(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)

>> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's the CUBE covering OpenStack Summit 2017. Brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation, Red Hat, and additional ecosystem support. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman. And if I'm sitting on this side of the table with the long hallways behind me, it means we're here for the wrap of the second day. John Troyer's here, day two of three days, theCUBE here at OpenStack Summit. John, I feel like you're building energy as the show goes on, kind of like the show itself. >> Yeah, yeah, getting my footing here. Again, my first summit. It was a good second day, Stu, I think we made it through. We had some fascinating stuff. >> Yeah, fascinating stuff. Before we jump into some of the analysis here, I do want to say you know, first and foremost, big thanks to the foundation. Foundations themselves tend to get, they get beat up some, they get loved some, without the OpenStack Foundation, we would not be here. Their support for a number of years, our fifth year here at the show, as well as the ecosystem here, really interesting and diverse and ever-changing ecosystem, and that fits into our sponsors too. So Red Hat's our headline sponsor here. We had Red Hat Summit last week and two weeks, lots of Red Haters, and now lots of Stackers here. Additional support brought to us by Cisco, by Netronome, and by Canonical. By the way, no secret, we try to be transparent as to how we make our money. If it's a sponsored segment, it lists "sponsored by" that guest here, and otherwise it is editorial. Day three actually has a lot of editorial, it means we have a lot of endusers on the program. We do have vendors, cool startups, interesting people, people like Brian Stevens from Google. When I can get access to them, love to have it here. So big shout out as always. Content, we put it out there, the community, try to have it. Back to the wrap. John, you know we've kind of looked at some of the pieces here, the maturity, you know where it fits in the hybrid and multi cloud world. What jumped out at you as you've been chewing on day two? >> Well, my favorite thing from today, and we talked about it a couple times just in passing it keep coming up, is OpenStack on the edge. So the concept of, that the economics works today, that you can have a device, a box, maybe it's in your closet somewhere, maybe it's bolted to a lamppost or something, but in the old days it would have run on some sort of proprietary chip, maybe an embedded Linux. You can put a whole OpenStack distribution on there, and when you do that, it becomes controllable, it becomes a service layer, you can upgrade it, you can launch more services from there, all from a central location. That kind of blew my mind. So that's my favorite thing from today. I finally got my arms around that I think. >> Okay, great, and we saw Beth Cohen from Verizon was in the day one keynote. We're actually going to have her on our program for the third day. And right, teasing out that edge, most of it, telecommunications is a big discussion point here. I understand why. Telcos spend a lot of money, they are at large scale, and that NFV use case has driven a lot of adoption. So Deutsche Telekom is a headline sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation, did a big keynote this morning. AT&T's up on the main stage, Verizon's up on the main stage, you know Red Hat and Canonical all talk about their customers that are using it. You know, we just talked to Netronome about telecommunications. Everybody here, if you're doing OpenStack, you probably have a telco place because that's where the early money is and it tends to be, there's the network edge, then there's the IoT edge, and some of the devices there. So it was was one of the buzzy things going in and definitely is one of the big takeaways from the show so far. >> Well, Stu, I also think it's a major prove point for OpenStack, right. Bandwidth needs are not going down, that's pretty clear, with all the things you mentioned. Throughput is going to have to go up, services are going to have to be more powerful, and so all these different connected devices and qualities of service and streaming video to your car. So if OpenStack can build a back plan, a data plan for OpenStack that can do that, which it looks like they are doing, right, that's a huge prove point downstream from the needs of a telco, so I think that's super important for OpenStack that it's usable enough and robust enough to do that and that's one of the reasons I think it gets talked about so much. The nice thing is this year compared to my comparisons of previous years of OpenStack Summit, telco is not the only game in town, right. Enterprise also got a lot of play and there's a lot of use cases there too. >> And just to close out on that edge piece, really enjoyed the conversation we had with John and Kendall who had worked on the container space. Talking about the maturation of where Cinder had gone, how we went from virtualized environments to containerized environments. And even we teased out a little bit that edge use case. I can have a really small OpenStack deployment to put it at that edge. Maybe that's where some of the serverless stuff fits in. I know I've been, I tell my team, every time I get a good quote on serverless, let's make a gem out of that, put it out there, 'cause it's early days, but that is one of those deployments where I need at the edge environments, I need something lightweight, I need something that's going to be less expensive, can do some task processing, and both containers and potentially serverless can be interesting there. >> Yeah, I mean, even in our Canonical discussion with the product manager for their OpenStack distribution, right, containers are all over that, right, containers are just a way of packaging, there are some really interesting development pipelines that are now very popular and being talked about and built on in the container space. But containerization actually can come into play multiple points in the stack. Like you said, the Canonical distribution gets containerized and pushed out, it's a great way of compartmentalizing and upgrading, that's what the demo on stage today was about. Also, just with a couple of very short scripts, containerizing and pulling down components. So I think again, my second favorite thing after the edge today was just showing that actually containers and OpenStack mix pretty well. They're really not two separate things. >> Right, and I think containerization is one of those things that enables that multi cloud world. We talked in a number of segments today, everything from Kubernetes with Brian Stevens as to how that enables that. Reminds me at Red Hat Summit last week we talked a lot about OpenShift. OpenShift's that layer on top of OpenStack and sits at that application level layer to allow be to be able to span between public or private clouds and we need that kind of you know that to be able to enable some real multi or hybrid cloud environments. >> Yeah I mean, containers and in fact that Kubernetes layer may end up being the thing that drives more OpenStack adoption. >> Yeah, and the other thing that's been interesting, just hallway conversations, bumping into people we know, you know trying to walk around the show a little bit, as to people that are finally getting their arms around, okay, OpenStack from a technology standpoint has matured and you know they either need it to clean up what was their internal cloud or building something out, so real deployments. We talked about it yesterday in the close though. They're real customers doing real deployments. It's heartening to hear. >> Yeah I mean, one of those conversations, I ran into somebody at a hyperscale company, a friend of mine, and you know they are building out, internal OpenStack clouds to use for real stuff, right. >> But wait, hyperscale, come on, John, we can give away. Is this something we have on our phone or something we, I'll buy and use? >> One of those big folks. >> There's a large Chinese company that anybody in tech knows that's supposed to be doing a lot with OpenStack. We heard definitely Asia, very broad use of OpenStack. Been a theme of the whole show, right, is that outside the US where we tend to talk a lot about the public cloud, OpenStack's being used. An undertone I've heard is certain companies that start here in the United States, it's sometimes challenging for a foreign company to say I'm going to buy and use that, absolutely that is a headwind against a company like Amazon. Ties back to we had a keynote this morning with Edward Snowden and some of those things. What is the relationship between government and global companies that have a headquarters in the US and beyond. >> Yeah I think it's too soon to say where the pendulum, how the far the pendulum is going to swing. I'll be very interested in the commentary for next year to see have we moved away from more of the centralized services dominating the entire marketplace and workload into more distributed, more private, more customizable. For all those reasons, there's a lot of dynamics that might be pushing the pendulum in that direction. >> And one of the things I've liked hearing is infrastructure needs to be more agile, it needs to be more distributed, more modularized, especially as the applications are changing. So I feel like more than previous summits I've been at, we're at least talking about how those things fit together. With everything that's happening with the OpenStack Days, the Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, Ceph, other open source projects, how those all fit together. It feels like a more robust, full position as opposed to , we were just building a software version of what we were doing in the data center before. >> My impression was the conversation at times had been a little more internally focused, right, it's a world unto its own. Here at this summit, they're definitely acknowledging there's an ecosystem, there's a landscape, it all has to interoperate. Usability's a part of that, and then interoperability and componentization is a part of that as well. >> The changing world of applications. We understand the whole reason we have infrastructure is to run those applications, so if we're not getting ready for that, what are we doing? >> I don't want to put words in their mouth, but I think the OpenStack community as a whole, one of their goals, you know, OpenStack needs to be as easy to run as a public cloud. The infrastructure needs to be boring. We heard the word boring a lot actually today. >> Yeah and what we say is, first of all, the public cloud is the bar that you were measured against. Whether it is easier or cheaper, your mileage may vary, because public cloud was supposed to be simple. They're adding like a thousand new features every year, and it seems to get more complicated over time. It's wonderful if we could architect everything and make it simple. Unfortunately, you know, that's why we have technology. I know every time I go home and have some interaction with a financial institution or a healthcare institution, boy, you wish we could make everything simpler, but the world's a complicated place and that's why we need really smart people like we've gotten to interview here at the show. So any final comments, John? >> No, I think that sums it up. Those are my favorite things for today. I'm looking forward to talking to a lot of customers tomorrow. >> Yeah, I'm really excited about that. John, appreciate your help here. So there's a big party here at the show. They're taking everyone to Fenway Park for the Stacker party. Last year it was an epic party in Austin. Boston's fun, Fenway's a great venue. Looks like the rain's going to hold off, which is good, but it'll be a little chillier than normal, but we will be back here with a third day of programming as John and I talked about. Got a lot of users on the program. Really great lineup, two days in the bag. Check out all the videos, go to SiliconANGLE.tv to check it all out. Big shout out to the rest of the team that's at the Dell EMC World and ServiceNOW shows, be able to check those out and all our upcoming shows. And thank you, everyone, for watching theCUBE. (technical beat)