 Welcome to CUBE Conversations. I'm Stu Miniman with wikibon.com, here at the Wikibon headquarters in Marlboro, Massachusetts. Excited to have with us today a startup launching here from the Boston area, Verilum in the cloud space and joining me for this segment are Mike Feinberg and Dan Pratozo, co-founders of the company. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining me. Thanks Stu. Yeah, thanks for having us. All right, so first of all, I recently was at the OpenStack Summit, clouds all the discussion, but Mike, maybe we'll start with you. You've been in the cloud space for a while. Let's talk about, you know, why a new company, why Verilum, you know, what's the big problem you guys are looking to solve? Yeah, sure. So I think that as you mentioned, you know, I had the opportunity to innovate in cloud and frankly what I've seen is that the enterprise customers in particular struggle with how to actually adopt this sort of methodologies and capabilities. And what you see in the marketplace is people that want to be more productive and more capable. And so we thought about the opportunity was we can make developers and end users be the sole point, important point of the enterprise infrastructure and make them the center of the universe and allow them to be much more productive and much more successful. We thought about that in a way that other people haven't. And it really was this interesting sort of challenge that you had capabilities that people wanted and the infrastructure not able to deliver it. So we thought about, can we give this an environment that was much more flexible, much more malleable that allows you to sort of take advantage of what you invested in and what sort of the new investments will be and deliver that to the end users. Interestingly, I sort of thought about this problem, said how can we help the customers? And you know, I had some experience, I was previously at Morgan Stanley and as a consumer of technology, sort of get a sort of slant on what's really, really important. So I thought about who could I talk to and I have, you know, Dan Petrozo is our co-founder, has been a peer and a friend for years and I went to him and as Dan was on the past 10 years and I let him speak to it on the consumer side and sort of expressed what we were trying to accomplish and said, is this makes sense? Is this where what we probably have to go after? Great, so Dan, let's pull you into this discussion here. You've been a CIO, it's some pretty big companies, give a little bit about your background and why hasn't the industry solved this problem? What's the problem that you guys are solving? Yeah, I, yes, as you said, Stu, I spent the better part of the last decade in CIO level positions at Goldman Sachs and Fidelity Investments in Morgan Stanley, so I've had the good fortune to manage a lot of technologists and as Mike sort of pointed out, there's, as we sit here today, there's still three things that really, really challenge most companies and the first being this insatiable demand for technology by companies and this equates to, we need to figure out ways to make developers more productive and developer productivities a challenge in most companies. Second, if you own infrastructure, what typically you have is an inflexible infrastructure and an underutilized infrastructure. And then third, in the latest, the last five years or so, you've really had security come to the forefront. So how do I isolate workloads? How do I do better governance? And folks who manage technology organizations are trying to figure out how do you get all these things solved? And we really think that what we've done so far at Verilum is trying to, has addressed all of these three problems. And to answer your question about why hasn't it happened, I think that most companies tend to come at these issues from a single dimension. So there's companies that focus on the developer, there's companies that focus on security, there's companies that focus on infrastructure. We think we have the right team that sort of looks at this holistically and we can provide a holistic solution for the customers. All right, so before we dig into kind of the product and the solution itself, Mike, maybe can you just give us kind of a snapshot of the company itself, when it was founded, how many people you've got, what the funding is, things like that? Yeah, so we're a company that's based in Boston and about 15 people strong and we're privately backed. And so I think that we've been, unlike I think many of the companies today, we've been very, very quiet. We were founded a couple of years ago and we're coming out today. Okay, come on, Mike, isn't there VC money just flowing to all this cloud stuff? You know, we've had the luxury of having done this before, we've been entrepreneurs before and we recognize that there's the right time and the right place for the right type of investment. And we thought the right way to do this is get the product and the capabilities that we wanted to deliver to our end users and we had the opportunity to fund that and make it available to our users without actually having to be distractions that others may have to take on. Okay, great stuff. Yeah, I love supporting the Boston tech community here and yeah, I mean, there's so many different aspects. I tell you that the NoSQL technologies wouldn't exist if it wasn't for all the work that came out of MIT. So, right for lots going on in the cloud space. So at the launch here, launching publicly the company, the product, the go-to-market, the kind of the whole shebang. Yeah, so we were joking that we took the stealth thing to seriously and we're absolutely coming out with the company, the product and really can talk about beta customers coming and really the whole experience of getting from start to fruition and come culminating today. Okay, let's walk through now, Verilum software-based product, what is the solution and what makes up the components? Yeah, so solution is focused as I said and making developer productivity. So we thought first and foremost, we needed to give an experience for the user to come to a portal that allow them to be able to have access to the capabilities that they may want to consume. And to give a little more clarity on it, you'll see virtual machines, VMs, you might be able to get access to Hadoop clusters and we didn't want to put a middleman. We wanted to all self-service in that experience. So there's a Verilum portal that actually where consumers come in and experience access to their resources. What we also recognized was the complexity of people adopting these new types of experiences, whether it be private cloud, data center or OS. And as Dan alluded to, you have to buy cloud management products, you have to buy a series of them and become the integrator. And enterprises were struggling. So we built an automation capability called Cloud Builder that essentially allows you to take both Greenfield and Brownfield technologies and bring them to bear into the Verilum solution. So we can take virtual machines that are say to underutilize in your environment. We can take bare metal machines and we can compose them and deliver them to the developers in an experience that they want to have. So that's the Cloud Builder. It's all about automation. It's all about simplicity. It's about getting rid of the expertise that's necessary to deploy these technologies. The third piece is I sort of alluded to, we don't want people to just have to invest new technologies. One of the problems with these new capabilities is people have to have huge investments in new opportunities. But they've made all these investments already. Can they redeploy those or make them more capable to satisfy these needs? So we wanted to help customers not with long-term capacity planning, but how could they optimize the capabilities they have? One of the things that's sort of interesting, people have designed for peak utilization. And that's really, really smart because they gotta keep their business going when something happens that's bad. But that doesn't happen all the time. And so there's a tremendous amount of underutilized assets at any given point in time. And if you could just repurpose that and deploy it to satisfy that need, that's the sort of software that we're doing. Cloud Forecaster helps those producers, actually, allow them to understand what they can use. All right, yeah, really interesting. When you talk about you've got your virtualized workloads and then analytics has been something that usually it's either sitting under desk, it's a rack of DAS that's very different. You talked about underutilizing, how do those things fit together? Yeah, do you want me to take that one? Sure. Yeah, so we recognize, and some of this is just from talking to customers and being customers, that just the growing amount of analytical workloads that are going on, and I think you've seen that in your practice, so the amount of action that there is in this space and how important it is for companies to actually analyze data. And to your point, it doesn't have to run at any particular time during the day. So we think that the combination of being able to aggregate resources for a special purpose, meaning analytics at points and times during the day, and providing the technological underpinnings to do that, and then allowing for the developers to be able to deploy on top of those environments for those periods, allow folks to build very large clusters. And we're already seeing some of our customers benefit quite a bit from that. Okay, and underneath in the cloud that piece is, what sits underneath that? Yes, so when we build the Verilum Cloud Builder and deliver it as the Verilum Cloud, it's composed of open source software, such as OpenStack, SAF, and we use software-defined networking technologies like OpenB switch and monitoring technologies like Ganglia, and we have our own secret sauce and a workflow management to actually bring this to bear to deliver a cloud. So to give you sort of point information, a user would say, they're sort of like, here's 100 servers that I would like to have participate. We'll take on the responsibility of creating a cloud out of those 100 servers in about 15 to 20 minutes. Well, and you talked about open source and all those pieces, but underneath that, can that be VMware? Yeah, so the important part about investments that people have in sort of the brownfield is, 90% of the customers have VMware investment. And in truth, the VMware investment, although it's improved utilization, has not improved it to 100%, so to speak. And so there's opportunity to reap the resources out of them and repurpose them for other uses. And we take on that responsibility. So absolutely can be VMware. It can be today could also be a bare and bundle machines. And it's sort of that combination that allows people to sort of statically assign resources and augment them with sort of this more dynamic capability. Yeah, and you mentioned there's OpenStack in there. One of my big takeaways from the OpenStack show was that OpenStack's trying to be that integration engine. Does that help bridge the gap between these various applications and what's happening on the VMware side? Yeah, from my perspective, OpenStack solves a number of problems. I think it does a great job of allowing tenancy to occur and allow separation of the customers. You augment that with our architecture of the OpenV switch. So it absolutely becomes an integration. It also becomes an integration because it allows people to have potentially access to their own resources, this tenancy, and we take advantage of that to give that self-service experience as well with our own interfaces and our own capabilities. But it's in complex sort of technologies that have to be brought to bear and architect in a way that's robust. And that's been the challenge for adoption of that technology from my perspective. And we've taken that on. We've talked to a number of customers who have investments and projects to bring these things to production, and it's just really, really hard. And we just want to make that a 15-minute process. So close that. Okay, so we've talked about things like OpenStack and VMware and the on-prem. What about public cloud containers and that sort of piece? Yeah, it's a great question. The fact is that people have thought about this problem and they want to have taken sides. The fact is you should bring, as a business, and I think Dan can talk this, you want to bring the best tool for the rest of the job. Public cloud is absolutely a great set of technologies and a great set of capabilities. And customers have to have the capability of using that resource and actually using their private investments. And if you look at the sort of the growth pattern, both the public cloud's growing, but also private environments are growing. So the fact is that what you need is capabilities to be able to harness both those capabilities in a very seamless manner. And so with our SAS portal, think about having multiple infrastructures and having the capability of seeing all those infrastructures and access to this. So public cloud is totally in our roadmap. Okay, great. Dan, maybe it would help to pull some of this together. We talked about some of your beta customers and what use cases have been done there. Yeah, walk us through what have you guys seen in your beta period? Yeah, so we're really, we focused in a couple areas and I'll just tell you about what a couple of our betas are actively doing. So we're working with a regional hospital group who has a hundred million or so dollar IT budget and they wanted to get in the game of analytics and to do some analysis around sepsis and patient acuity and these types of things. And so they had started a Hadoop project and the question for them was how are we going to actually be able to have a meaningful enough cluster to be able to process all the data that we have to do this type of analysis. And so when we came forward and we said, look, you don't need to buy any new equipment. We're going to help you figure out where your spare capacity is in your environment, meaning your VMware environment. And then we're going to layer in our technology and allow you to build these clusters on demand when your systems aren't being used. It's like a no-brainer for them, right? So the idea is I have all this trapped value that I've actually been able to exploit. Similarly, we're working with a reinsurance company that has a bit of a larger footprint, but has, think of a reinsurance company having lots and lots and lots of analytical needs to do everything from looking at their customers and the liabilities of their customers as well as their own investments and the amount of stress tests they need to do on a daily basis. So yet again, we're taking both their DR environment and their VDI environment and actually exploiting that in a way that they're able to run way more analytics than they actually could. And then to Mike's point, in our roadmap of taking the Amazon public cloud, they're going to use our solution as the single point of focus and control. Yeah, interesting. I mean, you throw out things like VDI and Hadoop. I mean, these were tough projects that most companies say, who owns it? How do I put it together? I have to build the whole thing and then I need to deploy it. You're saying I could just throw that on my existing infrastructure? Yeah, that's the beauty. The beauty is let's not try to go make you tear down environments to do something new. Let's allow you to repurpose those environments on the fly to actually get business value. And I think what we're really saying is that you're going to have a sort of a combination approach. You're going to have some dedicated resources, but that shouldn't be the limiting factor when you have all these underutilized assets. And I think the problem has been that the tools that exist, the technology, the infrastructure that existed didn't allow you to reap the benefits of your investments in a very dynamic fashion. And that's, I think, what we're exposing the most, but it's going to be a combination of all these sort of environments. Yeah, it's funny. You think back to what the promise of cloud computing was. You're trying to deliver that, without just giving it a term, hybrid cloud and everything else there. It's about the applications, about the business value and putting the developer in charge. It is. The funniest thing is there's still a tremendous amount of innovation at this part of the stack. And so, unfortunately, as a customer, you have to consider, okay, I deployed an open-stack cloud. Am I done yet? And the answer is no. You got to containers. Do you want to do mesospheres? Do you want to do, what do you need to do that's more in that stack? And so, are you going to become expert in every one of these things? And it reminds me of the days when people used to buy their CRM tools and actually modify and deploy. And all of a sudden, they realized, that wasn't really what the goal of the business was. At the end of the day, I can't adopt the newest innovations because I had customized. And I think the fact is that we think about allowing people to adopt these new technologies as they come as fast as possible. Yeah, Dan, that's a big question we've had, is how much of this IT stuff does most enterprises need to? How much do they push off to big clouds or service providers? Yeah, I think that what we've seen in what most organizations have is there's not a one-size-fits-all approach. And so, as Mike was saying earlier, you look at the public cloud and you look at private environments, both are growing. And the reason for that is because many companies have a multitude of needs and they end up doing some things in SaaS environments, they end up doing some things in private cloud environments. I don't think that will change anytime soon. And what customers are going to look for over time is how can I deploy these things in a way that's both secure as well as a way that's easy for my business. Because they've all recognized that they need to make it so that their technological innovation occurs quicker and therefore their developers need to be enabled. So all these sort of underlying things, whether it's from service providers or from cloud properties or from software providers needs to just get a lot more simple for them. And that's what we're all about, really trying to make it simpler for them. All right, so software is going on stuff that you already have in-house. How do you guys price it? How do you guys go to market? So we're a subscription model and we price it by the node. And we actually have a starter kit that you can actually get, just start playing with it for free. And I think there's some limits on how big that environment can get. And then there's obviously different pricing models based on support and service. Okay, so companies out, gone through beta. What should we expect to see from you guys throughout the rest of 2015 and beyond? Yeah, so I think we're now loud and proud and they're going to be out there talking about our stuff and vision and really educating the marketplace about the opportunity. The opportunity to take advantage of what you have, the opportunity to simplify your life and to get access to these new technologies. The opportunity to make people more productive, to actually focus on what the business needs is as opposed to the cool toys that you actually might want to play with at the end of the day. Get them out to the people. So I think we'll get that message out. I think you'll see some great customer stories as we go out through the year and just more technology coming out from us. All right, so Dan, I want to let you help wrap up for us. What's the action item for the CIO? How can they take advantage of that? I mean, I love the idea of putting the developers in charge. We've had a lot of the industry talking about that. It's about the applications, about the business value. What's the role of the CIO going forward? I think CIOs are fundamentally a CIO as a business person. And so a CIO needs to understand that their job is to help deliver technologies that make the business both more efficient and more profitable. And to the extent possible, remove all the barriers, technological barriers, that may exist within their own organization to allow that to occur. It's extremely challenging at scale, as you can imagine, just like any other function, whether you're running marketing or sales, at scale to do these things. And technology is highly complex, and it's changing all the time. But that's the prize. The prize is to make these companies a better company and focusing on solutions that actually do that and empower the organization in the most cost-effective manner is certainly where the action is going to be. All right, well, Dan Petrozo and Mike Feinberg with Verilum, really appreciate you sharing with us. Software is driving so much of the innovation in the world. Bringing the cloud realities out to the marketplace. Love the local tech. Thanks so much for joining me on this segment, and look forward to seeing lots from you guys more in the future. Thanks for joining, and be sure to watch much more on SiliconANGLE.tv for all our coverage in wikibond.com for all the research on cloud infrastructure and big data. Thanks for joining. All right.