 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hello, welcome to theCUBE Conversation here in the Palo Alto Studios. I'm John Furrier with some cloud-native news and industry coverage. So two great guests here to break down. What's going on in cloud-native? We've got Rancher Labs, Jim Serralli, Vice President of Global Channels and Alliances and Bryce Cracko, Product Manager for NetApp HCI. Guys, thanks for coming on this breaking news around cloud-native. I mean, it's been really all about cloud-native for the past year and a half, but this year, certainly with the pandemic, the modern applications are being pushed out faster and faster, a lot of pressure. So congratulations on this announcement. Jim, set us up. What is the news? I saw some articles. We got a story getting hit in the Silicon Angle. What's the news with NetApp with Rancher Labs? Yeah, thank you and you're right. We are seeing a vast push with the crazy times that we're in right now, but the news really is Rancher formally launching our OEM program and launching that with our marquee partner with NetApp. When companies get to a certain juncture, an OEM relationship and sometimes means just more of a marketing-type relationship, but as everybody knows, Rancher is one of the industry-leading multi-cloud, multi-Cubernetes cluster management solutions, open-source and what that means is we're an agnostic play for those that are trying to leverage Kubernetes. We've talked with NetApp, we've struck a deal with them for them to embed us on their HCI platform. And when you talk about our OEM program and the things that it entails is really around how do you get contract vehicles to map, go to market strategies? How do you get support, engineering, integration, development, all of those things aligned with partners? It's not an easy task. It's very important to the go to the kind of go-to-market strategy that we have. And I think not only with the market adoption around Kubernetes, Rancher's agnostic play and open-source and then obviously Rancher's come a long way, our products tried and true. We have nearly 500 customers. We're seeing those customers lean back in to some of the OEMs and to the software vendors to have them do more and get them more, I guess, ready for the things that they're doing in IT operations, how the AvDevOps folks are trying to do more and get applications to market faster. So we're really suited well for organizations like NetApp to take our technology bundle in it and really make it better for their customers experience. So the program allows for contract vehicles, direct integration, support, engineering, pricing, because not one size fits all. As you see the evolution from on-prem to cloud, IoT edge, a lot of different devices from hundreds of dollars to thousands. So Rancher's committed to making sure that we align our products and pricing to fit some of those low compute platforms and also be able to right size our business model to make them successful. Well, congratulations. I love the term OEM still kind of hangs around. I'm old enough to remember when it was actually equipment not software, original equipment manufacturer, which essentially you're essentially letting NetApp embed your code into their equipment or their software. But this is the relationship of a channel, an indirect channel for Rancher, which you guys are launching, which is a total validation. Appreciate that. I'd like to get into the NetApp side, Bryce, if you don't mind, because obviously, cloud's not new to NetApp, storage's becoming more critical, hybrid cloud's more important. Tell us about the transformation of HCI because I think this is where Kubernetes and starts to fit in when you see the cloud native surge coming in. How are you guys looking at this opportunity? Yeah, you bet. When you look at it from a converged infrastructure, hyper-converged infrastructure, hybrid cloud infrastructure perspective, it's always been about simplicity. We're not doing anything in the HCI market in general that can't be otherwise done. It's just making it much simpler, reducing that learning curve and reducing that time to value that our IT customers get. And so I think we saw it, conversion infrastructure and hyper-conversion infrastructure all start out with virtualization as kind of the top layer that's facilitated. But now, obviously Kubernetes is becoming table stakes in the enterprise. So I think we're seeing all the vendors in the space put in some kind of automatic deployment of Kubernetes or some easier deployment of Kubernetes, making Kubernetes that top layer rather than just virtualization. And this is a really great opportunity for us at NetApp to be able to do that, not only with just any Kubernetes package, but one that's very well regarded and beloved in the DevOps communities and that's Rancher. So what we have here is kind of something that's great for IT and really great for DevOps in terms of being able to centralize multi-cluster management across a hybrid cloud ecosystem and really empower those DevOps teams to do what they need to do, but still keeping IT at the center of it. You know, it's interesting, you know, shift left for security, DevOps here, DevSecOps, it's all kind of happening with software, software defined, software operated. This is the new operating environment. What is the use cases that presents itself well for this? Is it from a customer standpoint? Is it they're looking for certain things? When you look at the product definition, you say, okay, we have NetApp, we have Rancher. Take me through that thinking. What's the customer use case? What are they getting out of this? Sure. Well, I think there's a variety of use cases where you see Kubernetes coming into play. And one of the great things about NetApp HCI is it's not just simple infrastructure, but it's also very scalable infrastructure. So that's where a lot of these types of products fall down is when you get to such a scale point they don't work. Because of our scalability and our ability to handle mixed workloads, we can really handle any number of use cases. So in a Kubernetes context, this could be anything from IT departments who are going to containerized applications for their own, the applications that they themselves manage, like ERP systems and so forth, that are starting to get containerized. It could also be for bespoke applications that the companies are writing themselves. The DevOps teams that actually write the code that makes the company work. And so there's kind of a wide variety of use cases in there that are starting to go to Kubernetes. If not, they're already, the DevOps teams largely are already using Kubernetes. And this is just a great way to centralize it on one kind of easy button, but yet very scalable and highly performant infrastructure for that kind of consolidation. Jim, this is the holy grail. You guys have been doing since the beginning of Rancher Labs, programmable infrastructure. Infrastructure is code. You couldn't get any clear here when you start to have mainstream programmable storage and programmable networking. All this is happening. This is what we had hoped for. The world's now gone full containers. Now you got Kubernetes and IDC still shows that the enterprises are only like 30 to 40% even dipping their toes in on containers, if that. So you see it, KubeCon, you see all that at VMworld, you see it at re-invent. You're going to see mainstream IT, the classic IT with DevOps. What's your reaction to that? Because is this, what's your take on this? Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. We are scratching the surface and I think that we will see IT really embrace, right? This becomes the opportunity for business enablement to take shape across all different avenues, ITs, building infrastructure and allowing compute to be available. And this is kind of, we'll see this surge, not just in the IT operations but really having the different groups from app depths to the business line owners to those pushing applications, understanding the entire ecosystem. We're talking about NetApp and the HCI today but you can think across the edge, data center edge, cloud, retail point of sale systems, getting immediate updates, dealing with IT operations and the compute platforms. It's really just endless and we're excited. I think the OEM program is going to allow companies like NetApp and other verticals and industries to really take shape and take advantage of what Rancher's offering to help them be more efficient across what their critical business apps are trying to do. Well, congratulations on NetApp. They're a very smart company. They got savvy customers and they're very loyal. Price, with that in mind, what's been the reaction you laid out the use cases when you bring this to market with your customers and partners? What's the feedback? What comes up on this and what's the vibe? Yeah, we've had some really enthusiastic early reaction, a couple of early customers looking at it. It's been a lot of fun and people are really excited. One of the great things about doing this with Rancher is that it's purely open source software. So our customers love that it's kind of a low risk proposition for them. They're very well hedged. They can push this button and get it started on their NetApp HCI with very little lead up to that, very little advanced knowledge and just kind of get started. It's actually, there's no incremental cost to use it on NetApp HCI. It's just if you want a joint support model that there's a fee. And so you can kind of think of it as an indefinite trial period in a way. And I think that's created a lot of early interest. And I think, yeah, I think it's going to be a really great option for our customers. It's going to add a lot of value to the NetApp HCI product. And so far everyone's been very excited about it. You know, I was talking with Dave Vellante, my co-host in the queue also does a lot of storage research, knows NetApp as well. We were also commenting about this dynamic and we kind of called this out in 2016 when VMware was having trouble with the cloud operations and then they decided to keep rid of everything and just partner with Amazon. Everyone's like, that's horrible, it's going to be terrible. They're going to lose all their customers. But we pointed out, and I think this is true here and I want to get your reaction, both of you guys, if you don't mind commenting, what turned out to be the case was, is that there was a clear distinction in an operator of infrastructure and software development environments with higher level cloud native services. And they're not necessarily competing directly. They're kind of coming together. This idea of operating infrastructure and IT concept when it goes software and goes cloud, it's not a win-lose dynamic. You have software and people often need to operate that, either code it or run it. So at large scale, this is where HCI kind of fits in, Bryce, right? I mean, because now you got the edge, it's more devices. I mean, this is more infrastructure to run. There's still more stuff. You got to operate all this stuff. It's not going to ever go away. You guys reacted to that. What do you think? Sure, yeah, I think, I mean, from a NetApp perspective, our customers use all kinds of infrastructure. They use public cloud infrastructure and NetApp has a really great public cloud-focused portfolio around public cloud services. So that's certainly a market that we plan and our customers use and it's part of the landscape, as you say. Edge, of course, also. And, you know, with this solution, I think it fits right into that because Rancher becomes this kind of container orchestration control plane that's hosted on an HCI, but can span this hybrid multi-cloud and edge environment all from that kind of centralized location. I think the simplification of the workloads is a huge deal. Jim, your thoughts on this? Obviously, you've got this great program, you've got the OEM program, and you've got an indirect partner. Rising Tide floats all boats here with this market. What's your take? Absolutely. And what better way to launch this program with somebody like NetApp? So, yeah, you know, Rancher from its inception has been an open source platform, agnostic. I think that will help, you know, help us, not just us, but NetApp and other OEM partners, depending on operating system, legacy systems, verticals, industries, we're all playing a part in it. On-prem cloud, hybrid cloud, you know, I think Rancher is really well suited for this advancement, strictly by the way that we've continued in our philosophy of building an open source, agnostic platform to help organizations, OEMs, ISVs, cloud providers, you name it. I think that Rancher's really well suited for, you know, kind of taking this additional ride, if you will, right? We're seeing, we're all seeing it. And as you pointed out, it's less than 30% adoption today. We're all hoping for that to increase exponentially. Yeah, when you go mainstream, you got a lot of issues. Bryce, final question on the news analysis here. Why Rancher Labs from a NetApp perspective? What was the deciding factor for you guys? Well, they just made a lot of sense for us to partner with. Again, the open source nature of it and the free nature of it made it really low barrier entry for our customers. We really liked that. We also liked their very open and agnostic approach. So, you know, nothing that we're doing here with Rancher has to be at the expense of any other relationships that we have. And that was really an important consideration. You know, it's a very low risk, low cost, easy to get going solution for our customers. And there's no fear of lock in with it. And so it's basically just all potential upsides and no potential downsides. And I think it's a really great solution for both IT and for DevOps, which was really critical. Real quick question on the customer expectation. Are you guys going to support Rancher? How does the customer get impacted by this? Obviously NetApp has their own support. Is there joint support? Are you guys going to handle that? How does that customer deal with touches? Yeah, that's really the crux of the deal there is NetApp's able to provide frontline support for our customers or NetApp HCI customers. If they've purchased the Rancher support package through NetApp, they can get support for it through NetApp and we're able to pass tickets back and forth between the companies as needed. So you don't have to have any guesswork about where the problem and the stack might lie. You just open your support ticket with NetApp and we can make sure it gets resolved. So that's been a really great part of the deal. Well, gentlemen, thanks for coming on. I appreciate the news insight. I do want to ask one final question while I got you both here, if you don't mind. As we come in to the end of the year 2020, what an crazy year it's been between the pandemic and just the shift, the massive sea change of how virtualization, not server or storage virtualization but the virtual world we live in, remote everything, pandemic, uncertainty. The digital transformation is just full throttle, just more and more pressure. As we come out of cloud native, KubeCon and AWS re-invent, we had VM, all this activity. What do you guys think of the most important stories that customers should pay attention to in cloud native? What's the high order bit? What's the one thing or two things that really are notable that people should pay attention to that's important? Bryce, we'll start with you. I think it's bringing Kubernetes into the mainstream, right? I mean, that's what we see happening. How do you do that in a way that continues to give DevOps the flexibility they need and empower them in the way that Kubernetes does but also brings it into the mainstream? That's what I think what everyone's trying to solve right now. Jim, your take on the most important story people should pay attention to. I think the same. I think Kubernetes adoption and really getting that education and people up to speed to start making that transformation quicker and getting that adoption rate up. I think we'll see a lot of benefits, like you said, remote virtual and Kubernetes is kind of that framework that needs to get out there, be prevalent and all of us take advantage and start working together. All right, we'll leave it there. Guys, congratulations on the deal, NetApp embedding Kubernetes and Rancher support inside their hyper-converge infrastructure, HCI. Bryce, Jim, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thank you. Okay, I'm John Furrier with CUBE conversation here in Palo Alto. Normally where we do these in person, but it's remote with the pandemic, giving the latest continuing the CUBE virtual coverage here in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching.