>> 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)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Live from Washington, DC, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, and its ecosystem partners. (upbeat electronic music) (electronic whooshing) >> Okay, welcome back everyone. Live here in Washington, DC, this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of AWS Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit. This is the reinvent for the global public sector. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, and Stu Miniman is here as well, he'll be coming out. Our next guest is Jeff Valentine, who is the Chief Product Officer at Cloudchecker, a really hot, growing company, innovating with the cloud around security and data management, all kinds of great stuff around compliance. Jeff, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> So we've been following you guys, you guys are at all the reinvents and summits with huge booths, you guys are growing like crazy. You guys cracked the code on using the cloud's scale and really delivering great value properties. And before we get into some of the public sector news and also new things for you guys, what's the core business for Cloudchecker and how are you different, and why are you guys winning? >> Yeah, no that's a great question. You know, businesses that are moving to the cloud have this huge problem, once you get to the cloud, it's probably more expensive than you thought, it's probably less secure than you thought, and you really don't know how to run it like you used to run your own data center. So we solve those problems, that's what a CMP does, a cloud Management Platform. Our system controls costs for government, it actually helps you to hit your budget, for security, we're monitoring continuously for all these weird things that might happen. And, of course, we're making a new announcement today, around compliance. >> Yeah, I mean, the phenomenon that we've seen, this is a pattern, including us, we're on Amazon, we started using it. You don't really know what happened 'til you look at your bill. (laughs) Once you go, oh damn, that's kind of elementary. But as it gets more complicated, new services are coming out, Amazon announces at every reinvent a zillion services. So you got Redshift, you got Stagement, all this new stuff's going on, you got to really manage that in like, a portfolio, you guys do that. >> We do. >> Now, how does that translate to the public sector? 'Cause some companies actually can't translate, and that's something that we looked at for who's successful. If a company can be good in commercial enterprise and also move to the public sector, they've got something going on that's right. The one's that can't, don't. And you guys are doing it, what's the unique public sector pivot or linkage or linchpin for you guys? >> That's a great question, you know, public sector, to us, is a large enterprise and we go to that market the same way we go to other large enterprises, we go through our partners. Sometimes agencies will come to us directly, that's great when they do. Oftentimes they need help from some of our partners around the show floor today. They're going to go to them for the people power and they'll come to Cloudchecker for the software or the automation. >> Jeff, when you said earlier that sometimes you go to the cloud, you're all excited to get in, and then you find out, maybe it's less secure than you thought. Where are the gaps? Help us square the circle, because you hear from, you know, the large cloud providers, cloud's more secure. People like myself actually believe it's probably more secure than what I can do as a small business, but where are the gaps that you're filling? >> Yeah, so here's the issue. It is inherently secure when it's used that way. Now, you've got 3500 developers that are writing code for various agencies, and if one of them forgets to close off a certain setting on, maybe an S3 bucket for Amazon, all of a sudden, somebody can get to that data. Our system is there to be a backstop, so we're automatically checking and alerting when there's a problem like that. >> So you automate that entire process. >> We automate that, we look at the whole thing every second. >> Awesome. >> Tell me about the customers' challenges, migrating to the cloud. How would you summarize the challenges that an agency or a group within the public sector migration challenges? What are the key things that goes through the customer that you guys can talk to directly? >> Sure, I mean, there's really three categories again. On the cost side, they have a budget to hit, and you really can't be over by a penny. It has to be matched up to the penny every single time. So we help them to do that, spend exactly what you're supposed to spend, not a penny more. The next problem they run into, of course, is the security. You need to be able to prove that you're secure, not just think you're secure, but know you're secure all the time. Our software's there to automate it. And then they have to actually prove through an audit process that they're compliant with various federal standards, like NIST 800-53 and others. They have to be compliant in that environment, as well, our software can automate that compliance. >> Tell me about the hard news you guys had. You had a press release that had gone out this morning, you guys had got some news, share the breaking news here on theCUBE. >> Sure, yeah. For years we've always been a security product and a cost product. The third leg of that stool is now total compliance. That total compliance module is free for all our customers, is free for all our current and future customers. But it automatically checks against 37 different compliance standards. So, HIPAA, PCI, all the NIST standards, et cetera, we're giving you a score card and a dashboard, how you're doing, and let's you remediate those problems when you see them. >> And what's the impact of the customer base? >> Well, they literally can't pass their security audits unless they do a lot of work today, to prove that they're in compliance with these standards. Our software now saves them the time to do that. >> So the trend is automation in this. >> It is. >> What's the secret sauce on the product side? Can you share a little bit of the Cloudchecker magic? >> Sure, let me try to describe it this way, Amazon's price list, which is complicated to understand, because there's 100,000 items on it, changes all the time. Nobody really gets that. They add new products, little variations, little instant sizes, little restrictions, little price changes, (chuckles) for every different type of way you can buy it, whether it's a reserved instance or not. And being able then, to unblend those to all your different customers, if you're a service provider and selling it again, you have to go share those costs. And, by the way, you then need to calculate your own margin on top of that. That manipulation of 100,000 things every second, we actually generate terabytes of data per month from each one of our customers and we store it for seven years. That volume, it's a really big data problem, that's our secret sauce, yeah. >> So, talk a little bit about the architecture of your products, 'cause when I think about security, you know, cost management, asset management, governance, even just within those categories, oftentimes, there's like a zillion point products. >> Yeah. >> It sounds like your philosophy is to have a, sort of an all-in-one. Maybe talk about some of the challenges of developing that product and how you're approaching it architecturally? >> Yeah, it starts with being deep on everything that we do. Our cost only product, if you just look at cost, hundreds of functions and reports, very complex product. Take that same level of complexity to security, we have 550 best practice checks, not 10 or 20, Amazon has 80, we have 550. (laughs) Take that now to compliance, not just a few standards, 37 different standards that we automatically monitor for. You have to have the depth in each one of those to be able to do any of them. >> And the depth comes from, obviously you've got to have some domain expertise, but then you've got codify that. >> We do, yeah, I mean, honestly, we started in 2011, so it's a maturity. You can't do it if you just started six months ago, (laughs) you have to build up. >> And how do you charge for the product? >> Our customers pay us on a percentage basis of what it costs them to run in the cloud. So if they're paying Amazon $10, they'll pay us a percentage of $10 to manage that. >> And that will vary by how many functions they turn on? Or, like for instance, the announcements that you had today, do I have to pay more for that or is that included in the cost? Maybe explain that. >> No, it's all included. Our philosophy has been, we don't want to nickel and dime our customers, they expect great value from our product. I have to keep adding value every day to keep them excited, so I'm going to continue to develop that product. It's never done, it's an ongoing process and we're going to keep adding free features to the product. >> So you have a solution, basically they win, you win. >> That's right, we get a percentage of all of cloud. I mean, Gartner says cloud's growing at 40%, yeah, we're growing it much faster, because our partners are growing and they're getting new customers that are growing and you get this compounding effect. >> Dave and I was talking about software economics, and then you add to that the cloud, it's amazing. Alright, I want to get into one last area before you go. You guys are an advanced technology partner of AWS. What does that mean? Obviously you bring a lot to the table with the product, you went into detail on that. What is being an advanced technology partner mean for agencies and potentially customers that are looking to work with you guys? >> Sure, now, being a technology partner of Amazon means that we have security and governments competencies, so we're experts in what we do. It means that we have staff that is certified on Amazon, we have top-secret clearance staff, we have partnerships with top-secret cleared agencies that work with us. Our software uniquely runs, not only in commercial, it runs on GovCloud and it runs on the IC region, the secret region, Amazon calls it, that's completely air-gapped from the rest of the world. That C2S marketplace is something that we do get a lot of business from. It's funny, Amazon can't tell us who the customer is, like, we get anonymized data, but they're using us. (laughter) We get the checks in the mail. >> You're doing the Cloudchecker thing. >> We're doing the Cloudchecker. But it's part of our business model to be able to serve, by being experts at Amazon. >> Last question, if I may, you know, the big talk about multi-cloud and, you know, different types of cloud. What are you seeing as the trend there and how does Cloudchecker, you know, help customers? >> Sure, I think today there's a competition amongst the cloud providers for the same workloads. I don't think that's going to be there in the future, I think cloud providers are going to specialize in certain areas. You're going to have some generalists that can do everything, like Amazon, I think there are going to be some that are better suited to working only in certain regions or only with certain functions. If you just wanted to do realtime video processing for theCUBE, there's other ways that you might look at doing that. In the future, a combination of best of breed for multi-cloud providers, needs a central management platform, and that's where we're enacting into it. >> That's an interesting dynamic, I totally like that approach on that observation. But also, I want to ask you, with respect to partnering, 'cause if you believe that to be true, which I think it's true, more providers are going to come into the space specialized, but also, they're going to look like service providers and professional services. We saw REAN Cloud being very successful, although they got cut back on that contract on the DOD, a new kind of system integratives are emerging. >> That's right. >> How do you talk about that, and what is happening with that model? 'Cause you can automate it. >> We can. >> And it kind of takes away the labor piece. How is the SI market changing? >> No, that's a good question. Most of the SIs with Amazon are our customers, so they all use our software. They'll put there logo on it, but they end up, you know, using our software to help them complete projects. When you end up competing for a project amongst other SIs, they're all competing for the same business, right? So, when you can go in with an automation solution that cuts your costs and maintains your margin, you're going to win that business more often. So they need to bring in automation to be competitive against the others that are doing it. >> And also speed of deployment's another factor, scale. >> I think that's right. >> How is that changing the game? >> No, it's totally true. We're going from, you know, state of local workloads to federal workloads and this JEDI program. You're going to start to see massive movements from data centers to the cloud. That's going to take time, but it requires both people and technology, we're the technology piece of that. >> It's not going to be years, it's going to be weeks. >> (laughs) That's true. >> Jeff, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Cloudchecker, check them out, great company, advanced technology partner with Amazon Web Services. Here on theCUBE, talking about public sector, this is theCUBE, here in Washington, DC, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, stay with us for more live coverage, we'll be right back. (upbeat electronic music)