>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering DockerCon '18, brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are live at DockerCon 2018 on a stunning day in San Francisco at Moscone West. I'm Lisa Martin with John Troyer and we're excited to welcome two new folks to theCUBE from Skytap. We've got Lucas Welch, the senior director of communications and Hamish Hill, technical product marketing manager. Hey, guys. >> Great to be here, thanks for having us. >> And thanks for adding a lot of color, Lucas, to our set. >> Well, I just wanted to bring enough flair that you could realize I might have something interesting to say. >> Awesome, so speaking of interesting things, tell us about Skytap, what do you guys do, who are you, where are you based? >> Great, so Skytap. Founded in 2006, so relatively old by start-up standards but it's allowed us to learn a lot about where clouded option has been going. And what we've seen is there really is an overlooked challenge that enterprises are facing today, right? So, cloud native development, growing rapidly, gonna continue to develop, but what do you do with all your old stuff, your existing applications? And so Skytap is a cloud purpose-built for modernizing those traditional applications and we do that through a process we call IPA, although we don't advocate that you drink on the job. It's Infrastructure, Process, and Architecture. And the idea is to really get yourself to true modernization and making the most of cloud, and containers, and all of the modern technologies we can see on the show floor behind us, you first need to modernize the infrastructure, get yourself out of the data center. From there, in eliminating that barrier, you're gonna be able to modernize the processes. How do you develop, how do you change your applications? And by getting better in that regard, adopting things like DevOps and agile methodologies, finally you can start to make changes to the application themselves. So, in short order, we are the cloud for modernizing traditional applications and we like to see ourselves as complementary to the folks at AWS behind us and others who are best for that cloud native web scale development of new applications. >> Great conversation this morning at the Key Note about modernizing applications. I think it's on everybody's mind because the world does not start fresh and new every day, right? We all are working with things that we've been carrying, for some cases, for years and decades. So Docker is talking about, in fact we modernized a .NET application, I think, this morning so they showed a little bit of a demo with that and kubernetes. Can you talk a little bit about how you work with Docker and, you know, some of the challenges that you work with in terms of modernizing applications? >> Yeah, Docker has a great framework with what they have with their MTA. Actually, our VP of Product, Dan Jones, presented yesterday on making modernization magical and really looking at how Skytap complements what Docker has with their MTA framework. And I think Skytap provides, with our IPA approach, a great platform for enterprises to execute the Docker MTA approach and beyond that, sort of what Skytap provides is the abilities, sort of, to move out of the data center and get away from the hardware side of things, and start to leverage some of the scale that you can get out of the cloud. >> What are some of the things that an enterprise, that a legacy application expects that it's not gonna have if you just lift and shift it. You know, why do we need Skytap? >> Yeah, I think what's important to remember is often, even just lifting and shifting it is very difficult because if you want a monolithic or traditional application that's very much wed to the infrastructure it was built on five, 10, 15 years ago, taking that and putting it in a hyper scale provider often means you gotta rewrite from scratch and that's a really arduous process, often one that creates a skills challenge in and of itself because not only do you need people to manage the existing application, you need a whole set of new skills to take a cloud-like approach to that development. So that can create a lot of challenges and so what we see here at DockerCon, really the reason we're here, is both Docker and Skytap see the next wave of cloud, the next wave of modern development, is gonna be, "How do we bring all these benefits we've seen "in Cloud Native development "to those existing applications?" and what we see ourselves doing is eliminating that infrastructure barrier so then you can really start using containers to their full benefit, whether it's in Skytap cloud, in another cloud, or both. >> So, just to follow up a little bit. So it's not just some services like, I don't know, you've gotta have authentication, and you've gotta have storage, and you've gotta have all the things that an old legacy application, sitting in a data center, expects. But it sounds like, also, there's operational services as well and being able to operate with that kind of cloud-level agility? >> Yeah, what we provide with Skytap is, you know, we have a concept of a Skytap environment and so within that environment, you can have your traditional X86, sort of, VMware-based workloads. We also support IBM power systems. So we're the only cloud that can run AIX workloads and Linux on power and so alongside that, what we get is sort of the combination of being able to bring in containers as well and so as organizations go through that modernization journey, being able to receive or see value in the hybrid applications, sort of, along the way. >> We saw a lot of stats, thanks Lucas, this morning I think one of the first ones that I saw was in the press release that Docker released which was, this morning, 85% of enterprise organizations are running a multi-cloud strategy, so that's pretty pervasive. We're also seeing stats like, up to 90%, we had Scott Johnston on earlier, their Chief Product Officer, up to 90% of enterprises are spending, sorry. Enterprises are spending up to 90% of their IT budgets just keeping the lights on for traditional applications. As you said, lift and shift isn't practical for a number of reasons. You also talked about, you know, skill-set changes there. So I'm curious, what are some of the, kind of, common challenges you're seeing in the customer environment where they might be trepidatious to go to the container journey and how specifically does Skytap and Docker knock those out of the park? >> Yeah, well those stats, I think, are really indicative of the challenge and then the new approaches that companies are trying to take to solve that challenge which is, you have so much invested in what's made your company successful, and if you're a long-standing enterprise doing well on your market, you've been doing this for 10, 15, 20, maybe more, years and you've done very well to get yourself to where you are. You've invested millions, if not billions in your infrastructure, your talent, and the people that build the systems that run your business so to burn that all to the ground and start from scratch doesn't make a lot of sense and so, I think, one challenge you run into is inertia, right. It's like "Hey, we did well to get here, "why do we need to suddenly change everything we're doing?" And Skytap's recommendation is you don't need to change everything, but you do need to prepare to be able to change much more rapidly as our economy continues to be more driven by digital technique. So you have inertia as a challenge. I think you also have that idea that if you're spending 90%, as you said, right, of what you just got with the lights on, where's the money and where's the time gonna come for net new and how can you bring those two together? And so that's really where I think Skytap would play a big role is bridging that gap from where you are today, allowing you to leverage the people that you have, the skills that they have, the technology that you have invested in. So you don't have to throw that all out overnight. And instead you can get more and more value out of it as you bring it into the cloud, gain incremental agility, and then, over time, make the modernization and evolutionary changes you want to make based on business needs, not having technology drive what your business does. >> How much of that is a cultural change that you guys can help companies understand is essential? Because culture, change in culture is obviously, especially with large enterprises, they can't pivot that quickly, but culture is essential for a company to successfully undergo digital transformation. I'm just wondering, what kind of conversations are you seeing with that inertia? How much of it is culture needs to change and mindsets to embrace, you know, moving forward? >> Yeah, I mean, we see a lot of this in the conversations we have with customers. We see a lot of it comes out of the market from what analysts sort of have to say as well and I think reasons out of an analyst article that was shared sort of publicly so it talks about, actually, enterprises who have adopted DivOps first are actually more successful in the move to containerization and that's what we see, sort of, with the customers that come to us. And what we're able to provide and what the customers see in Skytap is, actually, the simplicity of the UI that we provide is, actually, a good step from what they currently have without sort of needing to get into what can often be multiple UI's and screens in some of the hyper scale cloud providers. And then on top of that, sort of, the on-demand access to environment so you're taking away, sort of, what is typically a reactive approach from corporate IT when they need to reach out and go, "Hey, I need "another environment or I need another BM like this." And these organizations, it's often taking maybe six to eight weeks to get those environments turned around. We can provision a complex environment in less than, sort of, 30 seconds in Skytap. So it enables those teams to be a lot more productive in what they're doing. And there's sort of the first phase of deciding to sort of adopt the changing culture before sort of even getting into that move from, sort of, after linking in with legacy applications, you've gotta waterfall SDLC, and so actually moving from there into, sort of, more agile approaches and looking at how you can increase release cadence and what, sort of, comes into that from a people aspect, and a process change, and a methodology, and how Skytap, sort of, supports that along with integration with other third party's automation tools as well. >> Yeah, I think you nailed it on the culture point and I just wanted to not forget about people as being a big part of culture, right? And you have, fear is a very real thing, right? Fear of change, fear of net new. And so in our own adoption of Docker, and containers, and kubernetes internally. SO our cloud runs on a very large kubernetes cluster of containerized services so internally, over the last few years, we went through our own modernization journey. And I think that, paired with some research we've seen, we recently did a study with 451 Research looking at what enterprise tech leaders are experiencing. The fear of change, the reticence to change, and then just the lack of knowledge of, "Okay, what is required of me?" Like, "You're asking me to change overnight. "All of a sudden I have to take classes at night "while I do my day job." I think these are really, very realistic and human questions to ask and I think you need to take that into account when you're looking at digital transformation, modernization, so thinking about, "Hey, how do we communicate, "with transparency, what we expect and the time frame?" Let's be upfront about the challenges we expect to run into and where we're gonna have problems and how we'll deal with those together. And make sure the communication is crisp, and clear, and consistent, so that people at least know what's going on, even if they may not like it upfront. >> Well, Lucas, you brought up kubernetes and containers, right? We're here at DockerCon, so, obviously, containers on the tip of everybody's tongue. But you also work with legacy apps, which traditionally, I suppose at this point, traditional means a VM. So how does that go together? What are you looking at your customers? Are they able to transition to more containerized infrastructure? Are they sticking with VMs? I mean, how do modern containers fit into the Skytap platform here? >> Yeah, I think we're seeing a lot of adoption with our customers who are moving into Skytap with their traditional applications and we continue to, sort of, learn and observe what they're doing. For us, there's two types of customers that move to Skytap. The first of those are really looking to migrate their whole data center or evacuate the data centers going, "Where can I put these legacy applications?" You know, there's not many places they can sort of go and so they move them into Skytap, get them up and running in there, and sort of see some benefits in that. And then, almost organically, start to look at going, well how else can I make, or get my team to be sort of more cloud-native or cloud reading. It's sort of an evolution of the people component we were talking about before and sort of going, all right, well as I get my teams more ready for cloud native, they start to sort of move towards containers and cloud native services. For our, sort of, other organizations that come in are those who already know and probably have already experienced, you know, other cloud, sort of, modernizations and are looking at what have they been able to achieve and what do they learn from that. And seen the value in actually Skytap and actually come to us with the approach of going, "Right, we want to come in here. "We want to move to more agile sort of methods. "We want to, sort of, start to take our traditional "monolithic applications, break it down "into into microservices, and move it into containers." >> I'm curious. One of the things that Steve Singh, the CEO of Docker, said this morning during his keynote was, about half the room, there's about five to six thousand people here at DockerCon, their fifth conference, that only about half of them are already on this containerization journey. I'm curious, and I know there's no one-size-fits-all, but when you're talking to customers who are at the preface of going, "All right, we've gotta do this. "This is really an essential component "of our transformation." What's the time frame that they could look to see measurable business impact once they start working with Skytap and Docker on this container journey? >> Yeah, well, I think we've gotta move away collectively as an industry from the idea that there's a Big Bang or silver bullet approach to change, right? I spent the five previous years before joining Skytap last year at a company called Chef Software, competes with Puppet, who's here on the show floor. Automation software. And what I saw there in terms of both DevOps adoption, adoption of automation, and the transition to the cloud, is that if you think you can get everybody full sale on the same amount of change at the same time, to do that effectively in a relatively reasonable amount of time, you're going to not only fail, but by failing, you actually set yourself further back than had you taken a more iterative approach. So I think from a time perspective, I think the first answer is you'll never be done so presume that the journey will continue into perpetuity because continuing to gain agility, continuing to get better at delivering software, to deliver value to customers, I don't see an end to that in any sort of near-term in our economy so I think that's gonna go on for a long time. So digital transformation, modernization, whatever buzz word people may want to use, the idea of evolving and changing is an ongoing process. I think, then, business leaders will say, "Well, that's baloney, I need change now. "I want results." I think, start with a project that has a deadline associated with it, alright? We need to be able to deliver our customer banking app online, via mobile, by January. Okay, well, bite that off singularly and so that you focus on that first, you learn from how you do that process, and then you can take those learnings, communicate them, and pick another project and another project. So we recommend kind of an iterative, progressive approach that will put time and measurable goals around a specific project, meet those deadlines, hopefully, if you're successful, and then give you a lot to learn and operate off of the next time. >> That's great. I'm really kind of curious about looking forward and economic models. You know, everything is as a service at this point. You have a lot of traditional providers, the Dells and HPEs of the world who sell a lot of hardware still and sell a lot of things upfront and they, the analysts and everyone else scratching their heads about how they get to sell more services along with that. Skytap's already there. You're selling your cloud provider, you're selling a service, in some ways you're replacing some of the infrastructure or, you know, an adjunct to it. I'm just kind of curious, going forward, I mean, is this the future of cloud? As a service provider, how do you see the economic model of the DNA of Skytap partnering with people? We've ended up talking about process and people more than we've ended up talking about technology today. Which is kind of fascinating. But is that, project us into the future, what do you all see? >> Yeah, I think what we see today with cloud, and the microservices and container model is really the evolution of what was sort of the virtual data center and developing in sort of VMs. And so sort of going a step beyond that, we're seeing the container model grow and as you rightly pointed out, we talked a lot about people and process and I think that sort of was what's holding back a little of the enterprise adoption today and I think as organizations get into this sort of process and mindset, almost and sort of going, "Hey, things are gonna continue to evolve over time "and our organizations need to be "ready to adopt a lot of these." And this isn't just sort of your development level as well as looking at right, well how does your corporate IT teams, how do your security teams and other parts of the business realize this is gonna continue to evolve really quickly? And I think that's what we're gonna continue to see, sort of up front and it's gonna drive a lot of the adoption of the cloud native services and containers but it's gonna take a bit of time for some organizations to get there. >> Yeah, I have a soapbox, I want to stand on it real quickly. I think cloud is the way forward, right? So no one wants to be in the infrastructure business long-term. So I think regardless of what your deployment model will be, most businesses, five, 10, 15, 20 years from now, I don't see them owning a lot of data center real estate, right? So make the infrastructure someone else's problem. Whether that's Skytap, whether that's AWS, whether that's Azure, or, frankly, whether that's all of us, to your multi-cloud statistic, right? We see the same thing. It's much like the data center was today and has been for a long time. Use the right tool for the right job. You've got a mix of technologies so you're not locked in to any single vendor and you're able to fit technology to your business needs so I think, one, we're going cloud and that's gonna be the way it is. I think, two, is open source, right? I mean, that's where containers gained all their momentum where Docker did a fantastic job of really giving a vibrant community of developers an opportunity to do their work much more easy, much easier and much faster. And so I think you'll continue to see open source play a much larger component in how, even very large, long-standing businesses, develop what they're doing. And then you bring those two together, right? You look at, how can the cloud ecosystem best support open source tools to deliver and develop software that's gonna add value at the end of the day. >> Guys, I wish we had more time. Thank you so much for stopping by and sharing with us what Skytap is doing and how you're enabling customers to not just evolve from a technology standpoint but, I think, as we've all talked about here, really, what might even be more important is evolve the people and the processes. So thanks Lucas, thanks Hamish. Thanks for your time. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> We wanna thank you for watching theCUBE. Again, I'm Lisa Martin with John Troyer from DockerCon 2018. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)