 Okay, we're back here live inside the Cube Day 3. This is SiliconANGLE's exclusive coverage of OpenStack Summit in Portland, Oregon, 2013. Explosive growth in the OpenStack community crossing over in the mainstream. It's hit a tipping point. We're here three days of live coverage. This is the Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract a signal from the noise. And we talk to everyone, we're talking to all the top dogs, the big guys, the developers, the startups. And we have another exciting startup here, Sean Lynch, who's the CEO of MetaCloud from Pasadena. Welcome to the Cube. Thank you. So, you guys are funded startup early, well not, well, growing early stage, but you know, first round. Growing quickly. Growing quickly. Yep. Jerry Yang is an investor. I'm an adventurer. Jerry Yang and I'm the adventurers and Storm. Jerry Yang, obviously the co-founder of Yahoo and your partner was also running opposite Yahoo and you ran SVP. Was engineering your ops at Ticketmaster? Yeah, as Senior Vice President of Global Operations at Ticketmaster. Yeah, so you guys know a little bit about scale. That's right. We both come from very big operations background. So, one of my favorite interviews I've ever done on the Cube was with Amar Awadala, who's the co-founder of Cloudera and he was at Yahoo, sold his company there back in the day and when he started Cloudera, I asked him, you know, Amar, tell me about the vision of Cloudera and he had an epic line. At Yahoo, we saw the future. We were in the future and then he went to start a company to bring that future to the rest of the world. And a lot of the web companies and the folks that you'd like at Ticketmaster, you guys were doing a lot of stuff at web scale. The web scale market was pioneering DevOps. That's right, yeah. So talk about that. Yeah, we had a massive, you know, big multi-tenant private cloud in 2008, actually, based on, you know, we didn't have the luxury of open stack at the time, but so we had to build our own orchestration layer running on open source Citrix Zen server and it was, you know, cobbled together, but it was servicing the third largest e-commerce site in the world. So we come from very large, big scale operations and the team, the core engineering team, also comes from Ticketmaster. It's the cloud engineering and operations group from Ticketmaster. So they came along with me when we founded the company and we're bringing that operations expertise to bear with our clients. I often talk with my friend, Insik Ray who's at Rembrandt Benches. He was at Loud Cloud and talking about, you know, the cloud back in the day and it builds your own everything. That's right. You know, so explain to the folks out there why open stack is so popular. Sure. And compare and contrast to the things that you had to do back in the days when you had to roll your sleeves up and do everything. Yeah. Maybe I'll talk about why we started with OpenStack. And OpenStack is kind of a starting point for our platform. OpenStack is highly modular and we really needed something that was modular so that we could build on top of that, you know, the enterprise functionality that we felt like we needed to take the product to market. So we've added HA, dynamic failover. We've added automated scale up and scale out. We've added real time, you know, performance and capacity planning, graphite integration, trending, SEF, block store support. So we really needed something that was highly modular so we can add to it and deliver something into our client base. And I think one thing you'll see with MetaCloud, our business model is distinctly different than I think most, than anyone else actually, you'll see here at the summit. We have a very different business model than private cloud space. We operate clouds, our enterprise clouds on our client's behalf. So obviously OpenStack, vendor neutral, a lot of choice, layered components. That's right. Completely modular. So, okay, cool. Good to check the box on the OpenStack popularity. Talk about your startup right now. Okay, obviously you guys, you know, have experience. You have, you know, made your bones in building your own. You have a lot of experience writing code, infrastructure is code, DevOps. What are you guys doing right now in your startup and what is your core vision and value proposition? So we started the company in 2011. We have two years of R&D on top of OpenStack. We've done a lot to it. And really our focus thus far has been on product technology, product development, and very little on sales and marketing. We're kind of that OpenStack-based company that not many people have heard of, but we've had a lot of commercial traction and commercial success in the space. We have big enterprise customers that, trust me, you've heard of Fortune, I'll call it Fortune 30 companies, and we're operating their clouds, and we have been for some time. So you operate, so the architecture of your business model is what? Explain to the folks out there how you're engaging with clients and what the business model is. So simply put, maybe I'll talk about why we started the company. We started the company because Public Cloud is great in that it's fully managed. It's not great because it's public. So what we wanted to do is take that Public Cloud experience and move it into the enterprise. You just consume OpenStack, you just spin up compute, you can drive up the efficiency of your existing capital investment. We take your existing servers, we take your existing data centers, we take your existing server infrastructure, and we overlay our platform on top of it, and we remotely manage it for you. You just consume it like you would the Public Cloud. But the problem with Public Cloud today is problems for the enterprise become acute at scale. Cost, data locality, predictable performance. You don't really have that in the Public Cloud space. But it's fully managed, you just consume it. It's highly agile. No one can take that away from EC2. So you're co-locating Public Cloud inside the enterprise. That's exactly right. And can I borrow that tagline? Because it's a great tagline. Cool. All right. And when you get so big, you've got to contribute to the QLs. Because that's a great tagline. I hope that's all right. That's right. Always adding value here inside the QL and love to help startups that do and kick ass things. So let's expand. This is really a great topic because this is one of the reasons why Marantis is getting a lot of success. We had the CEO on yesterday, Adrian. And people want OpenStack now. And the IT doesn't have the resources. They've cut down to the bone. They've outsourced everything. And now they've got to invest a lot of money to spin up new stuff. Right. And many in the OpenStack space are kind of in the consulting arena or they're handing software over. But there's a real problem. What we classify as day two support. Right. What do you do after you've architected and engineered an OpenStack-based cloud for someone? You hand it off and they run into real world problems in production. They have to pick up the phone. They have to articulate the problem. Well, they're down potentially. And you have to articulate back a solution. Well, during that time, you're taking a hit in production. That's just not feasible. So in our environment, we're streaming back performance and capacity planning metrics all the time. We can proactively take advantage of that data. If we see, you know, ECC memory errors or smart disk detection errors, well, actually live migrate VMs off suspect bare metal, quite set it aside and say, hey, you know, this needs to be replaced or looked at. So it's a very white glove. White glove. Yeah, yeah. And what you're doing is you're basically operationalizing not five nines components. You're basically aggregating the performance across multiple workloads. Exactly. And multiple clouds. I mean, we have this nice networking effect. We can see, you know, Tableau Software is one of our referenceable clients. You know, we can see, hey, how's Tableau Software doing versus another, you know, another big client. And we can kind of correlatively say, hey, you know, on this hardware configuration with this workload, maybe we want to make these tweaks or recommend these tweaks to our clients. So do the clients get data protection? I mean, obviously sensitivity. One of the big issues is, you know, I've heard one guy tell me, private once in the name of the company, CIO, big, huge, billion dollar budget say, I will never, ever put any of my data in the cloud. Right. Just a period, ever. Yeah, and we hear that a lot. So you guys are streaming stuff back to your platform. Is it data or is it just element? It's performance metrics. It's tenant level workload metrics. It's performance oriented. It allows us to do trend based performance analysis. Not data. No, not at all. In fact, we're pretty adamant about having a hard line of demarcation between us and our clients. And that line of demarcation is very clear cut. We don't get into the guest VM. You know, we're just running the cloud virtualization and orchestration self-service layers. So Sean, I'm curious when you go in and you make a proposal that you're going to move some portion of their existing services and reconfigure it into a private cloud? I presume that's how it works. Or do they usually allocate a new budget and buy a bunch of new stuff and set that up as a cloud? I mean, honestly, what they really say, if I can be candid, is I have all this VMware stuff. Can you convert it over for me? So really, we see VMware is highly vulnerable right now. And we do bake-offs against them all the time and we steal business away from them all day long. And really, it's, hey, we have this ESX or VCloud environment. Can you get in there, migrate those hypervisors that bare metal over to MetaCloud, handle the migration of my guest VMs, handle the migration of the infrastructure and iteratively get me off of VMware and get me into an open platform. Well, this is exactly what's happening in other scale-out open source environments with Oracle's getting their butt-handed to them because, hey, I want to convert or whoever can convert licensed software into a scalable architecture will win. Yeah, and we'll do the whole thing. We'll basically take a couple cabinets of VMware, convert it over to OpenStack, hand them the keys to their new cloud within a couple days. Yeah, exchange your car. That's right, turn your car, we're just right. We're back to the car. I like it. Car analogies again. I'm curious if you guys are able to do it at an efficiency level, that's better. Because my question was, okay, so you set up their private cloud. Things are great. Oh my gosh, we need more resources. Sure. And you're not really in their procurement cycle and I presume the service that you sold them doesn't include, we're going to help you with procurement and more gear. But conversely, if you're running it more efficiently and things are really. You need less. You need less. How does that really work out in the real world? Look, the server market's a $55 billion market. And realistically, server infrastructure's about 15% utilized across the enterprise. Even with virtualization, I mean, if you look in a VMware environment where you're virtualizing on a per server basis, on a per hypervisor basis, yeah, you're driving up utilization of that single server. But VMware doesn't really have a robust answer to multi-tenancy. We do. We do via OpenStack. And, you know, OpenStack is highly multi-tenant, which allows us to look at covariant workloads. Hey, Dev's busy when QA isn't. QA is busy when load testing isn't. Load testing's busy when production isn't. Let's take all of those covariant workloads due to multi-tenancy, stripe them across the same bare metal. Let's drive that utilization up to 85, 90%. You get a tremendous amount of additional use out of the same capital investment. You don't need to buy more boxes. That's right. So talk about your investment. Talk about your investment now. Obviously you have customers you're generating revenue. Yeah, we're generating revenue. You didn't do a monster venture round. We didn't need to. You didn't need to. So you're producing good cash flow. We're making, yeah, we're doing great. Yep, absolutely. So, hot start up here. FYI, if you're in Pasadena, they're hiring. I guarantee you they're hiring if they get these kind of clients. Any plug for the recruiting opportunities? Yeah, definitely jobsatmedicloud.com hit us up. You know, we're right next to Caltech. If you're at Caltech, stop by, say hi. Yeah, so let's talk about these scale, that you've had experience in. So let's want to kind of reflect back on your earlier days. Sure. You know, really, I mean, reminds me when I was in college, we used to write stuff in Assembler, God, back in the glory days. But, you know, now, you know, you look back now at the frameworks out there. For the young guys out there, the young guns and the young DevOps guys out there, what's, give them the, what it used to be like in the old days, when you walk in the snow with no shoes on. Sure, sure. And I, you know, I would. What should they be doing now? What should they be getting excited about when they get to come out to the working world? I would love to sit back and say, hey, you know, you guys have it easy. It was much harder when we, you know, we had to make SBI Origin 2000s, Actives, Oracle servers and stuff. But, you know, yeah, and it was hard and we had to build our own caching and application servers. We didn't have off-the-shelf components. But, you know, there's new challenges. When the opportunities becomes new challenges. So, you know, now you have so many different components. Cloud-enabled services. You know, you have, you know, which Paz stack do you use? Which, you know, when do you go up the stack and if so, how much? So there's the complexity of having options. And I think that, you know. The whole little level of programming opportunities and challenges. That's right. That's right. And so I think that diversity, you know, makes it difficult. What's your take on infrastructure as code? We've, obviously DevOps has become mainstream. We had a site we launched two years ago called devopsangle.com where we were the only ones talking about DevOps at the time and obviously we were pro DevOps. But, that's hit the mainstream. But this notion of infrastructure as code, you talked about orchestration. These are key new opportunities. Managing physical infrastructure dynamically. What are your, what's your view on that? Yeah, and my view is, look, I mean, prior to Chef and Puppet and Solutions like it, in 2004, when I was heading up, you know, Systems Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering at Ticketmaster, we embarked on an R&D initiative called Spine, which is, it's a mouthful, but it's a configuration management and anomaly detection system, highly polymorphic. It adapts to the environment it's in. But it was called Spine. It's actually, we GPLed it when I was there. It's available via code.ticketmaster.com. And it's basically operations as code. So we saw a need for that in 04. We, you know, we GPLed it in 04. And, you know, truth be told, it's the system by which we deploy clouds at MetaCloud today. So, you know, we're big fans of it. Taking, you know, operational resources and encapsulating that as code makes a ton of sense and always has. Great, so final question. What's your goals for the year? Obviously, you guys are a startup and you got to pick a position, enter the market in on a beach head. Don't be too overly aggressive and then expand and sequence to a larger position. What's your strategy? You know, we've nailed our product. I think the product is absolutely solid. I mean, we've added a tremendous amount of R&D around HA with OpenStack. We've had the luxury of having that battle tested in production. You know, we've encountered pretty much every type of, you know, workload variant you can imagine at scale. So really, I feel like our product is rock solid. I feel like the one thing we haven't done is market it well. You know, I think we haven't invested very much in sales and marketing and we need to. So I think we need to take what we have today and go wide and go fast. And paddle, paddle, paddle. Get it out there. Okay, successful DevOps strategy. We're here at the OpenStack Summit. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick. We'll be right back with our next guest at the short break. Check out MetaCloud, great hot startup. Love their business model. Let's see how many clients you can get and we'll be here for you. And remember, if you use that phrase, you know. We'll do. Just attribution. It's open source at this point. So, you know, license with attribution. So we'll be right back with our next guest here, the exclusive coverage of OpenStack. This is SiliconANGLE.com's coverage. We'll be right back. Thanks, guys.