(upbeat music) >> Greetings from Los Angeles, Lisa Martin here with Dave Nicholson. We are on day three of the caves wall-to-wall coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon North America 21. We're pleased to welcome Mark Hinkle to the program, the co-founder and CEO of TriggerMesh. Mark welcome. >> Thank you, It's nice to be here. >> Lisa: Love the name. Very interesting TriggerMesh. Talk to us about what TriggerMesh does and what, when you were founded and what some of the gaps were that you saw in the market. >> Yeah, so TriggerMesh actually the Genesis of the name is in, cloud event, driven architecture. You trigger workloads. So that's the trigger and trigger mesh, and then mesh, we mesh services together, so cloud, so that's why we're called TriggerMesh. So we're a cloud native open source integration platform. And the idea is that, the number of cloud services are proliferating. You still have stuff in your data center that you can't decommission and just wholesale lift and shift to the cloud. So we wanted to provide a platform to create workflows from the data center, to the cloud, from cloud to cloud and not, and use all the cloud native design principles, but not leave your past behind. So that's, what we do. We're, very, we were cloud, we are cloud operators and developers, and we wanted the experience to be very similar to the way that DevOps folks are doing infrastructure code and deploying that we want to make it easy to do integration as code. So we follow the same design patterns, use the same domain languages, some of those tools like Hashi corpse, Terraform, and that that's what we do and how we go about doing it. >> Lisa: And when were you guys founded? >> September, 2018. >> Oh so your young, your three years young. >> Three years it's feels like 21 >> I bet. >> And startup years it's a lot has happened, but yeah, we my co-founder and I were former early cloud folks. We were at cloud.com worked through the OpenStack years and the CloudStack, and we just saw the pattern of, abstraction coming about. So first you abstract the hardware, then you abstract the operating system. And now at with the Kubernetes container, you know, evolution, you're abstracting it up to the application layer and we want it to be able to provide tooling that lets you take full advantage of that. >> Dave: So being founded in 2018, what's your perception of that? The shift that happened during the pandemic in terms of the drive towards cloud adoption and the demands for services like you provide? >> Mark: Yeah, I think it's a mixed blessing. So we, people became more remote. They needed to enable digital transformation. Biggest thing, I think that that for us is, you know, you don't go to the bank anymore. And the banking industry is doing, you know, exponentially more remote, online transactions than in person. And it's very important. So we decided that financial services is where we were going to start with first because they have a lot of legacy architecture. They have a lot of need to move to the cloud to have better digital experiences. And we wanted to enable them to, you know, keep their mainframes online while they were still doing cutting edge, you know, mobile applications, that kind of thing. >> Lisa: And of course the legacy institutions like the BFA's the Wells Fargo, they're competing with the fintechs who are much more nimble, much more agile and able to sort of disrupt the financial services industry. Was that part of also your decision to start in financial services? >> It was a little bit of luck because we started with our network and it turned out the, you know, we saw, we started talking to our friends early on, cause we're a startup and said, this is what we're going to do. And where it really resonated was PNC bank was our, one of our first customers. You know, another financial regulatory company was another one, a couple of banks in Europe. And we, you know, as we started talking about what we were doing, that we just gravitated there because they had the, the biggest need, even though everybody has the need, their businesses are, you know, critically tied to digital transformation. >> So starting with financial services. >> It's, it's counter intuitive, isn't it? >> It was counterintuitive, but it lends credibility to any other industry vertical that you're going to approach. >> Yeah, yeah it does. It's a, it's a great, they're going to be our hardest customers and they have more at stake than a lot of like transactions are millions and millions of dollars per hour for these folks. So they don't want to play around, they, they have no tolerance for failure. So it's a good start, but it's sort of like taking up jogging and running a marathon in your first week. It's very very grilling in that sense, but it really has made us a lot better and gave us a lot of insight into the kinds of things we need to do from not just functionality, but security and that kind of thing. >> Where are you finding these customers with respect to adoption of Kubernetes? Are they leading? Are they knowing we've got to get there eventually from an infrastructure perspective? >> So the interesting thing is Kubernetes is a platform for us to deliver on, so we, we don't require you to be a Kubernetes expert we offer it as a SaaS, but what happens is that the Kubernetes folks are the ones that we end up really engaging with earlier on. And I think that we find that they're in this phase of they're containerizing their apps, that's the first step. And then they're putting them on Kubernetes and then their next step is a security and integration path. So once she, I think they call it and this is my buzzword of the show day two operations, right? So they, they get to day two and then they have a security and an integration concern before they go live. So they want to be able to make sure that they don't increase their attack face. And then they also want to make sure that this newly deployed containerized infrastructure is as well integrated as the previous, you know, virtualized or even, you know, on the server infrastructure that they had before. >> So TriggerMesh, doesn't solely work in the containerized world, you're, you're sort of you're bridging the divide. >> Mark: Yes. >> What percentage of the workloads that you're seeing are the result of modernization migration, as opposed to standing up net new application environments in Kubernetes? Do you have a sense for that? >> I think we live in a lot in the brown field. So, you know, folks that have an existing project that they're trying to bridge to it versus the Greenfield kind of, you know, the, the huge wins that you saw in the early cloud days of the Netflix and the Twitter's Dwayne scale. Now we're talking to the enterprises who have, you know, they have existing concerns. So I would say that it's, it's mostly people that are, you know, very few net new projects, unless it's a modernization and they're getting ready to decommission an old one, which is. >> Dave: So Brownfield financial services. You just said, you know, let's just, let's just go after that. >> You know, yeah. I mean, we had this dart forward and we put up buzzwords, but no, it was, it was actually just, and you know, we're still finding our way as far as early on where we're open source folks. And we did not open source from day one, which is very weird when everybody's new, your identity is, you know, I worked, I was the VP of marketing for Linux foundation and no JS and all these open source projects. And my co-founder and I are Apache committers. And our project wasn't open yet because we had to get to the point where it could be open and people could be productive in the use and contribution. And we had to staff up engineers. And now I think this week we open-sourced our entire platform. And I think that's going to open up, you know, that's where we started because it was not necessarily the lowest hanging fruit, but the profitable, less profitable, lowest hanging fruit was financial services. Now we are letting our code out into the wild. And I think it'll be interesting to see what comes back. >> So you just announced that this week TriggerMesh integration platform as an open source project here at KubeCon, what's been some of the feedback? >> It's all been positive. I haven't heard anything negative. We did it, so we're very, very, there's a very, the culture around open source is very tough. It's very critical if you don't do it right. So I think we did a good job, we used enough, we used a OSI approved. They've been sourced, licensed the Apache software, a V2 license. We hired someone who was well-respected in the DevREL world from a chef who understands the DevOps sort of culture methodologies. We staffed up our engineers who are going to be helping the free and open source users. So they're successful and we're betting that that will yield business results down the road. >> Lisa: And what are the two I see on your website, two primary use cases that you guys support. Can you dig into details on that? >> So the first one is sort of a workflow automation and a really simple example of that is you have a, something that happens in one cloud. So for example, you take a picture on your phone and you upload it and it goes to Amazon and there is a service that wants to identify what's in that picture. And once you put it on the line and the internship parlance, you could kick off a workflow from TensorFlow, which is artificial intelligence to identify the picture. And there isn't a good way for clouds to communicate from one to the other, without writing custom blue, which is really what, what we're helping to get rid of is there's a lot of blue written to put together cloud native applications. So that's a workflow, you know, triggering a server less function is the workflow. The other thing is actually breaking up data gravity. So I have a warehouse of data, in my data center, and I want to start replicating some portion of that. As it changes to a database as a service, we can based on an event flow, which is passive. We're not, we're not making, having a conversation like you would with an API where there's an event stream. That's like drinking from the fire hose and TriggerMesh is the nozzle. And we can direct that data to a DBaaS. We can direct that data to snowflake. We can direct that data to a cloud-based data lake on Microsoft Azure, or we can split it up, so some events could go to Splunk and all of the events can go to your data lake or some of those, those things can be used to trigger workloads on other systems. And that event driven architecture is really the design pattern of the individual clouds. We're just making it multi-cloud and on-prem. >> Lisa: Do you have a favorite customer example that you think really articulates that the value of that use case? >> Mark: Yeah I think a PNC is probably our, well for the, for the data flow one, I would say we have a regular to Oracle and one of their customers it was their biggest SMB customer of last year. The Oracle cloud is very, very important, but it's not as tool. It doesn't have the same level of tooling as a lot of the other ones. And to, to close that deal, their regulatory customer wanted to use Datadog. So they have hundreds and hundreds of metrics. And what TriggerMesh did was ingest the hundreds and hundreds of metrics and filter them and connect them to Datadog so that, they could, use Datadog to measure, to monitor workloads on Oracle cloud. So that, would be an example of the data flow on the workflow. PNC bank is, is probably our best example and PNC bank. They want to do. I talked about infrastructure code integration is code. They want to do policy as code. So they're very highly regulatory regulated. And what they used to do is they had policies that they applied against all their systems once a month, to determine how much they were in compliance. Well, theoretically if you do that once a month, it could be 30 days before you knew where you were out of compliance. What we did was, we provided them a way to take all of the changes within their systems and for them to a server less cluster. And they codified all of these policies into server less functions and TriggerMesh is triggering their policies as code. So upon change, they're getting almost real-time updates on whether or not they're in compliance or not. And that's a huge thing. And they're going to, they have, within their first division, we worked with, you know, tens of policies throughout PNC. They have thousands of policies. And so that's really going to revolutionize what they're able to do as far as compliance. And that's a huge use case across the whole banking system. >> That's also a huge business outcome. >> Yes. >> So Mark, where can folks go to learn more about TriggerMesh, maybe even read about more specifically about the announcement that you made this week. >> TriggerMesh.com is the best way to get an overview. The open source project is get hub.com/triggermesh/trigger mesh. >> Awesome Mark, thank you for joining Dave and me talking to us about TriggerMesh, what you guys are doing. The use cases that you're enabling customers. We appreciate your time and we wish you best of luck as you continue to forge into financial services and other industries. >> Thanks, it was great to be here. >> All right. For Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin coming to you live from Los Angeles at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 21, stick around Dave and I, will be right back with our next guest.

>>Hold on. Welcome to this special cube conversation. I'm John ferry, host of the queue here in Palo Alto, California. Got a great deep dive conversation with multicloud, who we were featuring on our AWS showcase of cloud startups. Uh, Venkat Krista who's the CEO. And co-founder great to see you again and Candace Hendrix delivery architect at green pages, a partner customer. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on as always cube conversations are fun to get the deep dive. Good to see you. >>Oh, great to have, uh, have this opportunity, John. Thank you so much. Uh, Candace, thank you for joining us. It's been a pleasure work in pages, John, we're looking forward to this conversation today. >>Yeah. One of the things I'm really excited about that came out of our coupon cloud startups showcase was you guys talking about day two operations, which has been kicked around, but you guys drilled into it and put some quantification around the value proposition, but this is every company has a day to problem an opportunity and then usually our problems and most people see, but they're really opportunities to create this value proposition around something that's now going to be an operational, um, standard table-stakes. So let's get into it, take us through, uh, what you guys have with day two offers that, do a deep dive on this. Take, take it away. >>Thanks, John. Uh, John, we'll do a little bit of an involved conversation today. We'll switch between a little bit of a slide and, um, we are actually happy to show a quick demo as well. So our customers can, uh, what they see is what they get kind of demo. Um, so, uh, to give a quick background on context a day, two operations in the cloud are important for customers who are trying to get, uh, self-service provisioning, going standardization going, uh, have a way to help their developers move fast on the innovation. What we are experiencing now is developers are increasingly having a seat at the table and they would like their infrastructure architects and infrastructure solution providers to enable them to do things that they want to do with fewer friction points. What day two platform that we built does is it upskills our it teams so that they can deli work, uh, what the developers need so that the sandbox environments that they want comes to life quickly. >>And on top of that, developers can move fast with the innovation with guard rails that are in place, the guard rails that are it, administrators, it leaders are able to set for developers, include cost guard, rails, governance, guard, rails, security, and compliance guard rails, a, you know, bot based approach to getting out of the way of the developers so they can move fast while the, uh, technology provides them the Alcoa to go innovate without running into the common cloud problems, such as cost overruns or security or compliance challenges today, I'll go show and tell a little bit of all of this, and then we'll bring in partners or partner, canvas as well, so that she can talk about how we help the fortune 200, uh, innovate, uh, faster with our platform. >>Awesome. Well, let's get into it. I, you know, as you know, I, I think that day two operations is really a cloud, uh, lingua. Frank was going to be part of everyone's, uh, operational standard. And it's not just for making sure you've got cost-effectiveness, but innovation strategies that rely on cloud, they need to have new things in place. So take us through the show and tell. >>Great, well, let's switch to the slide deck here. So I'm going to give a quick background and then go from there. Great. So, um, uh, you know, Montclair is an intelligent cloud man and platform company. We help customers of all sizes. Uh, we are an AWS partner that is a cloud management tool, competency partner, super happy to be in a wedding on the AWS platform for AWS customers. Our platform is an autonomous cloud operations platform. What our mission is, we empower ID teams to go deliver to their developers and become cloud powerhouses. Uh, I'm going to go through a quick three sections of the Manticore platform that delivers value to our customers first with our platform without needing additional skillsets or hiring, uh, needing to hire, uh, you know, hard to find talent or having to use third party tools. Our customers can use AWS native solutions to achieve full visibility into their cloud environments. >>They can enable consistent self-service deployments and simplify them. They can also reduce the total cost of cloud operations, all in just a few clicks. Uh, I'm going to show and tell, uh, what customers get quickly moving into the slide where customers can get visibility into the footprint, a comprehensive security posture management and compliance posture management, click away and solve these problems. They can enable their innovation teams with operations ready environments that can provision anything from server-based workloads to serverless workloads, to containerized environments. All of that are available readily in the platform. And of course, uh, all of this can be done with a few clicks and no code. That's our platform. And a nutshell I'm happy to switch to a demo from here on John. How does that sound >>Great. Sounds awesome. Let's get the demo. Thanks for the overview. By the way, we cover that in a great video too, and a high level, um, in our new show startup showcase, people can check that out online, um, check it out, but let's get into the demo. >>Sounds good. So I'm going to switch to my laptop again here to show the browser window and go into the demo environment. Great. So this is Monte cloud.com. Uh, customers can go to app.monica.com. I'm going to move fast in a demo environment show and tell here, uh, customers split login, assuming they have signed up for the platform. It's free to sign up. Uh, the platform activates immediately. This is their full first run experience. Uh, customers can get started in about a couple of clicks. There's a welcome screen here. They can walk through this. What this provides is a way a guard had experience for customers to be able to gain visibility, security, compliance, and set up the cloud operations, uh, environment in just a couple of clicks. So in this case, customers can get continuous resource visibility. They click next from a security point of view, we'll assess about 2,220 plus security best practices and customers can select saying they would like to remediate the issues. >>We'll help do that. That's a bot based approach that does it click next compliance, a similar situation. We do compliance assessments in the platform. Customers can remediate it. Uh, click next. We have provisioning templates, John. We had a really good conversation yesterday about this, a whole set of, uh, well-architected, uh, templates that customers can click and provision anything from, uh, basic core networking, all the way up to high performance computing and minds that all is available in the platform. Again, click next to go select that customers can manage servers, windows, or Linux servers running on any cloud could be hybrid cloud, uh, Azure, AWS GCP. Again, we can manage them in a single interface and last but not the least application management, our ID operators and leaders want to have a position on how their cloud applications are performing. They want to react quickly to it best possible platform. Uh, that's it they've selected all the features. All the, which is free in the platform. Some features are available in the free trial. Customers can click and say they would like to try for 14 days. That's all. So click next platform sets itself up. This is how quick we can get to helping customers understanding what they need to do. I'm going to try and show you if I can go to the next screen here and say, this is my company name. >>So I'm going to enter some details here that, uh, helps, um, capture some basic information about, uh, our customers, uh, departments. Uh, let's say this is a demo account, or I'm going to say, um, HR, um, uh, account, let's say there's a human resources department that I'm trying to connect and manage their cloud environment, but click next >>And that's it. They connect to the AWS account. We now take our customers back to an AWS console where they're familiar interface. They're going to click next on this cloud formation stack here, which automatically starts creating what we need on the customer's account. And click, click a button here. It's going to run in the background, what my platform in this case, my view, the other view does is, uh, it instantly receives notification back from the customer's account. As you can see now, day two has recognized that, Hey, the customer is trying to connect the cloud account. It's a question. Do you want to manage these regions? We can manage 15 plus regions click next. Uh, that is pretty much it. Uh, I'm going to skip this one so that we can get to the dashboard. I'm going to skip this as well, because you can invite your team members. Uh, you can get weekly reports, uh, long story short, that's it about 10 clicks. We are already in, in a cloud environment where customers can begin to manage, operate and start taking control of the cloud footprint. >>Got it. And physical you, you skipped over the collaboration feature that's for what team members do. Kind of see the same dashboard. >>The great question. Uh, our customers can invite additional team members could be an educator who wants to look at the total cost of cloud operations. Uh, they could invite another team member who wants to be enabled only for certain parts of the platform. Very simple. We have SSO integration as well in the platform. So, uh, invite additional users start using day two in less than 10 minutes, no additional, uh, you know, configuration required. >>You know, Amazon's got that slogan always day one. You guys are always day to always go to >>About all about ensuring data was taken care of. >>Awesome. Great stuff. Candace, what's your take on this? How do you fit in here? Talk about what it's like to work with these guys. What's the, what's your perspective on this? A new multicloud day two operations dashboard. >>Hi, thank you, John. Hi, Ben Kat. Thank you very much for the introduction. Um, basically our interaction is collaborative and we're great team partners, and we work well with, with multicloud often and, and have been partners working together for quite some time and solutioning products for our clients. >>Great. Vinca you want to chime in as well and share some color commentary on, um, your partners value? >>Sure. Thanks Justin. So, uh, so green pages, uh, they offer cloud services and a whole suite of solutions to their customers. Some of the customers are ranging from fortune a hundred enterprises, uh, to a wide variety of customers. Perhaps we can actually switch over to a slide deck here, but Candace, if you're up for it, maybe we can walk through a liberal green pages and solutions that you've implemented. We can talk from the customer point of view, which we think would be more beneficial to our audience as well. >>Yes. Thank you. That's very helpful. Um, again, my name is Candice Hendrix and I'm a delivery architect here at green pages technology solutions. And what I'd like to do is share a few examples of collaboration that we have achieved through our partnership with Moni cloud first to give a better history of green pages we've been in business since 1992, we maintain a wide range of customer base, um, approximately 500 different, uh, customers and all different workflows from insurance to government to, um, um, manufacturing and the such. We've also made the CRN tech elite two 50 less for, uh, sense its inception in 2011. And basically what that is, is it's all of the companies and, or the top 250 companies in the U S and Canada, having the highest level of experience top of their game, maintaining the highest levels of training and certifications. We also offer managed services, support, professional services, cloud readiness assessments, and migrations, as well as growing a CSP or cloud service provider today, I would like to highlight a few innovative projects that we've executed with multicloud is our partner for AWS compliance needs as well as, um, AWS Dr. >>So this slide first outlines a business scenario that we dealt with with one of our clients to address cost security compliance standardization across a global AWS environment. And the challenge with this was that we experienced was the complexity of the cloud environment and the size of the environment and how can they stay compliant, optimize costs and scale the outcome with the teamwork of Mani cloud and green pages, we were able to achieve all the facets of the challenge, also enabling and, and creating what we coined it, the compliance bot and what that provided was a platform to easily parameterize some of the, um, options such as configurable schedules, configurable target servers, departments, um, options to choose between automated and manual remediation processes in compliance ability to choose whether that remediation process also, uh, auto reboots versus approval based reboots on, um, infrastructure or resources integrations into a Slack channel for manual remediation approval process, as well as daily noncompliance reporting the compliance bot also can ensure proper patching necessary agents required software versions and resources, um, that they maintain compliance through the use of tagging Lambda functions, AWS fleet manager, AWS config, and AWS CloudWatch. >>Uh, another, um, opportunity we've had to work with, um, Moni cloud in this use case, the scenario that the green pages customer needed to solve was the automation of Dr to address the requirement of an entire AWS regional failure within requirements was a RTO of four hours and an RPO of less than one minute uncertain ESE, two instances. So the challenge that we had was to develop this solution with only the use of AWS native services meeting the required RTO and RPO with no custom tooling integration. So with mighty clouds assistance and teamwork, what we were able to achieve is what we now refer to as the Dr. Bot, we solution the automation to replicate everything from their production, uh, environment in AWS to the Dr. Region in AWS, such as subnets, um, IP cider ranges, LAN IP addresses, security groups, load balancers, and all associated configuration settings. >>So with the pilot light scripting that runs daily through a Lambda function, we can manage those Delta copies into the Dr production or the Dr. Region from production and address any changes that may occur in the production environment to meet the RPO. What we used is cloud door, which is also a native AWS service. And we used AWS backup for the more static instances, we then created an integration to send any health alerts in the event of an AWS outage to their Slack channel. Then upon approval, um, they could kick off through a manual approval process. They could kick off and execute an end to end fail over from production to an AWS region and to their Dr. Region in AWS, both the compliance spot and the Dr. Bot automations can be ported and variabilize for any AWS environment. We welcome the opportunity to discuss this further and assist you in your cloud journey. I hope this explain some of the great innovation that we've been able to work with money cloud on. Thanks, Ben Capra, allowing me to speak and back to you. >>Thank you, Candace. This is fantastic. John Lassie Seesaw, right? The challenge with cloud operations is there's a lot of moving parts and, uh, visibility, compliance, security, uh, you know, all of that. Typically customers have to write custom code or integrate ten-plus tools, suddenly what, you know, customers we're seeing they're spinning up their own cloud operating teams. They're spinning up their own homegrown cloud operations model, which in invariably results in more attacks, symptoms of maintenance tasks, our platform can do all of this abstract, the complexity, and put this kind of automation within the reach of customers who are trying to transform their it departments by clicking away. That's the attack that we built on top. >>Yeah, I think that's a great example. I think Candace highlights some of the things we were talking about last time around intelligent applications, meeting, intelligent infrastructure, and to your point about operations, this comes up huge all the time in every conversation we're in and we're seeing it in the marketplace where there's a new operational model developing in real time. You're seeing people, um, homegrown ops, transforming ops. I mean, there's new roles and responsibilities are emerging and that's just the nature of the beast right now. This is kind of the new normal that it's not your traditional ops model. It's transitioning to a new, new way. This is a great example. Um, you see that the same way? >>Well, that's a, that's a great description, John you're right. That is the model that is evolving that, uh, once, um, that demands more from it teams and on the runway that is shrinking to transform and the cloud surface, it has grown how that's exactly where the becoming to help. And, uh, uh, we did do a little bit of a deep dive into what the platform does today to talk to our audience so that they can get this value. Thank you for that. Uh, you know, uh, depth in diving, happy to chat a little bit more if you'd like about, uh, where customers could go and that they can get started. >>Yeah. Looking forward to it. Vanco. Thanks for coming on, Candace. Thank you very much for sharing. Um, green pages. Congratulations. Love the Dr. Bot. That's phenomenal. I mean, I w I want a cube bottom. You're just doing these interviews is boss, but I'm looking forward to having a follow on conversation vanco. We're going to certainly see you out on the internet on Twitter. Um, maybe get you on our clubhouse, uh, chats, a lot of action out there. A lot of people talking about this, and you're seeing things from observability to new kinds of monitoring, to modern application development techniques that are just evolving in real time. So day two is here. Thanks for sharing. >>Looking forward, John, and, uh, where customers could go to is they could go to montclair.com today. They could get started in just a few place. We have a free version on the platform. They can activate this account in 10 months. They now have the power of the automation that we've built, and they can start taking control of the cloud operations in about 10 minutes. So we encourage persons to go find some free monitor.com and thank you candidates for taking the time, uh, uh, does it's fantastic that we'll be able to go solve some problems together. >>Mazi cloud turning teams into cloud powerhouses. That's their slogan. Check them out. I'm John Farrar with the cube. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: 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 coming to you from our Boston area studio and this is a special CUBE Conversation, we always love talking to startups around the industry, understanding how they're creating innovation, doing new things out there, and oftentimes one of the exits for those companies is they do get acquired, and happy to welcome back to the program one of our CUBE alumni, Sheng Liang, he is the cofounder and CEO of Rancher, today there was an announcement for a definitive acquisition of SUSE, who our audience will know well, we were at SUSECON, so Sheng, first of all, thank you for joining us, and congratulations to you and the team on joining SUSE here in the near future. >> Thank you, Stu, I'm glad to be here. >> All right, so Sheng, why don't you give our audience a little bit of context, so I've known Rancher since the very early days, I knew Rancher before most people had heard the word Kubernetes, it was about containerization, it was about helping customers, there was that cattles versus pets, so that Rancher analogy was, hey, we're going to be your rancher and help you deal with that sprawl and all of those pieces out there, where you don't want to know them by name and the like, so help us understand how what was announced today is meeting along the journey that you set out for with Rancher. >> Absolutely, so SUSE is the largest independent opensource software company in the world, and they're a leader in enterprise Linux. Today they announced they have signed a definitive agreement to acquire Rancher, so we started Rancher about six years ago, as Stu said, to really build the next generation enterprise compute platform. And in the beginning, we thought we're going to just base our technology based on Docker containers, but pretty soon Kubernetes was just clearly becoming an industry standard, so Rancher actually became the most widely used enterprise Kubernetes platform, so really with the combination of Rancher and SUSE going forward, we're going to be able to supply the enterprise container platform of choice for lots and lots of customers out there. >> Yeah, just for our audience that might not be as familiar with Rancher, why don't you give us your position in where we are with the Kubernetes landscape, I've talked about many times on theCUBE, a few years ago it was all about "Hey, are we going to have some distribution war?" Rancher has an option in that space, but today it's multicloud, Rancher works with all of the cloud Kubernetes versions, so what is it that Rancher does uniquely, and of course as you mentioned, opensource is a key piece of what you're doing. >> Exactly, Stu, thanks for the question. So this is really a good lead-up into describing what Rancher does, and some of the industry dynamics, and the great opportunity we see with SUSE. So many of you, I'm sure, have heard about Kubernetes, Kubernetes is this container orchestration platform that basically works everywhere, and you can deploy all kinds of applications, and run these applications through Kubernetes, it doesn't really matter, fundamentally, what infrastructure you use anymore, so the great thing about Kubernetes is whether you deploy your apps on AWS or on Azure, or on on-premise bare metal, or vSphere clusters, or out there in IoT gateways and 5G base stations and surveillance cameras, literally everywhere, Kubernetes will run, so it's, in our world I like to think about Kubernetes as the standard for compute. If you kind of make the analogy, what's the standard of networking, that's TCPIP, so networking used to be very different, decades ago, there used to be different kinds of networking and at best you had a local area network for a small number of computers to talk to each other, but today with TCPIP as a standard, we have internet, we have Cisco, we have Google, we have Amazon, so I really think as successful as cloud computing has been, and how much impact it has had to actually push digital transformation and app modernization forward, a lot of organizations are kind of stuck between their desire to take advantage of a cloud provider, one specific cloud provider, all the bells and whistles, versus any cloud provider, not a single cloud provider can actually supply infrastructure for everything that a large enterprise would need. You may be in a country, you may be in some remote locations, you may be in your own private data center, so the market really really demands a standard form of compute infrastructure, and that turned out to be Kubernetes, that is the true, Kubernetes started as a way Google internally ran their containers, but what it really hit the stride was a couple years ago, people started realizing for once, compute could be standardized, and that's where Rancher came in, Rancher is a Kubernetes management platform. We help organizations tie together all of their Kubernetes clusters, regardless where they are, and you can see this is a very natural evolution of organizations who embark on this Kubernetes journey, and by definition Rancher has to be open, because who, this is such a strategic piece of software, who would want their single point of control for all compute to be actually closed and proprietary? Rancher is 100% opensource, and not only that, Rancher works with everyone, it really doesn't matter who implements Kubernetes for you, I mean Rancher could implement Kubernetes for you, we have a Kubernetes distro as well, we actually have, we're particularly well-known for Kubernetes distro design for resource constrained deployments on the edge, called K3S, some of you might have heard about it, but really, we don't care, I mean we work with upstream Kubernetes distro, any CNCF-compliant Kubernetes distro, or one of many many other popular cloud hosted Kubernetes services like EKS, GKE, AKS, and with Rancher, enterprise can start to treat all of these Kubernetes clusters as fungible resources, as catalysts, so that is basically our vision, and they can focus on modernizing their application, running their application reliably, and that's really what Rancher's about. >> Okay, so Sheng, being acquired by SUSE, I'd love to hear a little bit, what does this mean for the product, what does it mean for your customers, what does it mean for you personally? According to Crunchbase, you'd raised 95 million dollars, as you said, over the six years. It's reported by CNBC, that the acquisition's in the ballpark of 600 to 700 million, so that would be about a 6X increment over what was invested, not sure if you can comment on the finances, and would love to hear what this means going forward for Rancher and its ecosystem. >> Yeah, actually, I know there's tons of rumors going around, but the acquisition price, SUSE's decided not to disclose the acquisition price, so I'm not going to comment on that. Rancher's been a very cash-efficient business, there's been no shortage of funding, but even amounts to 95 million dollars that we raised, we really haven't spent majority of it, we probably spent just about a third of the money we raised, in fact our last run to fundraise was just three, four month ago, it was a 40 million dollar series D, and we didn't even need that, I mean we could've just continued with the series C money that we raised a couple years ago, which we barely started spending either. So the great thing about Rancher's business is because we're such a product-driven company, with opensource software, you develop a unique product that actually solves a real problem, and then there's just no barrier to adoption, so this stuff just spreads organically, people download and install, and then they put it in mission-critical production. Then they seek us out for commercial subscription, and the main value they're getting out of commercial subscription is really the confidence that they can actually rely on the software to power their mission-critical workload, so once they really start using Rancher, they recognize that Rancher as an organization provide, so this business model's worked out really well for us. Vast majority of our deals are based on inbound leads, and that's why we've been so efficient, and that's I think one of the things that really attracted SUSE as well. It's just, these days you don't just want a business that you have to do heavy weight, heavy duty, old fashioned enterprise (indistinct), because that's really expensive, and when so much of that value is building through some kind of a bundling or locking, sooner or later customers know better, right? They want to get away. So we really wanted to provide a opensource, and open, more important than opensource is actually open, lot of people don't realize there are actually lots of opensource software even in the market that are not really quite open, that might seem like a contradiction, but you can have opensource software which you eventually package it in a way, you don't even make the source code available easily, you don't make it easy to rebuild the stuff, so Rancher is truly open and opensource, people just download opensource software, run it in the day they need it, our Enterprise subscription we will support, the day they don't need it, they will actually continue to run the same piece of software, and we'd be happy to continue to provide them with patches and security fixes, so as an organization we really have to provide that continuous value, and it worked out really well, because, this is such a important piece of software. SUSE has this model that I saw on their website, and it really appeals to us, it's called the power of many, so SUSE, turns out they not only completely understand and buy into our commitment to open and opensource, but they're completely open in terms of supporting the whole ecosystem, the software stack, that not only they produce, but their partners produce, in many cases even their competitors produce, so that kind of mentality really resonated with us. >> Yeah, so Sheng, you wrote in the article announcing the acquisition that when the deal closes, you'll be running engineering and innovation inside of SUSE, if I remember right, Thomas Di Giacomo has a similar title to that right now in SUSE, course Melissa Di Donato is the CEO of SUSE. Of course the comparison that everyone will have is you are now the OpenShift to SUSE. You're no stranger to OpenShift, Rancher competes against RedHat OpenShift out on the market. I wonder if you could share a little bit, what do you see in your customer base for people out there that says "Hey, how should I think of Rancher "compared to what RedHat's been doing with OpenShift?" >> Yeah, I mean I think RedHat did a lot of good things for opensource, for Linux, for Kubernetes, and for the community, OpenShift being primarily a Kubernetes distro and on top of that, RedHat built a number of enhanced capabilities, but at the end of the day, we don't believe OpenShift by itself actually solves the kind of problem we're seeing with customers today, and that's why as much investment has gone into OpenShift, we just see no slowdown, in fact an acceleration of demand of Rancher, so we don't, Rancher always thrived by being different, and the nice thing about SUSE being a independent company, as opposed to a part of a much larger organization like RedHat, is where we're going to be as an organization 100% focused on bringing the best experience to customers, and solve customers' business problems, as they transform their legacy application suite into cloud-native infrastructure. So I think the opportunity is so large, and there's going to be enough market there for multiple players, but we measure our success by how many people, how much adoption we're actually getting out of our software, and I said in the beginning, Rancher is the most widely used enterprise Kubernetes platform, and out of that, what real value we're delivering to our customers, and I think we solve those problems, we'll be able to build a fantastic business with SUSE. >> Excellent. Sheng, I'm wondering if we could just look back a little bit, you're no stranger to acquisitions, remember back when Cloud.com was acquired by Citrix, back when we had the stack wars between CloudStack and OpenStack and the like, I'm curious what lessons you learned having gone through that, that you took away, and prepared you for what you're doing here, and how you might do things a little bit differently, with the SUSE acquisition. >> Yeah, my experience with Cloud.com acquired by Citrix was very good, in fact, and a lot of times, you really got to figure out a way to adapt to actually make sure that Rancher as a standalone business, or back then, Cloud.com was a standalone business, how are they actually fitting to the acquirer's business as a whole? So when Cloud.com was acquired, it was pretty clear, as attractive as the CloudStack business was, really the bigger prize for Citrix was to actually modernize and cloudify their desktop business, which absolutely was like a two billion dollar business, growing to three billion dollars back then, I think it's even bigger now, with now everyone working remote. So we at Citrix, we not only continued to grow the CloudStack business, but more importantly, one of the things I'm the most proud of is we really played up a crucial role in modernizing and cloudifying the Citrix mainline business. So this time around, I think the alignment between what Rancher does and what SUSE does is even more apparent, obviously, until the deal actually closes, we're not really allowed to actually plan or execute on some of the integration synergies, but at a higher level, I don't see any difficulty for SUSE to be able to effectively market, and service their global base of customers, using the Rancher technology, so it's just the synergy between Kubernetes and Linux is just so much stronger, and in some sense, I think I've used this term before, Kubernetes is almost like the new Linux, so it just seems like a very natural place for SUSE to evolve into anyway, so I'm very very bullish about the potential synergy with the acquisition, I just can't wait to roll up my hands and get going as soon as the deal closes. >> All right, well Sheng, thank you so much for joining us, absolutely from our standpoint, we look at it, it's a natural fit of what Rancher does into SUSE, as you stated. The opensource vision, the community, and customer-focused absolutely align, so best of luck with the integration, looking forward to seeing you when you have your new role and hearing more about Rancher's journey, now part of SUSE. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you Stu, it's always great talking to you. >> All right, and be sure, we'll definitely catch up with Rancher's team at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon European show, which is of course virtual, as well as many other events down the road. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE.