(upbeat music)
>> Okay, we're back here at theCUBE on this floor
in CLOUD CITY, the center of all the action
at Mobile World Congress.
I'm John Brown your host.
Michael current CTO of Virta San
is here with me remote because this is a virtual
event as well, this is a hybrid event.
The first industry hybrid event,
Greg would be back in real life on the floor, Michael,
you coming in remotely.
Thanks for joining us here in the cube in cloud city.
>> Thanks for having me and said the beer.
>> We were just talking on camera about.
He went to Michigan and football,
all that good time while we were waiting from Adam to pseudo
great stuff, but let's get into what you guys are doing.
You've got a great cloud news, we're going to get to,
but take a minute to explain what you guys do first.
>> So Virta San helps organizations
of any size thrive in the clouds.
So we have a unique combination of proprietary technologies,
such as our cloud optimization platform that we'll talk
about in a minute and a global team of experts that helps
companies make the most of the cloud from getting to the
cloud and building the cloud to optimizing the cloud all the
way to managing the cloud at scale.
>> Well, you got a lot of experience dealing
with the enterprise, a lot of customer growth
over the years, great leader.
The cloud dynamic here is the big story
at mobile world congress, this year, the change over,
I won't say change over per se,
but certainly the shift or growth of cloud on top of telco,
you guys have some news here at mobile world congress.
Let's share the news, what's the big scoop?
>> So we have an automated cloud optimization platform
that helps companies automatically understand your usage
patterns and do spend fully, automatically.
And we focus first on AWS is the biggest cloud provider,
but starting this week,
we wanted announces we're actually going live with our GCP
product,
which means people who are on the GCP cloud platform can now
leverage our platform to constantly understand usage
patterns and spend and automatically take action
to reduce spend.
So we typically see customers save over 50% when they use
our platform.
So now GCP customers can take advantage of the same
capabilities that our AWS customers
take advantage of every day.
>> Talk about the relationships as you get deeper.
And this seems to be the pattern I want to just unpack it.
You don't mind a little bit the relationship with Google
and this announcement and Amazon you're tightly coupled
with them, is it more integration?
Talk about what makes these deals different and special for
your customers? What's what's, what's about them.
What's the big deal?
>> Well, I think for us, obviously we think that, you know,
the public clouds of the future, right?
And obviously cloud city and all the different companies
there agree with us, and we think that much like,
you know, you don't,
you don't generate your own electricity.
We don't think you're going to generate you're to you're
going to build your own technology infrastructure.
For the most part,
we think that pretty much all compute will be in the public
cloud.
And obviously AWS is the market leader in the largest cloud
provider in the, but you know, GCP,
especially with telecom has some compelling offerings.
And we think that, you know,
organizations are going to want choice.
Many will go multicloud,
meaning they'll have 1, 2, 3 of the big providers
and move workloads across those.
But even those who choose one cloud provider, you know,
each cloud provider has their strengths and different
companies will choose different providers.
And they're all, you know,
they've all got strong capabilities and their uniqueness.
So we want to make sure that whether, you know,
an organization goes across all cloud providers or they
choose one that we can support them no matter what
the workloads look like, and so for us, you know,
developing deep relationships with each of the public cloud
providers, but also, you know,
expanding our full set of capabilities to support all
of them is critically important because
we do think that there's going to be, you know,
a handful of large public cloud providers
and obviously AWS and GCP are among them.
>> Yeah, I mean, I talk to people all the time and even,
you know, we're an Amazon customer,
pretty robust cloud in the bills out of control is what's,
what's this charge for it.
There's more services to tap into, you know,
it's like first one's on me, you know?
And then next thing you know, you're,
you're consuming a hell of a lot of new services,
but there's value there and there's breaths a minute
for the cloud, we all love that.
But just as a random aside here,
I want to get your thoughts real quick, if you don't mind,
this idea of a cloud economist has become part of a new role
in an organization, certainly SRS is DevOps.
Then you starting to get into people who actually can squint
through the data and understand the consumption
and be more on the economics side,
because people are changing how they report their earnings.
They're changing how they report their KPIs based upon the
usage and costs, and...
What, is this real?
what's your thoughts on that?
I know that's a little random,
but I want to get your, get your thoughts on that.
>> Well, yeah, it's interesting
that that's been a development.
What I will say is, you know,
the economics of cloud are complicated and they're still
changing and still emerging,
so I think that's probably more of a reaction to how dynamic
the environment is then kind of a long-term trend.
I mean, admittedly for us we hope that, you know,
a lot of that analysis and the data that's required
and will be provided by our platform.
So you can think about it as,
you know, a digital or AI powered cloud economist.
So I don't, I don't know,
hopefully our customers can use the platform
and get everything they need and they won't need
to go out and hire a cloud economist.
That sounds expensive.
>> Well, I think one of the things that sounds like great
opportunities to make that go away,
where you don't have to waste a resource to go
through the cost side.
I want to get your thoughts on this.
This comes up all the time, certainly on Twitter,
I'm always riffing on it.
It comes up on a lot of my interviews and private chats with
people about their, their cloud architecture,
spend can get out of control pretty quickly.
And data is a big part of it.
Moving data is always going to be...
Especially Amazon and Google,
moving data in and out of the cloud is great.
Now with the edge,
I just talked to Bill Vass at a Amazon web service.
He's the VP of engineering.
You can literally bring the cloud to the edge
and all the clouds are going to be doing this,
these edge hubs.
So that's going to process data at the edge,
but it's also going to open up more services, right?
So, you know, it's complicated enough as it is,
spend is getting out of control.
And it's only seems to be getting out of control even more.
How do you talk to customers?
I'd want to not be afraid they want to jump in,
but they also want to have a hedge.
Yeah, what's your, what's your take on your story?
>> I think there's a lot of debate right now
as to whether or not, you know,
moving to the cloud from a cost perspective
is cost-effective or more costly.
And there's a pretty healthy debate going on at the moment.
I think that the reality is, you know, yes,
the cloud makes it easier for you to take on new services
and bring on new things, and that of course drives spend,
but it also unlocks incredible possibilities.
What we try to do is help organizations take advantage
of those possibilities and kind of the capabilities
of the cloud while managing spend,
and it's a complex problem, but it's a solvable problem.
So for us, we think that, you know
the job of the cloud providers is to, you know,
continue to innovate and continue to bring more and more
capability to bear so that organizations can transform
through technology,
the job of the teams using that technologies
is to really leverage those capabilities,
to build and to innovate and to serve their customers.
And what we want to do is enable them to do that
in a cost-effective manner, and we believe,
and we have data to prove that if you do public cloud,
right, it's cheaper because you know, those,
those organizations, you know, much like, you know,
at the turn of the industrial revolution,
factories used to have their own power plants because you
couldn't effectively reliably and kind of cost-effectively
generate power at scale.
Obviously no one does that now.
And I think with the cloud providers, that's the same thing.
I mean, they're investing in proprietary hardware,
tons of software, tons of automation.
They're highly secure.
You know, at the end of the day,
they're going to always be able
to provide a given capability at a lower cost point.
Like, of course they need to make profit.
So there's a bit of margin in there, but, you know,
at the end of the day,
we think that both the flexibility and capability of it
combined with their ability to operate at scale gives you
a better value proposition, especially if you do it right.
And that's what we want to focus on is, you know,
the answer is there.
You just need the right data
and the right intelligence to find it.
>> Totally, I totally agree with you.
In fact, I had a big debate with Martine Casada
at Andreessen Horowitz about cloud repatriation,
and he was calling his paradigm.
Do you focus on the cost or the revenue?
And obviously they have Dropbox,
which is a big example of that,
and I even interviewed the Zynga guys
and they actually went back to Amazon,
although they didn't report that,
but I'm a big believer that if you can't get the new
revenue, then you're in cosmos then,
and there are the issues, but again,
I don't want to go there right now.
I'll talk about that another time, but I want to get your,
I want to get the playbook, so first of all,
I love what you do, I think it's an opportunity
to take that heavy lifting away from customers around
understanding cost optimization.
A lot of people don't know how to do it.
So take us through a playbook.
What are some best practices that you guys have seen to help
people figure this out?
What do you say to somebody, help me, Michael,
I'm in a world of hurt, what do I do?
What's the playbook?
Can you give some examples of day in the life?
>> Sure, so I think,
I think the first thing is know
what you're spending money on
which sounds obvious, but you know,
there's cloud environments are complicated,
especially at scale.
There's hundreds of thousands of skews and lots of different
usage patterns.
And I think the first thing is understand
what you're spending money on.
Number two is understand what you're getting for that spend.
So, you know, what value are you driving with that spend?
And then number three is put the information in the hands
of the people who can do something about it.
And I think that is,
is one of the things that we really focus on is,
you know, we built our product
from an engineering focus first.
It was engineers solving the problem of understanding how
to keep cloud costs in control.
And so our whole principle is give the people,
working with the technology,
the data to make good decisions and give them
the power to act on it.
And so, you know, a lot of companies say,
"Oh, we're spending more over here.
Or maybe we should look at that."
But, but what we believe is actually be specific,
where are you spending money?
Where exactly are you spending too much?
And what should you do about that?
And give that information to the people who can take action,
which are the engineers.
And then lastly make it important in the organization
because there's a ton of competing priorities.
And what we've found is that, you know,
where there's leadership support there's results.
And so I think if you do those four things, you know,
results will follow.
Now, obviously, you know,
you need to understand specific utilization patterns
and know what to do with different kinds
of resources and all of that stuff is complicated,
but there are certainly solutions out there.
Ours included who helped you with that.
So if you get the other four things, right,
plus you have some help,
you can keep it under control
and actually not just keep it under control,
but operate in an environment that's much cheaper than
hosting all this technology yourself and much more flexible.
>> That's a great point, I mean,
the fact that you mentioned earlier,
the engineering piece that is so true people I've talked to,
you mean our experiences and it's pretty common.
The DevOps team tends to get involved in things like making
sure you're buying reserve instances or all kinds of ways
to optimize patterns, and that's also an issue, right?
I mean, first of all, it makes sense that they're doing it,
but also engineering time is being spent on
essentially accounting at that point.
Demonstrates the shift, I'm not saying it's good or bad.
I'm just saying that got to be realistic.
It's a time sink for the engineering when they're not
engineering accounting, or should they,
this is a legit question, it's not so much they should
or shouldn't, I mean, if you say to someone,
"Hey, you're paid to build and write software
and you're spending your time solving accounting problems."
That's obviously a mismatch.
But when you talk about SREs and DevOps, Michael,
it's kind of what might not be a bad thing, right?
I mean, so how do people react to that?
Are they kind of scratching their head on the same way?
Or are you guys the solution to that?
>> Well, I think that at first they are, but for us,
at least it's, you know,
we don't want them trying to understand the intricacies
of a savings plan or understanding kind
of the different options for compute instances.
What we want them to do is we give them all the information.
So our approach is give them all the information.
They need to quickly make a decision,
let them make a decision,
like push a button and then let
the change happen automatically.
So if you think about it, you know,
the amount of time they spend is, is a minute.
That's the goal because then we can use their expertise.
So it's not a finance person or an accountant doing research
and making decisions that may or may not make technical
sense and then looping in a bunch of people
and they all talk, and then all that,
that kind of whole process it's now here is a data-driven
observation and recommendation.
You have context to say yes or no,
if you push the button and then you say, yes, then,
you know, the change happens.
If you say, no, the system learns.
>> It's building right into the pipeline and they're shifting
left to security, it's the same concept.
It's really a great thing.
I really think you're onto something big.,I love this story.
It's kind of one of those things where reality's there.
Michael, we've got 30 seconds left.
I want to get your thoughts to share what put a plug in for
the company, what you guys are doing,
what are you looking at higher?
You got a 30 second plug,
go plug the company, what do you got?
>> Well, you know, we think that, you know,
for any organization, big or small,
trying to make the most of the public cloud and be cloud
first, you know, we, we bring a unique set of expertise,
automation, and technology capabilities to bear,
to help them thrive in the cloud and make the most of it.
So, you know,
obviously we would love to work with any company that,
that wants to be cloud first
and fully embrace the public cloud.
I think we've got all the tools
to help them thrive.
>> Yeah, and I think,
I think the confluence of business logic technology
engineering working together is a home run.
It's only going to get more stronger, so congratulations.
Thanks for coming on theCUBE.
>> Thank you.
>> Adam, back to you in the studio for more action,
theCUBE is out, we'll see you later.