(bright instrumental music) >> Well, thank you for joining us here as we continue our series of CUBE Conversations on the AWS Startup Showcase. John Walls here on theCUBE again, glad to have you with us. We're joined by a couple of guests today. I'd like to introduce them to you. I'm joined by Venkat Krishnamachari who's the Co-Founder and CEO of MontyCloud, and, Venkat, good to see you today, sir. Thanks for being with us. >> Good to see you, John. >> And also with us is Kandice Hendricks. Who's the delivery architect at GreenPages and, Kandice, thank you for your time as well today. >> Thank you. >> But, Venkat, I'd like you to lead off a little bit just for our viewers who aren't too familiar with MontyCloud. Share with us a little bit about the origins of your company and the services that you're providing. >> Sure thing John, thank you for taking the time. MontyCloud is an autonomous cloud operations company. our origins rest in thinking about our customers from a cloud perspective on what can cloud do for customers. We've been in the enterprise background workspace for a long time. Me and my team members, we have been part of larger companies like Microsoft, AWS, Commvault. So in our journey, what we understood is anytime there is a technology shift that's happening, customers that are able to leverage that technology in a simpler way, are able to innovate better. We realize cloud is so powerful, but sort of complex. We figure it's a, with great power comes great responsibility. And with cloud there's a lot of shared responsibilities that come to customers. We asked this question, how can we help our customers deliver on their part of the shared responsibility in a much easier way than the current situation is, so they can innovate faster and move their business forward. So MontyCloud was born out of understanding larger platform shifts that happen around us all the time, and how we can help customers thrive on that environment. >> We're talking about customers and it's kind of these conundrums that they find themselves in as they're trying to make these big shifts and they have a lot of concerns. GreenPages, one of your clients, and Kandice, I'd like you to come in and maybe tell us a little bit about GreenPages and then I'm going to shift over to how you got to MontyCloud and about that relationship. But first off just give me the 30,000 foot level on GreenPages. >> GreenPages being also a consulting firm working with our clients to solve complex issues as well for security compliance and any of the cloud adoption migration needs. We've been in business since 1992 and I've had the pleasure to work with MontyCloud for quite some time now. I know I've been here just a few years at GreenPages and have been with MontyCloud from the start. And it's just such an awesome team work that we have together solving some of those issues for our clients. >> Venkat touched on a few of those, and they're concerns that I'm sure you share with many other companies, you know, about compliance studies of operation, about TCCO, right? You've got a lot of things on your plate. What were your concerns and what were your goals that you took to MontyCloud and you said, we want to get here, help us. >> So Green Page just started out like as more of VMware player, really strong in the VMware marketplace and it slowly adopted into a CSP and offering more cloud native solutions and problems. But one of the things that really drove us to MontyCloud was their skill levels was far beyond what we could provide as consultants. Like we had the administrative skills but not as strong on the development side and MontyCloud just shines when it comes to the development side and really assisting us and being a great partner with what we need to achieve those goals with our clients. >> So, Venkat, the autonomous CloudOps, this transformation toward this service that you're providing, take that in pieces, if you would, about just how that has evolved and how you define autonomous, in this case, and what are those components? >> Sure thing, thank you, Kandice. It's been fantastic working with GreenPages as well. So, John, I'll take a small example of how GreenPages as a partner, you know, we look at them as a partner in a way to help customers. What Kandice is alluding to is the cloud development aspects. What we figured is MSPs, IT departments across large scale enterprises, all of them are trying to get their internal teams to consume the cloud better and modernize their infrastructure, and build intelligent applications. In all three aspects, we learned that there's undifferentiated amount of heavy development that every team has to do. We started thinking about how can we automate that, and when we say, hey, we can develop for our customers, we truly develop an autonomous approach. Our platform automates those development aspects for customers such that when a customer wants to go to cloud, wants to set up the guardrails, want to set up their self-service provisioning and get to intelligent applications, for every layer, we have developed a repeatable, reusable platform that fills the gap, like the gap that Kandice was pointing out, is the gap in cloud skills and cloud knowledge and cloud development skills. We augment our platform, which fills the gap, and also the tooling gap that comes along with cloud, both of that we've been able to work with partners like GreenPages, and several customers and give them the power of cloud automation with a platform approach back to them. That's what we've been specializing on. >> Venkat, when you talk to a customer and not just GreenPages but customers in general, are there common concerns? Are there challenges that everybody seems to have or think, you know, big buckets security would be one compliance is a cost, obviously, but what is it that you hear from customers, and then in turn, how do you then transform your company, or to meet their needs? How have you kind of reconfigured your approach to address those concerns? >> Sure thing, John. See, our platform is called MontyCloud DAY2. Here's why, or maybe that background might help. We know, day one mindset matters when it comes to digital transformation and technology adoption. But what we also know from experience is day two comes after day one, and most customers are under prepared for the cloud operations that they need to deliver. Ever wonder why large companies, such as Amazon AWS is able to operate a massive data center with just few people? Is able to deliver global scale services with fewer engineers behind it? The power of automation that large companies use is not readily available to customers who are also consuming the cloud. So we looked at that problem space and said, how do we help? And what we learned from hundreds of customers conversations is that there are three things that seem to matter and three things that digital transformation leaders are doing better. We understood those three important things and started automating them. So every customer that's taking the cloud journey can benefit from it. The three things we gathered are, first, most customers are trying to do undifferentiated heavy lifting when it comes to consuming the cloud. For that, they are looking to simplify deployments. Leaders in the space are simplifying deployments, enabling their builders, developers, to move fast without them worrying about the underlying infrastructure. So simplifying deployment is a number one thing that we have understood that's important to solve. The second thing is visibility. Having a visibility into what the cloud footprint is automatically puts leaders in a spot where they can ask questions about, now that I got visibility, what's my compliance posture? What's my security posture? Where do I spend money? Where do I save money? All of that rests on top of a continuous visibility framework. So leaders do that really well. The third thing we understood from customers that they do well is keep an eye on day two, keep an eye towards reducing the total cost of cloud operations, not just the cloud bill. You see, when you go to the cloud, initially is you test the water with couple of applications, things work and businesses grow. Now, the consumption grows higher. You really want to have more and more cloud powered workloads which means the footprint is going to go larger. What we don't want is as the cloud footprint grows, you don't want the cloud bill to be inconsistently growing. You don't want to security compliance and operational overheads to grow along with the cloud footprint. You want those lines trends to drop while the footprint grows, which means the approach that leadership position that customers take is how do I think about my total cost of cloud operations, and who can help? So these are the three areas we spent time understanding and automating. That's the approach we take, John. >> So, Kandice, back when Venkat was talking about Day2 I saw you smile a little bit, right? 'Cause I think you do have this kind of like now what moment, right? You've given me all these great capabilities. We have a whole new tech, our life is great, now what? You know, what happens tomorrow? Day two, which I think is genius. So let's look at GreenPages. What was your day two experience or your now what experience in terms of now that you've been handed this bright, new, shiny well-oiled machine, if you will, concerns that you had about maintaining, sustainability, about adding new apps, adding new services, microservices, all these things, that might be, you know, with different technologies that weren't there before? >> Right, so I'm very familiar with MontyCloud DAY2 platform and it's incredible, especially for the small businesses, it's really trying to adopt that enterprise level automation and simplicity. So that's what DAY2 provides. What our relationship with GreenPages has enhanced is their ability to improve and innovate on their DAY2 platform, because a lot of the projects that we've worked together as a team have built the ground, you know, some of the refactoring and the enhancements of their DAY2 platform which they've had for quite some time So our partnership in that development has helped drive some of the underlying functionality of the DAY2 platform, if that makes sense. >> Sure, and, Venkat, as we know, cost is key, and that is the bottom line, right? You know, help me be more efficient, help me be more compact, but help me save money, right? So at the end of the day, how have you addressed that? How are you providing these additional values at lowered costs in terms of what the client can see at the end of the day? >> That's a great question, John There's a little bit of fogginess in cost, right? What we repeatedly see is cost of cloud bills but cloud bills are usually shockers. People are not getting used to that yet. The consumption economics has changed the capex model to opex model. While that is great, if you don't understand where you're spending the cost, that's a challenge. There's a whole slew of startups and companies helping understand the cloud bill. We took an approach of not just the cloud bill being the problem, right? That is a challenge of a skill gap. Customers wanting to go to cloud need to go hire a lot of specialized talent. That's hard to combine, to get their cloud operations started the right way. We've seen customers go into cloud and only realize this is not working. It's the Wild Wild West in terms of growth. So they do a V2 version of their own cloud again. So we see challenges, whether it's a skill gap that's adding to cost. Then there is cloud bill, obviously. Then there's a tooling gap. Traditional solutions that are not built for the cloud and built in the cloud, don't lend themselves very well for cloud operations. Security is a good example. Compliance is a good example. Ongoing routine automations is a good example. In all three cases what we find customers repeatedly do is they have a chance of either building it themselves, which is expensive and hard to maintain, or they go after specialized tooling, which again brings you the host of integration problems. We looked at it and said, how do we help customers use cloud native tooling? For example, there are no third party agents in MontyCloud DAY2. There is no need to go buy a third party security or compliance or governance tool. We looked at cloud native offerings from Amazon, for example, and we automated them at a higher order and put that power back in the customer's hands. Which means what our customers were able to do is from connecting to MontyCloud, to setting up a cloud operations that is continuously going to reduce the total cost of operations. They can go from zero to that state in couple of days by themselves, within hours, they'll be productive, and they don't have to go close the skill gap. They don't have to buy a third party tooling, and then ongoing basis, they're going to get all the benefits of what AWS provides, in terms of cost optimization, which our platform can contextualize and give it in the customer's hands. So there are many layers you have to cut cost and understanding that's very important to us. And it's been very helpful to talk to our customers and innovate on all the layers on their behalf. >> Well, you certainly, I think you've hit all the big pieces, right? If you've lowered the costs, full visibility, simple deployment, it's a winning combination, and congratulations on that, and thank you both. It sounds like you've got a pretty good thing going, GreenPages and MontyCloud, and we wish you continue to success down the road. Thank you both for joining us here on theCUBE. >> Thank you, John. >> Thank you, Kandice, thank you, John. >> You've been watching theCUBE conversation here on AWS Startup Showcase. I'm John Walls, your host, and thank you for joining us. We'll see you next time around. (gentle instrumental music)