 Hey, hey, everyone. Welcome to SuperUZTV again. I have two great guests for you, Boris Rensky from Morantis and Jesse Praubman from BlueBox, an IBM company. Boris and Jesse, you want to introduce yourselves? Sure, I can start, I guess. So I am Boris Rensky. I'm co-founder, chief marketing officer at Morantis. So I'm Jesse Praubman. I was the CTO of BlueBox, now an IBM Distinguished Engineer and CTO of the BlueBox offering inside IBM. Thank you. Now, you two have a part of two companies that have really made that jump from being a startup to very big players in the open-stack system. So why don't you know, what has been some of the biggest challenges for you when you first try to build your startup? Do you want to start? Yeah, I'll start. So BlueBox is around for, I don't know, nine years or so before we really got involved in the open-stack community in a big way. The biggest challenge for us was figuring out some of our positioning in the space. So if you look at OpenStack, you can see today, there are a lot of duplicative offerings and differentiation with an open-stack product is a hard thing to do. So we spent a lot of time looking at the business models in the space and figured out a different approach that we could take as a service model and realized that that was a place that wasn't as saturated as some of the other models in the space and one that we felt really the intellectual property that we built in the previous nine years of the company would help us succeed in. So that business model piece was a really important factor for us. Well, from my standpoint, I guess we're somewhat similar to BlueBox in the sense that we weren't one of the cool kids that started OpenStack. Neither were we one of the large companies that can make a press release and say, we're putting a billion dollars behind OpenStack and get everybody's eyeballs. So we got involved maybe a year into already OpenStack being there and the market was in place and a lot of brands were in place. Some folks were benefiting from the cool kids that started type of association, big players naturally from their existing footprint in the enterprise and their existing brands. Getting any kind of credibility behind the Miranda's brand was one of the biggest challenge for us and this actually dovetails also into the value proposition that we have because you can build credibility if you're focusing on some very niche technology solution to a specific problem. The problem with OpenStack is that it's pretty kind of horizontal platform and you have to get kind of really creative about being relevant in what you offer. So we started out positioning ourselves as the services guys and winning credibility as the services guys for OpenStack battling the battle against IBM and Cisco and HP that were all there. That was kind of the biggest challenge. I think the other big thing that you guys did really well and I think helped us was having a voice and a position and an opinion and being really consistent with that. I think if you look at the companies that have been the most successful in this space, they were very vocal and present and visible with their position and their thoughts in the space. I think we both benefited from that ability. So what are some of the key things that you and your company did to make that jump from being a startup to being an established player in the OpenStack ecosystem? I think that from our standpoint, nothing that we did is really unique to OpenStack. I think that's kind of just a playbook for how to get there for any business. Our view was that we need to make sure that we built a brand, you know, services for OpenStack, okay, and then we needed to figure out how to make sure that whatever we deliver to the customer actually meets the expectations and at the same time, what we promise is aligned with the already preconceived notions, expectations that people are coming into OpenStack with, right? So we started as services and, you know, it's not a sexy thing, right? But we kind of stuck with it and our position was that we have to kind of gradually evolve our value proposition, find the kind of repeatable pockets of value that we can productize and gradually flow it into the customers and then finally packaging it into that into the distribution and then moving onward. So balancing that evolution together with the OpenStack ecosystem and the kind of, you know, the buying patterns of the people that are bought into OpenStack, that's been probably the biggest kind of contributor to our success. Yeah, I think from our position, I think that a day going from startup to established player was the acquisition day, right? So in this world, you can have the best technology, you can have the best offerings, but for the customers, the enterprise buyers that are really interested in having the budgets, oftentimes the incumbent relationships can be really helpful. And so being able to bring the technology that we built as that startup into IBM and leverage its data center footprint around the globe, leverage its account relationships, leverage its upstream contributions, that was really a pivotal date for us in how we were able to spread what we built far and wide. And what do you think BlueBox did that made you an attractive acquisition for IBM? Yeah, you know, I think it came down to the technology. So again, when we entered the OpenStack space, we picked a specific methodology on how we were going to approach this. So the distribution model, there's a bunch of companies out there doing it and doing that well, so we knew that wasn't going to work for us. But we had a bunch of technology that we built that allowed us to really efficiently run OpenStack offerings as a service. And the key there is efficiency, right? So IBM had an offering in market that did the same thing that the BlueBox offered us. It was a similar product. In fact, Architect did somewhat similarly as well, but they were missing sort of that operational technology that we'd built. And so when they saw that componentry that we had and we saw what they had with their footprint, it was sort of the ha moment. Like we can do the one plus one is three breathing these things together and have a much more compelling offering. Great. So now you two are the wise sages of the OpenStack community. So as the people that startups look to as examples to follow, what key advice would you give to a new startup in the OpenStack ecosystem today? Don't do it. I'm kidding. So I think that at this point, if you were to do a startup in the OpenStack ecosystem, you have to be really innovative and focused around the very kind of interesting new either business model or technology play. The time kind of ship has sailed for doing kind of like, you know, just generic, I think, platform type. I am the OpenStack guy startup that's going to be very capital intensive at this point in time. But I think that there is a lot of opportunities still to innovate kind of around the business models as well as around technology. So you can focus very much on specific network for containers and OpenStack or something like this. Or kind of new interesting delivery models that guys like platform nine, for example, are doing or zero stack that can potentially pan out. If you're focusing on particular sector, like, you know, focusing on the government sector, you really know how to do, you know, government certification. And you have the right contacts there and you can package OpenStack for government consumption. So things like this has to be very focused. It can be kind of horizontal, generic, just attached to OpenStack itself. Yeah, I agree with that. It's all about finding your niche. To some extent, OpenStack is pretty boring now. Like you go back two or three years and every summit was a big debate about does this thing work? Will it last? And here we've got Garner up on stage now, you know, it's singing its praises. So when something's boring, sort of the base level line for startups isn't there. The reason startups flourish is because they solve sort of that unique interesting problem on the edge or the fringe for something that is rapidly changing or new. So that's not to say that that doesn't exist at OpenStack, but it's certainly not at the core anymore. You know, you go walk the Expo hall here, there's a whole bunch of companies that exist that are doing all kinds of things on the periphery or up the stack or into the services layer. And that's where you got to go. You got to figure out what's the whole, what's missing from the space because it's not just that core piece anymore. That's definitely solved. And then how are you going to make material difference and how are you going to make money? I think that's the last big challenge, right? And it's been a challenge, I think, for everybody in the OpenStack space for a long time and was getting the platform to a place where enterprises are ready to invest dollars. We're finally now there and customers are buying and there's revenue flowing in, but now you've got to figure out as a startup the piece that you're adding, is there enough revenue to actually build a meaningful long-term business in that specific place? Well, thank you Jesse and Boris for joining us and thank you for everyone who's watching SuperUZ TV. Thanks. Thank you.