 Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and ecosystem partners. Welcome back to the FIRA here in Barcelona, Spain. This is theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2019. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host for two days of coverage is Corey Quinn, and we're excited to have on the program a first-time guest, but a company that we've known for quite a while, Daniel Lopez-Ridrejo, who's the CEO and co-founder of Bitnami. Just announced recently that Bitnami is being acquired by VMware. Daniel, thanks so much for joining us, and congratulations to you and the team on the exit, as it were. Thank you very much, gracias. It's an honor to be here. Yeah, so we had Erika Brescia, who's the co-founder of yours on theCUBE seven years ago. Back then, I was trying to figure out exactly what Bitnami was and where it fit in this whole world. Maybe you can just bring us up to speed for those that maybe don't know, and there's all these people in the enterprise space that might not know your community that the dev space knows real well, as to bring us back the who and the why of Bitnami. Yeah, Erika is my co-founder, and we have been building this together over the year. It has been quite a fair ride, and we started Bitnami as an offshoot for a previous company called BitRock, in which we made software easy to install, and then we realized that a lot of what people wanted to make easy to install on Linux was open-source software. So we started working with companies like MySQL and Suga CRAM, Splunk really early on, where there were only like four or five people, and over time, we decided to do the same thing as an open-source project for all those other tools and projects that didn't have a way to make them easy to install. We started as Bitnami.org, we wanted to emphasize that it was an open-source project we're never going to be a company, and it didn't turn out to be that way. All right, so we got a lot of things to cover, but help us connect the dots as to those early, dot org, it wasn't a company, to a company having the dev space too, was starting down the path towards the enterprise, which seemed to be a natural fit as to what happened today. Yeah, so going back to your real question of why we wanted to make, we've always been driven, there is all these marvelous open-source software out there that is super difficult to use for a great majority of people and we just wanted to lower the barrier to make it easy to use, and that's what got it to start, that we never expected the success, it turns out that we went from a hundred to a thousand to 10,000 to hundreds of thousands of downloads, and we're super popular with developers, we have literally millions of developers using Bitnami, and as part of that evolution, we started working with the cloud providers. We drive a significant percentage of usage for Amazon, for Google, for Microsoft, that's what makes it valuable to those cloud vendors, and as the next stage of the company, we wanted to go directly to the enterprises in which we already have a lot of developers in those same enterprises, but when you go and move to production, you know there's a lot of red tape, a lot of gates that you have to go about, compliance and security, and that's what we're taking the company into. Yeah, nine, 10 years ago, I stumbled over your company or project at that time, and it was the second best way I ever found to run WordPress. The first, of course, is don't run WordPress. I'm very serious, don't run WordPress, and I'm curious now with the acquisition of Bitnami, what is the longer-term vision for how this fits into a more cloud-native landscape? Is it continuing to just be the, not just, but is it continuing to be the application that you get from a catalog and it's up and running? Is there a containerized story? Is there something else I'm not seeing? No, that's the core of Bitnami, and that we will continue to do that. What has evolved over time is initially you could download and install it and run it on your Mac, and then we were one of the first early adopters of AWS, so we created all the same eyes, and when people were thinking that we're crazy that Amazon was a company that sold books, but what were we doing? We kind of saw that where it was going early on, and then as Kubernetes came along, we were really, really early there as well, and we were one of the early partners of days around Helm. We provide a lot of the Helm charts right now. We may have double a little bit on serverless, so whatever comes next, we will be there, and Orgo will continue to be the same team, which is to make awesome software available to everyone. So, in definitely of the underlying platform, that's what we are focusing. So, the core mission is not changing. We're just augmenting that and going after the enterprise, more Red Hat Enterprise Linux, more Open Shift, more multi-tier, high availability, more production features. All right, so you talk about all those pieces. You talk about Linux and everything there, and while I want you to help connect, how does that tie into VMware and what you see them doing today, because sure, Linux has been something that could live on the hypervisor for a long time, but in many ways there's been struggles in competition between VMware and the Linux community in the past, but starting to see some of that change and maybe this helps accelerate some of that. Yeah, I think there is a couple of companies, Microsoft and VMware, that were completely different from other companies than five years ago, and probably decision will have been different for us, like five years ago versus what the company is today and where they're going. For us, VMware is, the holy grail of acquisition is two plus two equals five, and that's hardly the, there's a lot of acquisitions that don't go that way. For us, it was a very thought out decision, and it was, I think it was clear for us in the sense that we have a very big footprint with developers, their own enterprise IT. We wanted to go to the enterprise, they wanted to go into developers, they understand open source, understand distributed teams, yeah. Yeah, maybe, I'd love to hear your insight as to that developer community, because when I walk around the show floor, you know, there was that struggle between the enterprise and the developers, and now, you know, the storage world, you know, we need to get, you know, CICD and all these things, and they're like, we don't know how to get there. And over the last few years, it seems there's been a blurring of the lines, and more enterprises embracing it, you know, open source is a big piece of that, so is it just, as you said, five years ago this wouldn't have happened, but you know, now it feels like we're ready for that next step of the curve. Correct, and all of that is because of the standardization that Kubernetes is allowing. You can standardize best practices, and you're seeing a consolidation, the CICD, you know, wall, and it's just like, things that used to be very exotic now is, you know, business as usual, and it's a parallel, you know, I started using Linux in 93, when there was not even the concept of a Linux distribution, you have to do all these things to just get a prompt. But over time, like people standardized, you know, I remember there were like 50 or 60 Linux distributions, you know, Slackware, you know, SLS, and eventually everybody, you know, converged on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I think something similar is going to happen, we just meet way there, in which you will not have KubeCon because, you know, Kubernetes will be something transparent that is boring. So, we're not there yet, but at some point Kubernetes will be boring, and there will be layers on top of that where all the action is, or will be. With, from my perspective, coming from a small startup background, it seemed to me that VMware was always one of those stodgy, boring companies I didn't have much time for. And lately there have been a series of high-profile acquisitions, Heptio, Wavefront, Cloudfront, and now Bit and AMI. And it's really changing almost without me noticing my entire perception of their place in the modern evolving cloud ecosystem. I think so, and that's one of the things that attracted us. And I told to Tori Valdi, you get to spend a bit of time with the CEO, with, you know, the people at the high level. For us it was very important. And again, one thing that we haven't mentioned, and we have been for the most part, we have been bootstrapped, you know, we have been profitable. We only took a little money from White Combinator when we were already profitable. So we have choices. Sometimes our BC funded peers don't have that choice. So it was a very meditative decision. And for me, for this kind of acquisitions with a much bigger company, you know, joins forces with a smaller company, the strategies need to be aligned. And to me, VMware realized that the wall is, you know, a few years ago, that the wall is going to be multi-cloud. The wall is going to go towards Kubernetes and containers. And the acquisition of Heptio, the acquisition of Cloud Health, told us that they're serious about that. And that we can, you know, fit right in and take advantage of that transformation that they're going at. And so far, it's working really, really, really well. And that's part of what made us decide to go in this direction. Yeah, Daniel, what can you tell us about what things, once this actually does close, what will that mean for the brand? You know, what about relationships with, you mentioned Heptio, but not only Heptio, Pivotal, you know, obviously is a big player in this space. You know, how does all of that line up? So with Heptio and other units, like the marketplace, other groups, we are, we're already working with them before the acquisition. With Heptio with case on it and a bunch of other initiatives. And we're just going to double down on that. And they want to keep Bitnami. They want to keep the brand. They want to keep the team. If anything, we're going to get more resources. And again, that was the fact that they, you know, they don't want to touch something that is working. They just, you know, we have been partners for, I think, seven or eight years. We have gotten to know each other over that time and build that trust that is needed. And, you know, it's, in a way, nothing is going to change. Is we're going to, the same team, doing the same things. We're just going to have more access to their, you know, user base, which is what we're going to do. Like we started down this path because we were, you know, raising money to build an enterprise sales force. And at some point we decided, okay, this doesn't make sense. We're going to go, you know, give away all this chunk of the company. To get access to the enterprise or to build a sales force to get access to the enterprise when, you know, we can be part of VMware and, you know, get that for free. You mentioned a fair bit about what's going to change as far as you getting exposure to new customers, effectively broadening into additional markets. What does this mean for your existing customers who are, in some cases, whenever you're in a customer of a small-ish company and there's an acquisition, it sometimes is now to be a little concerned do I need to find a new vendor? Do I need to find a new provider? And frankly, there's nothing else like you that I've ever seen on the market. No, that's a really good question. For us, what is a little bit unique is we have millions of users, but we only have a handful of customers. So our customers, AWS, Google, Microsoft, Oracle. So it was very important. VMware is already a vendor to all of this. And so far, you know, everybody's going to stay and we're going to continue and deepen the relationship. And it does one of the things that made this attractive. So for customers, nothing is going to change and we're just going to continue to deeper, deepen those relationships. And that, again, that was important. Have we gone through some of the other options? There will be a lot of very awkward conversations to have and that's not the case. Yeah, Daniel, how about the developer community itself? As you said, millions of downloads out there. We understand how some of the reaction could be. It's being where it's going to be. The evil company is going to touch that. And I think so far, the feedback has been extremely positive, including even Hacker News, right? And those people don't like anything. I mean, I've been Hacker News since the very beginning and it's going to be hard. So it's something that was monitoring how people, and so far it's been very, very positive. And that's only not a testament how much people like Bnami, but also, again, like being where a choir helped you and everything's great. Like we talked to a lot of the people that helped you. Hey, how are things going? How has it been, right? And I really loved it there. So for us, it was a very, something that gave us a lot of reassurance that all these other open source companies with a lot of open source DNA were being successful there and gave us reassurance. Time will tell. We'll see you one year from now where we are. But so far, I've talked to, all the conversation has been great. So Daniel, you have a very interesting viewpoint on this whole ecosystem. We work with all the cloud providers. Any commentary you'd give of kind of, you talked about kind of midway point of the maturity. Where do you see things today? Where do you see them going? What do we need to fix as an industry? It's very difficult to predict where things are going. I just think that at this point, it's very safe to say that it's going to be a multicloud wall. That was not like three, four years ago. It seemed that it could be like a repeat of the 90s in which Microsoft owned 90, something percent of the market share. And there's a lot of things that didn't make sense. Right now, at least Amazon plus a bunch of other clouds are very viable and if anything, they are growing. So a lot of companies like HashiCorp, like VMware, companies that support this multicloud environment, not all of them, but all of them are very well positioned to try because it's not going to change anytime soon. The other thing that I think is safely to assume is we're going to have more artifacts than ever. So companies like, Artifactory, I think they will do well as any companies have to do with security. We're going to have more security issues, not less, but that's in the long term as much as I can predict. All right, well, Daniel, thank you so much. Congratulations again. We look forward to seeing you at VMworld, where we'll have theCUBE. There'll actually be our 10th year doing this at VMworld, so we're excited and always happy to talk to us, especially the startups having some great news here. For Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks as always for watching theCUBE.