 Here's your host, Jeff Frick. Hi, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are on the ground in Seattle, Washington, for really a great tech week here. We wanted to bring theCUBE up, get a feel for what's going on. LinuxCon, DockerCon, OpenStack, Seattle. Seemed like everything that was going on this week in tech was going on in Seattle. We wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to come out and see Bluebox, Jesse Proudman, visit right in the ground central of what's going on in Seattle. So thanks for having us out. Our pleasure to have you. So absolutely. So it's pretty interesting because this is kind of, where Cloud started, arguably kind of AWS really popularized the idea of Cloud computing as an outsource provider to enterprises through kind of the adoption of Shadow IT. We've got Microsoft Azure here. Satya's rebuilding Microsoft around Cloud and Office 365. So this is really kind of Cloud Central and then here you guys are. Successful startup recently acquired by IBM, congratulations. So is Seattle ground central for Cloud? Absolutely. Seattle has been and will continue to be Cloud City. You've got every company that's doing anything in the infrastructure space and really the SaaS space has a presence here. So Amazon, Azure, Google, CenturyLink, IBM now. We're all here and I think it creates a very interesting sort of vortex of talent, of expertise, of experience sharing and we were really excited as Bluebox to be based here and then now part of IBM being able to really establish a foothold, a presence for IBM Cloud in Seattle will be doing some pretty great stuff over the next year. That's great and what's interesting about you guys coming obviously you're built on open stacks, big part of your story but you still now offer a choice of Clouds for people. They can have an in-prem, off-prem. There isn't one Cloud solution that's appropriate for every workload. There's a variety out there and you guys kind of come at it from a variety based on kind of an open source underpinning. Yeah, so I think one of the coolest experiences about going through the M&A process is being able to go sit down and talk with many of the giant enterprise providers of open stacks. So if you look at the sponsor list we get to talk to a lot of those organizations and the IBM Cloud strategy really resonated with us. So it's this public dedicated local model where the locale of the Cloud really is irrelevant. What we're delivering is an experience. We're delivering an API and an SLA and whether that sits on premises at a customer site or is a dedicated private Cloud in a software facility or ultimately is an open stack-based public Cloud. Having that consistent experience and that consistent API across all three is really key and IBM is putting significant energy and resources behind delivering on that vision. I remember that was really a big part of your talk at OpenStack Silicon Valley last year when we had you on talking about why are we spending so much time talking about the nuts and bolts and the pain of putting this stuff in when really the focus should be on the user experience and they don't really care. They just want it to work. Credit to AWS for really resetting expectations for what people think should be available on basically dialing it up, turn it on, log in and go. And that's been successful for you. Yeah, and I think that's been the OpenStack challenge. So many of the conversations have been why don't we see more adoption? Well, it didn't work for the first couple of years to the extent that an enterprise needed it to work. We finally crossed that gamut, but then the experience of a distribution versus as a delivery as a service wasn't driving that experience that customers were looking for. And so I think we've finally crossed that gamut now. There's companies like Blue Box and Platform9 and MetaCloud, Cisco that are able to deliver this capability as that experience regardless of the location. And this is where I think we'll start to see more and more of those enterprise use cases and more widespread adoption outside of just technology companies. Yeah, so dig into that a little deeper because you gave a presentation this morning at the OpenStack Scal event about really the death of the distro. I wonder if you can dive into that a little bit. What was kind of your point of view? Why are you taking that stance? Yeah, so part of that was just watching as an observer for the last couple of years. And then the other part is watching as a service provider for the last couple of years. So if we go talk to customers and prospects, the reality is that software distributions today, they've worked phenomenally well for things like Linux or things like MySQL or smaller single server installations. But when you think about cloud, you're no longer talking about a single server as the unit of measurement. You're not talking about one Linux distribution. You're talking about hundreds of interconnected servers and interconnected sets of software. And so being able to ship OpenStack as a software distribution, yes, that works. You can get everything up and running easily. We got a cool demo from Canonical this morning with them doing that. But the reality is that things go wrong. The operations burden of OpenStack, the operations burden of a distributed system, that falls on the shoulder of the software distribution user. And that's the big challenge. And whereas with Linux or with a database, when you have sort of one system go down, you have an isolated area of failure. When you're using a cloud for your production applications and that cloud goes down, you've lost everything. So we call it the blast radius. The blast radius has gone up dramatically. And so working with a service provider who has a network effect of hundreds or thousands of installations who can learn from each one of those installations and you can push those changes out and updates and upgrades and learnings back out into that network of installations, that's the way customers will be successful using OpenStack, not as raw software. So let's shift gears a little bit and talk about liquidity event, not part of IBM, but you guys have a real distinctive culture really driven a lot by you. You're the face of the company. You're out there a lot. You have a great sense of humor and really kind of represent well. Now you're part of IBM, right? So it's goodness. You've got resources that you've never had before in terms of sales, distribution, smart people, distinguished engineers, et cetera. But you're also now part of a bigger family, 400,000 people now, 400,000 and 60. How's that changing the culture? How are you kind of managing that as well as taking advantage now of the increased distribution and resources that you can bring to bear? Yeah, it's a great question. I think it's one that hits any startup that goes through an acquisition and do a larger company. We certainly watched MetaCloud go through that experience almost a year ago now and good friends with a number of folks over there. So it certainly had a lot of learning that we were able to do from that team. You know, I think at the end of the day, IBM, when they came to us, they said, look, there's a lot of things you guys are doing very, very well. And there's a lot of things we think that we can bring to the table. And so our job collectively is how do we capture the benefit of both organizations and make sure that the sum is better than the parts. And so culture was a big part of what they thought we did right. And what we were able to build with 65 people was pretty phenomenal. But matching that up, as you mentioned, with the brand, with the distribution, with the sales force, and with the technical expertise, that's really critical. IBM has a really unique position of understanding enterprise requirements. They know what these buyers want. They know what the buyers need. And they have those long, deep-seated relationships. And so bringing that together with technology innovation, a much faster development cycle, an offering that gets customers in at the ground floor from a price point perspective and grows with them as the customer grows, we're able to blend all of those things together into one really compelling offering. And that's what we're most excited about. I think we are uniquely positioned in terms of open-stack acquisitions that have happened in the last 18 months to really leverage that acquirer to do so much more as a combined entity versus kind of just being folded in and disappearing. Yeah, yeah. I'm not worried about you being folded and disappearing. It's not your style. But I don't want to shift gears because it's a cultural thing, but anyone who pays attention to you sees it. It shouldn't be hard to see. And that's race cars and cars. You're a race car fan. What is that all about in terms of, and what lessons do you take from, obviously, that outside of work and that experience into work? Why is that important to you and how do you leverage it? Yeah, it's a great question. I've been a car fanatic for years since I was in high school and have always had that racing hobby. I think as an entrepreneur, so much of your personal day and your personal identity is wrapped up in your business. I found myself sort of stuck around the clock thinking about work and what we were going to do next and what technology we could build and how we were going to close that next deal. You put yourself in a race car and you get it on the racetrack and that goes away. It's an experience where all you're thinking about is driving that car and the mechanical connection to something physical. It's so different from what we do digitally that it really became this interesting release, this interesting place to find some sense of calm and some sense of that physical, tangible world. We live in IT and cloud. We live in something that you never really touch and be able to go to the racetrack and touch the cars and work on the cars and experience that being so fundamentally different from what we do on a day-to-day basis. It's been just a phenomenal part of my life. I can imagine just the concentration. You cannot let anything enter your mind when you're focused on that track. Another cultural thing, so we're happy to be here, you guys have signs and posters and trophies all over the place which is very, very cool. We have the gong here, we have a big culture around winning and the sales team is critically important to us and I think often times in many organizations the sales team is often the corner and certainly they're closing deals but it's often difficult for pieces of the organization to see and to feel the success of each individual team. It's easy to share a product release and all the features that were added. Easy to share what marketing has been doing because it's all public but the sales team often misses out on that. We added the gong every time we close a deal that gong gets rang. Some people love it. I think we've almost started heart attacks a couple of times. I am a notorious loud gong ringer myself so we close the deal, the M&A transaction we did a pretty wild gong ring as well. It's now become this loved and hated part of the culture depending on who you ask here. You can't hate the gong. Obviously the people that hate the gong haven't been in startups that have not had a successful transition liquidity event. It's the auditory assault I think that they're most concerned about. Absolutely. I gave you the last word before we check out what you've gone through the acquisition. I'm sure there was a lot of stress and things going on up to that point. We've got through that. We're in the open stack season. We're at open stack summit in Vancouver Valley next week. What's your short-term objectives? What are you doing over the next six months that you can share? The first two months after the acquisition were really integration, getting the teams, the engineers, the employees employees employees employees employees employees employees employees employees employees employees employees employees employees employees employees employees employees employees employees employees employees