 Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon EU 2024, live from Paris, France. Join hosts Savannah Peterson, Dustin Kirkland, and Rob Streche as they interview some of the brightest minds in cloud native computing. Coverage of KubeCon cloud native con is brought to you by Red Hat, CNCF, and its ecosystem partners. The CUBE's coverage of KubeCon EU 2024 begins right now. Good afternoon cloud native community, and welcome back to Paris, France. My name's Savannah Peterson, and I am so delighted to be here for three days of broadcasting, live on theCUBE from CNCF's biggest event in Europe. It's also the largest open source event in Europe. It's just a blast. Joined by Rob Streche. Rob, you've been killing it today. This is a lot of interviews. This has been awesome. I think just the energy and how we're looking at how everybody is bringing cloud native together with their heritage apps is really been a great theme today. And I think that that is where people are really trying to understand all of these complexities. Yeah, it's all about decreasing complexity. Everybody wants that easy button for AI for everything. Really excited to have a new guest with us, Dimitri, welcome to the show. Yeah, hi, thanks for having me. Yeah, it's a pleasure. How's it going for you so far? It's really awesome. So actually, this was the very first day when I'm like here in the KubeCon. I had a lot of meetings yesterday, so today I jumped into the car and drove here two hours from Luxembourg. Oh my goodness. Okay, is that where Emma is based? Yeah, Emma's headquartered in Luxembourg. Wow, that's a unique HQ location. Yeah, true, we love Luxembourg. It's relatively small, but it's super convenient for us and they do a lot to attract the talents into the country. Yeah, and you said you've got about 80 team members now? Yeah, we're around 80 team members, 15 full-time employees based out of Luxembourg and another 65 are distributed across the globe. Oh wow, okay, that's exciting. So just in case the audience isn't familiar, tell us a little bit about Emma. So Emma is a crony. Emma means enterprise multi-cloud management application. So what we do, we have bigger organizations to streamline the way they interact with the different cloud service providers and the way they manage the different cloud environments and the applications. So we help them to deploy, manage, analyze the workloads and properly reduce their like cloud costs and what they do in the clouds as well. Wow, and I can imagine that's a huge challenge for folks right now. Yeah, it is, especially for the bigger ones, again. Because imagine you're like based out of AWS, right? So you have your environment at AWS and then you decided to acquire someone smaller because of the business, you like the business, not the infrastructure, not the cloud service provider. So you acquired the guys and you got this multi-cloud. So you have AWS, imagine they have Azure and you need somehow to merge that and you're going to have a clue what to do and you need to hire the high-skill professionals. And we know there's a lack of a high-skill professionals out on the marketplace, so that's the problem. Yeah, the skill sets I think with multi-cloud and we're big believers in it here at theCUBE, we talk about it all the time that not everything is moving the cloud. In fact, we have a lot of research that we've done that shows that it's actually hitting an equilibrium, that 50% of new apps are going to the cloud and 50% of the new apps are actually going on-premise or to a co-location. Do you see that multi-cloud, like a multi-cloud strategy has unique benefits to organizations? I wouldn't say like someone really wants to go multi-cloud, right? And even when they tell you we have a multi-cloud strategy, that's not true. In the bottom of their heart, they don't want to be there because it's a very complicated story. So what they want to do, they want to stay cloud agnostic and that's the different thing. They want to decide where and how they deploy the workloads and how their workloads scale based on the cheapest available instances out on the marketplace or better reliability or whatever. So that's a bit different thing, but on the other hand, again, we see that the guys they want to leverage is approach where they decide where and how they deploy the workloads and scale these workloads. So we can call it multi-cloud, but we prefer to say it's more cloud agnostic than multi-cloud. I think that's a really important differentiation because nobody actively wants to increase complexity. I mean, that would be proper insanity. How does Emma, speaking of complexity, how does Emma make it easier? How do you solve this problem? Yeah, so that's a great question. In the background, I'm a networking engineer like you. So I started my career as an engineering guy, so I know all these things related to the Ethernet, TCPIP protocols, whatever. So when we started to build Emma, we never knew what is the right way to build the best cloud management platform in the world. So we decided to just simply get connected all these different cloud service providers, one with another through the multi-cloud networking backbone. So we've built this networking backbone and on top of that, we've built a software and this is a unified dashboard where you can deploy your workloads, scale them and on top of that, we also have our API gateway where you can get connected. All of these applications you have around here and for example, automate your deployments and the workloads or for example, export the data to analyze it later on using the different software that you like. So again, unified platform that helps companies to deploy into the variety of clouds. It's kind of like a mission control setup. Yeah, oh, I love that. How, so what sort of, I'm sure that your customers want a lot of things. I bet they want better performance, I bet they want it cheaper, I bet they want to be more efficient. What sort of features do you have that address those different needs, desires? So what we realized that companies, they always have the quite similar use cases in terms of infrastructure. So they operate VMs, they operate networking, backbones. They also leverage microservices. Sometimes it's like, what was that? 15%, 10% of our customers, they actively leverage in the microservices. So let's say mostly it's all about the instances, applications and the managed services they can get out of the cloud service providers. So imagine, ML is a single platform where you can easily get all of these services, applications, managed services. And on top of that, we are building our own solutions. We recently launched the very first multi-cloud Kubernetes as a managed service. So you can imagine, you can deploy and scale your workloads across the clouds using this managed service that we launched. I was going to ask you about that because I had heard about it and I think, how does that really help people? Because I think even though we sit here and I think even on the main stage this morning, they talked about how we're 10 years into Kubernetes and we still have a long way to go. And so how do you make it easy for customers to get into Kubernetes through that service? So let's put aside all the automation thing. So like infrastructure is caught and all this like difficult stuff. Let's have a look at the dashboard, right? So we simplified the way the customer deploys his very first cluster. So in a number of clicks, you decide, okay, so I want workers in Amsterdam, Google, Asia, Paris, and London AWS to like, to distribute the workloads, to be assured that nothing would affect your application. So you do this within a few clicks and then also you set up the policy for the auto-scaling in case your application needs to scale. And on top of that, you have already the preset of all operators inside this cluster which are ready to actually onboard your application. And you get it by default so you don't need to be a high-skill professional. And we provide it as a fully managed service where the control plane is also distributed between the clouds. And all these features, they leverage our network in Backbone and help customers to scale their applications and grow their applications faster. And you can manage within the single platform all your existing clusters across the different clouds and the providers or whatever. So you're also helping them from an egress or lateral movement between the clouds and things of that nature. And I would assume that because being in Europe, data provenance and data residency is a big thing, being a company from Luxembourg, being in the EU has its advantages as well. Yeah, of course. I mean, Luxembourg itself is a very interesting place. So imagine in Luxembourg, we have several tier four data centers. So like military grade protection. And from this perspective, it's a very unique location. And also we are quite close to Paris, to Frankfurt, so to the major internet exchanges. With our network in Backbone, we have a physical presence at all of these locations and we help customers at all of the data centers where the cloud service providers are based. And we help our customers to move the data freely and reduce the egress cost. What we do, we deploy our own equipment and make this equipment interconnected. So that's the physical network in Backbone. Yeah. How many different clouds are you working with these days? Or do you see your customers working with? So definitely we support the hyperscalers. And also we think it is important and we support also the local providers. And that's an interesting thing. If you exclude the hyperscalers and you connect all the local cloud service providers, one with another, the cloud capacity that you can offer to the end users will be significantly bigger comparing to what AWS, Azure and Google provide to the customers. So again, we support all the hyperscalers, local providers, and we do also have the native connectors to the private environments like on-premises infrastructure for our customers as well. So when you come to a show like this, are you, I mean, I bet you're doing a lot of things, but are you more looking for projects to integrate into your toolkit? Are you meeting with bigger teams to figure out how to solve their problems? How are you spending your time in here? Oh. Collect on the stickers. There you go. We all love the stickers. Well, we do our swag segment. We'll be on tomorrow. We're here for the stickers too. Yeah, jokes aside. So definitely we are here to understand what are the, let's say, forward-looking technologies and the best of great products exist in the marketplace, right? And we also are willing to partner with the cloud-native companies because we are strong believers in a bigger future of the cloud-native community. So we are the part of CNCF as well. We work with the companies. We support all the contributors. And here we also are discussing the partnerships with the companies like DataDoc and Uralic because we also see that there are a few overlaps and we can't be like complimentary one to another. So, yeah. Do you see since a new set of customers coming your way since all of the fun with VMware being bought by Broadcom happening? That's a good topic. And actually when Broadcom bought VMware, a lot of enterprise, let's say not customers, but prospects, they reached out to us like, okay, guys, we see that everything is changing. We want to hash our risks. So is there anything that Emma can provide us to support us to support us in terms of finding the better solution, how to mitigate those risks? So yeah, thanks to this acquisition, I mean, we understand that maybe it's not the best option for the partners and the customers, but thanks to this acquisition, Emma gained a lot of new customers and we helped them to stay more agnostic than they were before, right? Yeah. I mean, if it fuels business, what are you going to do? Interesting tailwinds come from unique locations sometimes and I can imagine that's a big deal. What are you looking for in the future? What's next for you guys as a team? So we are expanding into the United States. We are in the middle of a fundraise that will support this expansion. So we are expanding into the United States because we see that the cloud market in the United States is 15 times bigger than here in Europe and the sales cycle is shorter. So it makes a lot of sense business-wise for us to expand, but product-wise, so we are about to build the multi-cloud GPU support because we see all this AI hype. Of course. And we see that the cloud service providers, they cannot offer a lot of virtual GPUs to the customers, to the end users, because there's only one player who produces this GPUs, right? So we want to build as an aspect thing as an application, that tool that will be able to build a logical GPU on top of the existing accelerators so you can combine the GPUs from Azure, AWS, and Google and make like your logical container where you can deploy your application and train your model. How do you help organizations with that type of deployment where they're having a piece of an application, where a piece of an application, one place and a piece of an application, another place, is that really like the superpower for Emma is being able to bring that all together and can it really help them manage through that? So the devil is always in details, right? And of course if you have a legacy Oracle, pardon me, Oracle database somewhere in Azure and the other one at AWS and you want them anyhow to be like connect, we can do this, but you need also to put the load balancer in between and do all this stuff. Imagine if there is like a Kubernetes, we have a global load balancer and we do have our network and backbone that supports this. That makes sense. Where do you see Emma next year? Do you see yourself in the United States and really growing in that direction? Myself as a person or myself. Well the company. The company. Yeah, so definitely we have already heard if you guys to cover the United States market we have a few good demos scheduled with the bigger organizations like super huge companies and definitely this year for our company is going to be the year of the United States. So we see us there. I love that. All right, so final question for you. Wouldn't we have you back on the show because you've been fabulous. What do you hope you can say at NextCubeCon that you maybe can't say yet today outside of penetrating into the US? So I hope the NextCubeCon for our company will be both. I mean, we want to attend the European one and the United States one and definitely during these CubeCons we want to say that we have succeeded with the expansion and we have succeeded with the product delivery. Love that. Well then I guess we'll see in Salt Lake City. Dmitry, thank you so much for being on the show and Rob, fantastic questions this segment in particular and thank all of you for tuning in from home, from your car or from outer space. My name's Savannah Peterson, here with theCUBE for three days of broadcasting in beautiful Paris, France. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.