>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2017 presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman here with my cohost, Justin Warren, and you are watching theCUBE SiliconANGLE Media's live production of AWS re:Invent 2017. Happy to welcome back to the program, Rishi Yadav, who is the CEO of Zettabytes, and Bart Hickenlooper, who is the SAP of client services. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you, Stu. >> So Rishi, yesterday you on the other set with John Furrier and with Justin, and we were really excited to really launch Zettabytes, help you bring the company out. We've known Infoobjects and your company for a while, so of course we want people to go check out the other interview, but in today's hybrid multi-cloud world, we've seen Amazon kind of slowly moderating a little bit the way they discuss it, but why don't you bring us inside a little bit? What are you hearing from customers, and what kind of led to the creation of Zettabytes? >> What we are hearing from customers is that there is a lot of talk about the cloud and AWS. The challenges that what I discussed yesterday also was that how do I take those baby steps toward our option of the cloud? That is where the challenge comes. On one side and they say everything on prem is bad. Everything on cloud is good. Those kind of statements are okay, but somebody who has got billions of dollars of business running, for them it doesn't make any sense. They want to have logical steps, and they also want to have, with every step, what value they are adding. >> We always hear, right, we always take in and it's like all in on any one thing. Oh come on, you are using various SAS providers. You probably have multiple cloud providers. Yes, you've still got something sitting in the backend of your data center, where many things, and that migration takes time. What kind of strategy and tactics do you hear customers doing that gets Zettabyte engaged? >> What was in most enterprises is an effort to really modernize their applications. They want to make those so that they are cloud native leveraging the innovation that's taking place in the cloud. That application modernization is really what's driving an enterprise to do some things and move quickly to the cloud. It's no longer the economics of moving to the cloud, but that innovation engine that can be really egnited with those technologies. Getting there from their legacy platforms is a little tricky. They need a development cycle that works in a hybrid fashion to really go cloud native with those applications. >> When they're starting off on that journey, where do you find customers starting with? What are the applications that they do first, and what are the functions that they use from AWS, like are they going with just EC2 type things? Are they using S3 for storage? What do they start with? >> That's a good point that for the first phase of the cloud out option most of the work was on IES. Whatever you have on prem, you just put that on the cloud then obviously you go through your storage and things like that. That is where there was a lot of talk. If you remember a few years back, everybody was saying, "The cloud is not cheap, "the cloud is costly," and as Bart said, it's not about economics. Has always about convenience. It's always about the value-added, and especially when enterprises started getting into the cloud, started the all opt in cloud a few years back, that's where those things became very important because that is what they wanted. You just cannot save someone 20% in investiture cost and that may not even come and that it's worth the option of the cloud. >> We were talking yesterday about the 100 services, the number of services that you as an orginzation have to wrap your brain around and one of the things that Zettabytes helps with that is to give you some focus so again, what are the things that Zettabytes is focusing on that they find that customers actually really, really want from cloud. Amazon is so huge. Making sense of the whole thing is quite tricky. When you talk about application modernization, if you have a monolithic application, EC2 and S3 are great. If you are going to migrate it, you can do that. What we are seeing is really a switch to DevOps for application development, microservices development that leverage certain platform services from Amazon that are specific to enable an application, and those are things like Lambda, Kinesis, Elasticsearch, and you can write microservices that consume those services in addition to your traditional storage and compute, and really get cloud native. We've selected those services on our platform to help with that application modernization and really enable a customer to make applications with microservices enablement. >> WikiBon has been looking at many years really. What has happened with this transformation of the data center. The research that we put out a few years ago is what we call true private cloud because like you said, what was happening the virtualization plus. I love virtualization. I spent 15 years on that wave, but it wasn't enough, and even when we started simplifying with even some automation on there, that application journey, and how do we get ready for modern applications? I worked a lot on the HCI wave. It was, "Let's modernize our infrastructure, "and then we will worry about that application stuff later, "and maybe it's not a fit." What is different now? What are the toolings available? Why is now, can I put that stuff, I mean, the cloud native, isn't it? That should all live in a public cloud, no? What cannot live in many places? >> I think that's a great point. Three pieces of the puzzle, infrastructure, data, and the applications so there has been a lot of talk about infrastructure and not having infrastructure. Data, every other company in the Bay Area is a backup and restore company. Nobody is talking about applications. Yes, they are SAS players, right? We are like, okay, we will just host an application for you and you don't have to worry about anything else, but what about a lot of these legacy applications which have been built over the last 20 or 30 years? Nobody is talking about that. Everybody talks about greenfield applications. What about we start new? Everything is going to be the cloud. Is going to be cloud native. Everything is awesome, and then the clients say, "Yes "but I already invested $5 million in the applications "in the last 10 years." What's going to happen to them? >> To say that the first 80% of writing software is putting the bugs in, and then the second 80% of writing software is taking them out again, so if you have to completely start with these core business applications that are generating revenue, there's a lot of risk there in going to something brand-new. I know we've had Andy Jassy talking about if I was starting the company again today, I would go completely all serverless. And I think, really? Right now in 2017? Is it really that established and that great? What is your take on that? For an enterprise that have this investment already, should they be going completely all into serverless, or should they be picking off some of these other more mature services do you think? >> I would say it would be really application-specific. If it's traditional transactional, you may or may not want to go serverless because you've got that relational database really kind of structured around it. If it's a modern application and you are a company that has, for example, a brand-new mobile application, then you are going to want to leverage things like Lambda in those application development so you can trigger the correct service to spin up in that application. I think modernization is really specific to the use case. What we are seeing is a digital transformation in most companies where they are really requiring some newer applications to leverage past services like Lambda, Elasticsearch, Kinesis, and other things. >> Rishi, one of the things that we've heard from customers for many years is they so that they'd like to have the same in their data center as in the public cloud. We did a survey years ago and everybody, it was like 80% said that then said, "What do you have?" I've got VMware here and I've got an AWS there. Is it about having the whole stack? Are APIs enough? How much commonality do you need? How does Zettabytes look at this And had to help customers bridge this model? >> Yes absolutely, so number one is that the VMware type of solution is still pretty much, I like VMware but it's pretty much infrastructure as a service base. The second thing is the reason we have come up with our platform is that few core services and for few key workloads, IOT is being one of them, low intensive uploads being another of them, the workloads in which you need special type of security and governance which clients are used to from the last 20 years. Yes, AWS have amazing security and governance, no doubt about that, but still, part of the workload they may want to run locally, and they should at least have that freedom. Only those part of workloads are going to be run on Zettabytes plans, but the API compatibility will provide complete, so whether you want to run it on Zettabytes or on AWS, most of the workloads are going to work on AWS, and that you can run from our platform. >> I want to keep off the word you mentioned there. You mentioned appliances. We have seen lots of solutions over the last decade. You have done quite well as appliances. Talk about the HCI, talk about the backup recovery, lots of things there, but it's a software world now. Hex serverless, Andy Jassy says we will build serverless. Why an appliance? Talk a little bit about the go to market. What do people get today? How do they buy it? Why does that make sense for your customers? >> Yes absolutely, a value added more from the sales perspective but appliance, from the optimization perspective is perfect. In our case, yes, we have figured out a spec which is perfect perfectly optimized for tuning our software platform and we can provide to the clients. If they want to have a similar stack built themselves that is perfectly okay, but the idea is that hardware has an equally important role to play as software has. >> When you think about the platform services that we have like S3, RDS, and others, you definitely need hardware to support a real workload and for us to really standardize on something that someone can do, true development with that depth on the platform is really critical. You can go to GitHub and get open source S3 and work around it, but it's a mock. Really what you need is a platform to develop application, and the other thing is I worked for Cisco for 10 years, and the channel there is extremely powerful with companies like CDW, WWT, the routes to market there is really compelling for combined solution and I think part of the reason you are seeing success with those combined solutions is the customers are used to a service model where it's one throat to choke on those types of platforms, and the channel is a trusted advisor. It's a great way for us to go to market. >> Yeah, to just give my two cents on that, people conflate that we've had some commoditization of what's happening in infrastructure. It doesn't mean just grab stuff off of the shelf. I read an article 4 years ago. AWS infrastructure is hyper optimized. If you went to the Tuesday night's keynote, oh my gosh, they spent way more on hardware than anybody else in this ecosystem, I'm sure, and spent more as much, so it's not that you have IP in hardware. From my understanding it you are making sure you've got, your software is natural to package. If I can do it, somebody else can do it. >> Bart: Yeah, go ahead. >> Absolutely, I think that part is very, very important that one throat to choke, one company which supports everything. In our case, yes, if you want to have your own hardware, then you can do that, but in our case, if you take the whole appliance from us, that we are providing you complete support. Hardware, operating system, as well as the software. >> And in a certain sense, we are really trying to, l like you said, Stu, match the performance of those optimized environments on AWS for our clients so they get a similar experience from our platform that they would get on AWS. If they build something on Zettabytes and then deploy on AWS, they should get the same experience. >> I want to give you the last word. I'm sure you have lots of customers coming by our booth. It's not far from where you're sitting right now. What are some of the key things they are hearing? What is getting them excited, interested in, that they want to follow up with? >> I think most of the customers we've talked to we say, "Okay, are you using AWS?" they say, "Yes," because they are at re:Invent. I say, "Okay, how far you are in the AWS option?" that's where the devil comes in the details. These applications we have been able to migrate, these we have not been able to migrate. We are building our exponents around it and things like that, and then the question comes, "Do you really want to go too deep into figuring out "the problems which the vendors have solved, "or would you rather focus on your business problems?" that's what I would say. They would say one package, one platform when you get to focus on your business problems and we take care of the rest. >> Yeah, and I think in the keynote yesterday, Andy Jassy said it's all about the analytics and what we are hearing is we've given a lot of thought to putting together a platform that supports big data analytics in addition to the AWS abstraction that we've done, so those analytics workloads were really intriguing to people that are talking with us, our support of machine learning, converting what may be a traditional spark job into a Lambda function is really something people are raising their eyebrows about. >> Bart Hickenlooper, Rishi Yadav asking how deep you are into AWS? Well here at theCUBE we are about 60 interviews in which means we have a few more hours left of great interviews here, so for Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you so much for watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering AWS re:Invent 2017 presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. Live here in Las Vegas, the Cube is covering exclusively the AWS re:Invent. We've got two sets. This is set one, set two behind me. We're here with a startup called Zettabytes, Rishi Yadav, Cube Alumni CEO, and Sudhir Janir, CTO. Hot new start-up, Zettabytes. Formerly, you're an entrepreneur, your other company's still going, Info Objects. Welcome back. >> Thanks for having us here. I dont know it's the seventh time, eighth time? I mean, we love Cube guys. Yes, so Info Objects is the mothership and doing really, really great, and today we are launching Zettabytes, which is our hybrid cloud, cloud integration platform. We are starting with AWS, and then it's going to have integration for the clouds. >> So start-ups are impacted, and we were talking yesterday about kind of a demarcation line between a point in time. I say 2012, maybe you can say 2014, if you were born before 2012 or 2014, you probably didn't factor the cloud as large scale as it is. But after that day, you're a new born start-up, you look at the cloud as a resource, an opportunity, so what's your perspective as an entrepreneur, a serial entrepreneur, you start a company, you look at the big beast in Amazon, opportunity, challenge, what's your view? >> So actually 2014 was an inflection point for two things. Number one is that the big data, big data, it started with the hyper scale companies, and at that time, you're talking about Facebook, and Yahoo and other places, but it was not enterprise-ready. And we suddenly saw the option. John, you have been following the big data directly from the, I think the cloud data basement days, right? So in 2014 it got a better option. And the things like security and governance, which were offered not much concern earlier, it became front and center. Another thing which happened was around 2014, 2015, timeframe, the public cloud, which were for eight, nine years, essentially AWS, that was about 70 start-ups about saving money for them. That also started getting an option, and the enterprise, and when you're talking about enterprise, there you cannot tell them that if you deploy 10 servers on AWS, it's going to save you $200,000. They would say you already have $500 million spent. We have these huge data centers, so they needed some more value than that. >> How about your company Zettabytes, so you're launching a new company, what is it, what does it do, why are you starting it? Take a minute to explain what you're doing. >> Yes, absolutely. So the Zettabytes idea came from this convergence of the big data, public cloud and IOT. And market is ripe for it, and the challenge was that we talked to a lot of customers, a lot of them have already started working in the cloud, and some of them were planning to start the journey in the cloud, and the challenge was that at the same time they also wanted to build a big data link, Andy talked about it a lot today, right, assuming the largest big data lake. So now the question was that do you really want to go the old school route in which you are using Hadoup and other services around it, and then you do lift and shift to AWS? And then you transform to PAS. So you spend one and a half, two years in doing Hadoup, and then you spend another one and a half, two years, doing the PAZ, that cloud-native transformation in a better way. And then realize that whether the clients are on AWS today, or they are going to be in one year, they need the same experience, the same cloud experience, the same AWS experience which they have on their AWS, they want on-prem. Now that includes the other cloud-native APIs, but also the agility and everything else. >> So let met ask Sudhir a question. So you're the CTO. I know you're technical too, so I have both of you. So the old days, I'm a developer, I have my local host, I'm banging away code, and then I go, okay I'm done. And I say, ship to the server for QA or whatever. And even the cloud. Businesses want that same kind of functionality on premise. They want to go to the cloud, so all the developers are changing, they want that local host like feel. They don't wanna have to write code, ship it to a server, put it through the cloud, they just want instant integration to Amazon. Is that what you're doing? >> Yeah. >> Did I get it right? 'Cause that seems what I think you're doing. >> Yes, you develop that seamless experience. So you have the same set of APIs, which you normally would do on AWS, so still use the same data, still use the same data blue CLI. Use all data blue APIs, we're accepted those APIs on this platform, build a good base, based on those APIs, now using Kubernetes, you decide where this workload will go. >> So one of the challenges of AWS though is that they release services like constantly. I think we had the announcer at the keynote today, it was like another hundred or so services that they were releasing. So how do you choose which ones? Do you support all of them, or do you focus on specific ones? >> No, first we are focusing on a few specific ones, which are mostly being used. We are starting with Lexi, for example, as three. Lamda, Kenesis, Kafka, and this bargain is DFS are there from day one also. And all of these are Lexi, we are doing Lexi, today official announcement, they have launched Kubernetes Now. Container management service. We have that flexibility from day one only. So we have that in our outlines, and using that, even for example, your workload says, some of the piece should run on that, on Lexi, on permalines. Some of the P should go to the cloud, that is also possible. >> So you're selling an appliance. >> Yeah, yeah. The one million Lexi, or Kubernetes million might run on the AWS, few of the menus might run on your uplines, you can easily Lexi's do the all the container management. >> This is model, they pay for the box, or is it a service? Or they get the box as part of a service? What's the business model? >> So we do both, so it's a (mumbles) format, as well as an appliance, so the beauty of appliances is that everything is already optimized for you, so that makes it very easy. But if a customer has a chosen hardware platform, and we can definitely deploy it on that also. And adding to the hunter services thing, I think that's a great point, that AWS has so many services now that can you really go and figure out which services are most optimized for your needs? So that's where you need a partner on prem-site, and that's what we are going to be, and another thing as Sudhir mentioned, the EKS which they announced today, Kubernetes, so you have Kubernetes on-prem, AWS is supporting Kubernetes, and we are also supporting Kubernetes, so if you want closer to that level, it's completely seamless. >> And you were saying before, your target is enterprise has been good, so the appliance delivery model and the simplicity of being able to manage a lot of different services. Clearly being able to manage things at scale is something that enterprisers are crying out for because otherwise I have to, AWS is great, if you wanna hand build everything yourself, it has all of those components that you can assemble like Lego, but if I'm an enterprise, I want to be able to do that at scale. Humans don't scale very well, so I need some technology to help with that. So it sounds like you are actually providing the leverage to get enterprise humans to be able to manage AWS. Is that a fair characterization? >> Absolutely, that is definitely a very important aspect of it, and another aspect of it is that if you do not want to have some workloads on AWS for one thing or another. IOT workloads by definition cannot be on AWS. Low intensive workloads. They cannot be on AWS. In the same way the workloads in which you need some actual level of security. So within your data center, as much as beat down the data center piece, you have your own security and governance. And you can do that, and that's coming back to your question that are we going to support all hundred services, yes, but the local execution we have only going to provide for some services, which by their very nature make more sense to learn on-prem. >> Yeah, keep the core services. >> Rishi: Core services. >> All right so how do you guys gonna sell this product, take us through the start-up situation, you're here, are you talking to customers? Why are they are buy you? What's the conversations like? When do they need you? Take us through your conversations here at re:Invent. >> Yeah, so before that, the AWS has been super successful for the green field applications. The new applications, the applications which are born in the cloud, but when it comes to transforming the existing application it becomes a big, big challenge. So a lot of customers are coming to us, they are interested in how I can seamlessly transform their-- >> John: What's an example workload? >> So the example workloads for us is going to be the big data workloads. Which we have specialized in for last so many years. So one of them can IOT. Sudhir, probably you can explain what that is. >> So that example could be for example from today's keynote, if you see Expedia case, or Lexi Goldman Sachs case, they spend a lot of time in converting their code to the AWS specific-word, right? Millions of lines, or billions of lines of code. What we are doing today, if you dealing with the application, tomorrow it could be future ready for AWS. It's more convenience, we are actually modeling your experience with AWS. >> So it's making for enterprisers to make that transition from what they're doing today across the cloud, because that's a big deal for them. >> Tomorrow when you are Lexi, then you go to AWS, your data will decide whether you want to earn your workload on our plans, or AWS. >> Okay, so your market is hybrid cloud, basically. People doing hybrid cloud should talk to you guys. >> Yeah, and code would be future proof. What you you are you developing today-- >> John: All right so is the product shipping? >> Yes, so we are in the early beta stage, we already have five beta customers. And the product is going to be ready in a week's time. >> So data now. >> Yeah, yes. >> Yeah, these guys are ready already. >> Open beta, restricted beta? >> It is going to be restricted beta for now. Then it's going to be open beta, so yes, we are going to five more customers in the next two months for the beta. >> Take a minute to explain the type of customer you're looking for. Are they all field spots, any more, you have five more spots, you said? >> Yeah, we have five more spots for the beta. >> John: Who are yo looking for out there? >> Any large enterprise which is planning to move to AWS, but are struggling with all the nitty gritties, looking at the hundred services, and how do you integrate your existing applications there. So how you could take baby steps, like so we are going to not just take that baby steps, but sprint through it, so that's what Zettabytes plans is for. >> Rishi, congratulations on the new start-up, launching here, Zettabytes, open beta, five more spots left. Check 'em out, Zettabytes, if you're doing hybrid cloud or true private cloud, they have five spots available. It's The Cube, bringing all the action, the start-up action here and also the conversations at re:Invent. I'm John Furrier, Justin Warren. We're back with more after this short break. (electronic jingle)