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>> Announcer: From the SiliconANGLE Media Office
in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE.
Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman.
>> Hi, and welcome to a special presentation
of CUBE Conversation.
I'm Stu Miniman and we're here in our Boston-area studio,
happy to welcome to the program first-time guest
Brian Kelly, who's the Co-founder and CEO of CLoudGenera.
Brian, thanks so much for joining me.
>> Stu, thank you so much for having us here.
>> All right, first of all Brian, we always love.
We get you know a co-founder on the program,
you got to bring us back to kind of the why.
You know, why was CLoudGenera formed?
We've had a chance to dig into it but CLoudGenera,
there's cloud in the name, there's generation.
Tell me about the company, the name,
and a little bit about your background.
>> Be glad to.
So like most great companies,
our company was born of the market's necessity.
We saw trend happening as many businesses
we're shifting the way they manage their IT
and the trend took the form of this buzzword cloud.
And so you know CLoudGenera as a company
absolutely helps businesses figure out their
most efficient path towards leveraging cloud technologies.
But our value proposition is actually greater than that.
Our business exists to help companies determine
the best IT services to support
the needs of their organization.
>> Great.
Well luckily cloud's simple.
Enterprise IT, we just have a button we press,
and everything works awesome.
I think the reality is though,
nobody ever gets rid of anything.
Changing applications is really tough
and it's a really complicated
and super fast changing market out there.
So maybe, drill in just a tiny bit
and explain what it is that you do
and why that's a little bit different
than some of the other things happening in the marketplace.
>> Sure.
Well the big easy button does exist,
when you push it nothing happens.
Maybe it makes a funny sound.
As the name would suggest,
CLoudGenera specializes in the formation of clouds
and to the point that you made,
this is not simple, this is not easy.
Cloud is not a target state.
Unlike virtualization, which was a target state,
cloud is really an operating model.
And also as you highlighted, there's so much variability
and complexity associated with cloud.
Am i talking about infrastructure?
Am i talking about platforms?
Am i talking about software as a service?
Cloud for us can be any of those things.
It can be you managing your infrastructure.
Can be somebody else managing your infrastructure,
all the way up through your apps.
And so what our business aims to do is
to demystify all the variability and complexity
associated with making cloud decisions.
Really it's about helping people figure out
where to place their workloads and what we commonly see is
that the migration does not generate success
unless you've considered how to optimize your workloads
in advance of selecting a new execution venue.
So as a business our software, our technology,
helps customers to determine how do I
optimize my workloads, regardless of
whether or not I'm going to move them.
And ultimately, how do I get the best value
for my spend at IT services as I'm contemplating
cloud as a model for hosting my apps?
>> Yeah, so every vendor I talk to out there,
if I'm a cloud platform vendor
or if I'm an infrastructure vendor,
they all have these tools that say hey,
here's how the experience is going to be on our platform.
Maybe it compares against a couple of things out there
but you're not pushing hardware,
you're not pushing platforms.
Explain how you fit into kind of the ecosystem
and you're not just, when you say cloud
it's it's not just public cloud,
it's you know, talk a little bit about
the spectrum of things that you support.
>> Okay, be happy to.
So first, what I would say is that
when you look at a vendor strategy,
their strategy is to drive you to adopt
their technologies, their solutions.
And so any of the tools that they're bringing to market,
any of the services that they're bringing to market,
are biased towards the outcome
that they're trying to achieve.
This was actually when I say CLoudGenera
was born of the market's necessity,
the market really needed a solution
that was agnostic and unbiased to the outcome.
Something that would be so bold is
to recommend not doing anything
if that was the best option available to your business.
That's really what makes CLoudGenera special.
We are the best place to go in the market
to get that unbiased agnostic viewpoint
that's tailored to your needs as an organization
and guides you to the right vendors and the right solutions.
>> Yeah.
It's interesting you think about like
there's consulting companies that
would get involved and send a bunch of people
and help you through your journey.
We talked about there's been lots of tools out
that have poked at this but there's a big elephant
in the room and it's a little tough to
kind of figure out where to start.
So I just want to, talk a little bit about
kind of the breadth and depth of what you do.
How do you keep up with all of these things?
I mean, while we were talking I'm pretty sure
Amazon released one or two new features.
And the next time Intel comes out with a spin,
you've got a billion SKUs that you have to update.
So how does this impact you
and how do you help keep up with it?
>> So Stu, this is really what creates the longevity
and value proposition for my business.
The market is changing at breakneck speed.
To your point, the major providers
both in data center as well as in cloud
have probably released a half a dozen new services
for the market to contemplate just in our conversation.
So CLoudGenera addresses this in a couple of different ways.
But all of it born in automation and intelligence.
And so we have a cloud research function
as a part of our platform that is continually ingesting
the data around what the market can offer.
So this could be services you could consume
from public cloud providers like the Microsoft Azure,
the Amazon EC2, the Google Compute as an example,
but we're not an infrastructure play.
We actually move up and down the stack.
So if you want to look at platform as a service solution
like Cloud Foundry as an example,
you're moving towards no SQL,
as an example, for managing data.
Do I do that is infrastructure?
Do I do it as a platform, as a service?
Right, what level of service is available in the market?
Our automation, our intelligence, gathering that market data
is the big value for our customers
because through that automation we give them something
that have avoids their need to spend a lot of money
on consultants or to spend a lot of time internally
trying to assess what the market can offer.
And then most importantly once you have that data,
how do you turn it into insights?
How do you take that data and make it actionable
for your business based upon your needs
and the requirements of your workloads?
So that that's a big part of our secret sauce.
A big part of our IP.
We stay current with the market so that you don't have to.
And what's interesting about our business is
that we don't just do point in time comparisons.
In fact, we sit on historical data and trends,
both how you can modernize in your data center
and how you can leverage cloud services
and that data set is over four years large,
I like to say, not four years old.
And so in that way we can even predict
where the market is headed
so if you're if you're leveraging us
or doing this manual as opposed to
leveraging our automated methods,
we've got the recipe of how to make good decisions
and really it is staying current on the market.
That's the only way that that you can address it.
Love to touch on another aspect of the question you asked,
which is consultancies.
If there's one thing that we're disrupting in the market,
it is the ability to do this analysis at scale.
Many of our clients tell us that it's cost prohibitive
to hire an army of consultants to come in
and assess their current capabilities
and then attempt to map that to what the market can offer.
If you're using a manual method powered by labor,
you're likely going to have an answer
that reflects the market ninety days ago,
180 days ago.
CLoudGenera gives you the power at your fingertips
to get those sort of insights immediately.
And when I talk about disruption,
it's really doing in minutes what normally took months.
it's also a fraction of the cost,
Both productivity and labor as well as the true costs
if you're leveraging consultants
to do this sort of analysis.
and so in that way we can scale to servinG customers
that are as large and as complicated as the Global Five.
We can also scale far and wide to
serve many customers in the market at the same time.
Again, it's because we're using algorithms.
We're using data science.
We're not trying to solve this problem with labor.
>> Yeah, I love that and you talked about,
it's not just about the platform,
you're looking at what we've said for years.
Customers need to look at their data,
they need to look at their applications,
and that's where you need to start.
I'd like you to talk a little bit about your users
because you know, talked to so many companies,
it's like oh, they've tried
either building their own in-house solution
or going to a service provider
or going to a public cloud
and they get one or two apps.
Some critical one or some real important
or some cool new one and then they're like okay,
I've got hundreds or thousands of other apps
and trying to figure out how they do that,
you got to use some intelligence.
You need to use some, you know,
it needs to be driven by software.
It can't be some big process that
I'd have some consultancy or a thing like that.
Do you have some customer examples you can bring us through
or talk to how that typically works?
>> Yeah, absolutely.
I'll share a few patterns that we see in the market.
One pattern and it doesn't have a bias
towards a particular industry vertical
or a particular size of customer.
But there's an illusion out there in the market
that you'll be able to lift and shift your workload
from your data center to Amazon's data center,
as an example, and then magically
that's going to take care of all your problems.
Amazon's going to manage your mess for less.
Well, the harsh reality that customers are finding
is that while Amazon, as an example,
might be an excellent provider
of IT services for your business,
if you're not optimizing your workload
to leverage that provider,
you're not going to get the benefits that you'd hope.
And so one trend we see commonly in the industry
and it's a mistake we hope folks make,
whether they leverage our service
or they solve this problem some other way,
is you know please don't try to do the lift and shift.
In fact, another big trend we see in the industry
of companies that have gone that route
is they do what we like to call repatriation.
Where they made the full-fledged push
into migrating their workloads to a new venue
and ultimately to figure out that the lift and shift
was not successful for them.
And the larger the client,
the more pain they've experienced
because the more money they're spending on IT
and the harder that gets.
>> Just to poke at that a tiny bit
and I know we don't have a lot of time to dig into it
but it's if you lift and shift and that's the step one
of doing, I need to break something apart,
I want to refactor some pieces,
and eventually know I'll get there.
But is that okay and are there paths to get there?
Or are you saying hey, you want to sort those pieces out
first before you get to the cloud?
>> There's some use cases where lift and shift
absolutely has a benefit, absolutely has a value.
If you're dedicating IT capacity
and it's dedicated towards something
that's used sporadically,
well just the usage model alone,
you could potentially get a benefit out of a lift and shift.
You're getting the benefit of the optimization
just by being able to leverage the elasticity of cloud.
But beyond some of those low hanging fruit use cases,
we actually see this as a detriment to
many company's success.
I like to use the analogy of a moving company.
The last thing you want to do is pack the box,
pick up the box, move the box,
and then move it three or four times
before you actually get to the destination.
That's what lift and shift is really doing.
You just pick up what you had in your data center,
you put it in somebody else's data center,
and now you're in a foreign land
and you're going to try to break that thing apart
and re-engineer it there.
That's actually going to be a lot harder in practice
than what we've seen as more of a better option,
which is optimized where you are.
If you're if your target state for
the next innovation is to get to containers,
figure out how to containerize before
you make the migration as an example.
If your endgame is to move from a database on infrastructure
to a platform as-a-service,
well optimized that databases deployment,
optimize that workload before you attempt
to transition it to the path.
So I would say nine times out of ten,
you're probably going to want to treat an application workload
before you attempt to move it someplace else.
Otherwise, you're just going to be lifting and carrying
that box several times.
>> Yeah, it unfortunately reminds me of
anybody that's moved and you know,
you move someplace and three to five years later
you run across that box and you're like
why did I even move this to my environment.
I've outgrown it, I don't need it.
I could have either gotten rid of it
or done something else with it.
Last piece of the technology I want to cover for today
is we've talked a bunch about the public cloud,
you do a lot with service providers
and with the in-house data center stuff.
Maybe talk a little bit as to what you cover.
Public clouds, there's a few really big ones
but there's so many service providers.
What do you engage with?
What do you cover there and in the data center there's just,
I can't imagine how many options there are.
What's the scope of what you cover?
>> So this might be a little controversial for some folks
because if you read the the trade rags,
cloud is the answer.
Whatever cloud may be, moving to cloud is the answer.
Our philosophy as a company is that
public cloud is not the only game in town,
nor will it be the only game in town in the future.
We believe in companies investing in technology
to get the best value for their spend.
And as a result there's a continuum of options
that we see existing far into the future
and those include regional data center providers.
Frequently we see them being value-added
because they can offer a level of service
that's not yet been implemented in public cloud.
Who's going to manage the stuff that
an Azure doesn't manage, as an example.
These regional providers, these service providers,
many of whom are evolving to do managed services
and other people's data centers, not just their own,
are going to play a key role in this next wave of technology.
And so again, these regional providers,
we see them being very important for
delivering the service level that customers expect.
There's also and this is a very prominent topic right now,
there's concerns about data privacy and data sovereignty.
While the hyper scalars have done a great job
of building a global footprint, they still have gaps.
And so if companies are concerned about
GDPR in Europe, as an example.
If they're concerned about PIPEDA
up in Canada, as an example.
These regional service providers
have the compliance capabilities,
they have the protection already in place
to not just deliver a high service level
but also to deliver a solution that
can be lower risk for your business.
And so that's really where we see service providers
fitting in the market and we see customers
having the right mix of public cloud
and service provider powered infrastructure.
As well as for large companies,
they may still have the buying power,
and they may still have the level of expertise in house,
so like my Fortune 50 clientele
but you could even take it down probably to the Fortune 500.
Where it's more cost-effective for them
to still operate in their data center.
Today, because we're a data-driven company
and we live in the data and the insights it provides,
still the majority of the workloads,
either for service level security
or if you're a large company, the economics to run IT
are still better suited in data center.
We don't know that it's always going to be the majority
in your data center.
We see this evolving as the public cloud providers
continue to mature, over the last few years
they've matured greatly.
But again, we see a continuum of options
for customers to consider.
We think those options will get smaller
but we still think you're going to have
a purpose to consider in your data center,
in a regional service provider,
as well as considering a hyper scalar for your needs.
>> All right.
Brian, last thing.
Need to get speeds and feeds on CLoudGenera.
How many employees you have, how many customers you have.
Can talk anything about the funding?
And tell us about this looking south.
>> The Silicon South.
Well, let me start there.
One of the things we're very proud about
is being a company that's headquartered here
on the East Coast and specifically in the South.
That said, we're already a global company.
We have customers around the world.
There's well over a thousand subscribers
of our cloud assist technology,
which is where you can both model future uses of technology
as well as load in your existing inventories
and analyze your business at scale.
What I would share again about the Silicon South is
that we're one of these cool companies
that is helping the southeast kind of rise up
as a technology center.
Not one of the normal places that folks think of
as innovation hubs but very much
in the Carolinas in particular,
we have a market that's on the rise
with very smart data scientists,
very smart developers, and very strong business leaders.
And so that's one of the things
we are very proud of as a company.
There are 22 employees in CLoudGenera today.
As I mentioned, we have a global footprint
in terms of customers.
I gave you a stat just around our cloud assist product.
One of the cool things about us is that
we serve both the consumer,
so that would be the enterprise that's trying to
figure out what to do with their technology investments.
We also serve their suppliers.
We will not bias ourselves
so they can't bias the output of our software
but what they can do is leverage our software
to guide their customers decisions.
In fact, our relationship with Amazon, Microsoft,
and Google are relationships where they know
sometimes our software will recommend an outcome
that they can't monetize
but they still choose to work with us
and they still choose to recommend us
and in some cases, leverage us for their clients
to make sure their clients are getting
the best value for their spent.
>> Well, Brian Kelly,
Charlotte North Carolina based CLoudGenera.
Appreciate you joining.
Thanks so much for sharing with us
some of the nuance and complexity
that you're trying to help enterprises glean through.
We'll be back.
Check out lots more coverage at theCUBE.net.
So many shows where companies are
trying to sort through this very complicated space.
So be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all the videos.
Wikibon.com where we're digging through
with our analysis on our team.
I'm Stu Miniman, thanks so much for watching theCUBE.
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