>> Speaker: From the SiliconANGLE Media Office
in Boston, Massachusetts, it's TheCube.
Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman.
>> I'm Stu Miniman, and this is a special Cube conversation
here in our Boston area studio.
Happy to welcome to the program Bobby Allen,
who's the chief technology officer
and chief evangelist at CloudGenera.
Bobby thanks so much for joining us.
>> Thank you Stu, thanks for having us.
>> Alright so Bobby we had a great conversation
with your CEO Brian Kelly talking about
CloudGenera, helping customers if,
in my own words I'll say, there's
this great mess of the cloud and service providers
and data centers and things are changing all the time.
And here's a great tool to help people understand this.
Now, I've had people asking me for years,
it's like "Hey, I've got my app,
"or I'm building a new app, where do I do this?"
And I've always said well, there are
certain things that are really easy.
If it's going to be up for a really short
period of time, and it's something there,
it's like you're not going to spend the time to
rack and stack and build and do this.
hey, Cloud was great for that.
And on the other end of the spectrum now,
the public clouds might disagree,
but if I have something that's just like
it's going to be cooking along and
it's not changing and it's there,
the rent versus buy analogy once again goes towards
kind of doing it in a hosted or my own data center.
But there's a whole lot of stuff in the middle,
That is, well, it depends.
There's there's this uncertainty in the world
and that's where you live, so bring us in
a little bit as to some of the thinking
as to how CloudGenera helps and where let's get into it.
>> That's a great question Stu.
So, we feel like the market is actually changed,
in the sense that information is coming faster and faster,
there's more and more information that people are
inundated and honestly overwhelmed by.
And so when people ask us for more information,
we typically tell them you don't need
more information in our opinion,
you really want to move from information
to clarity to insight, "What should I actually do?"
And so to go back to the real estate analogy
you talked about, I think people think of cloud as a house.
Cloud is at least a neighborhood if not a state,
and you need to figure out where should I live
within that state or that neighborhood.
So, let's take AWS for example.
AWS is a vendor that has many, many, many services,
but also different flavors of how you can run things.
So before people would look at CloudGenera
as a company that can compare different execution venues.
Do I want to run this in Amazon or Azure or Google?
Still we increasingly get people that want to understand
which flavor of Amazon should I do?
Do I do the multi-tenant, do I do the dedicated,
do I do the VMware cloud on AWS?
And those are all valid choices for us.
And so for us, we don't really care
where a customer wants to evaluate.
Let's define what you need and map that
to the relevant or interesting options in the marketplace,
and then take the guesswork out of it
so you have some data-driven decision making.
>> Yeah, I love that because I have
been covering Amazon for many years,
and boy I go to the show and it was like
"Alright, I thought I got my arms around Aurora
and now there's the serverless based Aurora,
and there's 17 different database options
inside of Amazon so, oh boy," and then, right.
Let's not even talk about all the compute instances.
I think it's more complicated to pick a compute instance
in the public cloud than it is if I was going to put
something in my own rack these days.
>> Bobby: Yes, yes it is.
>> So, but that being said I want to for a second
before we talk about the public cloud,
talk to your viewpoint, how are you helping customers in
kind of the service provider to data center world.
And because that's a complicated and very
I have to say fragmented space.
>> It is.
>> How does CloudGenera help there?
>> So CloudGenera deals with the consumers,
so ones who actually want to benefit
from the technology themselves,
but also from the service provider side.
So if you're Joe's Cloud Shack,
or regional cloud provider or Vmware service provider,
anyone who is offering technology services,
you may want to know number one,
how do you compare with the large hyperscale providers,
and then number two, how can you showcase your
valued proposition next to those.
So maybe Amazon and Azure and Google
are on the top of peoples' minds,
but how do your services compare to those?
So in our platform you can actually show
a Joe's Cloud Shack next to an Amazon
next to something like a Synergy or SimpliVity.
So options inside and outside the data center
that you thought about and then ones that you didn't
can all be kind of presented in a fair way,
so you take the guesswork out of
how they compare to each other.
>> Yeah, it's interesting.
One of the big raging debates we've had out there
is, "Oh I wish I had a cloud concierge."
And it's like well, it's not a utility,
and therefore, I could stand up something in my data center
or I could put a Paz in my environment
or there's so many layers in the stack
and so much nuance that it's the paradox
of choice I think that most people have.
So, maybe walk us through a customer.
When do they tend to come to you,
what are some of those patterns,
and what are the things that really help
get accelerated when they use a platform like yours?
>> So, some of the things that people think about are
they have workloads that they want to move
maybe they want to exit a data center,
or what really happens commonly
is there's a new leader in town.
New CIO comes in, "We're going to have a cloud-first strategy."
And we're not opposed to that.
The biggest principle for us is
do you understand why you're doing,
and whether this is the right time, the when?
Because if you don't do the right thing
at the right time for the right reason
there's a hole in your strategy.
And so what we look at is, okay what is it
that you're trying to move or change or transform,
What are the things that are interesting to you
or strategic, and then let's look
at putting those things together.
Now when you define what you need,
you shouldn't define what you need
in terms of where you're going, right.
I don't decide my venue based on
the airline I want to get on, I decide
I need to be in Vegas for this conference at this time,
and then I see the airline that can get me
there on time for the best price, hopefully.
And we take that same approach
when it comes to helping customers.
Let's talk about what you need
in a vendor agnostic way that's
divorced from the options in the market.
Because your needs are not impacted
by Amazon or Azure or HPE or Dell.
And so then, after we define your expectations
and your requirements let's map those
to the things that you're curious about,
or that your leadership says are strategic,
and then let's make sure that we understand
what we call the concept of logical equivalence.
The spirit of your requirement may be called
x in one provider and y in a different one,
are they really the same as a tomato to-mah-to,
or are they really two different types of,
excuse me, services or entities altogether?
So let's, let's evaluate then,
how well your needs are met by these different vendors.
Is it just a semantics issue or
are these really two different things?
Yes, they're both different types of block storage
but the requirements are different.
The latency is different, the redundancy is different,
the pricing is certainly different.
How close are these things to meeting
the spirit of what you asked for?
And the other parts too that I'll just offer
that we see a lot is people are concerned overly about cost.
How much does it cost?
And we feel like the problem is not
a problem of cost, it's a problem of value.
People go to look for cost calculators
but really what they need are value calculators, right?
I take a Porsche and an F-150.
An F-150 is a bigger vehicle but the Porsche
is more expensive for a reason.
There's a different experience than just space.
And so the reality is people don't mind paying more
if they know what they're paying for.
Transparency is really the key.
>> On that cost piece though, how much of
the total equation do you look at?
So I think about, my data center
there's everything like the power,
space, and all those pieces, if I go
to a service provider, if it's my stuff,
if I still have to manage it, versus
some of the operational expenses.
How much of kind of the, I hate to say total cost,
but how much of that spread do you look at?
>> We try to be pretty comprehensive, Stu.
So, if you go to a public provider for example
you're not paying for power but you're paying for
a certainly hourly charge typically
on an (mumbling) basis that accommodates
a lot of the things that I'll say
are platform or hypervisor and below.
Now where I think a lot of the other people
that are in this space maybe fall short,
and our opinion is that they don't
look at things above the hypervisor.
If I move a workload to an AWS,
they may have some great services I can take advantage of.
The labor and the licensing and the other considerations
that we consider to be carryover costs
are things that I still need to accommodate.
If I put a workload in Amazon,
someone still needs to patch the OS,
maybe manage the database, maybe audit security.
Those are things that have labor and licensing
and software considerations that we try to look at.
So we try to be as comprehensive as possible,
but we also look at SLA, we also look at security,
so you may need to bring another
manage services or consulting or software packages
to fill those other gaps, so we try
to be as holistic and comprehensive as possible.
>> What other kind of patterns and data
do you bring for CloudGenera?
So thinking things either from
a vertical standpoint or kind of size of company.
I just think there's been certain movements
in virtualization and containers and the like where
there's been kind of that data
and how do I understand what's going to make sense for me, so.
Does CloudGenera get into any of that?
>> We do get into some of that.
So we try again not to force anything down someone's throat.
We try to look at where you are,
but also understand that there are some patterns.
So for example, when we talk about
different industry verticals it's very aligned
to security and compliance for example.
So we know that there are certain providers
that are interesting but not ready for primetime
because they don't have HIPAA, high tech, high trust,
things that are typically relevant
for the healthcare industry, so we're
very quickly able to say this is something
that may not be right for you just yet.
Or if you have certain regional concerns,
maybe you're looking at GDPR in Europe,
you're looking at IRAP in Australia,
we can, again, typically guide them to,
this provider has some very interesting services
but they don't have the security or the SLA that you need.
So we try to do that to kind of whittle it down.
The other thing that we're seeing though,
Stu, is that honestly, many enterprises
are biting off more than they can chew.
They try to do too much at once,
and so some of the things that we talked about,
even off camera, is I would ask the question
"Does the industry have a POT problem?
"Are we trying to do too much at once?"
And when I say POT I'm using that to represent
the acronym of, to me, three pieces
that we need to break this down to.
Number one is parity, number two is optimization,
and then number three is transformation.
Many enterprises in our opinion are
trying to eat an elephant with a spoon.
They have no idea how to get there
and they really don't understand
what is too much in terms of the cost,
and so when they're evaluating
how much they can handle, how much change is too much,
in terms of people, process, and technology,
the thing to us is, what does parity look like?
And that may mean a lift and shift in some cases,
it may not, but you at least have to define
what success looks like if you take what you're doing
in your data center and move that somewhere else.
But then, the middle ground is optimization.
How do I take the spirit of what I'm doing,
move it to that venue and then kind of
clean it up or optimize it a little bit,
and then once I'm there and I can
evaluate the unintended consequences of change,
what are the things that I didn't think about?
The impacts to my people, the retraining,
the other software package I need to put in place
for monitoring and management, and so forth.
Once I have a handle on that, then I can finally
move from optimization to transformation,
but that's not, that's not glamorous.
That's not interesting.
People don't want to talk about that.
They want to go whole hog and change
everything all at once and we get into trouble doing that.
>> Bobby you've given me flashbacks.
I worked in the storage industry for a decade,
and migrations, you still kind of
wake up in the middle of the night,
screaming a little bit because
it's always challenging, there's always
all of those things to work through.
You think you've gone through all of your checklists
and then, oh wait, something didn't work.
Database migrations, big discussion going on there.
From Wikibon David Floyer has just been like,
it's so many horror stories.
People get there but it's, if you don't have to,
maybe you don't want to, but there's
so many reasons why you want to, so,
I guess I want to highlight, we're
not telling people not to change,
and moving faster and getting on board,
some modernization's a good thing, everywhere.
You've got a virtualization environment,
there's lots you can do today that we
couldn't do two or four years ago.
So, how do we get over this POT problem then?
>> I think part of it is, so again
going back to the moving analogy,
if I'm going to move, Stu, it would be foolish
for me to move without getting an estimate.
And there are times when an estimate
should be able to come in my house and tell me
"It's actually better for you to sell that piano
"than to try to move it, 'cause it's not worth it."
I would want someone, if I were CIO in an enterprise today,
to tell me, "Don't waste your time focusing on this,
"this is really where you need to focus your time
"because this is going to be the Pareto principle
"that saves you the time and the money."
The reality is bringing someone
who's benefited from the land mines and the pitfalls,
so in our opinion, bringing whether that's an SI,
consultancy, a data service company like CloudGenera
that's benefited from a lot of the things we've seen
in the industry, don't hit things on your own
that other people have stumbled on, right?
Benefit from others' mistakes to allow you
to take a look at the whole thing.
So the challenge that I think we're having, Stu,
is that we're proficient in talking about these things,
there aren't enough use cases in terms of
mature of cloud transformations to really
look back at anecdotal data this comprehensive.
We're still figuring a lot of this stuff out,
and I know people don't want to hear that,
but that's my opinion.
>> So, Bobby, is there some place when I'm
filling out these forms that I put in
here's the skill set my team has,
and a little alarm goes off and says,
"Hey, time to do some retraining, some reskilling,
"maybe bringing on some new people
"to handle some of these new areas."
How do you handle that side of it?
>> I think part of it is honestly,
and this may sound a little trite,
I think people that are willing to raise their hand
and say that we need some help
or that "We don't have this all figured out,"
or that "There are some things that we need to bring in
"a little bit of help to help us get that estimate
"before we look to move everything,"
that's really the skill set you want to have.
People that are not saying, "I'm the (mumbles)
"juggernaut of everything cloud,"
because those people don't exist yet in my opinion.
There are people that have pockets of expertise
in things that they have really deep knowledge about,
but we need to mix that with, I think,
a healthy appreciation for the fact that there's still
a lot of things that we're learning about together.
The other part of that, Stu, is it's
a community and it's a network.
You may know storage migrations,
I may know database migrations,
let's put our heads together about
how we can work together as an enterprise
and make sure that we minimize impact to the users,
because at the end of the day,
that's really the challenge, is not to do a cool project,
it's to deliver value to the business,
and that's what I think we're loosing sight of
with all this cool technology sometimes.
>> Alright, so Bobby you've got
over a thousand people using the tool.
What are some of the big areas that people are like,
"Oh wow, this is the stuff that's saving me
"either lots of time, lots of money, saving my business,
"and heck if I'm running the show, keeps my job"?
>> I think storage is a big one.
So people are oftentimes unaware
that there are so many different ways
that you can run storage in a given provider.
So Amazon for example has four to six
different ways you can just run block storage
in their particular multi-tenant cloud,
and people aren't aware of that.
So there's a case that we did for a major bank.
We showed them that a terabyte of storage in Amazon
can run from 300 dollars up to 26 thousand dollars
depending on the level or performance that you want to hit.
Egress is another one, so what does
the network behavior look like in those applications?
Because people often will estimate
the resources but not the traffic.
What are the estimates to have
a level of parity around security.
So I don't have HIPAA compliance
or SOP compliance in this particular provider.
What is it going to take me to get to that level
of parity that I need to have, because if I save money,
Stu, but I have to spend all that on my lawyer
because my data got accessed, then I've still
got a problem, I've just kind of moved that down the road.
So lots of things out there that
I believe we're hiding in plain sight.
Again, information is out there
that we just don't have the filters to find.
What I would say is a lot of people think
that cloud is a commodity, we're not there yet.
There're providers to this day, I can't give any names
to protect the innocent, but the same service
is literally triple in one provider what it costs
in another one for almost exactly the same service.
And there're examples like that that have been out there
for years, we just can't see them.
>> So, Bobby, last question, if somebody wanted
to get started with CloudGenera,
is there like a trial version,
or how would somebody get involved?
>> Yeah, so a couple things that are really interesting.
So there's a try now button on our website
that lets you kind of answer a few questions
and actually get a sample mini-assessment,
download a sample report, and actually see
the type of analysis that we provide, number one.
Number two, CloudGenera is a software company
but also a services company.
If you want to purchase the software, great,
and we actually have trials that we
can set up for you to do that.
We also do what we call proofs of value.
If you want to engage our team to come in
and do five to ten applications to see how those
might look with our analysis, and then they go
at scale and look at your whole CMDB.
We want to make sure we're meeting the needs
of the business and not trying to boil the ocean
if they're not ready for that yet.
>> Bobby Allen, CTO and chief evangelist to CloudGenerate,
thanks so much for joining me.
So much happening in the cloud world.
Be sure to check out thecube.net
for all of our coverage, as well as
wikibon.com for all the research.
Thanks for watching theCUBE, I'm Stu Miniman.