(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and I'm talking to you out of our Boston area studio, and we have been doing a CXO leadership series, talking with leaders across the IT industry about how they're managing during this global pandemic. I'm really happy to welcome back to the program, he's a Cube alumni. He was a Racker, and he is now with Stacker. We'll get into the company in a bit, but Prashanth Chandrasekar, the CEO of Stack Overflows, thanks so much for joining. >> Thank you for having me again Stu. Really a pleasure, and always a fan of the Cube, so great to be here. >> Alright, and we note that you sporting the quarantine, you know beard, you know, grown since the last time we had you on the program. Prasthanth, you were named CEO of Stack Overflow at the end of 2019. Obviously, certain plans that you have you're a Harvard Business School alum, you've worked in, you know, the enterprise and cloud communities for a while. Take us back to, you know, what your team has been doing, really to react and lead in this global pandemic. >> Ya, no happy to, Stu, and obviously this is a very, you know, trying time for, you know, just the world in general right. So, companies small and large are having to kind of grapple with the reality, but I would say in general, I started October 1st, 2019 at, you know, at this amazing company, and it's just, been a real joy to see us really adapt very quickly based on just you know, just kind of challenging environment that we're in, and primarily if you think about Stack Overflow, you know, we were blessed that our, you know, our company has an ethos, an ethos perspective. We've been you know, highly remote in nature for years, for over a decade so you know, 80% of our team, product engineering team has been remote. 60% of our marketing team was remote, and then 40% of our company was remote all around the world. So, moving from that 40% to 100%, which we did very proactively in March, early March of 2020, has been a huge boon for our company in just our Stackers as you pointed out, they've just been very, I would say grateful that we've done that very, very quickly. Secondly, I would say the just the notion of, you know, being able to think about our business, and you know, our community, and how do we help each other. We've done a lot, you know, we meet with you know, we come together as a team, you know, three times a week, and we've already had sort of this Covid stand up as a leadership team, as a newly formed leadership team mind you, which I've just helped form over the past six months, and we've all really gone, you know, really to the extremes to make sure that our Stackers are their health and safety are taken care of. How do we serve our community in this environment? How do we make sure our customers are being, you know, really are getting the maximum value of our products, which are all focused on collaboration, so very relevant in this remote world. So, it's really been, I would say, all around, people have really rallied we had sort of a, I would say, somewhat of an advantage just having you know, adopting remote work at this point. >> But Prasthanth, maybe it makes sense if actually step back for a second. I'm sure most people are familiar with Stack Overflow, but give us, the kind of, the high level view of, you know, what the company is, and what drew you into the leadership role there. >> Yeah, no absolutely. You know I think Stack Overflow extremely well known obviously, with every developer and technologist in the world. So, in a nutshell, you know, we are the world's most trusted and largest community for developers and technologists. We have something like 120 million unique visitors that come to our websites every month, and talking 180,000 sign ups on a monthly basis. So, just say we do say a dramatic amount of impact to help ultimately, these folks solve their most complex problems on a variety of topics, whether that is cloud related topics, security related topics, full stack engineering related topics like Python or Rust, or you name it. All those, you know, those areas are covered in very much and very a lot of detail for our community we effectively share. Solutions to common questions, and code, and really be able to accelerate the development of software around the world. So, ultimately, it comes down to our mission, which our mission what we like to say is we help write the script of the future by serving developers and technologists, and so, that's our company in a nutshell. On top of that, ecosystem of communities that we've built. We have a great set of products, SaaS products that we've also built to help with real time collaboration within companies in a very, very similar format to our public community format. So, that's been very compelling. So, the two reasons why I joined the company beyond obviously the mission, number 1 is just the global impact, you know, there are only a few companies that have the level of impact that this company has around the world and helping everybody sort of accelerate their software development. Whatever apps you're building, and obviously we know, that we're sort of in this beautiful, Goldilocks zone of digital transformation, where everything is accelerating, even given the current environment. That's the first reason, just given the vast reach of this company, and then secondly, you know, is the fact that we are really trying to transform the company and accelerate the transformation into a SaaS company. So, our Stack Overflow for teams product, which is again the knowledge sharing SaaS squad that we have internally, is really a phenomenal way to share evergreen knowledge, and non-ephemeral type information within companies so that your most important questions are answered. They're answered once, and your not, you know, constantly having to, you know, tap people on the shoulder to answer a common question. So, those are the two primary reasons. One is the impact to the community, and secondly acceleration of our SaaS business. >> Excellent, Prasthanth. So wonder if you could help us drill in, and understand the business little bit. There's private repository, there's teams there. You know, it's interesting, if you look on the outside you say wait, is this kind of like a Reddit? Or when I hear you describe it, sure reminds me a little bit of say GitHub, who obviously got taken off the table for a rather large number so, I'll let you bring us inside a little bit of you know, how does the company you know, make money, and what are the plans that both, you know, support, you know, those broad communities and diverse things, but also, you know built that business. >> Ya, no absolutely, you know I think for us you know, we really believe it's a common, our mission statement like I mentioned is really our core driver for us, and so the ecosystem of communities that we've built for developers, as well as technologists, again just a very, very vast number, and we create developers right, on a daily basis through our community. So, it's very powerful in that people are learning about new technologies, or frameworks, or you know, cloud technologies through our websites, and so they are you know, that's a bit of a huge accelerant to this creation of jobs, and you know, people's capabilities. On the foundation of that, which is obviously, you know, accessible to everybody, and you know, it's free in fact, we had this ecosystem of products, and the first one in the primary Saas product is Stack Overflow for teams, which is this knowledge sharing and collaboration product that allows companies within, or teams within companies to use the same format that they absolutely love in the public community that they use to, you know, learn up on those subjects that I mentioned, but now share internal priority information to accelerate their development internally. To breakdown walls between teams, like product, and engineering, and developers, and operations, and also go to market teams, like product marketing teams, and sales teams, and so we have you know, a tremendous number of enterprises that have joined our program, over the past several quarters including Microsoft, who is a very happy customer that uses, you know, they have something like 70,000 developers and technologists, and go to market folks within Microsoft that are using our product platform to breakdown walls, and to be able to move very quickly with launching their products, and staying collaborative internally. In addition to that, we have what we call our Reach and Relevance business which is all around helping, just based on the fact that we have such massive reach in 120 million people from around the world showing up on our websites. Being able to help companies you know, showcase their capabilities and products in our platform, and also engage with the community, and for obviously the community to then learn about many of the latest and greatest of what's being launched by these phenomenal companies that are innovating very rapidly. >> Ya, so Prasthanth, we started off the conversation, you talked a little bit about the impact of the global pandemic. I'm curious, are you seeing any, you know, changes in trends? Are there new things that are trending on your site? Are there things that are either on the website, or they're coming to your team to learn more about? >> Ya, no definitely I think there are two places that I can point to. One would be on the community side we've definitely seen a spike in traffic in places like our meta-academia website, you know, as an example. Online learning became a huge topic of interest when people went remote, and obviously, you have families around the world that are trying to figure out not only how to school their kids but we have teachers all around in schools trying to figure out what are the best set of resources. So, we have, you know, all sorts of, like I said, about 40 million questions and answers across all sorts of topics, including you know, next generation E-learning sort of capabilities in our communities, and so, we've seen a spike in traffic in places like that. We've seen a spike in our medical communities, and our biology communities obviously, because of you know, people's curiosity, and these are, you know fairly advanced, you know academics, and people who are in the scientific community that spend a lot of time thinking about, you know the what's really behind Covid-19. What are the details of, you know, if you think about all sorts of topics around genetics, and obviously, the pharmaceutical implications so, we've seen a tremendous uptake in those sites, and in addition of course, overall to our overall websites, because people are spending time, you know, just at home. In addition, we've seen a very material uptake in our Stack Overflow for teams product where we know we just closed, you know our company's like largest deal in our company's history this past week for about 30,000 seats, you know, at a very large financial services institution, a global services financial institution. There's more and more companies that are thinking about business continuity. They're thinking about how do they stay, how do they collaborate across their distributed teams, their remote teams, and we have, obviously a very significant solution in that space. >> Excellent, well congratulations on that deal. It brings up, I guess, what are some of the key KPI's that you're tracking for to really assure the growth and the health of your business. >> Ya, I think both in terms of, you know , if you think about two sides of the coin right. From the community standpoint, obviously we care about our active users, and our engaged users, and the number of sign-ups, and on that front, that first part of that, you know, we've seen just a dramatic increase, you know, in all those stats, including, you know this year, just as a result of Covid, on average last year, in 2019, you know, the number of sign-ups per month was something like, 150,000 sign-ups per month, unique sign ups from around the world. People signing up for Stack Overflow accounts. This year, on average, it's gone up, and March was our highest sign-up month ever with 180,000 sign-ups for the month. So, we're seeing so that's important. In addition to sign-ups of course, when they come on to our websites we want them to get the answers to their most pressing questions, to be able to engage them with content that is useful to them. So, engagement, you know in terms of monthly engaged users very important, monthly active users is very important for us, and obviously our sign-up numbers. So, those are kind of the community oriented stats that we'd, and KPI's that we'd really track, and those look, you know look very promising, and then, finally on the business side, which is the other side of the coin, in our teams business primarily, and our Reach and Relevance business. Our teams business is all about our customers getting value from the collaboration SaaS platform that we have that they've signed up for right. So, are they using the various features? We've integrated that teams product with all the other popular tools that people use for things like real time collaborations. We integrate with Slack. We integrate with Microsoft Teams. We've integrated with, you know Okta. We've integrated with, you know Okta. We've integrated even with Enterprise, because really the idea is to be a part of that developer and technologist workflow so, folks can really look to Stackflow for Teams as the place where they get common answers, get great answers to their common questions that are constantly being asked within companies, but it's not very effective to ask the same questions again and again. So, the idea is to integrate with these tools to make sure that you are able to have an evergreen place where you can keep that knowledge. So, that's, you know we track usage of those integrations. We talk about how many of those questions and answers are being, you know, being exchanged within companies, and how much ultimately the outcome of saving time and money for our clients so that they are being very effective in their product development cycles, and people are not being tapped on the shoulder for every single item that might comes across for an individual company. So, that's really, there's an economic study that we performed with Forrester that captures a lot of this. So that's, you know, that's and then region relevance is all around engagement on our websites. Some people already looking and seeing, finding value in the content that our companies are posting, and force companies to be effectively translating their knowledge to the audience. >> Awesome. Well, Prasthanth congratulations on the progress, and definitely look forward to cracking the how the Stack Overflow Team is doing going forward. >> Thanks so much Stu, really appreciate the chat, and great to see you again as usual. >> Alright, make sure to check out theCUBE.net for all the coverage. I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you for watching. (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music)

>> live from London, England. It's the queue covering a ws summat London twenty nineteen, brought to you by Amazon Web services >> Hello and welcome to the A W s summit here in London's Excel Center. This is the Cube. Is my co host a Dilantin also. Now we're joined by present Chandrasekhar, who is the senior vice president and general manager act rack space and everything. If you're here to talk about really the next generation of cloud services, what are they on? What do you communicating to you? Partners here at the >> conference? Absolutely. Thank you, Susanna and day, for having me back on the show. Big fan of the Cube. Eso No, >> really, I >> think Rackspace next generation Cloud services absolutely foundational to what we do for our customers. And so, you know, ultimately what we're trying to deliver is a utility based model of service is very similar to how Amazon thinks about the cloud and what you know, they were effectively lead over the mass passed many years. So I think that the world we believe the world of traditional I t services of large, monolithic contracts where you got traditional size that are going and working with companies to say, Let us transform you with little transformation and you know, what about so services? I think those days are effectively gone and they're dead. So from our perspective, customers are on this journey from one platform to another. They're moving from traditional workloads through the public cloud. There's that hybrid journey that's underway, and we've talked about how Amazon has, you know, really acknowledged that through its working outposts, etcetera. But the idea is for us to say Listen, customers are in a very bespoke journey. Everyone's in a different journey. Individual journey. Let's feed them exactly where they are in that journey. Whether that's you know, right now moving, uh, traditional I t work loads to the public cloud. So let's go on architect and deploy them and migrate them based on best practices that we've gained from thousands of these engagements. Or, you know, if they're further along and they're actually did need to manage and operate these in a very you know, container centric or Cuban Eddie centric world, we can help them. They're too, or if they're already know several years in and there you see, the costs are getting hard to control because they've got sprawl within the organization. We can help them with cast optimization and governance. And all this is enabled through what we call a service walks model attract space, which really stitches together various of the's no peace part, if you will, of services across the infrastructure, security applications across the whole stack. And so that's the idea. So how would you categorize first? Not the rackspace strategy people remember. Of course. You guys catalyzed in incubated the open stack movement, which was kind of a Hail Mary against eight of us. And then others chimed in. And then you realize that Wow, we're going to step away. Yeah, it was great. Open source project. Amazing on DH. Now you partnering on Amazon? What's the strategy? How would you describe that? Yes. You know, I think if you've learned anything over the past, you know, ten, twenty years and that practice has been around for now, twenty one years, you know that it's an extremely dynamic market and is driven by customers ultimately and their pace of change and so on. So when we started as a company, you know, twenty years ago, we started manage hosting business and services is the foundation element of what we do and support and expertise for customers enabled by technology. And so that really helped us, you know, take us to the first ten years of our journey. And then the cloud movement enabled a lot by Amazon really took off and where it was really a mainstream consideration or an early consideration to say its more mainstream now, obviously. But back then, So we competed with the open stack from the cloud business on. Then, very soon we realised our customers were all also operating in Amazon, and so that really said, Listen, we've always historically said, Lets go where customers want to go and we've always been a services technology serves this company at heart, so it doesn't make a lot of sense for us to do move away from that DNA and that ethos. So it's no different from fasten it, saying, uh at a high level, you know, Windows O. R. Lennox. We can have a very kind of, you know, dogmatic view about one of the other. We just have to say this and what the customers want to work on based on what their various various factors that the take in consideration so no different. Here. Platforms are just platforms, their choices that customers have. And so we started saying, You know what? If customers want help on Amazon, there's still asking us for it. Lets go in partners with Amazon to do exactly that. So that's exactly what we did in twenty fifteen. >> So where do you fit in that value change? How do you help customers and weirdos? Rackspace add unique value. >> Yeah, so I think ultimately, you know there's various elements of value along the way, and I sort of describe the service rocks model is the way in which we really bring it together. So customers are either looking for help to get to the cloud. And they're asking us, You know, what is the best way for me to get there, given my current state. And so there's a deep, you know, assessment that's done from a kind of way, have a lot of expertise, and Laxmi is over a thousand data be a certified experts on certification. So we bring those experts to the customer, talk about you know why they're trying to go. Hey, they're trying to really reduce your meantime to recovery. You're trying to increase your release cycles on a kind of, you know, per you know, a certain rate that's very aggressive operate with the devil's principle and mindset. You know all those things are the object of the customers has and then be then enable them to go and say Okay, given all that here, the workloads we'd would enable you to kind of, like move or to kind of like build from scratch, bring an entire set of services with their infrastructure, security or applications services, start with the value added set of workloads, and then build from that effectively prove the case and then move on. To >> date, the very fact that Amazon websites its growth has bean so rapid. And there are so many new services coming online. You know, every bump that's actually helping you because people need help to navigate. >> Indeed. I mean, that's a that's a phenomenal point. I mean that ultimately, you know, bar the reason why customers in our install base we're reaching out to us and saying, Hey racked with you, done a phenomenal job helping us in our first evolution of our journey. Can you help us now in this new world where it's actually quite complicated? You know, that's sixteen hundred features on average of forty hundred features on average are being launched by Amazon on a yearly basis. And that's just, you know, despite what we hear in the headlines where cloud first companies and us, the startups of today are absolutely leveraging. You know, Lambda out of the gate or containers out of the gate, you know. But there there's a whole host of companies that are going through this massive digital disruption, trying to compete with these startups that >> need >> a lot of help to re skill their workforce, to change the way they think about process within the within their organization, between their business development and technology and operations teams. And then, ultimately, you know, how do they actually build out much more agile? We have respond to customers so that work requires a company like Rackspace to come and help them navigate through that. Really, really, you know, large, you know, set of features. >> I suppose that it's a space that you certainly didn't forsee ten years ago. >> Oh, absolutely, No. That's what's so dynamic about the space where I think that nobody, I think, could have predicted, You know, even today we're seeing this's a ton of kind of like, you know, momentum with concepts that were very nascent only a few years ago. The Cuban Eddie's There's a concept, you know, almost every one of our eight of us customers at Rackspace, what we call fanatical A W s eyes absolutely looking for help on communities. And so, you know, when we think about Doctor A few years ago on Doc Enterprise on, we think about communities and there was that, you know, battle today, you know, the battle has been won Carbonetti XYZ pretty much pretty much the defacto orchestration engine. So nobody could have predicted that a couple years ago tomorrow. Somebody else. Exactly. So it's fascinating, And that's why customers need help navigating. >> You know, all those guys are. The experts carried people through the journey. It's mentioned hybrid before customers want choice. You know, even the Amazon wants everybody to put their data. Their cloud. Yeah, customers sometimes have multi clouds and absolutely as a hybrid. And Marty, I think, >> is a is becoming a lot more. I think even Amazon is very much acknowledging that the big opportunity is high. Isn't hybrid Cloud Because if you think about where we are and the technology adoption curve and the trillion dollars have spent that ultimately going to move, there's no doubt that it's a class for cloud First World. Their destination is the cloud, but the vast majority. The workloads exists in traditional i t. And so how do we take that hybrid moment? You know, and outposts? It's a great acknowledgement of that on. So they're very aggressively investing. We're investing with them and helping our customers along that money effectively. >> Okay, Present for a second. Thank you very much for talking to us from Iraq Space. And my co host, David Lynch has been helping us. Navigator, What's happening here had the A W s Web something. I'm Susanna Street. Thanks for watching the Cube.

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back once again here, to Hall D in the Sands Expo. We're at AWS re:Invent for the third day of our three days of coverage here on theCUBE, of this fantastic show. Justin Warren, John Walls. We're now joined by Prashanth Chandrasekar, who is the SVP and GM of managed public cloud at Rackspace. Prashanth, good to see you this morning. >> Absolutely, thank you for having me. >> You bet, and Ajay Patel who is the SVP and GM of cloud provider services at VMware. Good morning, to you as well >> Glad to be here, good morning. >> Alright, first off, let's just talk about Rackspace, a little bit, if we can Prashanth. You're kind of going through this metamorphosis, right? This transformation of sorts. So kind of get us up to speed a little bit about your journey, about where you've been and where you're going. >> Yeah absolutely, I'd love to. I think Rackspace has been been on a phenomenal journey over the past 20 years. This is our 20th year anniversary as a company. So obviously we've been know historically for our managed hosting DNA and we came from that, a long time ago. But over the years, we very much are very, very focused on customers, just like Amazon is and VMware is and we really thought about, how do we make sure that we're at where our customers want to go. And so we evolved effectively to support the leading technologies in either the public cloud space, like an Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Google, Alibaba or in the private cloud space with VMware and even our own OpenStack Private Cloud deployments, along with our traditional managed hosting business. So over the years, and also with a very, very phenomenal new owner in Apollo, we've been transforming as a company that's truly a next generation IT services company, looking to take enterprises into the future, at their pace by the way, meeting them where they are and really making sure that we bring to bare, really, best of read services, cloud services, to really kind of manage their transition into the cloud and to make the most of that investment. >> Yeah, use that carrot approach, right? Not the-- >> That's right, that's right. >> Bring them along gently which many people need. Alright, so each of you has your expertise. I'm talking about the companies here. But now this partnership, this synergy that you have, it's kind of like peanut butter and chocolate in a way, right? Great combination! Everybody's going to love it! Talk about that partnership and how it's come together and how that's playing out right now. >> Yeah-- >> So from a philosophy perspective, we're both goal aligned, right? We're starting to see this world being a multi-cloud world and more importantly, it's all about the customer on their journey. They're going to have existing assets, existing data centers, for a long time. They're going to need support in terms of the legacy applications but also they replatform, rehost, and modernize the application. And they need a strategic partner, so Rackspace sees the same way. Starting to provide that set of choice and help the customer on their journey, at their own pace, enabled by a common technology platform. And so us as a company, we've also transformed ourself from we're going to be a vSphere-only company, to starting to embrace public clouds. Whether it's VMware cloud on AWS or our recent CloudHealth acquisition, which allows us to start managing native public cloud. So in this journey, we're seeing ourself as peanut butter and chocolate, as you said, working together, hand-in-hand for the benefit of our customers. >> Yeah, I really love that analogy and thank you for it, because in some ways, VMware and Rackspace, are very much, our philosophies are exactly the same in terms of where the customer journey is, but we approach the problem with two different angles. One, we come from it from a technology-services angle, 'cause we're a service company at heart, right? We're fanatical experience and we're known for that, and VMware is obviously a phenomenal, technology platform company. But we both believe in a multi-cloud and a hyper-cloud world where we see that, hey, the journey to the cloud is a very, very, long-standing one. We're in the early innings of this, where customer workloads are actually moving and this is, you can talk about the projections, you're literally probably over a trillion dollars spent over the next decade or so that's going to move >> in the cloud, exactly. >> with this very form factor, so it's a really exciting time and we're really, really aligned with our partners with VMware and of course AWS and the other public cloud partners. >> Yeah so, you mentioned that we are at the beginning. This is just the start of how things are working, So with customers who are looking at this transformation journey and trying to make this decision about, what do I keep onsite, what do I transform, what do I re-platform, what do I just completely replace with something new and let the old one die. How do you help customers make those decisions? >> Yes, absolutely, so this is the heart of what Rackspace is doing for our customers today, right? We are very much a company that's basically taking a very unbiased approach upfront. We're taking about literally, thinking about the planning stage and assessing their workloads, going through an application assessment and doing all the work that's required to understand, you know what, which workloads need to go on each of the public clouds? Which one runs well on Amazon? Which ones actually should be better leveraged on a VMware on AWS sort of scenario and so on, right? So there's a very deep assessment that's done upfront and then we go through the process of architecting and deploying, based on best practices that we've gained from, by the way, thousands of these customers that we've actually moved and then actually managing and operating in these environments, which we've been talking about at Rackspace, that's our DNA, and optimizing those environments, for cost and the greatest and latest of features that any of these providers provide. So that's the journey and the way we do that is, using a true next-generation cloud services set of capabilities which we announced a couple weeks ago in a press release and that includes something with a notion of service blocks, as we call at Rackspace, service blocks where you're literally able to mix and match all the things that I just mentioned along the journey, dependent on where the customer is on their journey. So we could say, let's focus just on architecting, deploying and migrating apps and that's it. That's what the enterprise wants, because they want to enable an internal, focused motion to manage these, and they want to skill up their internal people to do that. Or you might encounter a company that actually wants us to actually manage the whole thing, and that's fine too. And then maybe, by the way, nine months into their experience that they realize that or later down the line, they want us to help 'em with cost optimization or Kubernetes expertise to actually move into the container world. So that whole curve and the transitioning through that process, is our job to make sure, meet the customer where they are and make sure we deliver value very specifically at that point in time, for them, and not be, not put customers into some long-term, monolithic sort of contract. So really being agile around us. >> You know it's funny, it's very interesting, because as you see the complexity has only gone up. It hasn't gone down. That's when you talk about cloud benefits, the amount of services being launched, the complexity of all the different technologies. Rackspace is uniquely set up, they're going to have their VMware expertise and the AWS certified partners, that we can start to bring the value together. So we're excited about kind of mixing and matching and kind of this modular set of services and capability, that you can bring to bare for the customers. So I think, it actually puts us in a unique position in some ways, right? To be that trusted partner as we move on this journey. >> And to put some numbers around that, very specifically, that Ajay said, we have over a thousand, no, eleven hundred Amazon certified certifications at Rackspace. We have probably a very similar number of VMware, right? Over a thousand VMware people that actually service customers and that's all-- >> With Enterprise DNN Enterprise support, right? >> That's correct, that's right, and then ultimately we know that combination of expertise is very material in that scale for our customers to be able to leverage. >> So Ajay, you've got a long history with the Enterprise customers. The people have been using VMware for a long, long, time. What are you seeing from your existing customer base? What kind of technologies are they interested in? What are they moving to? Where is the momentum? >> So, clearly the excitement hype is around containers, Kubernetes, serverless, et cetera. But their bread and butter workloads, are existing applications. They're looking to optimize their data center costs, some trying to eliminate data centers, they're looking to lift and shift entire landscapes of application, move them to cloud. They're looking for expertise, building a center of excellence. Start up a prominent operation model or on a multi-cloud world So they're now starting to hit, what I call, real-world problems, where the experiments are working, they need to now create operational model around it and it's starting to go back to the trusted partners, VMware is a platform provider, Rackspace is a trusted managed services provider. Whether it's up front and design or to help operate. So we're starting to see this maturities coming in place and cost is not really the driver. They're starting to find that public out cost is actually an issue. So cost management too. If you just walk around the shop floor, it's all about cost management, security, visibility. These are all signs of a maturing market. >> And because of that, and you talk about a maturing market, if I'm just now making my entry, alright? I've decided, hey we're running our company, it's time to jump into the public cloud. Is there benefit to us being maybe a bit-- >> A bit more lore? >> more reticent yeah, than others, because there've been other growing pains, you've already kind of, you've found where the wrinkles were and so we will benefit by those past experiences? >> Absolutely, yeah. >> So I'm giving you a chance, I mean talk to somebody who hasn't made that commitment yet, and they're thinking I'm so far behind >> Yes. >> But they're not. >> Yeah, I mean I think this is a spot-on point, right? So when we work with enterprises, what we're really seeing is that, let's say a company has got 10 divisions within the company and you know, generally speaking, you've got maybe a couple divisions that have gone ahead of the pack. They've already done it, because they actually went with the cloud curve. They're leading the world internally. They're being the internal sponsors and the champions for the movement and you've got some laggards along the way as well. So Rackspace, our job is to really bring true up, if you will, the level of capability with the groups that are actually lagging. And also, not to do it in an artificial way, but actually do it on their terms, to say, you know what, you may not be ready for, a containerized world tomorrow. Maybe you actually start leveraging basic, easy to, and that's the way to get started. Which is fewer and fewer number of companies that are not there already, but the ability for you to move along and use advanced services, that's our job, to keep moving them and encouraging them to do it, bu enabling them through our tooling that we built and leveraging through partners like VMware or even on the top of each of the public clouds that we built, proprietary tooling, or through the expertise that we bring up to bat. So that's the combination. >> It's never to late to get started, so for customers who might've just decided that, actually I've decided, yes, it's time to go to cloud, I'm ready. How do they begin? How should they start on this journey? How would they start to engage with you? >> Yeah, I think for us, it's a what we've noticed, is that it's very important to just make sure that you take a success-based and phase-based approach. And so, starting with a place in the organization, where it actually makes a difference, there's a differentiated set of applications that are going to make a difference for the customer that they're trying to serve. Or it could be, listen, they have actually a problem where they have 27 DC's, as a customer that I was talking to yesterday that is about to join us, they're trying to consolidate down to six data centers over the next two years. So how do you go about that problem of doing DC consolidation and how do you figure out which workloads go on which platform, et cetera. So starting with some very specific problems, could be as big as a DC problem, or it could be as specific as, let's go work on this very specific differentiated critical application on the cloud et cetera, and that really creates a mushrooming effect, 'cause you notice the difference it makes in terms of developer productivity, your agility, your ability to deploy coded production multiple times and that just drives, you know, it gains the attention of, what we've seen is, that finally gets the attention of the CIO in the company and then the CIO is like, listen I better get control of this, because in some situations we have hundreds and thousands of Amazon accounts within these organizations, that they ultimately now want governance and visibility, and so that's when it starts creating a more holistic, enterprise-wide strategy around cloud and adoption and one of the various form factors they should use, to actually to keep moving on. So really it's mushrooming with a center of excellence and a sponsor or a line of business that's really starting and that's really where we've seen success. >> You know one other thing I'll add to that is, the guys who are fast followers now, are getting the benefit of hindsight of other partners, as you just said. And couple things I'm starting to see in the market. They're starting to make some strategic bets. They're picking a strategic technology partner from a technology platform perspective. They're looking for a strategic service provider partner, a managed service partner. And they're starting to look at them as trusted partners. The conversations are moving away from being transactional, to more success oriented. Now even Andy talk about that. It's really about outcomes and in this journey, I think you're starting to find the right partners, building the core competency within your organization and finding those sustaining technology platform choices that guide you through this hybrid world. That's what the world went with, the battlefield now is all about hybrid. It's no longer about private or public. Everyone's just, even Amazon finally recognized, the world is a hybrid with their outpost announcement, right? And starting to look at how do I work in this hybrid world and what's the right operating model. So it's a really interesting time to kind of make, say look, the world is going to be public and private, how do I operate in this? >> Cloud all the things >> Makes sense. I do want to say, before we say goodbye, that when Prashanth was talking about laggards, he was really looking at us (all laughing) an awful lot, but I don't know, I don't know what to make of that, but we won't take it too personally >> Might be the beard maybe. >> Thanks for being with us. >> Absolutely. >> Thank you for having us, >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you gentlemen. Back with more from AWS re:Invent. We're live in Las Vegas and you're watching the Cube. (relaxing music)