>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware, and its ecosystem partner. >> I'm Stu Miniman, here with my co-host John Troyer, and you're watching theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's production of VMworld 2017. We're the world-wide leader in live tech coverage. Happy to welcome to the program not only a first-time guest but a first-time for the company, Andrew Hillier, who is the CTO and co-founder of Densify, and not only the first time we've had Densify, we didn't even have Serva on so, I'm not sure what the problem was, but appreciate you joining us, and looking forward to learning about you and the company. >> Glad to be here, it's good. >> All right, Andrew, tell us a little bit about, you're a co-founder, so bring us back to the early days, what the idea was, and then there's some rebranding recently so I know that's relevant to the conversation. >> Sure, I'll tell you the story. So, we're all about analytics. I mean, we started off by looking at, with all the data that's available, and saying if you really do the math on it, you can make a lot of very important decisions, and not leave them to opinions or chance. So we built out a very powerful analytics engine, a lot of big customers adopted it, run on-prem, drive huge savings in virtual environments, de-risk. And what we found is that everybody's interested in those outcomes of the analytics, but not necessarily wanting to adopt software products. I mean, it's kind of the basis of all SaaS. So, we went and made a SaaS version of that product that runs, it's like a brain in the cloud, to give the same outcomes, and we've kind of really now taken that to the extreme where it's as a service now. And it's called Densify, we rebranded around that in the June timeframe to really capture the simplicity and the outcome of what we do. Which is to drive down cloud costs, drive down the amount of infrastructure you need on-prem, and make it all work better. >> Yeah, I'm wondering if you could give us just a little, from a macro standpoint, software. And the different consumption models you just walked through a little bit, but what are customers looking for, why has it been challenging before, and do we have it right this time? >> Yeah, well, I mean, from our perspective again, I think we get adopted, and traditionally in the past you would have to deploy the product, you would have to provision servers to run it on, a database server, train people, you know, have maybe a center of excellence around using it, and so that's worked really well. But I think that's, I think the novelty of running software has worn off for most organizations. They want to move on, and we see the cloud being adopted. People just want to get out of the business of running anything, really, and have it all done for them. And so we support on-prem model, and as many serve as on-prem, but really, this new model is where everybody's going because it's just so simple. It means, you can just adopt it and get results right away without reading any manuals or doing anything. >> Andrew, we've been talking about cloud for years now, right? It was almost a joke, it's much more real now. Your customers and the people you talk with, hybrid cloud, multicloud, how many, we have a choice of many different platforms. On-prem is not going away anytime soon, at least, I don't know, I'd love your opinion on that, but your customer base, the people you talk with, what kind of a, how many platforms are they on, what kind of platforms, and how does Densify pull all that together? >> Yeah, it's funny because it's a bit of everything, and that's IT, right? You always have one of everything you've ever had, plus all the new stuff, so, we support, these huge virtual footprints out there, a lot of companies have big VMware environments. But there's definitely a big focus on the cloud. So almost every customer we have is in some form looking, is really they see that as the future, the cloud containers, some mix of on- and off-prem. So I think it's going to be hybrid for quite some time. I don't think you're going to see the on-prem go away, that would just be unrealistic, but again, a lot of energy is being put into the public cloud, and it shows. So you know, one's almost a maintain mode in some cases, one's kind of the invest, we're investing in new technology, that's where a lot of the excitement is. So even our most conservative customers are looking at cloud in some way, and some of our newer customers are 100% cloud, there's no on-prem. >> Andrew, talk to us about the relationship with VMware that you've had and have today, and I guess one of the questions I looked, VMware announced like seven SaaS services, one which was Cost Insight. Does that compete at all against what you are doing? >> Well it's, it's a hugely complicated space with a lot of different, and a lot of the same words used for all the same thing. So we have a very good relationship with VMware. We integrate with all the product line, VRA, vROps, DRS, pDRS, we have integrations with all these things, and it works with that. But I think there's some confusion sometimes around all the people using the same words, like we optimize, or we do this or that. So what we find is that, in the core of what we do, is we analyze workload patterns. And it's like playing a game of Tetris. It's like saying, that workload's busy in the morning, that one's busy at night, we combine them together, we get a lot of efficiency. And nothing in the VMware product line does that. So it really plugs in very nicely with DRS, and again vROps, but there is confusion in the words people use. You might think that that does that, and there's some cost, you know, there's a lot of products that do cloud costs. Every product that starts with the word Cloud does cloud cost, but that's not really where you get this cost-saving, it's really analyze the workloads in the cloud is where you get those cost-savings. >> Yeah, I'm curious, you must have a really good view as to utilization. So I think back, there's a lot of argument as to how much utilization we're actually getting, 'cause VMware in the early days, it was like, oh I'll consolidate servers, I'll get greater utilization. But we still kind of stink at utilization, and I have gear, even cloud today, I've seen lots of companies, right, that I can take huge amount of costs out of what you're doing, so how are customers doing, what are they good at, what do they suck at, and where are some of the things that you're helping really well? >> Well, I mean, you struck a nerve there, because I mean, people are doing a terrible job in the cloud but often it's, a lot of times they throw things up there, and they don't even really look at what they're doing. It's kind of primitive in terms of the data collectioning, and the tooling around that. So a lot of times, these people don't even know what the workload is or what the utilization is. So we see some pretty big opportunity to carve that down. I mean, on-prem, I think people have gotten better. I think when they run our product, they really, it's designed to get at the optimal utilization, and that might be at 90%, it might be 50%, it might be 30 depending on your requirements. And if you have a mission critical environment that is active-active, and redundant, and all these things going on, then maybe your utilization won't be very high, but that's as high as you can make it and meet all your obligations. If in that test environment, you can run it a lot higher. So, there is no one right answer for what the best utilization is, it kind of, it depends on your workloads and what the environment's supposed to be doing, but universally in the cloud, we find it's just terrible. 'Cause they rush things into the cloud without having all the maturity around it to figure out how to optimize it. >> Right, Andrew, does that mean then the common mistake is under-utilization? Are people just running a lot of instances without actually knowing what's running in them, or how it's costing them? >> Yep, there's underutilized, there's deadwood for starters. So there's, and that's kind of a different problem. It's not that they don't know what they're doing, somebody forgot them, so there's no process around that, there's no ITSM pros that can turn these things off, so we find a lot of that. And there's this stuff that's not utilized very well at all that you could just be running better, 'cause somebody setting's extra large, and they never revisited it. The other, last thing that we do, we find this quite a lot lately, is we call modernization. So, you look okay, but you're on an old instance. There's a newer one that's a lot cheaper. You know, you're on an R3, you could be on an R4 on Amazon, and so we find a ton of those. And it's because people deployed an app six months ago, a year ago, and it looked great, it still looks great, but they don't have the ability to analyze and use benchmarks to say I have a new instance that's as powerful as that one, that's cheaper. You need the benchmarks. >> That's something that really doesn't happen when you have hardware, right? It's not like the server vendor calls you up and says, I have a new version I can swap out if you just tell me. >> Yeah, I mean, in the cloud I give the analogy to a cell phone company. It's like, they don't phone you and tell you that they have a new plan that'll be cheaper for you. You've got to kind of do that on your own. And so we do that for customers, it's one of the things that we do, and we kind of do it for you. So, we just tell you that, just make this move, it's got a lateral move to a new instance, and save a ton of money, and customers are just, they're too busy to become experts, and read the news every morning to figure out if new instances come up, it's just too much, right? >> But wait, they haven't seen these 17 announcements that Amazon had today that might have affected them? Does your tool make the change, recommend the change, how does that kind of workflow work? >> Yeah, it depends on the platform, how it works, but we have a very high degree of automation that we enable, and there's a few reasons. One is that the analysis is so precise, that when it says do this, you can just do that. So, for example, on-prem, if we say move the VM, we know it's not supposed to go with those other ones for PCI compliance. We know that that won't drive up the over-commit, so there's, you know, our equation, there's a lot of terms. That means it's very precise. So that means when we say to do something, you can just do it, and that means you drive a very high automation as a result. >> What kind of granularity? Is this happening minute-by-minute or hour-by-hour, or day-by-day, or? >> Well, there's two levels of granularity. There's predictive and there's real time. So one of the main things we do is that we will kind of gather all the workload history, and kind of learn the patterns of that, and to come up with a strategic plan saying for tomorrow, do this, but the VM in these places. And then, leave DRS turned on, it'll do its thing, but it won't do very much, because we've anticipated all the workflow patters. So a lot of times, we will do the kind of daily optimization and DRS and vROps can do their things all day long. They just don't do as much. But we also have real-time, so if we see something getting hot, we will do a hot add on it, we can do that as well. So we kind of have the combination of both predictive and reactive at the same time. >> Okay, um. How do you handle kind of your pricing of the solution? I've heard some offerings out there that it's like, oh, we're going to save you millions, and we're just going to take a fraction of that, rather that, or are you more traditional licensing, how does that all work? >> It's funny, the gainshare we found on that is very hard to structure. It sounds great until you finally make the contracts for it. What we do is for on-prem, we do it by target, and that's a physical-virtual system, and that's worked really well. That's the way a lot of our customers go there. And in the cloud, that doesn't work, because an instance could be anything from a tiny docker container to a giant X1, so it's as a percentage of spending. That's kind of what a lot of vendors kind of sat along in the cloud world. But we kind of don't make it infinitely variable. We know people want, they want the predictability, so we kind of say, you're in this band, it's just going to cost this and you can do whatever you want. >> And what, did you have any kind of standard rule of thumb as to you know, if you're, have X kind of spend in the cloud we'll usually save you X percentage, or, and wait, if you save them a lot more, doesn't that mean you're pushing them down into a lower tier, and so, you know, how does that get sorted out? >> It's a great question, that's the hazard of it it. It is, I mean, it doesn't hold us back from wanting to optimize, so, what we find is if you just take, for example, right-sizing the cloud. If you say you're under-utilized, we can make you smaller in the same class, a lot of people would say, 15% you might save. We find that the ability to go between instance classes, so again, you're memory optimized and you're computer optimized, or vice versa, we found is 35 to 40%, pretty reliably in our customers. So it's a pretty, more than pays for the product, many times over, it's pretty compelling. And it's pretty easy to get to. And in fact, next month's bill, which is the biggest thing, you know, on-prem is some cost. You can optimize it a lot, but until the next refresh, may not realize the gains. But in the cloud, next month's bill will actually be smaller. So we find it's a lot of urgency to do it in the cloud. >> Um, I'm curious, what have you seen from customers these days between their on-premises environment and the public cloud? One thing that struck me for years is, you know, if I bought gear and I'm not getting the results, the utilization out of it, you know, that kind of got a lot of attention. When I go see the public cloud, there's plenty of customers like, oh, what do you know, I was overspending 3x more than I expected, haha, I guess I'll fix it later. And I was like, wait, if you were buying hardware, you would have fired somebody, and, like, beat up your sales rep and things like that, but public cloud seems to be less mature in that standpoint? Are you seeing that changing, or what are you seeing from customers? >> Yeah, I think there is a realization, that kind of sticker shock for these people where it is kind of three times more than they thought it would be, but your point is also not really anybody whose problem that is, a lot of times. So we do see that becoming someone's problem. The cloud architects kind of seek out more roles that are financial optimization in the cloud, so people do care. I think that's a very positive thing. I think when a lot of dev ops groups start using Amazon for the first time, it's a bit of a Wild West, and they get agility, but nobody's really looking over their shoulder. I think that's starting to change pretty quickly. >> Yeah, I wonder. One of the problems I've heard, I've talked to plenty of customers that are like, I have to dedicate an engineer to pricing when it comes to the cloud. Do you solve that, do they still need to kind of have like a dedicated person, or part of a person, or is that part of the value that you offer? >> Well, and that's a good question. It depends on the customer's size, I think. So we see really small organizations, and again, the beauty of our new offering is that you, we can, you know, we can go to really small companies or really huge companies. We have customers with a hundred thousand systems, and some with 500. And the smaller ones, they may not have a big team, so they may not have those roles. So some of our smallest ones, we're just that role for them. They don't have a person that's dedicated to that kind of thing, they just wait for our advisors to try and make, 'cause we actually have a human advisor that's part of our service that gives you advice or insight into what's happening. So, for the small ones, that can be that person. For larger companies like the big banks that are customers of ours, we kind of become one of the team. So you probably still have people with lots of expertise, but maybe you don't need to rely on it so much, maybe you can not have it at all, but it's more like we're someone that makes their life easier. So they can go on and focus on what they should be doing, which is not looking at the cloud pricing every morning. >> Nice, I see that more and more, right, that you need, it's a service you're delivering, right? And it's not just bits and bytes, that's customer success, and you have people there that can help. This stuff is crazy complicated, especially if you are, say, a VMware admin just getting into Amazon. The pricing, like we just said right, the pricing is very complicated. So, can you talk a little bit about from the admin standpoint, the vRealize integration and some things like that, or is this, there's an admin-facing piece and then I suppose then there's a cost-facing piece, or? >> Yeah, I think there's several ways it can be used. You can use us almost like middleware and the admin doesn't necessarily need to interact. We, some of our customers, we run as an engine that just sits there, it's getting data, analyzing it and making changes. But, you're still using VRA for blueprints and VRO, and that kind of comes through us, but it's kind of behind the scenes. So it's a nice use case, because it just adds value without making anybody's life more difficult. We do have consols that are very powerful, so if you're a capacity manager or a data scientist, or a cloud architect you can actually start logging in and seeing workload curves and stuff. So we have some use cases where we are, our interface is used quite heavily, and some where it kind of sits behind the scenes. And so for administrators, again, it tends to make your life better without making it worse. You know, they're really busy as well, and they don't, they save time to look at that, so. >> If you have a big investment in vRealize, right? That's great, it just sits behind the scenes. Tools you already know. >> Exactly, we just pull data from it, and we push the rest back. We pull the rules from DRS, we push new rules down the DRS, it's all very clean, and so it just makes it all better without overlapping, and again, it makes your environment calmer. So, what we see in a lot of environments is you'll be able to fit a lot more work into it, and you don't have the vMotion activity during business hours. So we're starting to measure that in our customers, because volatility's an important thing. Like if vMotion at noon, at the peak of your app being busy, it's not good, right? So, we actually cause that to go away. >> Andrew, how much of your business is on-premises, and virtualized environment, versus cloud and any kind of line up as to where you spend the most time on the cloud? >> Well, I think for, I mean, we have lot of customers that are mostly VMware. I think a good portion of them are looking at cloud in some way. Some of our newer customers are 100% in the cloud, so that's kind of more because it's a newer offering, and Densify's quite new, I think that's a smaller number right now. But as far as what we're chasing down, it's big. It's very large portion of it. So I think it's really where we see where things are going. Again, it's, we usually do both, but the cloud stuff really captures our imagination. That's what they want to be doing. >> Yeah, any commentary on the VMware on AWS, you know, stuff that we've heard so far? >> Well I mean, I think it's cool, it's great. It's another option. What I like about is that what we find is when we analyze, there's technologies that over-commit and ones that don't. So I could take a workload and put it in the VMware environment and over-commit it, and the patterns match up, and get efficiency. If I put it in Amazon in like a large instance, I might be wasting my money 'cause I'm not using the whole instance, so. And I can't run a hypervisor in one of those. What we found is that for certain transactional applications it's much better to stack them together. For like batch workloads, it's better to run them in, rent a large for an hour. So I think it's a great offering, because for certain workloads it is quite efficient. For other workloads, it's not. And we have, you know, we're showing you here today, the ability to analyze and compare the two, saying if you took that app and put it in the new VMware on Amazon versus standard small, medium, and large, what's the cost difference? It's a cool analysis, 'cause it's different for each app, right? >> If I saw right, there are free trials available on your site. Is there anybody that ever comes up, tries your stuff, and then doesn't have something that saves them money? >> No, we have a very good success when you try it because it's a, partly because it's so easy. It's just, it's 15 minutes, you pull down a connector for VMware and you plug it into vCenter or vROps, and the data goes up and then we just do it all for you. And it'll always find something you didn't know or some savings, or some hidden risks in there. Usually a lot of savings, hardware savings or software savings. We will optimize the software licensing. And in the cloud it uncovers all kinds of stuff. We see all kinds of crazy stuff, utilization's very low, so it's a, yeah. >> I've run across people that do this similar sorts of thing, at least at a high level on the virtualized side and on the cloud side. I'm not sure that I've seen anybody that does it at both, is that one of your differentiators, how do you line up, what's the competitive landscape look like? >> Yeah, doing both is a big part. I think on each individual, we also do it much deeper. So like I said, in the virtual environments our ability to play Tetris with the workloads, there's nothing else really like it. We put a lot of R and D on that, and in the cloud there's a lot of focus on the cost. But not necessarily digging deeper into what's the cause of that cost? Or your Kubernetes environment, the utilization of those nodes, it requires deeper analytics than a lot of vendors actually have, so. >> Do you give any advice as to them saying I'm trying to decide if I want to do it on-premises or in the cloud, do you give any guidance that way? >> I don't think there's any standard answer. We don't try and take sides, like, the data talks. And it's not, in my opinion, it's not an area for opinion, it's just that numbers will tell you what's best for your app and everybody's different. >> You were talking certain, you know, I've got this batch application, oh well heck, I can run this in, you know, some extra large thing in the cloud, and therefore it would cost me this versus standing up some server farm. >> Yeah, and what we find is that the only real trick is that, absolutely, if you have something that's live for 12 hours and then off for a week, renting an instance for 12 hours is the way to go. But the other consideration, it goes back to one of your earlier questions, is multicloud, and how many providers do you want? 'Cause we'll analyze the environment and that app might be cheaper in Azure and that one might be cheaper in Google, but you're not going to put each app in each, so you're going to choose one or two and kind of send them all there. So, the analytics understand that as well. They're saying, well, you're not going to spread this stuff everywhere, we're going to find the best overall answer for your portfolio of workloads. And that's an important thing. >> Okay, so last question for ya. The virtualization admins out there, is there anything that they're still doing kind of very wrong that would make their environment more efficient? >> Well I think, I mean, it's funny that we still see an awful lot of spreadsheets out there. It's funny when people try and do the numbers, like to figure out where to put a new app. And they'll still kind of figure that out in a very rudimentary way, when again, science will tell you that. So you can make that happen automatically. So, there's still certain things people are doing manually that don't need to be done manually anymore, and it maybe it's their comfort zone. Maybe sometimes maybe it's other groups. But I think, again, our focus is saying that's great, let's take your policies and your rules, we'll just embed them, encode them, codify them, and then you can move on to better things than updating a spreadsheet or generating reports to send to your team every, you know, like, it's, we have very powerful reporting, so you can just make that happen automatically to people. And so, it's getting out of those kind of tasks that people have done for years and moving up the value chain and saying, now I'm going to focus on cloud, or on VSAN, or whatever it is people want to be doing next. >> All right, Andrew Hillier, appreciate you giving us all the updates on your company, and look forward to hearing more in the future. John Troyer and I will be back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2017. You're watching theCUBE. (cheerful music)