>> Announcer: Live from Washington, DC, it's CUBEConversations with John Furrier. (techy music playing) >> Welcome back everyone, here to a special CUBEConversation in Washington, DC. We're actually in Arlington, Virginia, at Amazon Web Services Public Sector Headquarters. We're here with Sri Vasireddy, who is with REAN Cloud and recently won a big award for $950 million for the Department of Defense contract to partner with Amazon Web Services, really kind of changing the game in the cloud space with Amazon, among other partners. Thanks for joining me today. >> Thank you. >> So, obviously we love cloud. I mean, we actually, we have all of our stuff in Amazon, so we're kind of a little bit biased, but we're open minded to any cloud that we don't provision any infrastructure, so we love the idea of horizontally disrupting markets. We're just kind of doing it on a media business. You're taking an approach with REAN Cloud that's different. What's different about what you guys are doing and why are you winning so much? >> Yeah, I mean, I guess that is, you know, the key word being disruption. You know, I'm hearing more and more as this news spreads out about why, you know, we've disrupted, so they're proven the disruption, and when I mean disruption, you know, I'll explain what the disruption, you know, we're creating in the service industry is if you take a typical, like a services company-- >> John: Mm-hm. >> They integrate products using people to integrate products to solve a problem, but in the cloud world you can create those integrations with programmatic or APIs, so we can create turnkey solutions. With that, what we're able to do is really sell outcome based. We go to the customer and say it's not time and material, it's not fixed price, it's pure outcome based. So, to give you an example, let's say if you went to a theme park and while you're on a ride somebody just takes a picture, and then after you're done with the ride they put a picture in front of you and say, "Do you want to buy this?" And if you don't buy it they throw it away, so we literally have the ability to create those outcomes on the fly like that, and that's the disruption because that kind of outcome based allows customers to meet their goals much quicker. So, one of the secrets to do that, if I can get this right, is you have to have a really software driven, data driven environment. >> Sri: Absolutely. >> So, that's fundamental, so I want to explore how you do that, and then what does it mean for the customers because what you're essentially doing is kind of giving a little predictive solution management to them. Say you want to connect to this service-- >> Sri: Yeah. >> Is that microservices, is this where it's going to be wired, take us through how that works, because there's tech involved. I'm not saying you don't want to throw anything away, but if it's digital (chuckling) what does it mean to turn it on or off, so is this what people are referring to with microservices and cloud? >> Yeah, so I'll get to the microservices part. The disruption, the way, you know... The innovation that we created is if you take 20 years ago, when you look at people transforming to the internet, right, so their first time they're going on the internet, at the time they were paying a HTML developer that would develop a webpage. >> Mm-hm. >> You know, hundreds of dollars an hour, right, and today high school kids can create their own webpages. That's the outcome focus, because the technology matured to a point where it auto-generates those HTML pages. So, fast forward 20 years, today people are looking for devops engineer as a talent, and whatever that devops engineer produces, we've figured out a way to outcome base. We can drag and drop and create my architectures and we are to produce that code, right. That's what makes us very unique. Now, coming to your question about microservices, when we are going to large customers we're taking this phased approach, right. First they will do lift and shift based-- >> John: Mm-hm. >> Move to cloud, which actually doesn't even give them a lot of their features. It doesn't give them better response. It doesn't optimize for cloud and give the benefits. Say they put in the effort to apply devops to become very responsive to customers. Say if I'm a bank I have my checking business and savings business, and each line of business got very efficient by using cloud, but they have not disrupted an industry because they have not created a platform across lines of business. >> John: Mm-hm. >> Right, so what they really need to do is to take these services they are providing across lines of business and create a platform of microservices. >> So, you basically provide an automation layer for things that are automated, but you allow glue to bring them together. >> Absolutely. >> That then kicks off microservices on top of it. >> Absolutely, right. >> So, very innovative, so you essentially, it's devops in a box. (laughing) >> That's it and what-- >> Or in the cloud. >> Yeah, what normally takes three years, so most of our customers when they tell this story they tell us, "Oh, that's five years down the road." So, we knock out three years off the mark, right. There are companies that, for example, DOD is one of our customers. >> Mm-hm. >> There are some other companies that have been working with DOD for the last two, three years and they have not been able to accomplish what we accomplished in three months. >> You guys see a more holistic approach. I can imagine just you basically break it down, automate it, put it in a library, use the overlay to drag and drop. >> Exactly, plug and play and that's it. >> So, question for you, so this makes sense in hardened environments like DOD, probably locked and solid, pretty solid but what about unknown, new processes. How do you guys look at that, do you take them as they come or use AI, so if you have unknown processes that can morph out of this, how do you deal with that use case? >> So, yeah, those unfortunately, you know, so what... There's this notion of co-creation-- >> John: Yeah. >> So, there's unknown processes where we put out best engineers is what drives to this commoditization or legos that-- >> So, you're always feeding the system with new, if you will, recipes. I use that word as more of a chef thing, but you know, more-- >> Sri: Exactly. >> Modules, if you will. >> Sri: Yeah. >> As a bit of an automated way, so it's really push button cloud. >> Absolutely. >> So, no integration, you don't have to hire coders to do anything. >> No. >> At best hit a rest API-- >> Sri: Yeah. >> Or initiate a microservice. >> Yeah, so what, I mean, the company started with Amazon.com as a, sorry Amazon Web Services as our first customer, and they retained us for software companies like Microsoft, SAP, and they went to Amazon and said, "We want to create a turnkey solution," like email as a solution, for example, for Microsoft, exchanging software. Email as a solution is spam filters plus, you know, four or five other things that we have to click button and launch, and Amazon, then we were servicing Amazon to create these turnkey solutions. >> So, talk about the DOD deal, because now this is interesting because I can see how they could like this. What does it mean for the customer, your customer, in this case the DOD, when you won this new contract was announced a couple days ago, how'd that go down? >> Yeah, so you know, I think we're super happy. Actually, again, 2010-- >> All your friends calling you and saying, "Hey, that $950 million check clear yet?" (laughing) That doesn't work that way, does it? >> It doesn't, it doesn't quite work that way, but although, you know, just some history, 10 years ago I had to choose between joining as a lead cloud architect for DISA versus first architect for Amazon Web Services, and I made the choice to go to Amazon Web Services, although I really loved servicing DOD because I think DOD's very mature in what you're calling microservices. >> John: Mm-hm. Back in the day, they had to be on the forefront of net-centric enterprise services, modern day microservices, because the Information Sharing Act required them to create so many services across the department, right, but there wasn't a technology like Amazon Web Services to make them so successful. >> John: Yeah. >> So, we're coming back now and we're able to do this, and I was with a company called MITRE at the time-- >> John: Yeah. >> And we, you know, I was the lead on the first infrastructure as a service BPA. If I compare to what that infrastructure as a service BPA was, the blanket purchase agreement, to what this OTA I think it's a night and day difference. >> What's OTA? >> OTA stands for other transaction agreements. >> Okay, got it. >> Which is how-- >> It's a contract thing. >> It's a contract thing, it's outside of federal acquisition regulation. >> Okay, got it. >> Which is beautiful, by the way, because unlike if you are doing such a deal, $950 million deal, probably companies that spend millions of dollars to write paper to win the deal, OTA's a little different. DIUx, who has the charter for the OTA, they need to find a real customer and a real problem to bring commercial entities and the commercial innovation to solve a theory problem, and then we have to prove ourselves. Thereabout, I'm told 29 companies competed and we, you know, we won the first phase, but there were two consequent phases where we have to provide our services, our platform, to the customer's satisfaction, and the OTA can only be the services we already provide. So, it's a very proven technology. >> John: Mm-hm. >> And as I see some of the social media responses, I look at those responses that people are talking about, you know, small companies winning this big deal and somebody was responding like, okay, we spent, you know, hundreds of millions on large companies, did nothing, and this small company already did a lot with $6 million. >> Well, that's the flattening of the world we're living in. You're doing with devops, you've automated away a lot of their inefficiencies. >> Absolutely, yeah. >> And this is really what cloud's about. That's the promise that you're getting to the DOD. >> Sri: Yeah, absolutely. >> So, the question for you is, okay, now as you go into this, and they could've added another $50 million just to get a nice billion dollar, get a unicorn feature in there, but congratulations. >> Sri: Thank you. >> You got to go in and automate. How do you roll this out, how big is the company, what are your plans, are you... Where do you go from here? >> Our company today is, you know, about 300 plus people, but we're not rolling this out on a people basis, obviously, right. You know, usually we have at least 10x more productivity than a normal company because especially servicing someone like DOD, it's very interesting because they do follow standards set by DISA. >> Mm-hm. >> So, what that means is if I'm building applications or microservices, which is a collection of instances, I have, DISA has something called STIG. You know, it's security guidelines, so everybody is using these STIG components. Now we create this drag and drop package of those components, and at that point it's variations of, you know, those components that you drag and drop and create, right, and the best thing is you get very consistent quality, secure, you know, deployment. >> I mean, you and I are on the same page on this whole devops valuation, and certainly Mark and Teresa wrote that seminal common about the 10x engineer. >> Sri: Yeah. >> This is really the scale we're talking about here. >> Sri: Absolutely. >> You know, so for the folks that don't get this, how do you explain to them that they, like what Oracle and IBM and the other guys are trying to do there. All the old processes are like they got stacks of binders of paper, they have their strategies to go win the deals, and then they're scratching their heads saying, "Why didn't we win?" What are they missing, what are the competitors that failed in the bid, what are they missing with cloud in your opinion? Is it the architecture, is it the automation, is it the microservices, or are they just missing the boat on the sales motion? >> Yeah, I think the biggest thing that people need to know is being on their toes. When Andy talks about being on the toes, when companies like Amazon at scale being on their toes, which means gone are those days where you can have roadmaps that you plan year, you know, year from now and you know, you do it, you're away from the customer by then, right, but if you're constantly focusing on the customer and innovating every day, right, we have a vision and a backlog. We don't have a roadmap, right. What we work on is what our next customer needs. >> John: Mm-hm. >> Right, and you're constantly servicing customers and you have stories to tell about customers being successful. >> What's your backlog look like? (laughing) >> Backlog could be a zillion things. Like what-- >> Features. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Feature requests or just whatever the customer might need. >> Feature requests, user stories, really understanding the why part of it. We try to emphasize the why of, you know, why you're doing and whose pain are you solving type of things, but the important thing is, you know, are we focusing on what matters to the customer next. >> How hard is multi-cloud to do, because if you take devops and you have this abstraction layer that you're providing on top of elastic resources, like say Amazon Web Services, when you start taking multi-cloud, isn't that just an API call or does it kind of change because you have, Amazon's got S3 and EC2 and a variety of other services, Azure and Google have their own file system. How hard is it code-based-wise to do what you're doing across multiple clouds? >> It's not at all difficult because every cloud has their infrastructure as code language, just like I talked about, you know, HTML to be generated to get a webpage. We use a technology called Terraform-- >> Mm-hm. >> That is inherently multi-cloud, so when we generate that cord I could change the provider and make it, you know, another cloud, right. >> Just a whole nother language conversion. >> Sri: A whole nother language, yes, exactly. >> So, you guys, do you have to do that heavy lifting upfront? >> Again, we don't, and it so happened that it will look at our platform that automates all these-- >> Yeah. >> The Amazon part of it grew so much because of what I just said. Like, the customer demand, even the enterprise customers that do have a multi-cloud strategy-- >> Mm-hm. >> You know, they end up more of what is good. >> Yeah. >> Sri: Right, so we end up building more of what is good. >> So, the lesson is, besides be on your toes, which I would agree with Andy on that one, is to be devops, automate, connect via APIs. >> Yeah. >> Anything else you would add to that? >> Devops is a, it's a principle of being very agile, experimenting in small batches, being very responsive to customers, right. It is all principles that, you know, that we embody and just call it devops, it's a culture. >> Managing partner of REAN Cloud. Sri, thanks so much for coming in. Congratulations on your $950 million, this close to a billion, almost, and congratulations on your success. Infrastructures, code, devops, going to the next level is all about automation and really making things connect and easily driven by software and data. It's theCUBE bringing you the data here in Washington, DC, here in Arlington, Virginia, AWS's Public Sector World Headquarters. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (techy music playing)