(techno music) >> Welcome back, everybody, Jeff Frick with theCUBE. We're having CUBE conversations in the Palo Alto studio. We're getting to the end of the conference season, so it's nice to take a break and do some interviews from the studio instead of from the road. We're excited to have our next guest. He's David Green, he's the CEO of Zero Stack. David, welcome. >> Thank you very much. >> Absolutely, great to have you here. So for folks who aren't familiar with Zero Stack, why don't you give them kind of the quick overview. >> Great, so Zero Stack's focus on building a new generation of private cloud infrastructure where IT can simplify their operations through automation, and at the same time, retain control of the environment. We're really trying to deliver that public cloudlike experience to users while giving IT the type of control they want to have. >> But you, just so I understand, so that, right, a lot of pressure, lot of benefits to public cloud, and everybody wants it in a private cloud, right? There's a lot of issues with public cloud that, you know, there's some data that can't be there, this or that, but there's a lot of attributes of public cloud that people just love, so how are you kind of squaring that circle? >> It's interesting, right? In the last 10 years that I've been working on cloud, this has been one of the recurring themes. It's one of the things that I think is so exciting about Zero Stack, right? You talk to a customer, you talk to an IT customer, and they're like, "I love the convenience of the public cloud idea, it's going to be so simple to operate, right? "But, I need to know where my data is. "I'm accountable for security, I'm accountable for cost. "I need to have control of the environment. "Why can't I have these two things together?" And that's what we've tried to merge together. So from an IT standpoint, it's still going to look and feel like that on-premises IT-managed infrastructure they're comfortable with. From a user perspective though, it's going to have that same sort of self service, on demand that they're used to getting from a public cloud. Think of going to a web application that looks and feels like Amazon, being able to pick the resources you want, but have those resources be coming from resources running within your data center. >> Right, right. >> And then be able to add to those resources the tools that you need to be productive in the environment, really very value added for the developer, again, in that infrastructure that's living in your environment. >> And to be clear, you're not replacing that existing infrastructure that's in my environment, you're really offering, I don't know, kind of a cloud virtualization overlay or ... >> The goal is to-- >> Restructures the UI? >> Yes. You use the servers you've got, the storage ya got, the networking you've got, pull those together into a pooled resource, again, back to the idea of a private cloud, pull those resources into a single set of resources that can be accessed for a variety of use cases to support different applications in the environment. >> So what's the impact, cause obviously, if there wasn't a benefit to doing it that way, people wouldn't be doing shadow IT and whipping out the credit card with Amazon. So, when you do this in an enterprise, what are some of the benefits they see? >> I mean, I think there's a couple. One is the radical simplification of operations. From an IT standpoint, running a private cloud is hard. You know, if you hook up your build of the online environments, which is kind of the most typical frame of reference that we see, it's expensive to set up. It's expensive to operate. It's complicated, it's hard to hire the people. We're trying to get away from the burden. That's the first driver we see for people. From a user standpoint, it's really about that speed. How does IT keep up with the demands of its users and move at that same pace, right? So trying to pull together those two sets of benefits into one is really the package that seems to drive our business. >> And that's really hard, right for IT cause IT's just be keeping their lights on, keeping everything running. Now it's a core piece, if not the really strategic piece, of the business. We talked a little bit before they turned the cameras on-- >> Right, right. >> About banking, right, all banking interfaces these days are electronic. There's nobody goes in to talk to the teller and giving them a check. >> Wait a sec, so go back up here. So, remember that IT today was fundamentally built around the back office. It was fundamentally built around stability. Remember the days when a change request was a physical piece of paper with 20 signatures on it, and you ran around the office, right? >> Every now then, not very often. (laughing) >> You were supposed to right? That was the mindset, right? I think in a traditional back-office set of applications, that worked great. But the problem is today, when the business is presenting itself to customers through software and trying to move at the speed of its customers, those old IT mechanisms built around stability just can't keep up. >> Right. >> So that's the gap that we're really trying to bridge with the Zero Stack solution. Preserve that knowledge set, preserve that control, preserve that data sovereignty that IT can bring, that on-premises infrastructures can bring, but at the same time, still operate at a pace and a speed that more dev ops organization is looking for. >> Right, because the pressure on IT >> It's only getting bigger. >> It's only getting more ... >> It's only getting more. >> If you're not using software to find automation, you're falling behind. So, I would imagine there's some second order impacts that have to come out of using a tool like Zero Stack in terms of utilization and those types of things that are probably some great opportunities. >> Essentially, we really want to be the heart. While the solution looks and feels more like they've got interfaces and management, the heart of the solution, in our mind really, is our machine learning capabilities. It's ability to take a set of information from the application layer, from the operations layer, from the infrastructure and from that start to make educated judgements as to how the infrastructure can best be utilized to support the business and to support the applications. So where should work loads be placed? How are we going to plan for capacity? What needs to happen next in the environment? How should we take corrective action? These are all the sorts of things that we can start to do. And again, what we're really trying to do is we're trying to automate some of the mundane tasks that held back IT and slowed down IT operations, and instead, let them focus on the areas where they can be of more value consulting with the business, helping to move things forward, helping to address higher order questions. >> Right, because really that's another huge opportunity for cost savings or efficiency for the customer, right? Because the traditional methods were not very efficient, and you had, since they weren't efficient, you had to have a lot of overhead, and you had to, you know, pre-order stuff, and you couldn't flex, so you're now, with your automation and machine learning, helping to better utilize those resources on just the pure infrastructure spending, right? >> Exactly, exactly. And that gives you part of the cost benefit that we see with the Zero Stack solution. By getting better utilization of the infrastructure that you have, we'll able to have a more economical solution going forward. We have customers who are getting a 10X return on their investment by using the Zero Stack solution over other cloud solutions they've looked at, just by getting better intelligence and better automation and better operation clarity about what they're doing. >> So then do you partner then with HP and a lot of the infrastructure providers who talk a lot about hybrid cloud cause clearly, they're invested in keeping a big piece of the cloud inside their walls. >> So in our model, we view ourselves as a software company. So we're going to add that Zero Stack software solution on top of your infrastructure of choice. And so, that could be Dell, that could be HP, that could be Lenovo, ya know, all the kind of leading hardware vendors have been certified to work with our product. We're going to add our software on top to create their cloud infrastructure. Then we're going to add our maturing applications, our user self-service applications on top of that, and that's going to give you the top-to-bottom full stack solution. And that full stack's really important because if you want to be able to take automated actions, you want to be able to optimize infrastructure, you've got to be able to not only interface with the users and meet their demands, but also translate those demands down to actions you're taking on the infrastructure. So we're going to be able to do that full stack top to bottom. >> So just a little bit more background on the company. How big are you, how long you been around, how many people, funding? >> Well, we're a start-up here based in Silica Valley, Mountain View, California. We're a Series B company. We're proud to have our first set of customers working with us right now, actively exercising the products, fantastic big enterprise projects. I'm looking forward to coming back and telling you about it as those finish up. But really, all from the theme of people who are unsatisfied with the solutions they've had available to them in the past and trying to figure out how they're going to move forward with a better, more flexible, easier to operate cloud solution. >> All right, well, David, we look forward to watching the progress and getting an update in a few months. >> Look forward to it. >> All right, David, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day. I'm Jeff Frick, he's David Greene. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (techno music)