from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hi everybody welcome to this special cube conversations part of our partner series sponsored by HP e hewlett-packard enterprise and we've been drilling into the role that partners play the value that they add as as they emerge is the sort of new breed of nimble system integrator Tim Ferriss is here and he's with green pages we're going to do a disaster recovery drill down it's a topic that is extremely important it's relevant to this day and age Jim thanks for coming on my pleasure thank you for having Saudi our it's it's traditionally been an expensive complicated hairy scary but necessary what should we know about dr today in the state of dr well like you said i think a lot of people have written it off as prohibitively expensive and certainly in the small and medium business but you know with the advent of cloud with it with the explosion of cloud services dr as a service has made a cloud cloud base dr and disaster recovery affordable for even a small business it's taken a lot of the complexity some of the complexity out of it and it's certainly some for some clients it's the first steps toward a cloud journey you know my my friend Fred Moore former storage tech senior vice president of strategic planning is famous for coining the term backup is one thing recovery is there anything it applies to dr you know failover is one thing failback is is everything and you know a lot of times it's just you know too dangerous to test failing back how is dr evolving particularly for the small and mid-sized businesses so they can have confidence that not only can they check a box sure for their corporate boards but they if there's a disaster they can actually recover the sim is similar to that to that phrase yeah DR is not just a replication exercise right not getting just getting data from point A to point B but automating that and automating the the testing and creating run books around around that data I think some things have certainly made that easier over the years you know I I was an early delivery consultant for solution for VMware Site Recovery Manager thankfully I've used it much more for in cases of data center migration than I have for actual disasters but you know it was a fantastic automation tool but used other technologies to get the data from point A to point B and replicate that data some things that have made that easier over the years for people in more affordable a bandwidth is cheaper so you've got to get that data it still gotta get that data from point A to point B and it was prohibitively the pipe was prohibitively expensive could it keep up with my rate of change so but bandwidth is becoming less and less expensive and less and less of a hindrance there the software and the technologies typically back in the old days it was a ray based replication you needed to have like arrays and in production in dr so i i have an all flash array in production i need that same array in dr well maybe that's maybe i want to spend money on an all flash array for a use case that I hope I never need you know I'll test but never need it and you know our partner HPE has done some great things they're letting you replicate from a nimble all flash array to a hybrid array and ER let's some people save some money there but for our small and medium business for those who want to get out of the data center business maybe they want to start with dr dr as a service has been a you know a big big mover for us you know a lot of a lot of traction with that over the past year into so i mean one of the concerns that you hear this from security practitioners all the time is that they're drowning in point products and sort of dr was sort of the same I asked the customer had to become the system integrator or had engaged and spent a lot of money figuring out that that system so the dr as a service kind of takes care of all that doesn't it does it offloads not only the operational maintenance of the of the dr infrastructure but your you can leverage their years of expertise in indy our functions you know again hopefully folks don't have a ton of experience failing over from disasters you know hopefully you only have that never happens or it happens once but but these folks have are seasoned veterans in indy are so you get to not only leverage them their service taking care of the operations of it but you get their expertise for design so i can actually you mentioned bandwidth in vo is joke gold mainframes that the the fastest way to get data from point A to point B is the Chevy truck access method and and so and that was tape and in the day since big large companies still use tape I mean the big hyper scalar guys use K tape I presume it's not is if I froze it was pretty much dead in small business and maybe even it's very word I get dirty looks yesterday but do people still use tape for dr type of thing people do I would say increasingly if people are using tape it's used for those work those less critical workloads those people are looking people you know hopefully anybody who's performing a business continuity initiative will tear their workloads you know they have their tier zero those things that need to be up and running hot in the data center those tier ones with the RTOS the recovery time objectives in the minutes tape you only want to use that for recovery time objectives maybe in the weeks okay so pretty much I mean I've always hated tape but but but it's still not dead yet now people are trying through okay so thinking as an architect let's say I'm a small let's say midsize business because there's some other challenges that their and I and I used to have you know sort of backup over here and recovery and I think about dr it wasn't integrated what should I be doing in terms of bringing those disciplines together how should I be thinking about architecting a disaster recovery solution from from my client where do I start well you you should start by assessing the the applications so don't start at the VM level or the the physical workload level here from your business what are those services that they need to provide in the event of a disaster so a business continuity plan needs to be in place before we you should take on a disaster recovery architecture initiative so having that input is key to the to the to the disaster recovery process so assess assess what services need to be up and when tear them so and then investigate we investigate with our clients several different methods of protection and a dr a dr architecture won't just consist of dr as a service or a physical prem the prem replication environment it could contain many different types of protection deer as for some products for our virtual workloads application based hot protection for sequel or database workloads and that sort of thing using native application replication so a lot of different things you can you can do and it's not just the one size fits all it's really a mosaic of things tailoring the solution based on the applications value yes that gets into so you know the funny discussions with you know people always say well speak in business terms and so you sit down as business people say what do you want your RPO and arts go to the end they go what ok RPO how much data you're willing to lose and they go how much a problem how fast do you want to get it back what are you talking about instantaneously how much money do you have so it's the notion of recovery point objective recovery time objective it's sometimes not business speak how do you translate a geek into wallet wallet yeah well yeah signing have you you ask the question have you assigned a value to downtime you know how much is it gonna cost you to be down and I don't like to go into customers and hit them with a lot of FUD you know fear uncertainty and doubt and but you you know it should a good business should value how much downtime or loss of data will cost the business and then use that to determine what they need to spend on on dr in order to make sure that that doesn't happen well you're suggesting so and and having had those conversations with many CIOs in the past it used to be email was mission-critical and it still is in many ways but of course the vast majority people have outsourced their their email to the right or ever Microsoft or whomever at Google and so now it becomes so the answer to that question is what does it cost you when it sounds well it depends what system is down you know if it's my transaction system and I'm a retailer online well and it's it's this Black Friday I'm losing a lot of money right and so do people have a sense of the cost of downtime or the the value of their data and their applications I I think a lot of times they do not and and it takes some encouragement in order to to help them realize that I think for some it's just so for our retail customers I think it's just so obvious that to them they're they're hyper focused on on on that value so we get just like you know it's it's unfortunate but during hurricane season we have a lot of conversations with folks about about dr because it's top of mind for everybody for our retail customers their hurricane season is you know Black Friday and beyond they want to make sure that they have a solid solution leading in the Black Friday because you know a minute of downtime can mean you know thousands and thousands of dollars worth of lost business and revenue so I think more and more it's becoming a common place for people to put value on it but you still run into folks who haven't okay so and I get it this it's an insurance cell it's somewhat of a fear it's not a fear of missing out it's a fear of losing you know all your data yeah and and so okay so let's let's assume so you guys can help me get through the business case let's assume I I get there um how are people sort of moving forward how fast are they moving forward and how critical is it for their digital transformations so so how fast are people people I think are moving we're having the conversation with more and more folks more and more folks or finding value in disaster recovery and we are helping them through that helping them through that assessment and providing the value I think another big value for the IT for the IT establishment is not just providing a service the best that they can do but getting some buy-in from the business on let's let's agree what what a reasonable recovery time objective is and let's agree understand that yeah I can give you a zero RPO recovery point objective or a near zero a synchronous replication but it's gonna cost X amount of money so that the business is taking some ownership for the quality of the of the disaster recovery solution and the the tightness of the RPO and RTO and you you empower the business to make those decisions by giving them options and I think we help our businesses the customers we work with so it's important I mean maybe it's worthwhile getting a little didactic here but but we're talking about you know RPO zero it means you're essentially you're not losing any data right on a disaster which is very very probably there's no such thing technically as our poz the closest is you know synchronous replication and and that sort of thing so near zero right so so you take you do synchronous replication you know within some physical metro area metro area yeah of course the problem is if you get hit with a major disaster then they both go out so you have to do async yeah yeah frankly just understanding what type of disaster you're asking me to engineer for is it or is it a localized fire in the data center centers away in an earthquake and regional disaster affecting the whole country now right yeah so so understanding what your or is it you know we to this day IT organizations are getting calls from upper management you know if they have a power failure in the building you know okay let's failover to our disaster recovery site and the power is going to be on in an hour or so and you know knowing when to make that decision is is critical as well and not using it too trivially so if you're in a zone where you have a high probability of some kind of disaster that's gonna wipe out both synchronous you know platforms you go asynchronous but then the problem becomes speed of light there's a there's a little bit of you know or it could be a lot it could affect the performance of the application - while you're waiting for that sink that's right yeah so that could be a revenue hit but it could be you know it can you handle fifty five minutes of lost data yeah yeah sure I can probably recreate that about 15 minutes yeah maybe I'll how about an hour how about half a day mm-hmm how about a day now you start to get into the business discussion of really what's the value and now you can architect around those things you can pretty pretty much if you throw money at it you can solve any problem as an architect mostly you absolutely finish that balance of the business case right exactly so so yeah by and by showing in what we'll often do is we'll do the assessment and we'll perform a workshop on various different ways in which we can solve a problem and we can show the client in the business okay well we can do what you asked for it will cost X and that's very expensive but we can do do it this way a little bit differently or combine a couple ways that may increase your RPO a little bit but they're much more affordable you know is that a and they can make a decision based on something you said before Tim resonated with me which was it's not one size fits all which says to me I need the technology to be able to give me the granularity that I can map to the application based on the cost of downtime or the value of the application it right and it sounds like I'm inferring that that type of modern technology exists today absolutely so besides just that there are a number of different ways that applications can be protected you know Active Directory needs to be protected using its native replication Oracle and sequel have their own methods of protection so does so does exchange but virtual workloads certainly you can dial up or down the protection using dr.azz with a product behind it like a like as erto a replication and automation host based replication capability and it you know host based it makes things a bit easier for clients because they can very granularly choose individual VMS without having to house them on a specific volume that's replicated and and have to do all that mapping in the backend it takes a lot of the complexity out of things and you can assign different priorities to those machines so I could be replicating a hundred machines but ten of them are more important I want to make sure that those ten get all the bandwidth they need to keep the lowest possible RPO and certainly there are technologies out there and we are partners with with some providers who can let you dial in what role does HPE play in this whole equation right so so HPE for four Prem the Prem disaster recovery technologies it's it's fantastic because I think I mentioned it earlier you know it used to be we have some we have some very high end workloads residing in primary data centers living on all flash arrays so a nimble or a three-part all flash array those are those are expensive technologies necessary to run the business in in normal circumstances but for dr for a solution that you hope you never need you can replicate to an all flash nimble to a hybrid solution a hybrid nimble in dr thereby saving yourself some money so you know a hybrid flash array and adaptive flash array in dr that is fronted by SSD and ram but costs more like an HDD or a spinning disk array so HP is allowing us to do some things that help help save some money there as well alright Tim thanks very much it was a great conversation and really appreciate your perspectives all right thank you Dave 500 you're welcome ok thank you for watching everybody this is Dave a latte with cube we'll see you next time

>> Hi everybody this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this video series. I'm here with Tim Ferris who's a Solutions Architect at GreenPages. Tim, welcome. Tell us about GreenPages and tell us about your role. >> Hi Dave, thank you for having me. GreenPages, we're a leading hybrid cloud solutions provider and systems integrator. We're dedicated to helping clients achieve digital business transformation. We help them do that through migration to and operation of hybrid clouds in the real world. We help them modernize their on-prem digital infrastructure and infrastructure. And we drive digital transformation adoption through new technologies and ways of doing things. >> Great, so we have been running a series of technology videos sponsored by GreenPages and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. So, check this out, and let us know what you think. Thanks for watching.

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston Massachusetts, it's the theCUBE. Now here's your host, Dave Velllante (electronic music) >> Hi everybody. Welcome to the special CUBE conversation sponsored by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. This is part of our partner series. You know the partner business has changed quite dramatically over the years. It used to be you could make a lot of money pushing hardware and get some pretty good margins there. But increasingly, partners are becoming system integrators. They're becoming much more specialized in helping organizations transform, supporting their digital transformations, their infrastructure modernization, moving to the cloud, hybrid cloud, security. It really runs the gamut. And here to talk to me about that is Tim Ferris, who's a solutions architect at GreenPages. Tim, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to be here. Thank you. >> So tell me a little bit about GreenPages. It's kind of a cool name. Where did that come from? And what are you guys all about? >> Oh God, I'm going to be killed for not knowing the history here. But, I think back in the old days, we used to hand out a neon green catalog. So we couldn't, back when we were doing cold calls, you'd probably get a lot of okay, we shipped you a catalog. Did you get that? Oh, I'm not quite sure. It may be buried under there. Neon green catalog, you could not lose. (laughs) I think we do our invoices on neon green paper now. >> That's good, green, the color of money. So tell us about your role as a solutions architect. What does that entail? And what's your background? >> Sure. So I'm a solutions architect. We have a number of different solutions architects at GreenPages who have a number of different specialties. My specialty is storage, disaster recovery and data management and protection and DR automation. And that's where it computes hyperconvergence, infrastructure and hybrid cloud. So specialization, a little bit wide, but we have other architects who are very deep in networking and hybrid cloud networking and that sort of thing as well. >> So let's get into some of that. Looking at your website, you guys are into everything. You've got software defined. You got cloud. You got security. You got DevOps and really runs the gamut. Well sometimes in this industry, we suffer from acronym soup. The reality is that things are changing quite dramatically. I mean it used to be you'd build an infrastructure to support a single application. You'd harden that infrastructure and that was it. It became a silo and people don't want that anymore. They want their data to be shared. They want it out of the silos, but at the same time it has to be protected. So what are some of the big trends that you're seeing in the marketplace and let's get into it. >> Sure. So yeah, many years ago that one app, one server, one application thing went the way of the dodo. You just got back from VM world. I paid my dues during the Wave One virtualization boom. When people were transforming racks and racks of servers into virtual machines. And so it used to be so easy to impress a customer. You show them a vMotion and it was like magic. You move the server from this server to that server without missing a beat. Now people are looking at hybrid cloud. So not just cloud, but hybrid cloud. Everybody we're talking to, we hear some people say that this is the last major hardware purchase that I want to make. Now I don't know the reality is that. That's debatable, right? But I think people want to have a roadmap to move their infrastructure to cloud or cloud services. Not just infrastructure as a service. You know, lift and shift. Software is a service and take advantage of that. So helping our customers manage that hybrid cloud journey is a big part of what GreenPages does. >> And of course, what the customer is really telling you is we don't want to spend a lot of time provisioning LUNs anymore because it doesn't add value to our business. We want to focus on building new apps or our digital transformation, etc. So and I think you're right. It's sort of aspirational that okay, we're not going to buy anymore hardware anymore. To me the key is, can the industry, through R & D, simplify what's on-prem and you know, lets face it, those mission critical apps you don't just want to throw them into the cloud. I mean, they're working. You don't want to have to refactor them and migrate. That's sort of an evil word. So to the extent that the industry can deliver that cloud-like experience on-prem, you can start to see this hybrid cloud vision evolve. What are your thoughts on that? >> Sure. So I think, in H it's fortuitous that we're here with HPE. I think they're doing a couple of things with some of their products and services that help push that. So it used to be that storage was relatively complicated. There were a lot of knobs and dials on storage that you could push and rotate in order to increase performance. You could have a number of different RAID levels. You know the 3PAR chunklets, and this sort of thing. There was a lot of customization you could do, you could use as a customer in order to properly set up your array for your workloads. People appreciate that level of detail that you can put into that but they want it easier. So I'm seeing a trend toward less customization and more ready just set it and forget it arrays. Nimble, the 3PAR array was highly available. Very good, very good array, very fast, but a little bit higher end to operate. Nimble with HPE's acquisition of Nimble, they've taken that operational complexity down significantly. Not only with operating the array, provisioning LUNs but managing it, maintaining it and performing predictive analytics through Infosite and that sort of thing. So at the storage level I think Nimble, in that paradigm is transforming storage. And HPE's GreenLake technologies, that is very much an answer to the private cloud. Having that hyperscale feel, that ability to expand elastically and get out of the hardware maintenance business by using the GreenLake service. >> So actually, a little bit of history here. So 3PAR was actually, the company was formed in the early 2000s before the term cloud computing really came out. They used, I think utility computing in their S-1 registration. But what 3PAR did is, it really simplified that high end. And then 3PAR reached escape velocity by going after the high end EMC base and did very well and of course famously got acquired by Hewlett Packard. At the time HP then became HPE. Nimble now is bringing sort of a new level where you're talking about intelligent automation and AI managing infrastructure, predictive analytics and that drives more automation which I think, Tim has really got to be a theme of hybrid cloud. I mean cloud is all about automation so hybrid cloud, on-prem, and public some kind of interconnection has to be highly automated, doesn't it? >> It absolutely does and people don't have time to turn the dials and to optimize their storage. They need systems that will do that for them. And there's the level one, the level two support that you get through those predictive analytics of Infosite are critical to customers. They don't, you know a lot of customers don't have time for full time storage admins anymore. And these technologies are what's freeing up those resources, those people resources to do other strategic things for the business. >> Especially in small and mid-sized businesses. >> Absolutely. >> Where they're generalist really, not really specialists at one thing. I want to come back to the hybrid cloud. You know thinking about data governance and management and security. Are we at the point where you can start to see sort of a consistent framework across clouds? You're smiling. (laughs) So what's the journey there? How are we going to get there? I mean (mumbling) (laughs) >> Yeah, I would say we're certainly early days there. I think you know customers need to be much more cognizant of the tools that they use and buy. They can't be necessarily proprietary on-prem tools. The best use of your money is to buy tools, that can be used to manage hybrid and secure hybrid infrastructures. So that should be a main qualifier for what people are looking for for security technologies and that sort of thing. It's not quite the wild west, though we still see, you know there's that shared governance model. That shared responsibility in the cloud. I think there are still some who haven't woken up to that basic concept. That just because I moved the workload to the cloud doesn't mean it's no longer my responsibility to secure that data. Though we're still talking with people today who may be under that misimpression. >> You're right, Tim. I mean that is not well understood and people think if I move in the cloud, I'm good. But there is shared responsibility model whether it's for security or governance, etc. And when you talk to chief information security officers they'll tell you, yeah, you know the cloud vendor might secure the storage device, but its' really our responsibility to do everything else. And the list of everything else is still quite long. >> Absolutely, you know rights, roles and responsibilities. Those sorts of things, firewall rules. They provide the firewall. They make sure the firewall is up to date on it's firmware. But you're setting the rules. You're setting the ingress, egress. So, yes it's very much still a shared responsibility. And yeah, it's eye opening still to some. >> Let's talk about your partnership with HPE. We talked about some of the products, but what do you look for in a partner? Obviously as I said before, you know used to be you sell in boxes. You want margin and I'm sure you still want margin. But there's got to be more, right? >> Well yeah, I mean we've known for quite a while. I mean we've seen the writing on the wall that, I remember the glory, I don't know glory days, the old days back when people could make a fortune selling memory, back before the turn of the century, turn of the century. (laughs) I'm dating myself. But it's true you could make quite a bit of money selling memory back then. But today and certainly over the past 20 years, people, our clients are choosing partners that they can't, not just the cheapest price, but people who can talk to them about a solution. Not just a product. Hear their business problems and turn that into technology solutions that help them address those problems. So that's what I would look for as a partner, if I were, we look to HPE for the same thing. Not just pushing product, where to sell product, but to solve business problems. And I think that HPE is listening, they're hearing their clients. They were listening to them with the acquisition of HPE Nimble. They're listening to them, how they're expanding Infosite from just a Nimble platform, the 3PAR and Prolient and other things and expanding some of those things. >> Yeah, the pendulum has swung after the dot.com boom it became cut, cut, cut. Everyone was concerned about budgets. You know IT doesn't matter anymore. We heard all that >> crosstalk >> and that's totally changed. IT's driving revenue. It's driving top line. Of course budgets are still critical and we've talked a lot about simplification which is a lot about attacking the IT labor problem. But right now the sentiment with the booming economy we're in. This tenth, ninth year of a run on a bull market, obviously in the late cycles, but the sentiment is much more toward how do I enable the business with technology? >> Yes. Yeah, yeah. So how does IT add value back to the business? They can do that through AI, through analytics and through digital transformation in general. I think we've seen a, you know there's always been this upward curve to storage growth. But it's dramatically increased I think. It's upward, predicted to be upward of 40 zettabytes, or something like that by the year 2022. And that's because more and more businesses are using this data more creatively. They're saving it more and not only is that growing, the usable data, but they need to retain it for longer. You've got to retain it, you've got to protect it and we've still got data protection problems. Not just storing it and providing the right performance level for it. But it's really difficult. And then you've got to secure all that extra data, as well. >> Well, I think you're right too. The curve is getting non-linear. I mean it used to be, I've said this often on the theCUBE that we for decades, we've marched to the cadence of Moore's law. But now the innovation sandwich, if you will, it's about applying machine intelligence to data and then automating, whether it's public cloud or on-prem cloud-like, it's being able to scale. >> Right. >> And it's those three pieces of the sandwich that are now driving innovation. No longer the doubling of transistors every 18 months. >> Yeah, so do people want to scale on-prem? Do they want to scale to the cloud and the cloud market itself as it's very elastic, very easy to grow and shrink and contrast? Or can you do some of those types of things on-prem? You know with GreenLake and with some other programs that let you have your on-prem security blanket and your on-prem performance with the hands-off operational paradigm and the elastic growth that you have in cloud. I think that's the best of both worlds for some. >> Let's end with a call to action. So what advice would you give to practitioners, clients that are looking to modernize their infrastructure? They're trying to support their digital transformation. They want to get from point A to point B. They don't want to spend a billion dollars doing it. They got to go on a journey. How do they get there? What's your advice? >> My advice is to certainly, I'm jaded here, but I would say engage professionals who have done this many many times. Don't learn on the job here. You can make some expensive mistakes moving workloads to the cloud. And we've seen anecdotal evidence, and in-person evidence of people moving to the cloud, doing it the wrong way and then having to migrate that back. That's a costly mistake. So make sure you do your planning. Migrate in phases. Move your data there in phases. Bite off some smaller chunks first to make sure if you have growing pain, teething pains that that happens with a non-critical application. Build your knowledge base and then make some better decisions. Engage people like GreenPages to help you roadmap your journey, your hybrid cloud journey. And don't go in with a preconceived notion of where you need to end, right? The applications, their performance requirements and that assessment work up front should dictate where the best place is for those workloads. >> Great advice. Tim Ferris from GreenPages. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It's great to have you. >> Thank you. >> And thank you for watching everybody. We'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante. We're out. (electronic music)

>> From Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, it's the CUBE. Covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2019. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of the VTUG Winter Warmer 2019. Just had Rob Ninkovich from the New England Patriots on the program. And, happy to bring on the program, one of the co-leaders of this VTUG event, Chris Williams. Whose day job is as a cloud architect with GreenPages, but is co-leader here at VTUG, does some user groups, and many other things, and actually a CUBE alum, even. Back four years ago, the first year-- >> That's right. >> -that we did this, we had you on the program, but a few things have changed, you know... You have a little less hair. >> This got a little longer. A little less here. >> More gray hair. Things like that. We were talking, >> Funny how that works out. you know, Rob was, you know, talking about how he's 35, and we were, like, yeah, yeah, 35, I remember 35. >> A child. (laughing) >> Things like that. Just wait til you hit your 40's and stuff starts breaking. >> Oh, so much to look forward to. >> So, Chris, first of all, thank you. We love coming to an event like this. I got to talk to a few users on-air, and I talked to, you know, get a, just, great pulse of what's going on in the industry. Virtualization, cloud computing, and beyond. So, you know, we know these, you know, local events are done, you know, a lot of it is the passion of the people that do it, and therefore we know a lot goes into it. >> I appreciate it, thanks for having me on. >> Alright, so bring people up to speed. What's your life like today? What do you do for work? What do you do for, you know, the passion projects? >> Ah, so the passion projects recently have been a lot of, we're doing a Python for DevOp series on vBrownBag. For the AWS Portsmouth User Group, we're also doing a machine learning and robotics autonomous car driving project, using Python as well. And for VTUG, we're looking at a couple of different tracks, also with the autonomous driving, and some more of the traditional, like, VMware to CAS Cloud Hybrid training kind of things. >> Excellent, so in the near future, the robots will be replacing the users here, and we'll have those running around. >> I have my Skynet t-shirt on underneath here. >> Ah, yes, Skynet. (laughing) You know if you Tweet that out, anything about Skynet, there's bots that respond to you with, like, things from The Terminator movies. >> I built one of them. >> Did you? (laughter) Well, thank you. They always make me laugh, and if there's not a place for snark on Twitter, then, you know, all we have left is kind of horrible politics, so. >> That's true, that's true. >> Great, so, yeah, I mean, Cloud AI, robotics, you know, what's the pulse? When you talk to users here, you know, they started out, you know, virtualization. There's lots of people that are, "I'm rolling out my virtualization, "I'm expanding what use-cases I can use it on, "I might be thinking about how cloud fits into that, "I'm looking at, you know, VmMare and Amazon especially, "or Microsoft, how all those fit together." You know, what are you hearing, what drives some of those passion projects other than, you know, you're interested in 'em? >> So, a lot of what my passion projects are driven, it's kind of a confluence of a couple of different events. I'm passionate about the things that I work on, and when I get into a room with customers, or whatever like that, or with the end users, getting together and talking about, you know, what's the next step? So, we as users, as a user group and as a community, we're here to learn about not just what today is... what's happening today, but, what's going to keep us relevant in the future, what are the new things coming down the pipe. And, a lot of that is bending towards the things that I'm interested in, fortuitously. Learning how to take my infrastructure knowledge and parlay that into a DevOps framework. Learning how to take Python and some of the stuff that I'm learning from the devs on the AWS side, and teaching them the infrastructure stuff. So, it's a bi-directional learning thing, where we all come together to that magical DevOps unicorn in the middle, that doesn't really exist, but... >> Yeah, I tell you, we've had this conversation a few times here, and many times over the last few years especially, is that, there's lots of opportunities to learn. And, you know, >> Too many. >> is your job threatened? And, the only reason your job should be threatened, is if you think you can keep doing, year after year, what you were doing before, because chances are either you will be disrupted in the job, or if not, the people you're working for might be disrupted, because if they're not pushing you along those tracks, and the tools and the communities to be able to learn stuff is, I can learn stuff at a fraction of the cost in faster times. >> Yep. >> Might not learn as much, but I'm saying I can pick up new skills, I can start getting into cloud. You know, it's not $1000 and six months to get the first piece of it. >> Exactly. >> It might be 40 to 60 hours online. >> Yep. >> And, you know, cost you 30 to 100 bucks, so, it's... >> Yeah, the lift in training, is a lot easier because, you're basically swiping your credit card, and with AWS, you have a free tier for 12 months, that you can play with and just, you know, doodle around, and then... And figure things out. You don't have to buy a home lab, you don't have to buy NFR license, or get NFR licenses from Vmware. But, the catch to that is, you do have to do it. There's a... remember Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? >> Of course. >> Remember the dad was doing the toothpaste tubes, he was the guys screwing the toothpaste tubes onto the machines. At the end of the story, he got, you know, automated out of a job, because they had a machine screwing the toothpaste tubes on. And then, at the end, he was the guy fixing the machine that was screwing the toothpaste tubes on. >> Right. >> So, in our world, that infrastructure guy, who's been deploying manually virtual machines, there's a piece of code, there's an infrastructure code, that will do that for them now. They've got to know how to modify and refactor that piece of code, and get good. And, get good at that. >> Yeah, you know, I've talked to a couple of people, we talk about, you know, there's big, you know, vendor shows, and then there's, you know, regional user groups and meet-up's, and the like. Give us a little insight into, you know, let's start with VTUG specifically, and, you know, what you're doin' up in the Portland area. Would love to hear some of the dynamics now, you know, it feels like there's just been a ground swell for many years now, to drive those, you know, local, and many times, more specialized events, as opposed to bigger, broader events. >> Yeah, it's interesting, because we like the bigger, broader events, because it gets everybody together to talk about, things across a broad spectrum. So, here we have the infrastructure guys, and we have the DevOps guys, and we have a couple of Developers, and stuff like that. And so, getting that group think, that mind share, into one room together, gets everybody's creative juices flowing. So, people are starting to learn from each other, that the Dev's, are getting some ideas about how infrastructure works, the infrastructure guys are getting some ideas about, you know, how to, how to automate a certain piece of their job. To make that, you know, minimize and maximize a thousand times, you know, go away. So, I love... I love the larger groups because of that. The smaller groups are more specialized, more niche. So, like, when you get into a smaller version, then, it's mostly infrastructure guys, or mostly Dev's, or some mixture thereof. So, they both definitely have their place, and that's why I love doing both of them. >> Yeah, and, you know, what can you share, kind of, speeds and feeds of this show here. I know, it's usually over a thousand people >> Yep. >> You know, had, you know, bunch of keynotes going on. You know, we talked about The Patriots, in, you know, quite a number of, you know, technology companies, people that are the, kind of, SI's or VAR's in the mix. >> Yeah, so, we had, I think, 35 sponsers. We had, six different keynotes, or six general sessions. We talked about everything from Azure to AWS, to Vmware. We covered the gamate of the things that the users are interested in. >> You had... don't undersell the general sessions there. (laughing) There was one that was on, like, you know, Blockchain and Quantum computing, I heard. >> Yep, yep. >> There was, an Amazon session, that was just, geekin' out on the database stuff, I think, there. >> Yes, yeah, Graph tier, yep. >> So, I mean, you know, it's not just marketing slideware up there, I saw a bunch of code in many of the sessions. >> Oh yeah, yeah. >> You know, this definitely is, you know, I was talkin' with the Amazon... Randell earlier, here on the program, and said that-- >> The Amazon Randall. (laughing) >> Yeah, yeah, sorry, Randall from Amazon, here. >> He's a very large weber. >> Gettin' at the end of the day, I've done a few of these, but, you know, remember like, four years ago, the first, like, cloud 101 session here? >> Yeah, yep. >> And, I was like, you know, I probably could have given that session, but, everybody here was like, "Oh, my gosh", you know, I just found out about that electricity. >> Right. >> You know, that, this is amazing. And, today, most people, understand a little bit more of... We've gotten the 101, so, you know, I'm getting into more of the pieces of it, but. >> Yeah, it was really gratifiying because, the one that he gave was, all of the service, all of the new services, of which, there were like, more than 100, in 50 minutes or less. And, he talks really, really fast. And, everybody was riveted, we... I mean, people were coming in, even up until the last minute. And, they all got it. It wasn't like, what am I do... what am I going to do with this? It's, this is what I need to know, and this is valuable information. >> Yeah, we were having a lunch conversation, about, like, when you listen to a Podcast, what speed do you listen on? So, I tend to listen at about one and a half speed, normally. >> Me too, yep. >> You know, Frappe was sayin', he listens at 2x, normally. >> Does he really? >> Somebody like, Randall, I think I would, put the video up, and you can actually go into YouTube, and things like that, and adjust the speed settings, I might hit, put him down to 0.75, or something like that, >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Because absolutely, you know, otherwise, you can listen to it at full speed, and just like, pause and rewind, and then things like that. But, definitely, someone... I respect that, I'm from New Jersey, originally, I tend to talk a little faster, on camera I try to keep a steady pace, so that, people can keep up with my excitement. >> I do, I speed up too. He actually, does this everyday. He flies to a new city, does it once a day. So, he's, he's gotten... This is like rapid fire now. >> Alright, want to give you the final word, you know, VTUG, you know, I think, people that don't know it, you go to VTUG.com, A Big Winter Warmer, here. There's The Big Summer one, >> The Summer Slam. >> With the world famous, you know, Lobster Bake Fest, there, I've been to that one a few times. I know people that fly from other countries, to come to that one. What else should we know about? >> So, we're about to revamp the website, we've got some new and interesting stuff coming up on there. Now that, we also have our slack channel, everybody communicates on the backhand through that. We're going to start having some user content, for the website. So, people can start posting blog articles, and things of that nature, there. I'm going to start doing, like a little, AW... like learn AWS, on the VTUG blog, so, people can start, you know, ramping up on some of the basics and everything. And, and if, that gains traction, then, we'll maybe get into some more advanced topics, from Azure, and AwS, and Vmware of course, Vmware is always going to be there, that's... Some of the stuff that Cody is doing, Cody Jarklin is doing, over at Vmware, like the CAS stuff, where it's the shim layer, and the management of all the different clouds. That's some really, really cool stuff. So, I'm excited to showcase some of that on the website. >> Alright, wow. Chris Williams, really appreciate you coming. And, as always, appreaciate the partnership with the VTUG, to have us here. >> Thanks for havin' me. >> Alright, and thank you as always for watching. We always love to bring you the best community content, we go out to all the shows, help extract the signal for the noise. I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watchin' The CUBE. (energetic music) (energetic music) (energetic music)

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