 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 theCUBE in Amazon Web Services ReInvent 2016 preview. Happy to welcome to the program a first time guest, Joe Cansella, who is the founder and CTO of Cloud Health Technologies, based locally here in Boston, Massachusetts. Joe, thanks for joining me. Yeah, thanks for having me here. All right, we always love when we get to get the founders on, Joe. Working in the cloud space, you've been in tech for a lot of years. Give our audience a little bit about your background and what led to starting Cloud Health. Sure, so I spent the majority of my career actually building software that manages infrastructure and applications. So it's not a big stretch to think that I would go start a cloud management company. But I started Cloud Health in 2012 at the time. The cloud was still emerging and it wasn't clear that there was going to be such a dominance of Amazon and public cloud. I just saw a complexity problem evolving that I think I'd seen a couple times before in my career where just the complexity of managing applications and infrastructures and services in the cloud was outpacing our ability to contain it. So I set out to build a company around that and that was a little over four years ago. Yeah, Joe, speak to that complexity issue because people, you know, cloud, wait, it's simple, I swipe a credit card, it's easy to consume and do that. So what specifically are the complexity issues that the cloud helps helping to tackle? Yeah, so I think you step back and you look, the great power of the cloud comes with one great cost and that is complexity, which is, you know, the amount of effort you can put in to actually securing or driving cost efficiencies or driving, you know, performance and availability across your cloud infrastructure, it gives you a lot of flexibility, a lot of expressiveness and you can do fantastic things but it comes with that cost of complexity and just managing it as you scale it. So, I mean, I personally confronted this which is in the 2011 timeframe I built out a distributed system that was across multiple public clouds that was thousands of quarts of compute, petabytes of storage and when you do that you start to realize that the cloud is a disruptive innovation but it needs to be harnessed and it needs to be controlled and it needs to be governed and so what I set out to do with cloud health was to build an open management platform that integrates with the tools that you use. So these could be from any number of vendors from, you know, Chef and Ansible and New Relic and Datadog and AlertLogic and be able to harness what they do in a single pane of glass where you can actually drive, really I distill down to three core value propositions, integrated reporting, integrated recommendations and then active policy management where you can drive unified governance. Okay, Joe, can you give us some of the speeds and feeds of the company itself, how many employees you have, how many products, how many customers? Sure, so in terms of customers, we're just under 700 customers so it's been really rapid growth, I think just by pure KPIs, we're actually one of the fastest growing SaaS companies in Northeastern United States. It's been a bit of a rocket ship in terms of the growth of companies at just under 140 people right now and we've done all that, I mean if you look we've been pretty much doubling both in customer count as well as in employee count over the last several years and then last year alone we did over 400% growth from a revenue perspective. Congratulations and what situation is the funding? Oh yeah, so we are a venture-backed startup so we've raised three rounds of funding so we raised an A, B and a C both from East and West Coast so we have some Boston-based investors as well as Silicon Valley-based investors and total funding in is 40 million over three rounds. Great and you mentioned some of the services that you work with, you know, Chef Puppet Ansible. How about from a cloud standpoint, obviously we're talking about Amazon but what other, you know, what solutions do you plug into? Sure, so we're a hybrid cloud solution so we actually support, we effectively have four products in the market today so we have an Amazon product that's market leading, very rich product, you should see it on the show floor. We have an Azure product, we have a Google product, we also have a data center product that actually supports private clouds and supports physical infrastructure inside your data center. Okay, and the scope of that private cloud piece, is it, you know, regardless of, you know, whose, you know, storage compute network? It is, yeah, it's completely agnostic of what the underlying infrastructure is. Okay, and it's four different products, do you have a hybrid option or how does that fit together? It all fits into a single pane of glass so you could actually start with us with just using our Amazon product which is really, that tends to be the most common pattern across our customers is our customers start with Amazon and then they say, you know what? This, the insight, the value, the governance, the reporting, you know, what I'm getting, I need that same efficiency back in my data center. Can I have that too? And so typically that results in them turning on the product. Often the path back into the data center goes through migration. One of the things our product does is it makes great migration recommendations which is you turn on our product, we actually discover your infrastructure and we understand the workloads and we can assess how to cost effectively what and how to cost effectively move infrastructure into the cloud. Great, and Joe, to speak a little bit to the use cases there, kind of a low watermark that customers need to hit before they're ready for your technology, what kind of leads them to start using you? It's a good question, it's all about complexity which is that complexity that we kind of opened with. Once that complexity feels like it's starting to get out of control and for us we start to see it, you see it based on the amount you spend in the cloud which is when you start doing Dev and test in the cloud and you have really small number of workloads and fairly low complexity, you don't need cloud health. And you can pretty much get away with whatever vendors tools you're working with and that's sufficient. It's as you start to grow, you start to confront that complexity and you need some centralized way to actually manage it. And that's where cloud health steps in. If you look at the top 50 companies that are pushing the bounds in the cloud today, I guess is the vast majority of them are actually cloud health users. Great, so what's it like living in kind of the Amazon ecosystem? Are you guys in the marketplace? Is there any kind of partnership with them? How much does Amazon kind of impinge on some of the services that you're offering? Sure, so Amazon's been a great partner. I mean they've really helped fuel the growth over the last four years. We've been very happy to work with them and we work on them multiple levels from, we work with the product managers. One of the keys to being in the middle of this nexus of what's happening in the cloud is, and I say this to everybody I meet at Amazon, which is the key for us is not that Amazon might not infringe or displace some feature that we might come out with. The key is for us is to always make sure we're complimenting and extending what they're doing and what other partners that we work with are doing. And that's the key to our business, which is once you bring together eight or 10 different products to go manage your cloud and you have hybrid cloud infrastructure, you have one or more public clouds, the complexity there is great enough to justify a really strong product to help solve that. The key is to understand where the opportunities are and make sure you're driving real customer value. All right, so Joe, it's going to be my fourth year going to Amazon re-invent, really excited we're going to have the cube there for the fourth year. Have to say it is by far the most impressive show that I go to year after year, just the growth of just the size of the show it's affected over 25,000 people this year. The, you know, how many releases, you know, Amazon always has, you know, some great customers and new announcements at the keynote and just, you know, that whole ecosystem of, you know, partners, customers and everything. It's just, you know, amazing to watch. What are you looking at for the show this year? Any kind of themes or, you know, key things that you're excited about? I always look forward to the themes at re-invent. So, and I've been going for four years as well. So, I think there's several themes that I'm kind of expecting to see a lot around. So, one is serverless, you know, I don't know if you're kind of plugged into what's happening there. Yeah, so for audience that haven't heard, it's the AWS Lambda feature. Sometimes people struggle with that serverless term. It's heard functions as a service is another alternative or, you know, we can call it, I think, Fred or Jim. If you don't like that, Brian Graceley, who does the Cloudcast podcast, they're launching a serverless podcast. But yeah, I'm familiar with it. I'm not sure how much of our audience is familiar with it. Sure, yeah. Why serverless? Exciting. I mean, I think part of it is anytime there's a disruptive innovation, there's this tendency to actually use it like the predecessor technology. So, you look like when we had digital cameras, the original digital cameras came in a box and looked suspiciously like film-based cameras. And today that isn't how you engage with digital photography, right? And I think the same has been happening with Cloud, which is today we're starting to see the glimpse of what the cloud could become, which is, I think much of the cloud over the last several years has been better virtualization. Consumption-based on-demand, third-party managed better virtualization. But things like serverless and a lot of the platform services that Amazon is innovating on, I think that's the future of the cloud. That's where the disruption is fully realized. And so I would be surprised if there's not some big announcements around that. So that's just one of several things, I think. And Joe, specifically, if I'm reading into what you're saying correctly, it's that potential to really change the way I build and create applications, right? Exactly. Which has tended to be, I mean, to the long pole in the tent, I've heard a lot of discussion about, do we just lift and shift to the cloud? VMware on AWS, is that an okay way to go? Any feedback on your end on that time to solution which is coming next year? Yeah, no, I mean, I found that partnership really interesting, it'll be, it's hard to say where it's actually going to go. I think one of the likely scenarios is, I mean, the truth is, is that most companies have VMware are already doing something in the cloud. So it makes great sense for VMware to actually have a play in Amazon that actually makes good business sense for them. But I do think the future of infrastructure is not going to have servers involved in it. And it's not going to have virtualized servers involved in it. And that may be the 10-year future or the five-year future. And just to clarify, when you say there won't be servers, it's that the application won't have to worry about that. At the back end, somewhere, there's compute that it lives on. Yeah, sadly, that's not true. But yeah, no, absolutely. I think the- It was like cloud, the old Larry Ellison, cloud's nothing but water vapor. It's like, no, it all lives on hardware eventually, but absolutely. No, the consumer will, it'll be an abstraction to the consumer at some point in time. So I find that exciting. I think enterprise, I would expect another big push around enterprise. I felt like two years ago, I felt like the theme was the enterprise is coming. Last year, I felt like the theme was the enterprises here. I feel like there's been the shift where I think most cloud providers were expecting the enterprise to come to the cloud. And I think that's happened, but I think there's a shift to realizing that the cloud has to come to the enterprise now. And so I think, I would expect you're going to see a number of things around that. And I think you can already see some of the announcements around some of the migration services that have come out over the course of this year and some that are in preview and beta, gives a glimpse of the fact that Amazon realizes that the vast majority of infrastructure still does not reside in Amazon. And reducing that friction, reaching out and embracing complex hybrid cloud deployments is going to be key to their long-term success. Okay, Joe, give us a little bit of insight. Any announcements coming from cloud health or what can we expect to see from your company at the show? Sure, yeah, so if you've been following us, there's a number of announcements that we've done around security, which is, so key to cloud health is is we seek to complement and extend the products that matter to our customers. And our customers use a wide variety of different products from a security perspective. And so we don't seek to displace those products, but there's a piece of security around just configuration monitoring that is just our customers are struggling with and fits right into the unified governance that cloud health drives. So what we did is we launched a new feature in our platform. It comes just as part of the base platform. You don't have to pay extra for it. And what it does is it does active governance across your security of your infrastructure. It applies best practice rules. We're also including third-party benchmarks like Center for Internet Security so that you can actually get quick time to value and understand how well are you complying with third-party standards. It's just a great way to actually understand the health of the security or infrastructure. Another announcement we're making is just around hybrid cloud, which is the single pane of glass, the ability to have a single dashboard where you see all of your infrastructure across all of your public and private clouds is just surprisingly powerful today, which is it's a struggle for CIOs and enterprises today to really get a handle on that. And when they've had cloud health for the public cloud, there's been a natural gravitation to say, you know, well, why can't I have that for my on-premise infrastructure? That's another big announcement. We're also announcing our ADS support, application discovery service from Amazon. Yeah, I'm interested to see, you know, Amazon for the last couple of years has talked about, you know, customers being all in on Amazon. We talk to customers, it's a multi-cloud world and even, you know, tend to look more from an application standpoint and say, okay, you talked to a customer, I'm all in on Amazon. It's like, are you using Microsoft, you know, Office 365? Of course you are. Are you using Salesforce? Of course you are. Are you using SAP and Oracle? Yeah, I'm probably using some of those too. And, you know, where do those all live? Well, some of them on Amazon, but many of them, you know, not in that environment. And how do I get my arms around, you know, managing and, you know, orchestrating all of the various pieces? And where does my data live? My data lives lots of different places and, you know, getting access to that is really challenging. Yes, it's a crazy world we've unleashed, which is, it's very complex, it's very hybrid, it's multi-vendor, it's heterogeneous and with that comes complexity. And I think, you know, that is the whole mission. My mission in life is to just collapse that complexity of managing disparate services, disparate vendors, disparate data that might reside in multiple locations. Yeah, Joe, I mean, think back to the data center world. The problem that we had in, you know, IT, I would have all these various pieces and therefore managing, you know, each one of those temples that I created for all my applications was a bit of a mess. I thought cloud was supposed to give us homogeneity, but as you pointed out, we've got a lot of complexity because, you know, lots of different services across multiple different platforms and, you know, we need solutions to help us pull those together. It sounds like that's one of the things you're tackling. It is, yeah, yeah. And I think that that's essential to our customers. Last thing just to hit on is, right-sizing is, we have a series of features that we're announcing and have announced around right-sizing. And that's just the constant optimization, which is one of the things we do that's really unique is we're trying to automate your business processes. So instead of you managing at a low level, like the cloud-embraced automation at a configuration management and provisioning level very early, but it hasn't at a business automation level where you want to say, here's the economics I need to manage that application to. Here's the security I need it managed to. Here's the usage, the performance, the availability, and then enabling software to actually automatically drive that efficiency. What we do with our, with CloudHouse is we actually have a policy engine that has integrated into it, business automation with the ability to actually go drive changes back to your cloud. So you can think of it as just this constant optimization engine that's looking for opportunities to actually make you more secure or more cost-effective or more performant. All right, Joe, last thing I want to get into is, you talked to a lot of customers. Where's their mindset at? How do they think about cloud? Do they really have a clear strategy yet? And ones that are looking at Amazon, what's their mindset at? Yeah, so almost all of our customers, large portion of our customers are very passionate about Amazon. And many of them you'll actually see here in re-invent. So what we, when we look at what our customers are saying, one of the biggest problems they're confronting right now is just governance, which is the model of the cloud. The cloud came kind of bottoms up. It came from line of business inward to central IT. And so the struggle is that you have infrastructure that's no longer being centrally managed like the infrastructure of 10 years ago. You have applications no longer being centrally managed. But yet you reside in an enterprise where that centralized governance is absolutely essential to what you do. So we see customers struggling with adopting a new model where they can have centralized governance and distributed management. And I think there's a missing process model. In the same way that DevOps kind of came on the scene and helped us bridge the gap between, the impedance mismatch between operations and engineering, the same thing needs to happen across just governance, across line of business and central IT. So that's one of the challenges we see. Security is a constant ongoing. I mean, four or five years ago, security was the concern for why you wouldn't move to the cloud. Now, everyone's moved beyond that. Now it's just how do I keep up with it? How do I do it better? And in many cases, customers are actually more secure when they actually move their infrastructure into a public cloud like Amazon. And that results from the ability to actually take advantage of all these different underlying components that allow them to put controls in place that were harder to do inside their data center. So that's a common theme we see. And then just overall governance, just being able to automate that governance and being able to drive change without having to put human beings in the middle of it is another common theme we see. Yeah, just on the security point, we definitely found, it used to be a little bit of barriers like, oh, wait, security in cloud, something I need to worry about. What people found was the engage. It's an opportunity to at least restart that discussion on security because if you hadn't changed your security processes in a while, you're really out of date. And my friends that are in the security industry is the thing you can do the most is be up to date. And when I'm using Amazon, what version of AWS are you using? It's a joke, right? Because you're on the latest version and therefore they can make sure to patch and fix everything. You mentioned governance. I'm curious, the customers you talk to, just to global events concern people around governance. I think about Brexit over in the UK, political situation here in the US. Amazon, US based, but very much a global footprint today. It does, I think one of the things cloud providers and especially Amazon has done well is they've put regions in all the places that matter, which gives data locality. So it gives the ability, just like the expressiveness of the security features that are available from Amazon, allow you to actually do certain things that make you more secure in the data center. You actually have that same expressiveness from a data locality perspective. So I think when it comes down to the mobility of data and being able to have data reside where it, in country or in region, there's the ability to do that now today. And that wasn't possible just a few years ago. So I think there's a concern there, but there's also a lot of building blocks to actually deal with different types of compliance that exists out there, different types of governmental regulations that exists out there. And then even within a enterprise, just being able to deal with your own policies and best practices around how to manage applications and infrastructure. All right, Joe, I want to give you the last word. You've been watching cloud since the early days. What excites you about today? What are just kind of the things that going forward are going to be able to help companies grow more, improve their businesses? Yeah, I feel like a lot of people feel like the cloud is much further along than it actually is, which is I think we're on the cusp of the next interesting part of the cloud, which is to me this is where the transformation really begins. This is, if you go back and equate it to the dot-com boom, to me I feel like we're entering 1996 of the dot-com boom, which is there's enough building blocks, there's enough expressiveness, there's the opportunity to really innovate and is really there. So I expect people are going to start to construct different types of applications that not only leverage the cloud, but would not be possible without the cloud. And I think once that happens, I think you're going to start to see a transformation and almost like a flywheel acceleration that will force businesses that really weren't innovating all along to actually play catch up to their peers that took the chance early in the cloud and drove that innovation. So I think we're in an exciting time. I think it's, this market's moved faster than any market I have ever been in. And just looking forward to the next few years of seeing how it plays out. Absolutely, we sometimes use the sports analogy. If we have moved on in innings, it's probably a double header. So, you know, lots of innovation left to go in the cloud space. Joe, really appreciate you coming. Help us give a preview for AWS 2016. Be sure to check out cloud health booth at Amazon re-invent and check out siliconangle.tv for all the coverage there, including our coverage of AWS re-invent 2016. Thanks so much. You've been watching theCUBE.