 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 CUBE Conversation. I'm Stu Miniman, and we're here in our Boston area studio. Happy to welcome to the program first-time guest, Brian Cuckell, who's the co-founder and CEO of Cloud Genera. Brian, thanks so much for joining me. Stu, thank you so much for having us here. All right, first of all, Brian, we always love. We get, you know, a co-founder on the program. You gotta bring us back to kind of the why. You know, why was Cloud Genera formed? You know, we've had a chance to dig into it, but, you know, Cloud Genera, there's Cloud in the name, there's, you know, Generation. Tell me about the company, the name, and a little bit about your background. Be glad to. So, like most great companies, our company was born of the market's necessity. We saw a trend happening as many businesses were shifting the way they managed their IT, and the trend took the form of this buzzword, Cloud. And so, you know, Cloud Genera as a company absolutely helps businesses figure out their most efficient path towards leveraging Cloud technologies. But our value proposition is actually greater than that. You know, our business exists to help companies determine the best IT services to support the needs of their organization. Great. Well, luckily, Cloud Simple, Enterprise IT, we just have a button we press and everything works awesome. I think the reality is though, you know, nobody ever gets rid of anything, you know, changing applications is really tough and it's a really complicated, super fast changing market out there, so maybe, you know, drill in just a tiny bit and explain what it is that you do and why that's a little bit different than some of the other things happening in the marketplace. Sure. While the big easy button does exist, when you push it, nothing happens. Maybe it makes a funny sound. As the name would suggest, Cloud Generous specializes in the formation of clouds and to the point that you made, this is not simple, this is not easy. Cloud is not a target state. Unlike virtualization, which was a target state, Cloud is really an operating model and also as you highlighted, there's so much variability and complexity associated with Cloud. Am I talking about infrastructure? Am I talking about platforms? Am I talking about software as a service? Cloud for us can be any of those things. It can be you managing your infrastructure. It can be somebody else managing your infrastructure all the way up through your apps. And so what our business aims to do is to demystify all the variability and complexity associated with making Cloud decisions. Really, it's about helping people figure out where to place their workloads and what we commonly see is that the migration does not generate success unless you've considered how to optimize your workloads in advance of selecting a new execution venue. So as a business, our software, our technology, helps customers to determine how do I optimize my workloads regardless of whether or not I'm going to move them? And ultimately, how do I get the best value for my spend at IT services as I'm contemplating Cloud as a model for hosting my apps? Yeah, so every vendor I talk to out there, if I'm a cloud platform vendor, if I'm an infrastructure vendor, they all have these tools that say, hey, here's how the experience is going to be on our platform. Maybe it compares against a couple of things out there, but you're not pushing hardware, you're not pushing platforms. Explain how you fit into the ecosystem and you're not just, when you say cloud, it's not just public cloud. It's, talk a little bit about the spectrum of things that you support. Okay, be happy to. So first, what I would say is that when you look at a vendor's strategy, their strategy is to drive you to adopt their technologies, their solutions. And so any of the tools that they're bringing to market, any of the services that they're bringing to market are biased towards the outcome that they're trying to achieve. This was actually, when I say Cloud Genre was born of the market's necessity, the market really needed a solution that was agnostic and unbiased to the outcome. Something that would be so bold is to recommend not doing anything if that was the best option available to your business. That's really what makes Cloud Genre a special. We are the best place to go in the market to get that unbiased agnostic viewpoint that's tailored to your needs as an organization and guides you to the right vendors and the right solutions. Yeah, it's interesting. You think about, like there's consulting companies that would get involved and send a bunch of people and help you through your journey. We talked about, there's been lots of tools out that have poked at this, but there's a big elephant in the room and it's a little tough to kind of figure out where to start. So I just want to talk a little bit about kind of the breadth and depth of what you do. How do you keep up with all of these things? I mean, while we were talking, I'm pretty sure Amazon released one or two new features and the next time Intel comes out with a spin, you've got a billion SKUs that you have to update. So how does this impact you and how do you help keep up with it? So Stu, this is really what creates the longevity and value proposition for my business. The market is changing at breakneck speed. To your point, the major providers, both in data center as well as in cloud have probably released a half a dozen new services for the market to contemplate just in our conversation. So Cloud General addresses this in a couple of different ways, but all of it born in automation and intelligence. And so we have a cloud research function as a part of our platform that is continually ingesting the data around what the market can offer. So this could be services you could consume from public cloud providers like the Microsoft Azure, the Amazon EC2, the Google compute as an example, but we're not an infrastructure play. We actually move up and down the stack. So if you want to look at platform as a service solutions like cloud foundry as an example, you're moving towards no sequel as an example for managing data. Do I do that as infrastructure? Do I do it as a platform as a service? What level of service is available in the market? Our automation, our intelligence gathering that market data is the big value for our customers because through that automation, we give them something that avoids their need to spend a lot of money on consultants or to spend a lot of time internally, trying to assess what the market can offer. And then most importantly, once you have that data, how do you turn it into insights? How do you take that data and make it actionable for your business based upon your needs and the requirements of your workloads? So that's a big part of our secret sauce, a big part of our IP. We stay current with the market so that you don't have to. And what's interesting about our business is that we don't just do point in time comparisons. In fact, we sit on historical data and trends, both how you can modernize in your data center and how you can leverage cloud services. And that data set is over four years large, I like to say, not four years old. And so in that way, we can even predict where the market is headed. So if you're leveraging us or doing this manual as opposed to leveraging our automated methods, we've got the recipe of how to make good decisions and really it is staying current on the market. That's the only way that you can address it. Love to touch on another aspect of the question you asked, which is consultancies. If there's one thing that we're disrupting in the market, it is the ability to do this analysis at scale. Many of our clients tell us that it's cost prohibitive to hire an army of consultants to come in and assess their current capabilities and then attempt to map that to what the market can offer. If you're using a manual method powered by labor, you're likely gonna have an answer that reflects the market 90 days ago, 180 days ago. Cloud Genera gives you the power at your fingertips to get those sort of insights immediately. And when I talk about disruption, it's really doing in minutes what normally took months. It's also a fraction of the cost, both productivity and labor as well as the true cost if you're leveraging consultants to do this sort of analysis. And so in that way, we can scale to serving customers that are as large and as complicated as the global five. We can also scale far and wide to serve many customers in the market at the same time. Again, it's because we're using algorithms, we're using data science. We're not trying to solve this problem with labor. Yeah, I love that. And you talked about, it's not just about the platform, you're looking at what we've said for years, customers need to look at their data, they need to look at their applications and that's where you need to start. I'd like you to talk a little bit about your users because talk to so many companies, it's like, oh, they've tried either building their own in-house solution or going to a service provider or going to public cloud and they get one or two apps, some critical one or some real important or some cool new one. And then they're like, okay, I've got hundreds or thousands of other apps and trying to figure out how they do that, you got to use some intelligence, you need to use some, it needs to be driven by software, it can't be some big process that I'd have to be, have some consultancy or thing like that. Maybe do you have some customer examples you can bring us through or talk to how that typically works? Yeah, absolutely. I'll share a few patterns that we see in the market. One pattern, and it doesn't have a bias towards a particular industry vertical or a particular size of customer, but there's an illusion out there in the market that you'll be able to lift and shift your workload from your data center to Amazon's data center as an example and then magically that's gonna take care of all your problems, right? Amazon's gonna manage your mess for less. Well, the harsh reality that customers are finding is that while Amazon as an example might be an excellent provider of IT services for your business, if you're not optimizing your workload to leverage that provider, you're not gonna get the benefits that you'd hope. And so one trend we see commonly in the industry and it's a mistake we hope folks make, whether they leverage our service or they solve this problem some other way is please don't try to do the lift and shift. In fact, another big trend we see in the industry of companies that have gone that route is they do what we like to call repatriation, where they made the full fledged push into migrating their workloads to a new venue and ultimately to figure out that the lift and shift was not successful for them and the larger the client, the more pain they've experienced because the more money they're spending on IT and the harder that gets. Yeah, just to poke at that a tiny bit and I know we don't have a lot of time to dig into it but if you lift and shift and that's the step one of doing, I need to break something apart, I wanna refactor some pieces and eventually know I'll get there, but is that okay and are there paths to get there or are you saying, hey, you wanna sort those pieces out first before you get to the cloud? There's some use cases where lift and shift absolutely has a benefit, absolutely has a value. If you're dedicating IT capacity and it's dedicated towards something that's used sporadically, well, just the usage model alone, you could potentially get a benefit out of a lift and shift. You're getting the benefit of the optimization just by being able to leverage the elasticity of cloud but beyond some of those low hanging fruit use cases, we actually see this as a detriment to many companies success. I like to use the analogy of a moving company. The last thing you wanna do is pack the box, pick up the box, move the box and then move it three or four times before you actually get to the destination. That's what lift and shift is really doing. You just pick up what you had in your data center, you put it in somebody else's data center and now you're in a foreign land and you're gonna try to break that thing apart and re-engineer it there. That's actually gonna be a lot harder in practice than what we've seen as more of a better option which is optimize where you are. If your target state for the next innovation is to get to containers, figure out how to containerize before you make the migration as an example. If your end game is to move from a database on infrastructure to a platform as a service, we'll optimize that database's deployment, optimize that workload before you attempt to transition it to the past. So I would say nine times out of 10, you're probably gonna wanna treat an application workload before you attempt to move it someplace else. Otherwise, you're just gonna be lifting and carrying that box several times. Yeah, it unfortunately reminds me of anybody that's moved and you move someplace and three to five years later, you run across that box and you're like, why did I even move this to my environment? I've outgrown it, I don't need it. I could have either gotten rid of it or done something else with it. Last piece of the technology I wanna cover for today is we've talked a bunch about the public cloud. You do a lot with service providers and with the in-house data center stuff. Maybe talk a little bit as to what you cover. It's public clouds, there's a few really big ones, but there's so many service providers. What do you engage with? What do you cover there? And in the data center, there's just, I can't imagine how many options there are. What's the scope of what you cover? So this might be a little controversial for some folks because if you read the trade rags, cloud is the answer, right? Whatever cloud may be moving to cloud is the answer. Our philosophy as a company is that public cloud is not the only game in town, nor will it be the only game in town in the future. We believe in companies investing in technology to get the best value for their spend. And as a result, there's a continuum of options that we see existing far into the future. And those include regional data center providers. Frequently, we see them being value added because they can offer a level of service that's not yet been implemented in public cloud. Who's gonna manage the stuff that an Azure doesn't manage as an example? These regional providers, these service providers, many of whom are evolving to do managed services in other people's data centers, not just their own, are gonna play a key role in this next wave of technology. And so again, these regional providers, we see them being very important for delivering the service level that customers expect. There's also, and this is a very prominent topic right now, there's concerns about data privacy and data sovereignty. While the hyperscalers have done a great job of building a global footprint, they still have gaps. And so if companies are concerned about GDPR in Europe as an example, if they're concerned about Pipita up in Canada as an example, these regional service providers have the compliance capabilities, they have the protection already in place to not just deliver a high service level, but also to deliver a solution that can be lower risk for your business. And so that's really where we see service providers fitting in the market. And we see customers having a right mix of public cloud and service provider powered infrastructure, as well as for large companies, they may still have the buying power and they may still have the level of expertise in house of like my Fortune 50 clientele, but you could even take it down probably to the Fortune 500 where it's more cost effective for them to still operate in their data center. Today, because we're a data driven company and we live in the data and the insights it provides, still the majority of the workloads, either for service level, security, or if you're a large company, the economics to run IT are still better suited in data center. We don't know that it's always gonna be the majority in your data center, we see this evolving as the public cloud providers continue to mature and over the last few years they've matured greatly. But again, we see a continuum of options for customer to consider. We think those options will get smaller, but we still think you're gonna have a purpose to consider in your data center in a regional service provider as well as considering a hyperscaler for your needs. All right, Brian, last thing, need to get the speeds and feet on cloud genera. How many employees you have, how many customers you have, can you talk anything about the funding and tell us about the Silicon South? Well, let me start there. One of the things we're very proud about it is being a company that's headquartered here on the East Coast and specifically in the South. That said, we're already a global company. We have customers around the world. There's well over a thousand subscribers of our cloud assist technology, which is where you can both model future uses of technology as well as load in your existing inventories and analyze your business at scale. You know, what I would share again about the Silicon South is that we're one of these cool companies that is helping the Southeast kind of rise up as a technology center, right? Not one of the normal places that folks think of as innovation hubs. But very much in the Carolinas in particular, we have a market that's on the rise with very smart data scientists, very smart developers and very strong business leaders. And so that's one of the things we are very proud of as a company. There are 22 employees in Cloud Genera today. As I mentioned, we have a global footprint in terms of customers. I gave you a stat just around our cloud assist product. You know, one of the cool things about us is that we serve both the consumer, so that would be the enterprise that's trying to figure out what to do with their technology investments. We also serve their suppliers. We will not bias ourselves, so they can't bias the output of our software. But what they can do is leverage our software to guide their customers' decisions. In fact, our relationship with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are relationships where they know sometimes our software will recommend an outcome that they can't monetize, but they still choose to work with us and they still choose to recommend us and in some cases leverage us for their clients to make sure their clients are getting the best value for their spend. Well, Brian Kelly, Charlotte, North Carolina, based Cloud Genera, appreciate you joining. Thanks so much for sharing with us. Some of the nuance and complexity that you're trying to help enterprises clean through. We'll be back. Check out lots more coverage at thecube.net. So many shows where companies are trying to sort through this very complicated space, so be sure to check out thecube.net for all the videos. Wikibon.com, where we're digging through with our analysis on our team. I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks so much for watching theCUBE.