>> Good afternoon everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE where we're coming to you live from Detroit, Michigan at KubeCon and Cloud Native Con. We're going to keep theCUBE puns coming this afternoon because we have the pleasure of being joined by not one but two guests from Kubiya. John Furrier, my wonderful co-host. You're familiar with these guys. You just chatted with them last week. >> We broke the story of their launch and featured them on theCUBE in our studio conversation. This is a great segment. Real innovative company with lofty goals, and they're really good ones. Looking forward to it. >> If that's not a tease to keep watching I don't know what is. (John laughs) Without further ado, on that note, allow me to introduce Amit and Shaked who are here to tell us all about Kubiya. And I'm going to blow the pitch for you a little bit just because this gets me excited. (all laugh) They're essentially the Siri of DevOps, but that means you can, you can create using voice or chat or any medium. Am I right? Is this? Yeah? >> You're hired. >> Excellent. (all laugh) >> Okay. >> We'll take it. >> Who knows what I'll tell the chat to do or what I'll, what I will control with my voice, but I love where you're. >> Absolutely. I'll just give the high level. Conversational AI for the world of DevOps. Kind of redefining how self-service DevOps is supposed to be essentially accessed, right? As opposed to just having siloed information. You know, having different platforms that require an operator or somebody who's using it to know exactly how they're accessing what they're doing and so forth. Essentially, the ability to express your intent in natural language, English, or any language I use. >> It's quite literally the language barrier sometimes. >> Precisely. >> Both from the spoken as well as code language. And it sounds like you're eliminating that as an obstacle. >> We're essentially saying, turn simple, complex cast into simple conversations. That's, that's really what we're saying here. >> So let's get into the launch. You just launched a fresh startup. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Yeah. >> So you guys are going to take on the world. Lofty goals if that. I had the briefing. Where's the origination story come from? What, how did you guys get here? Was it a problem that you saw, you were experiencing, an itch you were scratching? What was the motivation and what's the origination story? >> Shaked: So. >> Amit: Okay, go first please. >> Essentially everything started with my experience as being an operator. I used to be a DevOps engineer for a few years for a large (indistinct) company. On later stages I even managed an SRE team. So all of these access requires Q and A staff is something that I experience nonstop on Slack or Teams, all of these communication channels. And usually I find out that everything happens from the chat. So essentially back then I created a chat bot. I connect this chat bot to the different organizational tools, and instead of the developers approaching to me or the team using the on call channel or directly they will just approach the bot. But essentially the bot was very naive, and they still needed to know what they, they want to do inside the bot. But it's still managed to solve 70% of the complexity and the toil on us as a team so we could focus on innovation. So Kubiya's a more advanced version of it. Basically with Kubiya you can define what we call workflows, and we convert all of these complexity of access request into simple conversations that the end users, which could be developers, but not only, are having with a DevOps team. So that's essentially how it works, and we're very excited about it. >> So you were up all night answering the same question over and over again. (all laugh) And you said, Hey, screw it. I'm going to just create a bot, bot myself up. (Shaked laughs) But it gets at something important. I mean, I'm not just joking. It probably happened, right? That was probably the case. You were up all night telling. >> Yeah, I mean it was usually stuff that we didn't need to maintain. It was training requests and questions that just keep on repeating themselves. And actually we were in Israel, but we sell three different time zones of developers. So all of these developers, as soon as the day finishes in Israel, the day in the US started. So they will approach us from the US. So we didn't really sleep. (all laugh) As with these requests non-stop. >> It's that 24 hour. >> Yeah, yeah. 24 hours for a single team. >> So the world clock global (indistinct) catches you a little sometimes. Yeah. >> Yeah, exactly. >> So you basically take all the things that you know that are common and then make a chat bot answering as if you're you. But this brings up the whole question of chat bot utilization. There's been a lot of debate in the AI circles that chat bots really haven't made it. They're not, they haven't been good enough. So 'cause NLP and other trivial, >> Amit: Sure. or things that haven't really clicked. What's different now? How do you guys see your approach cracking the code to go that kind of reasoning level? Bots can reason? Now we're in business. >> Yeah. Most of the chat bots are general purpose, right? We're coming with the domain expertise. We know the pain from the inside. We know how the operators want to define such conversations that users might have with the virtual assistant. So we combined all of the technical tools that are needed in order to get it going. So we have a a DSL, domain specific language, where the operators can define these easy conversations and combine all of the different organizational tools which can be done using DSDK. Besides this fact, we have a no code, for less technical people to create such workflows even with no code interface. And we have a CLI, which you could use to leverage the power of the virtual assist even right from your terminal. So that's how I see the domain expertise coming in that we have different communication channels for everyone that needs to be inside the loop. >> That's awesome. >> And I, and I can add to that. So that's one element, which is the domain expertise. The other one is really our huge differentiator, the ability to let the end users influence the system itself. So essentially. >> John: Like how? Give me an example. >> Sure. We call it teach me feature, but essentially if you have any type of a request and the system hasn't created an automation or hasn't, doesn't recognize it, you can go ahead and bind that into your intent and next time, and you can define the scope for yourself only, for the team, or even for the entire organization that actually has to have permission to access the request and control and so on. >> Savannah: That's something. Yeah, I love that as a knowledge base. I mean a custom tool kit. >> Absolutely. >> And I like that you just said for the individual. So let's say I have some crazy workflows that I don't need anybody else to know about. >> 100 percent. >> I can customize my experience. >> Mm hmm. >> Do you see your, this is really interesting, and I'm, it's surprising to me we haven't seen a lot of players in this space before because what you're doing makes a lot of sense to me, especially as someone who is less technical. >> Yeah. >> Do you view yourselves as a gateway tool for more folks to be involved in more complex technology? >> So, so I'll take that. It's not that we haven't seen advanced virtual assistants. They've existed in different worlds. >> Savannah: Right. >> Up until now they've existed more in CRM tools. >> Savannah: Right. >> Call centers, right? >> Shaked: Yeah. >> You go on to Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, you go and chat with. Now imagine you can bring that into a world of dev tools that has high domain expertise, high technical amplitude, and now you can go and combine the domain expertise with the accessibility of conversational AI. That's, that's a unique feature here. >> What's the biggest thing that's surprised you with the launch so far? The reaction to the name, Kubiya, which is Cube in Hebrew. >> Amit: Yes. >> Apparently. >> Savannah: Which I love. >> Which by the way, you know, we have a TM and R on our Cube. (all laugh) So we can talk, you know, license rights. >> Let's drop the trademark rules today, John, here. We're here to share information. Confuse the audience. Sorry about that, by the way. (all laugh) >> We're an open source, inclusive culture. We'll let it slide this time. >> The KubeCon, theCUBE, and Kubiya. (John laughs) In the Hebrew we have this saying, third time we all have ice cream. So. (all laugh) >> I think there's some ice cream over there actually. >> There is. >> Yeah, yeah. There you go. >> All kidding aside, all fun. What's, what's been the reaction? Got some press coverage. We had the launch. You guys launched with theCUBE in here, big reception. What's been the common feedback? >> And really, I think I expected this, but I didn't expect this much. Really, the fact that people really believe in our thesis, really expect great things from us, right? We've starting to working with. >> Savannah: Now the pressure's on. >> Rolling out dozens of POCs, but even that requires obviously a lot of attention to the detail, which we're rolling out. This is effectively what we're seeing. People love the fact that you have a unique and fresh way to approaching the self-service which really has been stalled for a while. And we've recognized that. I think our thesis is where we. >> Okay, so as a startup you have lofty goals, you have investors now. >> Amit: Yeah. >> Congratulations. >> Amit: Thank you. >> They're going to want to keep the traction going, but as a north star, what's your, what are you going to, what are you going to take? What territory are you going to take? Is it new territory? Are you eating someone's lunch? Who are you going to be competing with? What's the target? What's the, what's the? >> Sure, sure. >> I'm sure you guys have it. Who are you takin' over? >> I think the gateway, the entry point to every organization is a bottleneck. You solve the hard problem first. That's where you can go into other directions, and you can imagine where other operational workflows and pains that we can help solve once we have essentially the DevOps. >> John: So you see this as greenfield, new opportunity? >> I believe so. >> Is there any incumbent you see out there? An old stodgy? >> Today we're on internal developer platform service catalog type of, you know, use cases. >> John: Yeah. >> But that's kind of where we can grow from there and have the ecosystem essentially embrace us. >> John: How about the technology platform? >> Amit: Yeah. >> What's the vision for the innovation? >> Essentially want to be able to integrate with all of the different cloud providers, cloud solutions, SaaS platforms, and take the atlas approach that they were using right to the chats from everywhere to anywhere. So essentially we want in the end that users will be able to do anything that they need inside all of these complicated platforms, which some of them are totally complicated, with plain English. >> So what's the biggest challenge for you then on that front leading the technology side of the team? >> So I would say that the conversational AI part is truly complicated because it requires to extract many types of intentions from different types of users and also integrate with so many tools and solutions. >> Savannah: Yeah. So it requires a lot of thinking, a lot of architecture, but we are doing it just fine. >> Awesome. What do you guys think about KubeCon this week? What's, what's the top story that you see emerging out of this? Just generally as an industry observer, what's the most important? >> Savannah: Maybe it's them. Announcement halo. >> What's the cover story that you see? (all laugh) I mean you guys are in the innovation intent-based infrastructure. I get that. >> So obviously everyone's looking to diversify their engineering, diversify their platforms to make sure they're as decoupled from the main CSPs as possible. So being able to build their own, and we're really helping enable a lot of that in there. We're really helping improve upon that open source together with managed platforms can really play a very nice game together. So. >> Awesome. So are you guys hiring, recruiting? Tell us about the team DNA. Now you're in Tel Aviv. You're in the bay. >> Shaked: Check our openings on LinkedIn. (all laugh) >> We have a dozen job postings on our website. Obviously engineering and sales then go to market. >> So when theCUBE comes to Tel Aviv, and we have a location there. >> Yeah. >> Will you be, share some space? >> Savannah: Is this our Tel Aviv office happening right now? I love this. >> Amit: We will be hosting you. >> John: theCube with a C and Kube with a K over there. >> Yeah. >> All one happy family. >> Would love that. >> Get some ice cream. >> Would love that. >> All right, so last question for you all. You just had a very big exciting announcement. It's a bit of a coming out party for you. What do you hope to be able to say in a year that you can't currently say right now? When you join us on theCUBE next time? >> No, no, it's absolutely. I think our thesis that you can turn conversations into operations. It's, it sounds obvious to you when you think about it, but it's not trivial when you look into the workflows, into the operations. The fact that we can actually go a year from today and say we got hundreds of customers, happy customers who've proven the thesis or sharing knowledge between themselves, that would be euphoric for us. >> All right. >> You really are about helping people. >> Absolutely. >> It doesn't seem like it's a lip service from both of you. >> No. (all laugh) >> Is there going to be levels of bot, like level one bot level two, level three, and then finally the SRE gets on the phone? Is that like some point? >> Is there going to be bot singularity? Is that, is that what we're exploring right now? (overlapping chatter) >> Some kind of escalation bot. >> Enlightenment with bots. >> We actually planning a feature we want to call a handoff where a human in the loop is required, which often is needed. Machine cannot do it alone. We'll just. >> Yeah, I think it makes total sense for geos, ops at the same. >> Shaked: Yeah. >> But not exactly the same. Really good, good solution. I love the direction. Congratulations on the launch. >> Shaked: Thank you so much. >> Amit: Thank you very much. >> Yeah, that's very exciting. You can obviously look, check out that news on Silicon Angle since we had the pleasure of breaking it. >> Absolutely. >> If people would like to say hi, stalk you on the internet, where's the best place for them to do that? >> Be on our Twitter and LinkedIn handles of course. So we have kubiya.ai. We also have a free trial until the end of the year, and we also have free forever tier, that people can sign up, play, and come say hi. I mean, we'd love to chat. >> I love it. Well, Amit, Shaked, thank you so much for being with us. >> Shaked: Thank you so much. >> John, thanks for sitting to my left for the entire day. I sincerely appreciate it. >> Just glad I can help out. >> And thank you all for tuning in to this wonderful edition of theCUBE Live from Detroit at KubeCon. Who knows what my voice will be controlling next, but either way, I hope you are there to find out. >> Amit: Love it.

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to this special Cube conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE in theCUBE Studios. We've got a special video here. We love when we have startups that are launching. It's an exclusive video of a hot startup that's launching. Got great reviews so far. You know, word on the street is, they got something different and unique. We're going to' dig into it. Amit Govrin who's the CEO and co-founder of Kubiya, which stands for Cube in Hebrew, and they're headquartered in Bay Area and in Tel Aviv. Amit, congratulations on the startup launch and thanks for coming in and talk to us in theCUBE >> Thank you, John, very nice to be here. >> So, first of all, a little, 'cause we love the Cube, 'cause theCUBE's kind of an open brand. We've never seen the Cube in Hebrew, so is that true? Kubiya is? >> Kubiya literally means cube. You know, clearly there's some additional meanings that we can discuss. Obviously we're also launching a KubCon, so there's a dual meaning to this event. >> KubCon, not to be confused with CubeCon. Which is an event we might have someday and compete. No, I'm only kidding, good stuff. I want to get into the startup because I'm intrigued by your story. One, you know, conversational AI's been around, been a category. We've seen chat bots be all the rage and you know, I kind of don't mind chat bots on some sites. I can interact with some, you know, form based knowledge graph, whatever, knowledge database and get basic stuff self served. So I can see that, but it never really scaled or took off. And now with Cloud Native kind of going to the next level, we're starting to see a lot more open source and a lot more automation, in what I call AI as code or you know, AI as a service, machine learning, developer focused action. I think you guys might have an answer there. So if you don't mind, could you take a minute to explain what you guys are doing, what's different about Kubiya, what's happening? >> Certainly. So thank you for that. Kubiya is what we would consider the first, or one of the first, advanced virtual assitants with a domain specific expertise in DevOps. So, we respect all of the DevOps concepts, GitOps, workflow automation, of those categories you've mentioned, but also the added value of the conversational AI. That's really one of the few elements that we can really bring to the table to extract what we call intent based operations. And we can get into what that means in a little bit. I'll save that maybe for the next question. >> So the market you're going after is kind of, it's, I love to hear starters when they, they don't have a Gartner Magic quadrant, they can fit nicely, it means they're onto something. What is the market you're going after? Because you're seeing a lot of developers driving a lot of the key successes in DevOps. DevOps has evolved to the point where, and DevSecOps, where developers are driving the change. And so having something that's developer focused is key. Are you guys targeting the developers, IT buyers, cloud architects? Who are you looking to serve with this new opportunity? >> So essentially self-service in the world of DevOps, the end user typically would be a developer, but not only, and obviously the operators, those are the folks that we're actually looking to help augment a lot of their efforts, a lot of the toil that they're experiencing in a day to day. So there's subcategories within that. We can talk about the different internal developer tools, or platforms, shared services platforms, service catalogs are tangential categories that this kind of comes on. But on top of that, we're adding the element of conversational AI. Which, as I mentioned, that's really the "got you". >> I think you're starting to see a lot of autonomous stuff going on, autonomous pen testing. There's a company out there doing I've seen autonomous AI. Automation is a big theme of it. And I got to ask, are you guys on the business side purely in the cloud? Are you born in the cloud, is it a cloud service? What's the product choice there? It's a service, right? >> Software is a service. We have the classic, Multi-Tenancy SAAS, but we also have a hybrid SAAS solution, which allows our customers to run workflows using remote runners, essentially hosted at their own location. >> So primary cloud, but you're agnostic on where they could consume, how they want to' consume the product. >> Technology agnostic. >> Okay, so that's cool. So let's get into the problem you're solving. So take me through, this will drive a lot of value here, when you guys did the company, what problems did you hone in on and what are you guys seeing as the core problem that you solve? >> So we, this is a unique, I don't know how unique, but this is a interesting proposition because I come from the business side, so call it the top down. I've been in enterprise sales, I've been in a CRO, VP sales hat. My co-founder comes from the bottom up, right? He ran DevOps teams and SRE teams in his previous company. That's actually what he did. So, we met each other halfway, essentially with me seeing a lot of these problems of self-service not being so self-service after all, platforms hitting walls with adoption. And he actually created his own self-service platform, within his last company, to address his own personal pains. So we essentially kind of met with both perspectives. >> So you're absolutely hardcore on self-service. >> We're enabling self-service. >> And that basically is what everybody wants. I mean, the developers want self-service. I mean, that's kind of like, you know, that's the nirvana. So take us through what you guys are offering, give us an example of use cases and who's buying your product, why, and take us through that whole piece. >> Do you mind if I take a step back and say why we believe self-service has somewhat failed or not gotten off. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So look, this is essentially how we're looking at it. All the analysts and the industry insiders are talking about self-service platforms as being what's going to' remove the dependency of the operator in the loop the entire time, right? Because the operator, that scarce resource, it's hard to hire, hard to train, hard to retain those folks, Developers are obviously dependent on them for productivity. So the operators in this case could be a DevOps, could be a SecOps, it could be a platform engineer. It comes in different flavors. But the common denominator, somebody needs an access request, provisioning a new environment, you name it, right? They go to somebody, that person is operator. The operator typically has a few things on their plate. It's not just attending and babysitting platforms, but it's also innovating, spinning up, and scaling services. So they see this typically as kind of, we don't really want to be here, we're going to' go and do this because we're on call. We have to take it on a chin, if you may, for this. >> It's their child, they got to' do it. >> Right, but it's KTLOs, right, keep the lights on, this is maintenance of a platform. It's not what they're born and bred to do, which is innovate. That's essentially what we're seeing, we're seeing that a lot of these platforms, once they finally hit the point of maturity, they're rolled out to the team. People come to serve themselves in platform, and low and behold, it's not as self-service as it may seem. >> We've seen that certainly with Kubernetes adoption being, I won't say slow, it's been fast, but it's been good. But I think this is kind of the promise of what SRE was supposed to be. You know, do it once and then babysit in the sense of it's working and automated. Nothing's broken yet. Don't call me unless you need something, I see that. So the question, you're trying to make it easier then, you're trying to free up the talent. >> Talent to operate and have essentially a human, like in the loop, essentially augment that person and give the end users all of the answers they require, as if they're talking to a person. >> I mean it's basically, you're taking the virtual assistant concept, or chat bot, to a level of expertise where there's intelligence, jargon, experience into the workflows that's known. Not just talking to chat bot, get a support number to rebook a hotel room. >> We're converting operational workflows into conversations. >> Give me an example, take me through an example. >> Sure, let's take a simple example. I mean, not everyone provisions EC2's with two days (indistinct). But let's say you want to go and provision new EC2 instances, okay? If you wanted to do it, you could go and talk to the assistant and say, "I want to spin up a new server". If it was a human in the loop, they would ask you the following questions: what type of environment? what are we attributing this to? what type of instance? security groups, machine images, you name it. So, these are the questions that typically somebody needs to be armed with before they can go and provision themselves, serve themselves. Now the problem is users don't always have these questions. So imagine the following scenario. Somebody comes in, they're in Jira ticket queue, they finally, their turn is up and the next question they don't have the answer to. So now they have to go and tap on a friend, or they have to go essentially and get that answer. By the time they get back, they lost their turn in queue. And then that happens again. So, they lose a context, they lose essentially the momentum. And a simple access request, or a simple provision request, can easily become a couple days of ping pong back and forth. This won't happen with the virtual assistant. >> You know, I think, you know, and you mentioned chat bots, but also RPA is out there, you've seen a lot of that growth. One of the hard things, and you brought this up, I want to get your reaction to, is contextualizing the workflow. It might not be apparent, but the answer might be there, it disrupts the entire experience at that point. RPA and chat bots don't have that contextualization. Is that what you guys do differently? Is that the unique flavor here? Is that difference between current chat bots and RPA? >> The way we see it, I alluded to the intent based operations. Let me give a tangible experience. Even not from our own world, this will be easy. It's a bidirectional feedback loop 'cause that's actually what feeds the context and the intent. We all know Waze, right, in the world of navigation. They didn't bring navigation systems to the world. What they did is they took the concept of navigation systems that are typically satellite guided and said it's not just enough to drive down the 280, which typically have no traffic, right, and to come across traffic and say, oh, why didn't my satellite pick that up? So they said, have the end users, the end nodes, feed that direction back, that feedback, right. There has to be a bidirectional feedback loop that the end nodes help educate the system, make the system be better, more customized. And that's essentially what we're allowing the end users. So the maintenance of the system isn't entirely in the hands of the operators, right? 'Cause that's the part that they dread. And the maintenance of the system is democratized across all the users that they can teach the system, give input to the system, hone in the system in order to make it more of the DNA of the organization. >> You and I were talking before you came on this camera interview, you said playfully that the Siri for DevOps, which kind of implies, hey infrastructure, do something for me. You know, we all know Siri, so we get that. So that kind of illustrates kind of where the direction is. Explain why you say that, what does that mean? Is that like a NorthStar vision that you guys are approaching? You want to' have a state where everything's automated in it's conversational deployments, that kind of thing. And take us through why that Siri for DevOps is. >> I think it helps anchor people to what a virtual assistant is. Because when you hear virtual assistant, that can mean any one of various connotations. So the Siri is actually a conversational assistant, but it's not necessarily a virtual assistant. So what we're saying is we're anchoring people to that thought and saying, we're actually allowing it to be operational, turning complex operations into simple conversations. >> I mean basically they take the automate with voice Google search or a query, what's the score of the game? And, it also, and talking to the guy who invented Siri, I actually interviewed on theCUBE, it's a learning system. It actually learns as it gets more usage, it learns. How do you guys see that evolving in DevOps? There's a lot of jargon in DevOps, a lot of configurations, a lot of different use cases, a lot of new technologies. What's the secret sauce behind what you guys do? Is it the conversational AI, is it the machine learning, is it the data, is it the model? Take us through the secret sauce. >> In fact, it's all the above. And I don't think we're bringing any one element to the table that hasn't been explored before, hasn't been done. It's a recipe, right? You give two people the same ingredients, they can have complete different results in terms of what they come out with. We, because of our domain expertise in DevOps, because of our familiarity with developer workflows with operators, we know how to give a very well suited recipe. Five course meal, hopefully with Michelin stars as part of that. So a few things, maybe a few of the secret sauce element, conversational AI, the ability to essentially go and extract the intent of the user, so that if we're missing context, the system is smart enough to go and to get that feedback and to essentially feed itself into that model. >> Someone might say, hey, you know, conversational AI, that was yesterday's trend, it never happened. It was kind of weak, chat bots were lame. What's different now and with you guys, and the market, that makes a redo or a second shot at this, a second bite at the apple, as they say. What do you guys see? 'Cause you know, I would argue that it's, you know, it's still early, real early. >> Certainly. >> How do you guys view that? How would you handle that objection? >> It's a fair question. I wasn't around the first time around to tell you what didn't work. I'm not afraid to share that the feedback that we're getting is phenomenal. People understand that we're actually customizing the workflows, the intent based operations to really help hone in on the dark spots. We call it last mile, you know, bottlenecks. And that's really where we're helping. We're helping in a way tribalize internal knowledge that typically hasn't been documented because it's painful enough to where people care about it but not painful enough to where you're going to' go and sit down an entire day and document it. And that's essentially what the virtual assistant can do. It can go and get into those crevices and help document, and operationalize all of those toils. And into workflows. >> Yeah, I mean some will call it grunt work, or low level work. And I think the automation is interesting. I think we're seeing this in a lot of these high scale situations where the talented hard to hire person is hired to do, say, things that were hard to do, but now harder things are coming around the corner. So, you know, serverless is great and all this is good, but it doesn't make the complexity go away. As these inflection points continue to drive more scale, the complexity kind of grows, but at the same time so is the ability to abstract away the complexity. So you're starting to see the smart, hired guns move to higher, bigger problems. And the automation seems to take the low level kind of like capabilities or the toil, or the grunt work, or the low level tasks that, you know, you don't want a high salaried person doing. Or I mean it's not so much that they don't want to' do it, they'll take one for the team, as you said, or take it on the chin, but there's other things to work on. >> I want to add one more thing, 'cause this goes into essentially what you just said. Think about it's not the virtual system, what it gives you is not just the intent and that's one element of it, is the ability to carry your operations with you to the place where you're not breaking your workflows, you're actually comfortable operating. So the virtual assistant lives inside of a command line interface, it lives inside of chat like Slack, and Teams, and Mattermost, and so forth. It also lives within a low-code editor. So we're not forcing anyone to use uncomfortable language or operations if they're not comfortable with. It's almost like Siri, it travels in your mobile phone, it's on your laptop, it's with you everywhere. >> It makes total sense. And the reason why I like this, and I want to' get your reaction on this because we've done a lot of interviews with DevOps, we've met at every CubeCon since it started, and Kubernetes kind of highlights the value of the containers at the orchestration level. But what's really going on is the DevOps developers, and the CICD pipeline, with infrastructure's code, they're basically have a infrastructure configuration at their disposal all the time. And all the ops challenges have been around that, the repetitive mundane tasks that most people do. There's like six or seven main use cases in DevOps. So the guardrails just need to be set. So it sounds like you guys are going down the road of saying, hey here's the use cases you can bounce around these use cases all day long. And just keep doing your jobs cause they're bolting on infrastructure to every application. >> There's one more element to this that we haven't really touched on. It's not just workflows and use cases, but it's also knowledge, right? Tribal knowledge, like you asked me for an example. You can type or talk to the assistant and ask, "How much am I spending on AWS, on US East 1, on so and so customer environment last week?", and it will know how to give you that information. >> Can I ask, should I buy a reserve instances or not? Can I ask that question? 'Cause there's always good trade offs between buying the reserve instances. I mean that's kind of the thing that. >> This is where our ecosystem actually comes in handy because we're not necessarily going to' go down every single domain and try to be the experts in here. We can tap into the partnerships, API, we have full extensibility in API and the software development kit that goes into. >> It's interesting, opinionated and declarative are buzzwords in developer language. So you started to get into this editorial thing. So I can bring up an example. Hey cube, implement the best service mesh. What answer does it give you? 'Cause there's different choices. >> Well this is actually where the operator, there's clearly guard rails. Like you can go and say, I want to' spin up a machine, and it will give you all of the machines on AWS. Doesn't mean you have to get the X one, that's good for a SAP environment. You could go and have guardrails in place where only the ones that are relevant to your team, ones that have resources and budgetary, you know, guidelines can be. So, the operator still has all the control. >> It was kind of tongue in cheek around the editorialized, but actually the answer seems to be as you're saying, whatever the customer decided their service mesh is. So I think this is where it gets into as an assistant to architecting and operating, that seems to be the real value. >> Now code snippets is a different story because that goes on to the web, that goes onto stock overflow, and that's actually one of the things. So inside the CLI, you could actually go and ask for code snippets and we could actually go and populate that, it's a smart CLI. So that's actually one of the things that are an added value of that. >> I was saying to a friend and we were talking about open source and how when I grew up, there was no open source. If you're a developer now, I mean there's so much code, it's not so much coding anymore as it is connecting and integrating. >> Certainly. >> And writing glue layers, if you will. I mean there's still code, but it's not, you don't have to build it from scratch. There's so much code out there. This low-code notion of a smart system is interesting 'cause it's very matrix like. It can build its own code. >> Yes, but I'm also a little wary with low-code and no code. I think part of the problem is we're so constantly focused on categories and categorizing ourselves, and different categories take on a life of their own. So low-code no code is not necessarily, even though we have the low-code editor, we're not necessarily considering ourselves low-code. >> Serverless, no code, low-code. I was so thrown on a term the other day, architecture-less. As a joke, no we don't need architecture. >> There's a use case around that by the way, yeah, we do. Show me my AWS architecture and it will build the architect diagram for you. >> Again, serverless architect, this is all part of infrastructure's code. At the end of the day, the developer has infrastructure with code. Again, how they deploy it is the neuron. That's what we've been striving for. >> But infrastructure is code. You can destroy, you know, terraform, you can go and create one. It's not necessarily going to' operate it for you. That's kind of where this comes in on top of that. So it's really complimentary to infrastructure. >> So final question, before we get into the origination story, data and security are two hot areas we're seeing fill the IT gap, that has moved into the developer role. IT is essentially provisioned by developers now, but the OP side shifted to large scale SRE like environments, security and data are critical. What's your opinion on those two things? >> I agree. Do you want me to give you the normal data as gravity? >> So you agree that IT is now, is kind of moved into the developer realm, but the new IT is data ops and security ops basically. >> A hundred percent, and the lines are so blurred. Like who's what in today's world. I mean, I can tell you, I have customers who call themselves five different roles in the same day. So it's, you know, at the end of the day I call 'em operators 'cause I don't want to offend anybody because that's just the way it is. >> Architectural-less, we're going to' come back to that. Well, I know we're going to' see you at CubeCon. >> Yes. >> We should catch up there and talk more. I'm looking forward to seeing how you guys get the feedback from the marketplace. It should be interesting to hear, the curious question I have for you is, what was the origination story? Why did you guys come together, was it a shared problem? Was it a big market opportunity? Was it an itch you guys were scratching? Did you feel like you needed to come together and start this company? What was the real vision behind the origination? Take a take a minute to explain the story. >> No, absolutely. So I've been living in Palo Alto for the last couple years. Previous, also a founder. So, you know, from my perspective, I always saw myself getting back in the game. Spent a few years in AWS essentially managing partnerships for tier one DevOps partners, you know, all of the known players. Some in public, some of them not. And really the itch was there, right. I saw what everyone's doing. I started seeing consistency in the pains that I was hearing back, in terms of what hasn't been solved. So I already had an opinion where I wanted to go. And when I was visiting actually Israel with the family, I was introduced by a mutual friend to Shaked, Shaked Askayo, my co-founder and CTO. Amazing guy, unbelievable technologists, probably one the most, you know, impressive folks I've had a chance to work with. And he actually solved a very similar problem, you know, in his own way in a previous company, BlueVine, a FinTech company where he was head of SRE, having to, essentially, oversee 200 developers in a very small team. The ratio was incongruent to what the SRE guideline would tell. >> That's more than 10 x rate developer. >> Oh, absolutely. Sure enough. And just imagine it's four different time zones. He finishes day shift and you already had the US team coming, asking for a question. He said, this is kind of a, >> Got to' clone himself, basically. >> Well, yes. He essentially said to me, I had no day, I had no life, but I had Corona, I had COVID, which meant I could work from home. And I essentially programed myself in the form of a bot. Essentially, when people came to him, he said, "Don't talk to me, talk to the bot". Now that was a different generation. >> Just a trivial example, but the idea was to automate the same queries all the time. There's an answer for that, go here. And that's the benefit of it. >> Yes, so he was able to see how easy it was to solve, I mean, how effective it was solving 70% of the toil in his organization. Scaling his team, froze the headcount and the developer team kept on going. So that meant that he was doing some right. >> When you have a problem, and you need to solve it, the creativity comes out of the woodwork, you know, invention is the mother of necessity. So final question for you, what's next? Got the launch, what are you guys hope to do over the next six months to a year, hiring? Put a plug in for the company. What are you guys looking to do? Take a minute to share the future vision and get a plug in. >> A hundred percent. So, Kubiya, as you can imagine, announcing ourselves at CubeCon, so in a couple weeks. Opening the gates towards the public beta and NGA in the next couple months. Essentially working with dozens of customers, Aston Martin, and business earn in. We have quite a few, our website's full of quotes. You can go ahead. But effectively we're looking to go and to bring the next operator, generation of operators, who value their time, who value the, essentially, the value of tribal knowledge that travels between organizations that could be essentially shared. >> How many customers do you guys have in your pre-launch? >> It's above a dozen. Without saying, because we're actually looking to onboard 10 more next week. So that's just an understatement. It changes from day to day. >> What's the number one thing people are saying about you? >> You got that right. I know it's, I'm trying to be a little bit more, you know. >> It's okay, you can be cocky, startups are good. But I mean they're obviously, they're using the product and you're getting good feedback. Saving time, are they saying this is a dream product? Got it right, what are some of the things? >> I think anybody who doesn't feel the pain won't know, but the folks who are in the trenches, or feeling the pain, or experiencing this toil, who know what this means, they said, "You're doing this different, you're doing this right. You architected it right. You know exactly what the developer workflows," you know, where all the areas, you know, where all the skeletons are hidden within that. And you're attending to that. So we're happy about that. >> Everybody wants to clone themselves, again, the tribal knowledge. I think this is a great example of where we see the world going. Make things autonomous, operationally automated for the use cases you know are lock solid. Why wouldn't you just deploy? >> Exactly, and we have a very generous free tier. People can, you know, there's a plugin, you can sign up for free until the end of the year. We have a generous free tier. Yeah, free forever tier, as well. So we're looking for people to try us out and to give us feedback. >> I think the self-service, I think the point is, we've talked about it on the Cube at our events, everyone says the same thing. Every developer wants self-service, period. Full stop, done. >> What they don't say is they need somebody to help them babysit to make sure they're doing it right. >> The old dashboard, green, yellow, red. >> I know it's an analogy that's not related, but have you been to Whole Foods? Have you gone through their self-service line? That's the beauty of it, right? Having someone in a loop helping you out throughout the time. You don't get confused, if something's not working, someone's helping you out, that's what people want. They want a human in the loop, or a human like in the loop. We're giving that next best thing. >> It's really the ratio, it's scale. It's a scaling. It's force multiplier, for sure. Amit, thanks for coming on, congratulations. >> Thank you so much. >> See you at KubeCon. Thanks for coming in, sharing the story. >> KubiyaCon. >> CubeCon. Cube in Hebrew, Kubiya. Founder, co-founder and CEO here, sharing the story in the launch. Conversational AI for DevOps, the theory of DevOps, really kind of changing the game, bringing efficiency, solving a lot of the pain points of large scale infrastructure. This is theCUBE, CUBE conversation, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)

(futuristic techno music) >> Narrator: Live from San Francisco, celebrating ten years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and it's eco-system partners. >> Good morning, welcome to day three of our coverage here on theCUBE of VMworld 2019. We're at Moscone Center North, here in San Francisco. Kind of a, well not kind of, it's a really cloudy day but I kind of expect that. We've been talking about clouds all week, right? Multi, hybrid, public, private, you name it, we've been talking about it. John Walls and Dave Vellante, good to see you this morning. >> Good to see you John. >> Yep. We're joined now by a couple of executives from Kaminario. Josh Epstein, who's a CMO and Eyal David who's the CTO of Kaminario. Good morning gentlemen, >> Good morning, >> Morning. >> Great to be here, great to be here. First of, let's just talk about the show. I know you've got a presence down on the floor, just your feeling about the traffic, the kind of traffic you're seeing at your booth, what the questions are, coming from customers, maybe what those answers are. Eyal, why don't you jump on that? >> Yeah, so first of all, it's great to be back in San Francisco for this conference! >> John: Here, here! >> Dave: Agreed! >> Definitely. (laughter) And I think it's very clear that, yes definitely, cloud is the name of the game, and especially how do you implement a hybrid cloud, customers are all on their cloud journey, and the big question is, "How do I do that?" "How do I take these new technologies, the cloud, "containers, and how do I take my applications "and my data services to the next step?" And it's kind of all over the place, all decisions, all the customers are asking about, this is where the focus is, where the interest is, and it's a great to be in the center of all of that. >> Yeah, you made a big decision, or a big announcement about a month ago. You said, "Okay, public cloud; that's where we're going." Josh, the driver behind that and kind of, what the early fall outs were? >> Sure, sure. I mean, we started our journey, really from the beginning of Kaminario, Kaminario's about ten years old, and you know, the data storage market, as a traditional all-flash storage array. The past 24 months, we've really pivoted the business model towards first, 100% software, we got out of the appliance business, started really focusing our business on doing these large software based implementations, moving into more subscription based revenue, kind of delivering that cloud based economics experience. And then, over the last several months, we've been focusing on taking our core architecture, which fundamentally decouples the data services from annoying infrastructure, and thinking about how that might actually look on public clouds. So doing the same thing, kind of creating this sort of shared storage experience, delivering all the traditional enterprise class data services, but sitting on public cloud infrastructure. It's been a really interesting journey. >> So let's double click on that, because it's clear that this space is not about the media, it's about the business model, it's about the additional value you can add for customers, so maybe you could add a little bit of color, as to sort of, how's that going, where you guys are differentiating in the marketplace, where you're winning. >> Sure, I mean I think- >> Yeah. >> Jump in, Eyal. >> Yeah, so I think it's, as you said, it's not about the media, it's all about how do you help customers have a uniform experience around any deployment model. So they want to deploy on-prem, they want to deploy in the cloud, they are actively seeking for a uniform way to do that without too much heavy lift. There's some challenges in going to the cloud. If you are not born in the cloud, you need to re-architect your applications, you need to kind of, learn some new skills. There's a big challenge, especially if you have big data intensive applications. That's where we focus, delivering that uniform experience around orchestration of resources and data services across your on-prem, off-prem and public cloud implementations. >> So you guys decided not to ship a box anymore, you know the Silicon Valley show, "Where's the box?" so I'm interested in the technical challenges of doing that, but also the customer feedback, because sometimes people want an appliance, so how were you able to transition through that and what's the feedback been? >> Yeah, I think for us, I mean, our core business, our core customer, has really been cloud scale applications, for the last five years. So this is large SAAS providers, e-commerce platforms, fintech, healthtech, any of these large, mature software companies, right, their core business is delivering a cloud scale application. And for them, you know, many of them were born before the age of the public clouds, they've actually heavily invested in application architectures that rely on enterprise class and shared storage. That said, they see the draw towards the cloud, they see the benefit of the cloud like economics, subscription based, consumption based economics, and then the overall capability to scale up and scale down like the cloud does, but that said, they need that bridge, from where they are today, with traditional data centric architectures to this cloud world. >> You mentioned fintech, and there's an interesting case, because when the cloud really started to gain momentum, a lot of financial services companies, the big guys especially, said "You know, we can build our own clouds." And then they realized, "Well we can't build them as fast as Amazon can build them", and so they sort of pulled back on that. But they, and they sort of put their foot in the cloud, and then went all, and then they said, "Wait a minute." So what are you seeing, in terms of, call it the private cloud, you know, we've kind of swung back to that, is that gap closing, are they able to get close enough? The key part of that is obviously the pricing models, and the pay by the drink. I wonder if you could add some color to the on-prem cloud business- >> Josh: Sure. >> If we can call it that. Some people might object, but that's- >> Yeah, definitely. So the way we approach it is that we want to bring the simplicity, the agility and the flexibility of the cloud model to this on-prem data center, to deliver the same performance, control of a dedicated resource, which is exactly what these type of fintech customers are looking for. So, in our basic architecture, which was already, we decoupled from hardware, already decoupled performance from capacity, we're able to do that extremely flexibly. You can get the same flexibility of the cloud in an on-prem solution with all the benefits, and you can also decide, on your own pace, in your own terms, what you actually need and makes sense to run on a public cloud infrastructure. >> So scale is obviously a big deal for your customers, that's kind of been your focus since day one, what's the bell curve look like? Are we talking about scale in just the ability to scale quickly, or is it also the sheer size, and what does it look like? >> Yeah, I think it's about performance at scale, it's about control over performance at scale, it's about control over availability at scale, and it's obviously about cost at scale, right? I mean, it's too, there's so many different ways to look at the economics of public cloud versus on-prem. If you're looking at the pure dollar, it's clearly building on your own dedicated on-prem infrastructure, it's clearly cheaper than paying Amazon or Google or whoever to do it. But there's clear benefits to kind of going in that direction, in terms of agility, in terms of hands off management, in terms of really just, you know, staffing expertise. But I think it does come down to control, right? And when you talk about scale, when you talk about petabyte scale, it's easy to lose control, and this is the benefit of shared storage models, and this is where we think there's a real opportunity. >> Can I follow up on that, because you said there's a clear benefit of, if I understood it correctly, of building out your own prem infrastructure at some critical mass. There's obviously people, like Andy Jassy, who would disagree with that. So what's your data showing? I presume it's weighted towards large customers. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah. >> But maybe you can add some color to that? >> We've certainly got good research, good analysis on this. And I think if you're talking about, we're talking about certainly over 500 terabytes to a petabyte, it's a multi petabyte scale, data driven applications, we're talking about business critical applications, big block storage, heavy analytics. If you compare just raw economics, the thing is, there's a lot more than just the raw economics, but the raw economics of an infrastructure built on Kaminario versus the equivalent infrastructure, built on one of the block storage resources from one of the public clouds, it's literally about 1/3 the cost, to build out your own dedicated infrastructure, leveraging a good, high quality colo, a good, high quality hardware underneath it. So raw economics, it's clear where that sits. >> Okay, so that's if we're comparing the cost of the, the acquisition costs versus some end number of years, right? >> That's correct, yeah exactly. >> And not really going into the labor costs at that- >> Not going into the direct labor costs of managing the storage, yes, there's clearly interesting benefits to going to a 100% cloud model. What that does to an organization, when you kind of, hands off, you know, you don't have the same kind of in house IT resources, you're out sourcing a lot of that- >> Well except what Eyal was saying before, is that you're trying to bring that cloud model to the data. So to the extent that you can close that gap, then you can- >> Eyal: Differently. >> Substantially mimic, exactly. >> We saw the opportunity to extend those capabilities into the public cloud, delivering a high performance storage solution in the cloud today is as expensive. Our focus over the years, of taking these commodity components and comprising them into a high performance shared storage solution. We can do the same in the cloud. >> But I think the key is multi-cloud. >> Yeah, let's talk about that. >> The key is that there's not one size fits all, and it really is about creating this mobility between your on-prem data and public cloud number one, and then public cloud number two. One of the key concerns about moving a business critical application to a public cloud is lock in, right? And if you can create this infrastructure where you're decoupling that data services stack that the application relies on, from the underlying infrastructure, you get this mobility between clouds that becomes really attractive. >> So you're kind of answering the next question that was on my mind, of how are you selling that to customers. The fact that we're having this very robust discussion about this fundamental shift and you get it, because you're providing this service to your whole client base, but if I'm a client, my head's starting to spin a little bit, right? And I've got big decisions to make, so how do you sell that, that this is not a little shift, this is a fundamental way, the way you're going to do your business? >> So, in the simplest form, we tell the customers that we significantly lower the barrier of entry into the cloud. You don't need to re-architect everything, you don't need to be worried about performance management, or, control, or orchestrating resources; we do all that for you, and we do it in the same way that we did it for you in your own on-prem data center, and we can do it on any of the public clouds. So the barrier of entry, the risk of actually doing that transition- >> John: Is lowered. >> Is lowered significantly, and you can that on your own pace, in your own terms, and make some smart decisions later on about what needs to reside where over time. >> So, when we think about multi-cloud, we think about, "Okay, I'm going to have data on-prem, I might choose "Azure for my collaborative workloads, "I might put my dev stuff in AWS, "I might put some analytics in Google..." You know, whatever, my business is going to decide what to do, I'm not going to have this grand, multi-cloud strategy, it's just kind of going to happen. And then IT's going to be called in to clean up the crime scene! But we're envisioning this architecture that's shipping metadata, and maybe compute to the data, versus moving data. Do you agree with that, or do you see it differently? >> We see, I think, two types of customers. Some behave just as you describe, but some have a very specific decision not to be locked into single vendors. So they'll say, "I'll put one business unit on Google Cloud, "and put the other business unit on Azure. "I'll put this certain type of application on one cloud, "and the other type on the other cloud, "because I want to make sure that I am cloud agnostic. "I'm actually mandating with an organization that "I can run anywhere." >> As a hedge. >> As a hedge, as a definite hedge, because they are concerned about locking to either of the vendors, and in that sense, they later on make the decision, "Okay, where is the "core of the data? "Where is my mission critical data which always "has some gravity, and how do I make sure that it's in "the right place at the right time." >> Doesn't that add complexity for the client? I mean, if they've got a workload here, and here, and here, it'll be a lot easier if it was all here, or most of it were here. But that adds, I'm wondering if- >> You're absolutely right, but what we see is this rapid shift towards embracing the multi-cloud model. So let's take an example. You have a classic cloud scale application, and might have an active/active data centers in two parts of the United States, sort of serving up the production application. You have dev test requirements, so they want the ability to rapidly spin up an environment to mimic a problem or do some development. Public cloud's a great example for that. You have DR requirements, your back up requirements, they want to be backing up, they want the ability to rapidly spin up in instance, in a public cloud instance, and no matter what, within every organization somewhere, even in the most sophisticated IT organizations where they have tremendous control over the data centers, some C-level exec somewhere that says, "In five years, I'm 100% on public cloud. I want nothing." So you have to sort of service that element as well, and what we're doing is saying, "Listen, you can continue to focus on building out "a world class, next generation data center, "based on the NVMe, all NVMe fabric, "and still have the mobility to do certain things "in the cloud, and still have this path, "if it makes for your organization, "to migrate the entire thing to public cloud, "and not get locked in." They'd be able to sort of, surf the clouds as actually- >> So technically, that means you have to speak as your API, S3, whatever language of the cloud, and so I'm trying to understand, sort of, technically, what you have to do, and then where you add value, where you pick up from whatever, VMware or whomever else is trying to be the control plane. >> So then, that is exactly the point, and to address the question about what the complexity of this multi-cloud world, this is exactly where we see the rise of this next generation orchestration framework, either from VMware or from others, that strive to give you this uniform experience. So we deliver that at the data services layer, we connect that to the orchestration layer, that allows you do seamless workload abilities, seamless data mobility to wherever it makes sense for those applications or business workloads to run. And basically, the customers expect, to date, that we encapsulate all that complexity for them. They want to be able to put their Google, Amazon or Azure credentials , and then forget exactly where it went. And this is a lot of what's going on in the floor this week, and that's exactly where we connect to the rest of that orchestration scene within the data center or the public cloud. >> So, in that context, are you primarily, I know you sell to a lot of different people, but is it the cloud architect, or the architect that's actually determining that throughout the organization, or is it again, cleaning up the crime scene type of a thing? >> It's usually a conversation with that CIO, who's kind of, on that cloud journey, building his cloud strategy, and even if he made the decision to in five years be in the cloud, now the question is, "Okay, what's happening in the meantime? "How do I actually do that?" >> One of the cool things that's happening in the meantime is most of our customers are in just this perpetual state of data center consolidation, right? Most of these large SAAS companies, they're growing through acquisition, they've got nine data to data centers, they all have a plan within two or three years to be consolidated on three next generation data centers and then have cloud mobility. So what we're able to do, this is leveraging our software model as well, is say, "Listen, let's do an enterprise wide, "unified licensing scheme, "where you're paying on consumption, "based on actual data stored, "and then you can build the underlying infrastructure "wherever you want. "You can base it on your traditional infrastructure "you might already own, it might be on next generation "NVMe, NVMe over Fabrics connected data centers, "and then a piece of it now might be in the public cloud." >> So, you're talking CIO, Dave, you're talking CSI, I'm just little confused! (laughter) Gentlemen, thanks for the time, we appreciate it. Great discussion, and continued success downstairs and on down the road. >> Great to be here guys, thank you. >> All right, back with more VMWorld 2019, here on theCUBE. (futuristic techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2017! Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. (futuristic music) >> Welcome back everyone, we are live, here, in Las Vegas for VMworld 2017, I'm John Furrier, my cohost Dave Vellante, eighth year with theCUBE, proud to have two great guests, Josh Epstein, CMO of Kaminario and Eyal David, CTO of Kaminario, great to see you guys again! >> Likewise, great to be here! >> You guys had a great event in Boston recently, what's going on with you guys? Give me an update on the company. >> Sure, I'll go first. Kaminario's been around for awhile, but we've been, first of all, moved the headquarters over to east coast US, outside of Boston, Massachusetts, opened up a great new office space there. Got a lot going on from a product perspective, a lot going on from a go-to-market perspective, you see a lot happening in the all-flash space and the storage space in general, and just, really excited to take it to the next step. We see a lot of things happening here. >> It's a pretty big week this week. We saw Scott Dietzen from Pure Storage become the Chairman and Jean Carlo, ex-CISCO MNA guy from Silver Lake come in to be CEO, so Dave and I were speculating, All flash, a lot of, what's going on! A lot of people saying, woah, is it growing? Still a need for flash. What's the big hubbub about? >> So, we definitely see a change in the market, and the emergence of two different models. The way people used to buy storage, and the way next-generation application, cloud-scale application, software-to-servers, e-commerce, online businesses, need to buy storage. And their need for simplicity, performance and cost-efficiency at scale is still driving the need for flash storage, and we'll talk about this yet to come some more. >> And you guys see those as really distinct opportunities, is that right? Can you add some color to that, Josh? >> Yeah, I think that we see the flash space made up of two different markets, one is just the massive stocking function of traditional enterprise data centers, making the move en masse to flash. And there you have, obviously, the incumbent vendors with their flash solutions, you know. That's a dogfight, there's a lot of competition in there. There's this other market which we see growing more healthily, more organically, which is the growth of these cloud-scale applications. As Eyal said, flash provider, or, software-to-server providers, e-commerce providers, fintech, healthtech, these large, highly-scalable, database-driven cloud-scale applications. That means a different type of of scale, so that's where we see less competition from the incumbents and more opportunity -- >> What's different about that market, what's the requirement, what are they looking for that makes this a good engine for them? >> So one of the key requirements is agility and flexibility. One of the current characteristics is they don't really know what is going to be the next workload, how their workload is going to change in scale over time. So they need an infrastructure that can change and adapt to their needs, still deliver the same level of performance, still deliver the same level of simplicity. But have that flexibility to address their changing needs in capacity and performance, to address growth in customers, changing in workload application, without too much pre-planning. >> So I'd ask the question to you guys, I get this all the time. So since you guys are the gurus in the area. I get this question a lot, what is a modern data center? With all the action on private cloud happenings, true private cloud, they truly point out, people are re-tooling their data centers to operate like cloud, it's still on-premise. That's kind of the gateway to hypercloud, very clear. Public cloud, workloads, all bursting, that stuff's great. What's a modern architecture, what's a modern data center? When I hear that term, what do you guys mean? >> That's a great question. So the modern data center, or even the next generation data center is exactly that, one that allows enterprises to achieve the same levels of scalability, efficiency, as the hypercloud, but on-premise, or in a hybrid fashion. But it allows them to have that level of control against operation simplicity that's hard to come by, but on their own terms, adapting to their own needs. >> So without the need to build out a massive engineering team to build this from the ground up. >> So are the buyers different, are those two worlds coming together? I wonder if you could address that. >> Yeah, I think the buyers are, in fact, different. I think, now, you see a convergence over time as the classic enterprise data centers start to look more like a private cloud. But we see this growth in large-managed private cloud providers really exciting, and they come in different forms. You have the Telcos getting into the business, you have the outsourcers getting into the business, you have the traditional channel getting into the business. We have a great partnership with Vion, a big federal reseller, and using Kaminario as a flash service offering. And they start looking like a cloud provider, and they're thinking like a cloud provider. >> And what's the benefits then? Cause I was just looking at the gov cloud impact, I was just at the Amazon Public Sector Summit. Huge traction right now because it's so fast, you can get into the government cloud quickly. Why is that unique, why, as a service, and why are you guys really driving that? >> One, it fits with our architecture perfectly. But I think from a customer standpoint, the ability to procure, like, procuring from the cloud, but also to get the kind of services, you know, as people start re-engineering applications thinking about dev-ops, cloud-data-type applications, leveraging the same kind of utilities that they might get from an Amazon or an Ajer, from a managed private cloud provider, it becomes really important. >> And Al-fed ramp is there, you get all the federal information stuff going on around it. >> So I wonder how you deal with this problem, it's a relatively small company, you're up against the big guys, you say, it's like a rock fight. But you have an affinity to, let's say, SAS players. They like your product and it fits better with their vision. But then you have this big whale, saying, okay, I'm going to buy my HR software from, you know, some SAS provider, I'm going to do some, whatever, 70,000-person deployment, but, as a quid pro quo, you've got to buy my all-flash array. So you must see that all the time. When you peel back the covers, underneath that SAS provider, what do you really see? Like, they fence off, sort of, legacy-vendors' stuff, and they really drive in their core business with your modern platform? Or is it sort of just a mishmash? >> No, I think we're seeing a shift. I think what we're seeing is, some of the legacy architectures are running up against boundaries. Boundaries in terms of complexity, boundaries in terms of agility. Kaminario was built to scale from the get-go. It was built for performance and it was built for scale. And I think what we're seeing is, the main value of these SAS providers, as they're reaching scale, is the ability to deliver consistent performance, consistent cost-efficiency, and really, our predictability. The ability to sort of forecast in the future what cost structure's going to look like in order to continue to deliver high-performance to their own users. >> So the hypothetical example I gave, I'm sure you see it, but are you, you know, winning head-to-head in those environments, and your piece is growing, and that's sort of just a static one-time deal? >> That's exactly what we're seeing, so our main growth, our main focus is on these software-to-service companies or software-to-service departments within existing companies building these types of offerings to deliver this as a service consumption model. And you were asking about the back-end, in the back-end, these are often large-scale databases operating mixed types of workloads, for example, transaction processing, analytics, all at the same time. And the need to support these types of workloads requires an infrastructure that can deliver at-scale, consistent performance. And when we face off the legacy vendors in those environments, we win out. >> You have to be substantially better as a small company. You are, otherwise, you're out of business. >> Absolutely. >> And so, interesting thing about the flash market it, a lot of the big guys realized right away, wow, I'm way behind, so they went out and they bought a lot of startups. What happened, did they sort of pollute them, through the integration, or ... (laughing) >> I think the marketshare statistics are a little bit confusing, but what we see is, you know, the bulk of the legacy vendors, you know, push in what we call retro-fit flash, basically taking their old legacy architectures, their scale-up or scale-out architectures, and cramming flash into it, and basically, then, they don't bring the same kind of simplicity, same kind of agility, same kind of scalability as a built-for-flash-offering like Kaminario. >> Right, what about, you guys have some announcements this week? >> Yup, take that? >> Yeah, two weeks ago we announced our next-generation platform, K2.n, which is based on a fully-converged, NVIO mean over fabric back end. This is basically taking our core operating system, Vision OS, which is a mature and robust storage software stack with all the data services and enterprise features that enterprises need. And deliver it on an NVIO fabric backend which leverages the existing capability to aggregate capacity and compute, and take it to the next level, delivering a very scalable and agile storage cluster that allows you to mix and match different types of resources, to add and remove resources very dynamically, and make your data center responsive in minutes and not hours or days or even months. >> You guys are familiar with our service and research, and we're very excited about NVIO over fabric, because we've been talking about it since probably, maybe 2008, 2009, some type of ability to scale and to communicate, and that's here today, finally. How close are we to actually having a product in the field that I can actually deploy? >> We will actually be shipping this in Q1, the K2.N They added another layer on top of that, We also announced a new software platform called Kaminario Flex, which is a orchestration platform which rides on top of K2.N, and allows you to dynamically compose virtual arrays out of these NVME-connected resources. So I really take that, looking ahead, that the classic notion of a monolithic shared-storage array, is going to die over time. >> Well, here's the numbers. I mean, it's automatic, go ahead. >> Well no, this is the whole debate that we've been clearing up with the true, private cloud report. I mean, guys, no-brainer, check, as a service, as the future, so you're good there. (laughs) The true pilot board, too bad it shows the on-prem stuff is declining in general, that's settlement for buying boxes, and the old way of doing things. Labor's being automated away and shifted, that's pretty obvious. Enter your business model, right? I mean, this is perfect for any cloud deal. >> Right. >> The question is, track record, bulletproof, reliability, security, the table stays all shift, data protection, all these details, that's what they care. You guys check that box ... (laughing) >> So the disability takes vision away, so I'm going to take it to the next generation. Technology is what actually allows us to do that. Whether it's in a hypercloud or we're going into a managed cloud provider, that is becoming a very desired consumption model for a lot of the ads of service members, allows them to build such a flexible architecture, based on a mature software step. >> So you guys, really, from what I see is your strategy is, get this out there quickly from a tech standpoint, software, flex, and integration with cloud is critical. Because you can offload a lot of that heavy lifting on those unique requirements to the cloud guys, where the pre-existing tech exists. Did I get that right? >> Yeah and I think what we see is these managed cloud providers are going to want to have a say in it, they want to actually be part of the evolution of the platform, right? >> Yeah, go ahead, fine, it's your stop! You can always buy the servers more flash! (laughing) >> So talk about your channel, and you go to market, help us understand that a little bit better. >> Yeah, I think it's all about focus for Kaminario. I mean, let's face it, the flash space is competitive, right, if we're going to go head-to-head with everyone, kind of, pull one of these growth-at-all-cost models. And you see what the market values those types of companies. So we've been really focused in two ways. One, SAS providers, next-generation business. I mean, if we opportunistically find a VDI deal, okay, that's great, we have a great solution for VDI, but it's not something that we're going to go out and hunting day to day. The second is really to focus on channel partners. We've got a channel first model, really, effectively 100% of our new business in 2017 will come through a channel partner. Most of those channel partners are looking at developing some type of managed services offering as well, so you know, it's not just about the margin on the deal, it's about the longterm -- >> Cause they're trying to respond to the market transit and value. >> Exactly, so it's about focus on a relatively small number of channel partners that get it, that like our model, and again, it's just -- >> Hey, you'll make money from it, cause that's all, at the end of the day, you've got to get that leverage, because that's your David and Goliath story. >> Exactly, yeah. >> And, global footprint? Is it primarily US and Europe or -- >> Yeah, so it's been, we started in Israel, US has been a good focus, last year we opened up the UK and France, end of the great we opened up Korea, we're now in Singapore, we're moving into China through partners, and so yeah, this is a global story. Clearly, US is the, in terms of adoption of these server infrastructures, US is really the furthest ahead, but it's a global phenomenon. >> What do you make of the VMwear momentum? Because two years ago, VMwear was, the stock was sort of in the tank and there was no growth, and now it's on fire, the data center's on fire, you can't get data center space! (laughing) >> From my perspective, the fast adoption that VMwear had for new technologies, for adopting containers, for adopting cloud paradigms, for adopting this new delivery model, and enabling a fuller stack aligns very well with the kind of demands of the next-generation data system we talked about, where the management plane, the orchestration plane, is becoming more and more important in optimizing the way in this infrastructure gets delivered. So that's, I believe, what is driving that forward. >> Josh and Elay, thanks so much for coming out, coming our way, you guys, company watch, love the business model. The tech comes home, you get it with that integration, man there's not a leverage there, congratulations on your success! (laughing) Great business. TheCUBE bringing you the CUBE as a service, all flash content here! Back with more VMworld coverage after this short break. (futuristic music)

>> Live. From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Google Cloud Next 2018. Brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. (techno music) >> Hello, everyone, welcome back to our day two of live coverage here in San Francisco, California for Google Next's conference called Next 2018, Google Next 2018 is the hashtag. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We're kickin' off day two. We just heard the keynotes, they're finishing up. Most of the meat of the keynote is out there, so we're going to just dive in and start the analysis. We got a tight schedule again, great guests, we have all the cloud-native folks comin' up from Google. We're going to hear from customers, and from partners. We're going to hear all the action. We're going to break it down for you. But first we want to do kind of a breakdown on the keynote, do analyze it and give some critical analysis, and also, things we think Google's doing great. Dave, day two, we've got three days of wall-to-wall coverage, go to the siliconangle.com for special journalism cloud series, a lot of articles hitting, a lot of CUBE videos, go to theCube.net, just check out those videos. That's our site, where all the videos are. Dave, day one, we had a great close yesterday; I thought it was phenomenal. But I thought we nailed it, today, too. And one of the things we were talkin' about in the first day close, editorially, was saying, hey, you know, this AI is super important. Today, in the keynote, more AI, more under the covers, more speed of announcements. Google kind of taking a playbook out of Amazon, let's get some announcements out there, I wouldn't say that the pace of announcements meets AWS, in terms of the announcements, but the focus is on a very few core things: AI, RollaData, Cloud-Native, Cloud Functions, Cloud Services Platform. This is the Google, that they're lifting the curtain. We're startin' to see some action. Your thoughts on the keynote... >> Well, I think you're absolutely right, I think Google realizes that it's got to compete with Amazon, from the keynote standpoint, demonstrating innovations, putting out a lot of function. I will say this, maybe it doesn't match Amazon's pace of innovation and announcements, but when you compare what these cloud-guys do with the traditional enterprise shows that we go to, there's no comparison. Even this morning, keynote day two, was drinking from a fire hose, there are dozens of announcements that Google made today. I would say just a couple of things, critical analysis, Google, everything is very scripted, as is all these shows, Amazon is very scripted as well, but they're reading everything, which I don't like, I would rather see them have a little bit more teleprompter, friendly, sort of presentation. So that's just sort of a little side comment. But the content is very good. The big themes I took away today, even though they didn't use this term, is really they're treating infrastructure as code. They're deploying infrastructure and microservices from code, as developers. So that was a theme that cut through the entire morning. Big announcement was the GA of Cloud Functions. It's been in beta, now it's Serverless, it's been in beta for a long time. And then a number of other announcements that we're going to go through and talk about, but those were some of the big highlights. But AutoML, I want to talk about that a little bit, talk a lot about developer agility. Threw out a couple of examples of customers, we heard from Chevron, we heard from Twitter, so they're starting to give examples, again, not as many Amazon, but real customers in the enterprise, customers like Mastercard, so, they're dropping some names... You're starting to see their belief manifest into actual adoption. But I'd like to ask you, John, what's your sense of the adoption bell curve, and the maturity curve, of the Google customer? >> Great question, I think for me, just kind of squinting through all of the noise, and looking at the announcements specifically, and how the portfolio of the show's going, it's very clear that Google is saying, we are here to play, we are here to win, we're going to take the long game on this cloud business. We have a ton to bring to the table, I call it the "bring out the Howitzers, the big guns." And they're doing that, they're bringing major technology, BigQuery, BigTable, Spanner, and a variety of other things, from the core Google business, bringing that out there and making it consumable; said that yesterday. Today, we looked at what's goin' on. You're seeing AI within G Suite. Leading by example, by demonstrating, look at it, this is how we use AI, you could use it, too, but not jamming AI and G Suite down the throats of the customer. AI and BigTable, I thought was pretty significant, because you can now bring machine learning and artificial intelligence, so to speak, into a data warehouse-like environment, where there's not a lot of data movement, data prep, it just happens. And then the Cloud Services Platform, the CSP, that Eyal Menor, the Vice President of Engineering, rolled out, I found interesting. The key move there was Cloud Functions. They now need to have Serverless up and running, and obviously Lambda's AWS. The uptake on the enterprise with Lambda has been significant, more than they thought. We heard that from Amazon, so I expect that Cloud Functions, and having this foundational layer with Kubernetes doubling down. The Kubernetes, Istio, and these Cloud Functions, represent that foundation. Knative open source projects, again, another arrow in their quiver around their open source contribution. This is Google, they're bringing the goods to the party, the open source party. This is an under-appreciated value proposition, in my opinion; I think a lot of people don't understand the implications of what's going to go on with this. This upstream contribution, and the downstream benefits that's going to come from their contra open source, is highly strategic. We used to call it, in the old days, "Kool-Aid injection." That's the way you ingratiate into the community with your software, ultimately the best software should win. There's not a lot of politics in open source, as there was once was, so I think that's fine. Now, to the question of migration, Google Cloud is showin' some customers up there, but I don't think they're going to, they're a long ways away from winning enterprises. What you see Google winning now is the AlphaTechies. The guys who were, and gals, who know tech, they know scale, and they can come in and appreciate the goodness of Google, they can appreciate the 10x advantages we heard from Danielle, with Spanner. These are what I call people with massive tech chops. They understand the tech, they've had problems, they need an aspirin, they need a steroid, and they need a growth hormone, right? They don't just need a pain-killer, they need solutions. These guys can make it happen. They jump in, take the machinery, and make that scale. The second level on the trajectory of their growth, on the adoption curve, is what I call, "Smart SMB, Smart enterprises." These are enterprises that have really strong technical people, where the internal conversations is not "if we should go to cloud," it's "how should we go to cloud?" And the DNA of the makeup of the technical people will decide the cloud they go with. And if it's engineering-led, meaning they have strong network operations, strong dev-team, then they have people who know what they're doing, they gravitate to Google Cloud. The third phase, which I think is not yet attainable, although aspirational, for Google, is the classic enterprise. "Man, I've been buying IT for years, oh my god, I'm like a straight-jacket of innovation, nothing's happening!" They're like, "we got to go to the cloud, how do we do it?" It's a groping for a strategy, right? So, Amazon gets those guys, because there's some things that shadow IT that Amazon can deliver, in more options, than what Google has. So I think I don't see Google knockin' that down in the short term, anytime soon. They can do plenty of business. Again, this is a trajectory that has an economy of scale to it, as an advantage, as a competitive advantage, by doing that. If Google tries to become Amazon, and meet their trajectory, the diseconomies of scale plays against Google. This is critical, Google does not want to do that, and they're not doing that, so I think the strategy of Google is right on the money. Nail the early adopters, the alpha geeks. Hit the engineering teams within the smartest companies, or small businesses, and then wait to hit that mainstream market, two, three years from now. So I think there's a multi-year journey for Google. Again, this diseconomies of scale is not what they want, they have tons of leverage in the tech, and the data, and the AI. So to me, they're right on track. They're now getting into the phase two. Smart. I give them credit for that. >> Let me pick up on a couple of things you said, and tie it into the keynotes from this morning. But I want to start with some of the conversations that you and I had last night, and around the show, with some of the GCP users. So, we've been asking them, okay, well how do you like GCP? Whaddya like? What don't you like? How does it compare with Azure? How does it compare with Amazon? And the feedback has been consistent. Tech is great, a lot of confidence in the tech. Obviously what Google's doing is they're using the tech internally, and then they're pointing it to the external world. It comes out in beta, and then they harden it, like they did today with Serverless and GOGA. The tech's great. Documentation has a little bit to be desired; we heard that as a consistence theme. Functionality not as rich in the infrastructure side as AWS, and not as enterprise app friendly as Azure, but very, very solid capabilities. This comes from people in financial services, people in healthcare, people from oil and gas. So, it's been consistent feedback that we've heard across the user base. You mentioned Knative; Knative is a new open source project, that brings Serverless to Kubernetes, and it was brought forth by Pivotal, IBM, RedHat, SAP, obviously Google, and others. Again, a big theme of the keynotes this morning was developer agility, bringing microservices, and services, and things like Kubernetes, to the developer community. Now, I want to talk about another example of a customer, Chevron. Is Google crushing it in traditional enterprise IT in the cloud? Well, no, you're bringing up the point that they're not. But, what they are doing, is doing well in places where people are solving data-oriented business problems with technology. Is that IT? It's not a traditional IT, but it's technology. Let me give you an example, Chevron was up on stage today, and they gave an example of they have thousands and thousands of docs, of topographical data points, and they use this thing called AutoML to ingest all the data into a model that they built, and visualize that data, to identify high-probability drilling zones and sites in the Gulf of Mexico. Dramatically compressed the time that it would have taken. In fact, they wouldn't have been able to do this. So they ingested the data, auto-categorized all the data to simplify it, put it into buckets, and then mapped it into their model, which was tuned over time, and identified the higher probability of sites for drilling. That's using tech to solve a business problem, drive productivity; Google crushes it with those type of data applications, really good example. >> And AutoML drives that, and this is where, again, a machine learning, AutoML, AI operation, we mentioned that yesterday, the IT operations sector is going to be decimated. But I think the big tell sign for me is when I look at the cloud shows, Amazon definitely has competition with Google, so that anyone who says Google's way far back in the market share, which you know I think is bastardized, I think those market share numbers don't mean anything because there's so much sandbagging going on; I could look at any one and say Microsoft's just sandbagging the numbers, and Amazon not really, if Amazon could probably sandbag the numbers even more by putting revenue from their partner ecosystem. Google throws G Suite in there, but they could throw AdWords in there and say technically that's running on their cloud, and be the number one cloud. What is a good cloud? When you have a cloud, if you can make a situation where you can take a customer and get them on the cloud easily, in a simplified, accelerated way, that is a success formula. What you heard on stage today was kind of, naw, I won't say underplayed, they certainly played it up and got some applause, is Velostrata and these services. They bought a company called Velostrata in May of this past year, and what they do is essentially the migration. We had a guest on, a user yesterday, migrating from Oracle to Spanner, 10x value, major reduction in price. They didn't say 10x, but significant; we'll try to get those numbers, she wouldn't say. But what Velostrata does is allows you to migrate to existing apps in a very easy, non-disruptive way, from on-prem to the cloud. This is the killer app for the leading clouds. They need tools to move workloads and databases to their cloud, because as clients and enterprises start to do taste tests, kick the tires in cloud, they're going to want to know what's the better cloud. So, the sales motto is simply go try it before you buy it. It's cloud. You can rent it. This is the value of the cloud. So, Amazon's done an extremely awesome job at this, Google has to step up, and I think Velostrata's one of many. I think the Kubernetes piece is critical, around managing legacy workloads, and adding new cloud natives. Between Velostrata, and the Knative, and the Cloud Functions, I think Google is shoring up their offerings, and it makes them a formidable competitor for certain workloads, and those early adopters, and that Stage Two, small, medium, or Smart enterprise, as a foundational element. I think that is a tell sign, and I got to give them props for that, and again, you can get an Oracle database into cloud, you're going to win a lot of business. If you can get an app workload running on Google Cloud seamlessly, in a very easy, meaningful way, it's just going to rain money. >> So let's talk about something we just talked about, how Google's not crushing it in traditional enterprise apps, but let's talk about some-- >> For now. >> of things we heard today, where they're trying to get into that space. So they announced today support on GCP for Oracle RAC, real application clusters, and exit data, and then SAP, via a partnership with Accenture. So Accenture does crush it with Oracle and SAP. Now, here's the problem: Oracle will play its licensing games, we've seen this with Amazon, where essentially, Oracle's license costs are double in AWS, they'll do the same thing for Google, I guarantee it, than they are in Oracle's cloud. So, 2x. It's already incredibly expensive. So, Oracle's going to use its pricing strategy to lock out competitors. So, that's a big deal, but we also saw some stuff on security: Cloud Armor, automatically defending against DDoS attacks, that's a big deal. We heard about shielded VMs, so secure VMs within GCP. These are things that traditional enterprises, it's going to resonate with traditional enterprises. >> Yeah, but here's the thing, then, we have one final point. I know we're going to run over a little bit of time, here, but I wanted to get it out there. You mentioned Oracle and the licenses. It's not just about Oracle, and their costs, and that disadvantage that could happen for a lot of people, and what cloud clearly has some benefits on a lot of cost. Here's the problem, like any Mafia business, Dave, we always talk about the cloud Mafias, and the on-premise Mafias. Oracle has an ecosystem of people who make a boatload of money around these licenses. So, you have a lot of perverse incentives around keeping the old stuff around, okay? So, as the global SIs, you mentioned Accenture, Deloitte, and others, those guys may salute the Google Cloud flag and the ecosystem, but at the end of the day, it's going to come down to money for them. So, if the perverse incentive is to stay in the old ways, saying "hey, okay, if we keep the license in there I get more better billing hours and I can roll out more deployments." Because what clouds do, and what Google's actually enabling, is enabling for the automation of those systems and those services, so you're going to see a future, very quickly, where half of the work that Accenture and Deloitte get paid on is going to be gone. From weeks to minutes; months, to weeks, to minutes. This is not a good monetization playbook for Accenture, and those guys. >> Well. >> So Google has to shift a ecosystem strategy that's smart and makes people money. At the end of the day-- >> No doubt. >> That's going to be a healthy ecosystem for every dollar of Google spend, it has to be at least 5 to 15x ecosystem dollars. I just don't see it right now. >> The big consultancies love to eat at the trough, as we like to say. But let's talk about the ecosystem, because you and I, we've walked the floor a couple times now. We mentioned Accenture, Cognizant is here, RedHead is here, KPMG, Salesforce, Marketo, Tata, everybody's here. UiPath, a startup in RPA; Cohesity's here. Rubrik's here, Intel's here, everybody's here, except AWS isn't here. >> Obviously. >> (chuckles softly) And Microsoft's not here. The other point that I think is worth mentioning, is again, big theme here is internally tested and then we point it at the market. Chevron, Autotrader, Mastercard, you're starting to see these names trickle out, other traditional enterprise. They announced today a partnership with NetApp for file sharing, for NFS workloads. So you're seeing NetApp lean in to the cloud in a big way. NetApps, back! You know you were seein' that. You saw Twitter on the Google Cloud. So you're seeing more and more examples of real companies, real businesses. >> I'll just end this segment by saying one thing quickly, the high IQ people in the industry, whether it's customers, partners, or vendors, are going to have to increase their 3D chess game, because as the money shifts around, the zero-sum game in my mind, it's going to shift to the value. Things are going to get automated either way, and that could be core businesses. So, the innovative dilemma is in play for many, many people. You got to be smart, and you got to land in a position, you got to know where the puck is going to be, skate to where the puck is going to be. It's going to require the highest IQ: tech IQ, and also business IQ, to make sure that you are making money as the world turns, because those dollars are up for grabs. The dollars are shifting as the new ecosystem rolls out. If you're relying on old ways to make money, you are in for a world of hurt if you don't have a plan. So, to me, that's the big story, I think, in the cloud that Google's driving. Google's driving massive acceleration, massive value creation, massive ecosystem opportunities, but it's not your grandfather's ecosystem, it's different. So we're going to see, we're going to test people, we're going to challenge it, we're going to have conversations here in TheCube. The day two of three days of live coverage. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay with us as we kick off day two. We'll be right back. (techno music)