from the computer museum in the heart of Silicon Valley extracting the signal from the noise it's the cube cover you openstack Silicon Valley 2015 brought to you by marantis now your host Jeff prick hey welcome back everybody I'm Jeff Rick you're watching the cube we are live at OpenStack Silicon Valley 2015 at the computer history museum in Mountain View California really excited to be out here the second year the event second year the cubes been here we go in two days wall-to-wall coverage is a lot of vibe around OpenStack a lot of vibe around cloud right now we have vmworld happening next week we were to OpenStack Seattle in Linux closed last week so it's all about cloud right now so we're really excited for our next guest kind of a relatively new startup Madeira miskovsky from platform 9 vp of product and co-founder so welcome thanks so for the people that aren't familiar with platform 9 wanna get kind of an overview of what you guys are up to absolutely so fat online is a startup that came out of VMware so we're part of the V mafia that's happening in the cell quality mafia there's quite a few of them and they're very helpful as well so it's a it's a good community good but so what platform i does is we are in a nutshell our mission is to make private clouds at any scale for organizations of any size extremely out of the box and intuitive and simple right in in order to do that we have a very unique approach or model that on OpenStack so we package OpenStack and deliver it as a web service so that's that's in somebody or platform mind us so you're delivering OpenStack as a web service that's interesting a lot of the early OpenStack players we've been talking over the over the day you know have been acquired by emc and HP and an IBM etc so now there's kind of this next-gen of startups really approaching OpenStack in a new way not necessarily kind of the fundamental poor at the bottom but new deployment methodologies new ways to consume it so that's a pretty interesting innovation and how are you finding the market uptake for that you know it's um it's fantastic to be in the space at this time we think the timing is perfect um because if you look at the OpenStack mind shell in the small to medium to large enterprises it's kind of reached at a point now where our buyers right RIT and applies directors or administrators or end users understand the value proposition that OpenStack provides so it's no longer a question about what is OpenStack and why should I care they've gone way past that right more about okay I understand the value proposition and I know open sources the future OpenStack is going to be powering clouds from now onwards and how do i align myself with it what is my OpenStack strategy and that's really where we come into picture and we can highlight what some of our unique differentiators in value adds on right and just coming from VMware just having built vCloud director and having work with enterprise customers um that gives us I think a little bit of an edge because we understand very well what some of the pain points of enterprise customers are in terms of building a private cloud and running it right right and how different is it working with an open source technology at the core and open source framework at the core yeah rather than building something on you know something that was designed inspected built in-house yeah it's a it's a very interesting experience having come from a company that builds proprietary software but one that has been just phenomenally popular it has powered private clouds of the entire world for for almost a decade I'm coming from that wall to the open source world is definitely a shift um there's a shift not only in terms of how the you know how you look at the technology um there is also shift in terms of how as a company you want to market and present yourself it's really all about community right open source is all about community OpenStack is about that so it's about openness and that's a really important part of our culture as well so you see that not only in the product we build but in terms of the blog posts we're I the support articles that we ride and the culture we have within our team as well right and then clearly you know vmware's got a huge engaged community to will be at vmworld next year I don't even know how many tens of thousands of people will be there but it's slightly different really it's kind of an ecosystem built around it versus everybody really contributing to the core and and then like you say so how do you manage being really active in open-source first building the stuff that that makes platform 9 platform 9 I always find that it's kind of an interesting management challenge for somebody managing engineering managing resources well how do you decide what that next unit of work needs to be for that engineer because clearly there's a lot of benefits to contributing back to the open source people get a lot of personal kind of pride and recognition within the community which is very important in open source so how do you kind of balance you know working for OpenStack versus working for platform 9 yeah no that's the way a good question and I think that's that's the key part of what a product person needs to play in terms of the role right because you have to not lose track not lose sight of the fact that you are part of this open-source community right OpenStack is part of our bread and butter right now so an OpenStack is all about openness right so so what's important to us is not necessarily that we create a proprietary modified version of OpenStack right that we offer to our customers we're not in business to do that we're here to make all the goodness of OpenStack in its entirety and purity so we're here to make the coil open-source OpenStack available to enterprises in a production-ready way right so our focus is really on simplified consumption of OpenStack that's been one of the biggest pain points right OpenStack right which is this is this wonderful powerful software which has so many knobs and you know different different options that you can tweak to make it work for your your environment but you really need to know how to do it and many times that manual is missing right which tends to be the challenge right so we're here to provide those really simplified recipes to our end users and in kind of hand hold them and say think of us as an extension of your ops team so let us do the hard work of getting your openstack cloud getting it up and running and then managing it on an ongoing basis or you focus on just consuming it and that's really the balance that we draw a bit and at the same time kind of going back to your point we are we're really passionate about making OpenStack better right improving it and so that community aspect is part of our team we're part of OpenStack OpenStack summits that the Vancouver one the one in Japan we're also taking initiatives and contributing back to the community on the vmware driver forint on the dr front that subclass so lots of that is also happening simultaneously yeah that's it's great so let's shift gears a little bit back to the company so um you've raised some money so you just raised around so congratulations thank you can you tell us who who's leading that round yeah your bench partners definitely so we taste our cities around with point munchers they've just been fantastic mentors and partners to have and to work with they were the previous funders of cloud stock as well um and then use your partner at the satish dharmarajan Scott rainy a great point and they've just both been a fantastic baby think of them as part of our team so good we love them and then four cities B which we just recently made that announcement and we were fortunate to have menlo ventures backing us funding us mark segal is a partner there um who's part of our board now and again that you know they are there also from a little with the V mafia you know we have our friends from put Nick's data and other companies right you know they're backing some of the same people right so really really excited about the new new team it is exciting like I said I think I view from here you know sitting is kind of this next wave of startups that are kind of attacking the next wave of problems um with the OpenStack deployment and you know you mentioned that often the manual is missing also the people are often missing here I think every single person here at the end of their keynote gave a little plug come work for us even though that's the AT&T DirecTV guys so so what's kind of your next challenge what can we look forward to from platform 9 next week at vm at the vmworld and and over the next six months yeah so you know what why we announced our funding we also made announcement that we are officially in GA with our vmware vsphere support and that was really a key announcement for us right we think it's a key enabler I'm not only from the perspective that if you think of the virtualization market in total and the percentage that's that's covered by VMware customers customers were on virtualization using VMware software it's humongous right silver it really gives us the opportunity to tap into that market and we don't really see OpenStack as an either/or when it comes to VMware many times it's presented that way but we don't see that at all partly also because we come from VMware right so we understand the power of that platform in what we believe strongly is that OpenStack only makes that platform a lot more easier to consume and automate right in a more next-generation cloud centric way so that's really what we are here to enable all right so next week you'll see us talking a lot more about how do we natively integrate with VMware and really make that stack you know consumable as an openstack cloud so from a vm with end users perspective he doesn't have to change a thing and that's a huge value proposition that we are making which is take what you have today including the workloads that you have and kind of magically transform them into an openstack cloud so in that instance is so customers already running vmware right they want to deploy OpenStack for a different application set for a particular reason is that kind of the use case that's got that's right and then different use cases also come into picture right cuz it's not really rip and replace I mean if you got a bunch of VMware infrastructure and things are running you know you don't necessarily look in the rip and replace it only not it yeah and that start of you doesn't work well either right right i am getting from vm would use to say beyond words technologies the most disruptive non-disruptive technology stopped in what it does but non-disruptive and how the things customer gets use it and we have the exact same philosophy right but it's but to your point there's different workloads that the penny it's really where it still goes back to this workload specific kind of driver based on the workload what's the application what are they trying to do you know then that should really drive the deployment but from that that's really from an Operations perspective from the from the actual app development perspective I don't really care and don't necessarily want to care right it should just work that's right that's exactly right it's the use cases that really are the most important question right that the end-users ask as well right which is we have this vSphere infrastructure which we really don't want to get get rid of at the same time we as an IT team are tired of having to constantly respond to our developers needs we are tickets and you know the usual delays in classes so we really want something about more agile and that's really what OpenStack enables right through OpenStack heat orchestration through just the simple self service access that's what we are here to enable awesome open door thanks for stopping by the cube I wish you the best and probably see you next week thank you ms county center alright thanks for stopping by i'm jeff Rick you're watching the cube we are live at OpenStack Simon Silicon Valley 2015 will be back with our next segment after this short break you