's not a full outsource. >> Right, right. >> You're bringing them in to make their jobs easier >> Right, That's right. So they get choices. >> Yeah. >> We, we, they get choices on how they build it and then we run and operate it for them. But they, they have all the observability. The benefit is that if we are managing their operations and most of our customers choose the managed operations piece of it, then they don't. If something goes wrong, we fix that and they, they they get told, oh, by the way, you had a problem. We've dealt with it. But in the other model is they've got to create all that observability themselves and they've got to get ahead of the issues themselves, and then they've got to raise tickets to whoever they need to raise tickets to. Whereas we have things like auto ticket generation and so on where, look, just drive the car let us worry about the engine and all of that. Let us deal with that. And you can choose whatever you want about the engine but let us manage it for you. So >> What do you, what do you say to folks out there that are may have a need for platform nine? What's the signals inside their company that they should be calling you guys up and, and leaning in with platform nine? >> Right. >> Is it more sprawl on on clusters? Is it more errors? Is it more tickets? Is it more hassle? What are some of the signs? If someone's watching this say, hey I have, I have an issue with this. >> I would say, if there's operational inefficiencies you can't get things to market fast enough because you are building this and it's just taking too long you're spending way too much time operationally on the infrastructure, then you are, you are not using your resources where they should best be used. And, and that is delivering services to the customer. >> Ed me Hora on for International Women's Day. And she was talking about how they love to solve complex problems on the engineering team at Platform nine. It's going to get pretty complex with the edge emerging >> Indeed >> and cloud native on-premises distributed computing. >> Indeed. >> essentially is what it is. That's kind of the core DNA of the team. >> Yeah. >> What, how does that translate to the customers? Because IT seems to be, okay, I have virtual machines were great, now I got to scale up and and convert over a transform to containers, Kubernetes >> Right. >> And then large scale app, app applications. >> Right, so when it comes to Edge it gets complex pretty fast because it's highly distributed. So how do you have standardization and governance across all the different edge locations? So what we bring into play is an ability to, um, at each edge, location eh, provision from bare metal up all the way up to the application. So let's say you have thousands of stores and you want to modernize those stores, you know rather than having a server being sent somewhere to have an image loaded up and then sent that and then you've got to send a technical guide to the store and you've got to implement it all there. Forget all that. That's just, that's just a ridiculous waste of time. So what we've done is we've created the ability where the server can just be sent to the store. You can get your barista or your chef just to plug it in, right? You don't need to send any technical person over there. As long as we have access to it, we get access to it and we provision the whole thing from bare metal up and then we can maintain it according to the standards that are needed and upgrade accordingly. And that gives standardization across all your stores or edge locations or 5G towers or whatever it is, distribution centers. And we can create nice governance and good standardization which allows them to innovate fast as well. >> So this is a real opportunity for you guys. >> Yeah. >> This is an advantage from your expertise. >> Yes. >> The edge piece, dropping in a box, self-provisioning. >> That's right. So yeah. >> Can people do that? What's the, >> No, actually it, it's, it's very difficult to do. I I, from my understanding, we're the only people that can provision it from bare metal up, right? So if anyone has a different story, I'd love to hear about that. But that's my understanding today. >> That's a good value purpose. So talk about the value of the customer. What kind of scope do you got? Can you scope some of the customer environments you have from >> Sure. >> From, you know, small to the large, how give us an idea of the order of magnitude of the >> Yeah, so, so small customers may have 20 clusters or something like that. 20 nodes, I beg your pardon. Our large customers, like we're we are scaling one particular distributed environment from 2200 nodes to 10,000 nodes by the end of this year and 26,000 nodes next year. We have another customer that's scaling up to 10,000 nodes this year as well. So we have some very large scale, but some smaller ones too. And we're, we're happy to work with either end. >> Okay, so pretend I'm a customer. I'm really, I got pain and Kubernetes like I want to, I can't hire enough people. I want to have my all focus. What's the pitch? >> Okay. So skill shortage is something that that everyone is facing right now. And if, if you've got skill shortage it's going to be really hard to hire if you are competing against really, you know, high salary you know, offering companies that are out there. So the pitch is, let us do it for you. We have, we have a team of excellent probably the best Kubernetes engineers on the planet. We will create your environment for you. We will get it up and running. We will allow you to, you know, run your applica, just consume the platform, we'll run it for you. We'll have SLAs and up times guaranteed and you can just focus on delivering the software and the value needed to your customers. >> What are some of the testimonials that you get from people? Just anecdotally, what do they say? Oh my god, you guys save. >> Yeah. >> Our butts. >> Yeah. >> This is amazing. We just shipped our code out much faster. >> Yeah. >> What are some of the things that you hear? >> So, so the number one thing I hear is it just works right? It's, we don't have to worry about it, it just works. So that, that's a really great feedback that we get. The other thing I hear is if we do have issues that your team are amazing, they they fix things, they're proactive, you know, they're we really enjoy working with you. So from, from that perspective, that's great. But the other side of it is we hear things like if we were to do that ourselves we would've taken six to 12 months to build that. And you guys have just saved us six to 12 months. The other thing that we hear is with the same two engineers we started on, you know, a hundred nodes we're now running thousands of nodes. We have not had to increase the size of the team and expand and scale exponentially. >> Awesome. What's next for you guys? What's on your, your plate? >> Yeah. >> With CRO, what's some of the goals you have? >> Yeah, so growth of course as a CRO, you don't get away from that. We've got some very exciting, actually, initiatives coming up. One of the things that we are seeing a lot of demand for and is, is in the area of virtualization bringing virtual machine, virtual virtual containers, sorry I'm saying that all wrong. Bringing virtual machine, the virtual machines onto the cloud native infrastructure using Kubernetes technology. So that provides a, an excellent stepping stone for those guys who are in the virtualization world. And they can't move to containers, they can't refactor their applications and workloads fast enough. So just bring your virtual machine and put it onto the container infrastructure. So we're seeing a lot of demand for that, because it provides an excellent stepping stone. Why not use Kubernetes to orchestrate virtual the virtual world? And then we've got some really interesting cost optimization. >> So a lot of migration kind of thinking around VMs and >> Oh, tremendous. The, the VM world is just massively bigger than the container world right now. So you can't ignore that. So we are providing basically the evolution, the the journey for the customers to utilize the greatest of technologies without having to do that in a, in a in a way that just breaks the bank and they can't get there fast enough. So we provide those stepping stones for them. Yeah. >> Amelia thank you for coming on. Sharing. >> Thank you. >> The update on platform nine. Congratulations on your big accounts you have and >> thank you. >> And the world could get more complex, which Means >> indeed >> have more customers. >> Thank you, thank you John. Appreciate that. Thank you. >> I'm John Furry. You're watching Platform nine and the Cube Conversations here. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here at the Orange County Convention Center, I'm your host Rebecca Knight. We are joined today by Emilia Sherifova, she is the VP of Architecture and Engineering at Northwestern Mutual, thanks so much for joining us Emilia. >> Thank you for having me. >> So I want to start off by talking about how you got to Northwestern Mutual. You came via an acquisition, you were CTO of LearnVest. What is LearnVest? >> LearnVest is a financial planning start up, it's a company that is bringing financial planning to the masses, it's a very mission driven organization. When Northwestern Mutual came as an interest to acquire us, we saw an incredible opportunity to partner with a Fortune 100 company, and tap into its client base of five million people, and bring sort of best in class digital experience and innovation, with best in class financial services products. >> Talk about that problem a little bit, in terms of bringing financial planning to the masses. Why don't the masses have financial planning? What's the disconnect? >> I think it's not easy, often it's a human driven problem. Often humans do not want to deal with their finances, as I know personally for myself, historically when I met with my financial advisor in the past I would get a plan and I wouldn't follow up on that. So building delightful experiences that engage our clients, with the combination of a financial planner that's prodding you, and giving you guidance. >> So there is a human there? >> Absolutely, there's no way to avoid a human. So it was that regional model of LearnVest to have the human help the robot part of it, and we are doing the same thing with Northwestern Mutual, where we're leveraging Northwestern Mutual best in class distribution work force and providing them tools to help them do their work best. >> I love the idea of a delightful experience when dealing with your finances, it seems antithetical. Give me some examples of what you mean by this. >> I think ability to give you a 360 view of your life, and give you a financial wellness score, for instance, after we've gotten a couple of data points about you, but also gathered some of the predictive data points that we know are probably true about you, and give you a score, one score, that gives you an idea what's the probability of you reaching your financial goal, or you retiring, or you going broke. So there is a way to do that in an easy, digestible and kind of delightful way where we're able to leverage technology and predictive capabilities to really push for financial security of our clients. >> And what is the customer response here? >> Customer response, it's been great. Now that we've rolled out a lot of these experiences for the customer base of Northwestern Mutual we have massive engagement with our customers, our traffic has gone dramatically up. >> So people are hungering for this? >> Absolutely, it's a much needed thing, and we're here to help them. >> So you've now been with Northwestern Mutual for a few years now, dividing your time between New York and Milwaukee, you're in both technology and financial services, both male dominated fields, can you describe a little bit about your career path, and how you got into it, and what you've learned along the way. >> Oh, absolutely. I'm originally from Russia, and I come from a family of engineers, so it was a somewhat natural path for me. I got into software engineering in the late 90s. My go to language initially was C programming, and I participated in the Y2K Challenge on Wall Street. >> Which seems so quaint! (laughs) >> And I've spent over a decade on Wall Street, building electronic trading systems, market data feeds. So I feel honored to have been able to pursue and have these possibilities, but I know how not easy it is, given what a male dominated world this is. >> Is it as bad as the headlines make it out to be? I mean, it really does, when you read it, it's sickening. The sexism, the biases, what's your experience been? >> I think I've been lucky enough to work in very supportive places, but I can tell you majority of teams that I've been part of are majority male, and whether my team mates want to be inclusive and engaging, when the majority is someone else that doesn't look like you, act like you, lean on similar defaults as you, it does not make for a very welcome environment. So I recognize that, and a big part of that, I feel, is having proper on boarding practices. Because on boarding often can happen, if you don't have a formal on boarding process, on boarding can happen in informal ways, and when it happens in informal ways, you tend to be attracted to the people who are like you, and you hang out with. So if you look at the technology world, it's dominated by mostly male. If you are in a start up world, it's mostly young males. And so I am determined to bring operational excellence and sustainability and diversity through strong operational practices, like ensuring that there is proper on boarding. Where for instance, a young mother who has a child has the potential to go home at 4 p.m., and cannot hang out with the guys and drink coke or beer at 7 p.m., to really understand the culture of the group that she joined. We want to make sure that she has sustainable, thoughtful on boarding practices, feeling like she's part of the organization. This is just one way of doing it. >> In terms of the on boarding, and I think you're absolutely right in a sense, that we do gravitate towards people who are just like us, look like us, talk like us, think like us, so are you pairing the new people with people who are not like them? >> Absolutely, but also actually I am pairing them with people who also recently just went through on boarding, that just join also fairly recently. That way they can explain the pitfalls that they gone through, and so we're definitely making sure we have these co pilots, but also rigorous processes to get people comfortable, whatever their background is. >> Now how many Grace Hoppers have you been to, Emilia? >> I have to say this is my first one. >> Your first one, you're a newbie! So what is your experience been so far. >> I am incredibly moved by the experience, actually. I have to say I've never seen so much energy before. I am moved by the stories that I have heard, incredibly inspired. I am inspired to keep pushing. I felt I could relate to a lot of presenters' backgrounds, I also came from a small town, that actually is not on the map, because it was a military town in the former Soviet Union, and a lot of stories of overcoming, and persisting, and ending up here, is what I can relate to. So I'm very excited, and very grateful, and I want to be here every year. >> So you'll be back? >> Totally! >> Great! Well, Emilia, thanks so much for joining us, it's been really fun talking to you. >> Thanks for having me. >> We'll be back with more from Grace Hopper just after this.