 from Seattle, Washington. It's theCUBE on the ground. Covering KubeCon 2016. Brought to you by the Linux Foundation and Red Hat. Here's your host, John Furrier. Hello everyone, we are here in Seattle for KubeCon, CloudNativeCon. This is theCUBE special on the ground. Covered by John Furrier, the host of theCUBE. I'm here with Bick Lee, the chief architect and co-founder of Platform 9. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for having me. I got the colors, got the shirt there, good promo on the name, get on the video. Good, good for you. You guys are a startup, three years old. I mean, come on, you couldn't have asked for more turbulent waters than coming in three years ago. I mean, what a ride you've had. What's your experience? I mean, go back three years, take us through from here to now, the founding of the company, what you guys have been doing, what's been the journey like? So prior to Platform 9, my friends and I, my co-founders and I spent many years at VMware and we were ready to kind of go in separate directions that had been there for a very long time, but I was ready for the next step and so were they. And we saw an opportunity and we decided to gang up together and pursue it. The opportunity that we saw was that open source software is just getting amazing and ruling the world, especially in the infrastructure space, right, for running compute, storage, networking. But what's defining this kind of software, it's fairly complex to operate. So we saw an opportunity in users who want to leverage that open source software to run their infrastructure, especially those who have not committed to the public cloud yet. So they want to have the same kind of agility but using their own resources, their own hardware, or sometimes they run their own hardware and a combination of public clouds. And we wanted to give those types of customers the ability to run a cloud at scale using the greatest and latest open source software. And we wanted to operate that as a service. So just like a SaaS, almost like a SaaS type of business. And so that's how platform nine was born. And do you have that SaaS now? Is that the offering that you guys offer is basically scale up as a service for enterprises, private cloud, public cloud, or how do you guys differentiate? To simplify it for you, think of it as a customer wants to run some kind of open source stack, such as open stack, that's where we started. They have a bunch of, you know, compute hardware and networking and storage, but they can't afford an entire IT staff to run that. So using platform nine, they can with very minimal installation and configuration, just install a very small piece of software. And then they go into the platform nine web portal and from there they can deploy an open source cloud stack in minutes. And then from there on, we take care of operating that control plan. So it's instant cloud for the customer. Yes. You essentially prefabricate based on what they select. Exactly. For the cloud stack. Okay, so what problem do you solve? This comes down to the challenge everyone has is they want to go to the cloud fast. They might not have the resources internally talent-wise. There is software out there that they'd have to cobble together. Some may be in building blocks, some might be microservices. So they're confused. But so the question is for you guys, what problem do you solve for them? Yes. We solve all of the life cycle steps and problems associated with operating a cloud. But more importantly, we solve the problem of doing the ongoing management and operations, troubleshooting, monitoring and backups and things like upgrades. People don't think of those things when they start a POC with a cloud. We've gone through that and we know that it's hard. And that is the value that we... So when does an environment, a customer, potential customer of yours, need to call you? When, what's the signs of pain or opportunity that they'd be like, I need platform nine. What's some of the use cases that you could walk this through? The typical use case would be we, as a customer, I have a bunch of legacy systems that are operated in a very manual way. I want the agility of something like an Amazon cloud, but for various reasons, maybe compliance, regulatory or other or policy. I can't go straight to the Amazon cloud. So I would like to have some of that agility using my own resources and my own data centers. But I can't afford to hire an IT staff to learn and then operate. So it's a quick standup of cloud-like, cloud-native architecture. Exactly. So you're a first wave of getting set up with a stack for cloud-native. So I'm an IT guy, I'm like, you know, my alternative is to hire 10 more guys or X number of guys versus go to platform nine. Is that, am I getting that right? You're getting it right. Maybe one thing to clarify is one of our main innovations is we operate your cloud from our own data centers, from our own control plane that we run in the cloud. And this is indicative of a new trend. You know, I don't know if you've used the ring doorbell or some modern networking equipment. These are things that you install on premises, but they're managed from the cloud. And that's how we can scale. That's your secret sauce. You want to enable the edge of the network, applications, whether it's the ring, by the way, for the folks who don't know, it's the camera that you can pre-record before. I love that product. It's the commercial. I need that, I'd love to have that. Especially people come to my door, you know, have small, all kinds of things. But Nest is the same concept. You see Nest. Exactly. Dropcam was a huge success, by the way, cloud-based Amazon. And no one invested in that company, by the way, until it hit critical mass. But that's the new apps that are coming out. Exactly. And the alternative is to fund the hell out of it, stand up a lot of resource, or have a team that knows the cloud. Exactly. And so you solve that problem. We solve that problem, yes. Okay, so what's next for the company? What do you guys do? How big is the team? What's the funding? What's the status of the startup? I'll say three years old, you're kind of like growing up fast. What's the, give us a state of the product and the team and the company. We're growing really fast and, you know, open-source software, again, is evolving very quickly. A few years ago when we started, OpenStack was really on the minds of many people. And we're seeing something repeat itself with containers, Docker, and Kubernetes. And since we've built a technology that allows us to deploy and manage almost any kind of open-source stack, we are now offering a managed Kubernetes service. That is very similar to the OpenStack one that we had. And that means we can remove complexity and run this on behalf of the customer. And we're not limited to OpenStack and Kubernetes. There's many types of software. What's the feedback from customers that you have right now? The people, our customers just really love us because in many cases our monitoring systems will catch errors, you know, as they happen and it will be fixed even before it results in any visible downtime. What's the next big thing for you guys? Data analytics in the cloud. What's the next thing that you guys see on the horizon for big features? Yeah, one thing that we have been exploring is other companies have noticed our technology and our platform. And they want to solve similar problems with their products, which is sometimes difficult to stand up, install, or operate. And perhaps they're thinking and talking to us about using Platform 9 as a delivery vehicle for their own products. Yeah, almost like how containers can contain storage, like Red Hat does. Take storage and put a container around it. You're a Platform 9 for standing up stacks. Exactly. Well, congratulations, Big. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Congratulations on the startup. Bookie and I are for you guys located in Sunnyvale. So we're in Palo Alto, so it gets you up to theCUBE and come to the Silicon Valley Friday show that I have podcast one of these Fridays to give us the update. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for sharing. Thanks for having us. I'm John Furrier. I'm the ground here at Dockercon. I'm not Dockercon. CubeCon. I get confused. DockerCon's all good. CubeCon and CloudNativeCon will be right back. Thanks for watching.