 Okay, we're back with Charlie Dublin. He's the vice president of product management at Acquia. Great to see you, Charlie. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, Dave. So Acquia, tell us about the company. Sure. So Acquia is the largest and best provider of Drupal hosting capabilities. We rank number two in the digital experience platform space just behind Adobe. So very strong business growing well and innovating every day. Yeah, Drupal open source, super deep, high quality content management system and more experience. You call it an experience platform? An experience platform, open, flexible. We want our customers to have choice, the ability to solve their problems, how they want, leveraging the power of the open source community. So what were the big challenges? Just describe kind of the business drivers. We're going to talk about StormForge but the things that you were facing, some of the challenges that kind of led you to StormForge. Sure. So our objective first is to provide the best experience with Drupal. So that entails lots of capabilities around ease of use for Drupal itself but that has to run on a world-class platform. It has to be the most performance. It has to be the most secure. It needs to be flexible to enable customers to run Drupal however they want to run Drupal. And so that involves the ability to support thousands of different kinds of modules that come out of the community. We want our customers to have choice with Drupal and to be able to support those choices on our platform. So optionality is key. You know, sometimes that creates other challenges like you've got one of everything. So how do you deal with that challenge? Yeah, that's a great question. Every strength is a form of weakness. And so our objective is really first to provide that choice but to do it in a cost-efficient way. So we try to provide reference architectures for customers, opinionation for our customers to standardize, take out some of the complexity that they might have if everything were a snowflake. But our objective is really to support their needs and err on the side of that flexibility. All right, so you guys had to go through a major replatforming effort around containers and Kubernetes. Can you talk about that and what role StormForge played? Sure, so tied to the last point, our objective is to provide customers the highest performance and most secure platform. The entire industry of course is moving to Kubernetes and leveraging containers. We are a large consumer of AWS services and are undergoing a major replatforming away from a legacy AWS towards Kubernetes and containers. And so that major replatforming effort is intending to enable customers to run applications how they want to. And the power of Kubernetes and containers is to support that. And so we looked at StormForge as a way for us to right-size resource capacity to support our customers' applications. I love it, AWS is now legacy. Andy Jassy one time said that if they had to redo Amazon, they'd do it in Lambda and using serverless. And so, yeah, it's been around a long time now. Okay, so what were the outcomes that you were seeking? Was it better management, cost reduction and how'd that go? Sure, so our customers run a wide range of applications. We support customers leveraging Drupal in every industry. Globally, we do business in 30 different countries. And so what you have is a very wide range of applications and consumer and consumption models. And so we felt that leveraging StormForge would put us in a position where we'd be able to right-size resource to those different kinds of applications, essentially let the platform align to how customers wanted to operate their applications. And so StormForge's capability in conjunction with Kubernetes and containers really puts us in a position where customers are able to get the performance that they want, and when they need it on demand. A lot of the auto-scaling capabilities that you get from Kubernetes and containers supports that. And so it really enables customers to run their applications how they want to functionally, as well as from a performance perspective. So this move toward containers and microservices, sort of modern application development coincides with a modern platform like StormForge. And so, I'm sure there are alternatives out there why StormForge, maybe you could explain a little bit more about why, from your perspective, what it does and why you chose them. Sure, so we leverage AWS in many respects in terms of the underlying platform, but we are a very strong DIY for how that platform supports Drupal applications. We view our expertise as being the best at Drupal. And so we felt like for us to truly maximize Kubernetes and containers and the power of those underlying technologies on the one hand allows us to automate more and do more for customers. On the other side of it, it puts a tremendous burden on the level of expertise in order to do that well for every customer every day at scale. And so that at scale part of that was the challenge. And so we leverage StormForge to enable us to write size applications for performance, provide us cost benefits, allocate what you need, when you need it for our customers. And that at scale piece is a critical part. We could do elements of it internally. We tried to do elements of that internally, but as you start getting to scale from a few apps to hundreds of apps to certainly across our fleet of tens of thousands of applications, you really need something that leverages machine learning. You really need a technology that's integrated well within AWS and StormForge provided that solution. So make sure I got this right. So it sounds like you sort of from a skill standpoint transitioned or applied your skills from turning knobs, if you will, to automation and scale. Correct. And what was that like? Was the team gleaning into that, loving it? Was it a challenging thing for you guys to get there? Yeah, that's a good question. So the benefit and the way that StormForge applies it, so they leverage machine learning to enable us to make better decisions. So we still have the control elements, but we have much greater insight into what that would mean ahead of time before customers would be affected. So we still have the knobs we need, but we're able to do it at scale. And then from the automation point, it allows us to focus our deep expertise on making Drupal and the core hosting platform capabilities awesome, sort of the stuff and resource allocation, resource consumption that's an enabler, we can outsource that to StormForge. So this is not batch, it's you're basically doing this in sort of near real time. Optimize live, right, is the capability. Maybe you can describe what it is. Sure, yeah. Optimize live is new, we're in testing with that. We've done extensive testing with StormForge on the core, call it decision making logic that allows for the right sizing of consumption and resources for customer applications. So that has already been tested. So the core engine's been tested. Optimize live allows us to do that in real time to make policy decisions across our fleet on what's the right trade off between performance, cost, other parameters. Again, it informs our decision making and our management of our platform that would be very, very difficult otherwise. Without StormForge, we'd have to do massive data aggregation. We'd have to have machine learning and additional infrastructure to manage to derive this information and, and, and, and that is not our core business. We don't want to be doing that. We want insights to manage our platform to enable customers and StormForge provides that. So, okay, so it's kind of human in the loop thing. Hey, here's what, like our recommendation or here's some options that you might want to, is a path that you want to go down but it's not taking that action for you necessarily, right? You don't want that. You want to make sure that the experts are have a hand in it still, is that correct? Correct, you still want the experts to have a hand in it but you don't want them to have a hand in it on each individual app. You need that, that machine learning capability, that insight that allows you to do that at scale. So if you had to step back and think about your relationship with StormForge, what was the business impact of bringing them in? Yeah, first from a time to market perspective, we're able to get to market with a higher performance and more cost effective solution earlier. So there's that benefit. Second benefit to the earlier point is that we're able to make resource allocation decisions focused on where our core competency is, not into the guts of Kubernetes containers and the like. Third is that the machine learning talent that StormForge brings to the table is world-class. I've run machine learning teams, data science teams, and we put them in the top 1% of any team that I've worked with in terms of their expertise. So the logic and decision-making and insights is outstanding, so we can get to the best decision, the optimal decision much more quickly. And then when you accompany that with the newer product and optimized live with that automation component you mentioned, all the better. So we're able to make decisions quicker, get it implemented on our platform and realize the benefits. What customers get from that is much better performance of their applications, more real-time, able to scale more dynamically. What we get is resource efficiency and our network and platform efficiency. We're not over allocating capacity that costs us more money than we should. We're under allocating capacity that could have a lower performance solution for our customers. So that puts money in your pocket and your customers are happier. So they're higher renewal rates, less churn. Correct. And that increases over time as you add more capabilities. That's correct. What's it like? New application approach, Kubernetes, container's fine. Okay, I need a modern platform, but it's a relatively new company, Stormforge, right? What's it like working with them? Sure, their talent level is world-class. And I wasn't familiar with them when I joined Aquia. I came to know them and then very impressed. There's many other providers in the market that will speak to some similar capabilities and would make many claims. But from our assessment, our view is that they're the right partner for us, or the right size, they're flexible, excellent team. They've evolved their technology roadmap very quickly. They deliver on their promises and convince the very good team to work with. So I've been very impressed for such an early-stage company to deliver and to support our business so rapidly. So I think that's a strength. And then I think, again, the quality of the people that's been manifested in the product itself. It's a high-quality product. I think it's unique to the market. So Napoleon Hill, famous writer, thinker, he wrote Think and Grow Rich, if you haven't read it, check it out. But one of his concepts is a lever, small lever can move a big rock. It can be very powerful. Do you see Stormforge as having that kind of effect on your business, that change on your business? I do, yeah. Like I said, I think the engagement with them has proven and this isn't debatable based on the results we've had with them. We ran that team through the ringer to validate the technology. Again, we've heard lots of promises from other companies. Ran that team through the ringer with extensive testing across many customers, large and small, many use cases to really stress test their capabilities. And they came out well ahead of any metric we put forth, even well ahead of claims that they had coming into the engagement. They exceeded that and so that's why I'm here, why I'm an advocate, why I think they're an outstanding company with a tremendous amount of potential. So thinking about, what can you tell us about where you want to take the company and the partnership with Stormforge? Sure, yeah, I think it's, I think the main next step is for us to engage with Stormforge to drive automation, drive decisioning as we expand and move more and more customers over to our new platform. We're going to uncover use cases, different challenges as we go. So I think the, you know, it's a learning process for both sides, but I think it's been successful so far and it has a lot of potential. Sounds like you had a great business and a great new partnership. So thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you very much. Appreciate your time. All right, my pleasure. And thank you for watching theCUBE. You're a global leader in enterprise tech coverage.