>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2017 presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman here with my cohost, Justin Warren, and you are watching theCUBE SiliconANGLE Media's live production of AWS re:Invent 2017. Happy to welcome back to the program, Rishi Yadav, who is the CEO of Zettabytes, and Bart Hickenlooper, who is the SAP of client services. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you, Stu. >> So Rishi, yesterday you on the other set with John Furrier and with Justin, and we were really excited to really launch Zettabytes, help you bring the company out. We've known Infoobjects and your company for a while, so of course we want people to go check out the other interview, but in today's hybrid multi-cloud world, we've seen Amazon kind of slowly moderating a little bit the way they discuss it, but why don't you bring us inside a little bit? What are you hearing from customers, and what kind of led to the creation of Zettabytes? >> What we are hearing from customers is that there is a lot of talk about the cloud and AWS. The challenges that what I discussed yesterday also was that how do I take those baby steps toward our option of the cloud? That is where the challenge comes. On one side and they say everything on prem is bad. Everything on cloud is good. Those kind of statements are okay, but somebody who has got billions of dollars of business running, for them it doesn't make any sense. They want to have logical steps, and they also want to have, with every step, what value they are adding. >> We always hear, right, we always take in and it's like all in on any one thing. Oh come on, you are using various SAS providers. You probably have multiple cloud providers. Yes, you've still got something sitting in the backend of your data center, where many things, and that migration takes time. What kind of strategy and tactics do you hear customers doing that gets Zettabyte engaged? >> What was in most enterprises is an effort to really modernize their applications. They want to make those so that they are cloud native leveraging the innovation that's taking place in the cloud. That application modernization is really what's driving an enterprise to do some things and move quickly to the cloud. It's no longer the economics of moving to the cloud, but that innovation engine that can be really egnited with those technologies. Getting there from their legacy platforms is a little tricky. They need a development cycle that works in a hybrid fashion to really go cloud native with those applications. >> When they're starting off on that journey, where do you find customers starting with? What are the applications that they do first, and what are the functions that they use from AWS, like are they going with just EC2 type things? Are they using S3 for storage? What do they start with? >> That's a good point that for the first phase of the cloud out option most of the work was on IES. Whatever you have on prem, you just put that on the cloud then obviously you go through your storage and things like that. That is where there was a lot of talk. If you remember a few years back, everybody was saying, "The cloud is not cheap, "the cloud is costly," and as Bart said, it's not about economics. Has always about convenience. It's always about the value-added, and especially when enterprises started getting into the cloud, started the all opt in cloud a few years back, that's where those things became very important because that is what they wanted. You just cannot save someone 20% in investiture cost and that may not even come and that it's worth the option of the cloud. >> We were talking yesterday about the 100 services, the number of services that you as an orginzation have to wrap your brain around and one of the things that Zettabytes helps with that is to give you some focus so again, what are the things that Zettabytes is focusing on that they find that customers actually really, really want from cloud. Amazon is so huge. Making sense of the whole thing is quite tricky. When you talk about application modernization, if you have a monolithic application, EC2 and S3 are great. If you are going to migrate it, you can do that. What we are seeing is really a switch to DevOps for application development, microservices development that leverage certain platform services from Amazon that are specific to enable an application, and those are things like Lambda, Kinesis, Elasticsearch, and you can write microservices that consume those services in addition to your traditional storage and compute, and really get cloud native. We've selected those services on our platform to help with that application modernization and really enable a customer to make applications with microservices enablement. >> WikiBon has been looking at many years really. What has happened with this transformation of the data center. The research that we put out a few years ago is what we call true private cloud because like you said, what was happening the virtualization plus. I love virtualization. I spent 15 years on that wave, but it wasn't enough, and even when we started simplifying with even some automation on there, that application journey, and how do we get ready for modern applications? I worked a lot on the HCI wave. It was, "Let's modernize our infrastructure, "and then we will worry about that application stuff later, "and maybe it's not a fit." What is different now? What are the toolings available? Why is now, can I put that stuff, I mean, the cloud native, isn't it? That should all live in a public cloud, no? What cannot live in many places? >> I think that's a great point. Three pieces of the puzzle, infrastructure, data, and the applications so there has been a lot of talk about infrastructure and not having infrastructure. Data, every other company in the Bay Area is a backup and restore company. Nobody is talking about applications. Yes, they are SAS players, right? We are like, okay, we will just host an application for you and you don't have to worry about anything else, but what about a lot of these legacy applications which have been built over the last 20 or 30 years? Nobody is talking about that. Everybody talks about greenfield applications. What about we start new? Everything is going to be the cloud. Is going to be cloud native. Everything is awesome, and then the clients say, "Yes "but I already invested $5 million in the applications "in the last 10 years." What's going to happen to them? >> To say that the first 80% of writing software is putting the bugs in, and then the second 80% of writing software is taking them out again, so if you have to completely start with these core business applications that are generating revenue, there's a lot of risk there in going to something brand-new. I know we've had Andy Jassy talking about if I was starting the company again today, I would go completely all serverless. And I think, really? Right now in 2017? Is it really that established and that great? What is your take on that? For an enterprise that have this investment already, should they be going completely all into serverless, or should they be picking off some of these other more mature services do you think? >> I would say it would be really application-specific. If it's traditional transactional, you may or may not want to go serverless because you've got that relational database really kind of structured around it. If it's a modern application and you are a company that has, for example, a brand-new mobile application, then you are going to want to leverage things like Lambda in those application development so you can trigger the correct service to spin up in that application. I think modernization is really specific to the use case. What we are seeing is a digital transformation in most companies where they are really requiring some newer applications to leverage past services like Lambda, Elasticsearch, Kinesis, and other things. >> Rishi, one of the things that we've heard from customers for many years is they so that they'd like to have the same in their data center as in the public cloud. We did a survey years ago and everybody, it was like 80% said that then said, "What do you have?" I've got VMware here and I've got an AWS there. Is it about having the whole stack? Are APIs enough? How much commonality do you need? How does Zettabytes look at this And had to help customers bridge this model? >> Yes absolutely, so number one is that the VMware type of solution is still pretty much, I like VMware but it's pretty much infrastructure as a service base. The second thing is the reason we have come up with our platform is that few core services and for few key workloads, IOT is being one of them, low intensive uploads being another of them, the workloads in which you need special type of security and governance which clients are used to from the last 20 years. Yes, AWS have amazing security and governance, no doubt about that, but still, part of the workload they may want to run locally, and they should at least have that freedom. Only those part of workloads are going to be run on Zettabytes plans, but the API compatibility will provide complete, so whether you want to run it on Zettabytes or on AWS, most of the workloads are going to work on AWS, and that you can run from our platform. >> I want to keep off the word you mentioned there. You mentioned appliances. We have seen lots of solutions over the last decade. You have done quite well as appliances. Talk about the HCI, talk about the backup recovery, lots of things there, but it's a software world now. Hex serverless, Andy Jassy says we will build serverless. Why an appliance? Talk a little bit about the go to market. What do people get today? How do they buy it? Why does that make sense for your customers? >> Yes absolutely, a value added more from the sales perspective but appliance, from the optimization perspective is perfect. In our case, yes, we have figured out a spec which is perfect perfectly optimized for tuning our software platform and we can provide to the clients. If they want to have a similar stack built themselves that is perfectly okay, but the idea is that hardware has an equally important role to play as software has. >> When you think about the platform services that we have like S3, RDS, and others, you definitely need hardware to support a real workload and for us to really standardize on something that someone can do, true development with that depth on the platform is really critical. You can go to GitHub and get open source S3 and work around it, but it's a mock. Really what you need is a platform to develop application, and the other thing is I worked for Cisco for 10 years, and the channel there is extremely powerful with companies like CDW, WWT, the routes to market there is really compelling for combined solution and I think part of the reason you are seeing success with those combined solutions is the customers are used to a service model where it's one throat to choke on those types of platforms, and the channel is a trusted advisor. It's a great way for us to go to market. >> Yeah, to just give my two cents on that, people conflate that we've had some commoditization of what's happening in infrastructure. It doesn't mean just grab stuff off of the shelf. I read an article 4 years ago. AWS infrastructure is hyper optimized. If you went to the Tuesday night's keynote, oh my gosh, they spent way more on hardware than anybody else in this ecosystem, I'm sure, and spent more as much, so it's not that you have IP in hardware. From my understanding it you are making sure you've got, your software is natural to package. If I can do it, somebody else can do it. >> Bart: Yeah, go ahead. >> Absolutely, I think that part is very, very important that one throat to choke, one company which supports everything. In our case, yes, if you want to have your own hardware, then you can do that, but in our case, if you take the whole appliance from us, that we are providing you complete support. Hardware, operating system, as well as the software. >> And in a certain sense, we are really trying to, l like you said, Stu, match the performance of those optimized environments on AWS for our clients so they get a similar experience from our platform that they would get on AWS. If they build something on Zettabytes and then deploy on AWS, they should get the same experience. >> I want to give you the last word. I'm sure you have lots of customers coming by our booth. It's not far from where you're sitting right now. What are some of the key things they are hearing? What is getting them excited, interested in, that they want to follow up with? >> I think most of the customers we've talked to we say, "Okay, are you using AWS?" they say, "Yes," because they are at re:Invent. I say, "Okay, how far you are in the AWS option?" that's where the devil comes in the details. These applications we have been able to migrate, these we have not been able to migrate. We are building our exponents around it and things like that, and then the question comes, "Do you really want to go too deep into figuring out "the problems which the vendors have solved, "or would you rather focus on your business problems?" that's what I would say. They would say one package, one platform when you get to focus on your business problems and we take care of the rest. >> Yeah, and I think in the keynote yesterday, Andy Jassy said it's all about the analytics and what we are hearing is we've given a lot of thought to putting together a platform that supports big data analytics in addition to the AWS abstraction that we've done, so those analytics workloads were really intriguing to people that are talking with us, our support of machine learning, converting what may be a traditional spark job into a Lambda function is really something people are raising their eyebrows about. >> Bart Hickenlooper, Rishi Yadav asking how deep you are into AWS? Well here at theCUBE we are about 60 interviews in which means we have a few more hours left of great interviews here, so for Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you so much for watching theCUBE.