 We're back at your storage service. Emil Stam is here. He's the Chief Commercial Officer and Chief Marketing Officer of OpenLine. Thank you, Emil, for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate your time. Thank you, David. Nice, glad to be here. Yes, so tell us about OpenLine, your managed service provider. What's your focus? Yeah, we're actually a cloud managed service provider. And I do put cloud in front of the managed services because it's not just only the service that we manage. We have to manage the clouds as well nowadays. And fortunately, everybody only thinks it is one cloud, but it's always multiple layers in the cloud. So we have a lot of work in integrating it. We're a cloud managed service provider in the Netherlands focusing on companies who ever had office in the Netherlands, mainly in the healthcare, local government, social housing, logistics department, and then in the mid-sized companies between say 250 to 10,000 office employees. And that's what we do. We provide them with excellent cloud managed services as it should be. Interesting, a lot of early on in the cloud days, highly regulated industries like healthcare, government, we're somewhat afraid of the cloud. So I'm sure that's one of the ways in which you provide value to your customers is helping them become cloud proficient. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about the value prop to customers. Why do they do business with you? Yeah, I think a number of reasons why they do business with us are choose to choose for our managed services provider. At first, of course, are looking for stability and continuity and from a cost perspective, predictable costs. But nowadays, you also have a shortage of personnel and knowledge. So, and it's not always very easy for them to access those skill sets because most IT people just want to have a great variety in work, what they are doing. Towards the local government, healthcare, social housing, they're actually a sector that are really in between embracing the public cloud but also have a lot of legacy and bringing it together best of all worlds is what we do. So we also bring them comfort. We do understand what legacy needs from a managed service perspective. We also know how to leverage the benefits in the public cloud and I'd say from a marketing perspective, actually we focus on using an ideal cloud being a mix of traditional and future-based cloud. Thank you. I'd like to get your perspective on this idea of as a service and the as a service economy that we often talk about on theCUBE. I mean, you work with a lot of different companies. We talked about some of the industries and increasingly it seems like organizations are focused more on outcomes and continuous value delivery via suites of services and they're leaning into platforms versus one-off product offerings. Do you see that? How do you see your customers reacting to this as a service trend? Yeah, to be honest, sometimes it makes it more complex because services like you look at your Android or iPhone, you can buy apps and download apps the way you want to. So they have a lot of apps but how would you integrate it into one excellent workflow, something that works for you David or works for me? So the difficulty sometimes lies in the easy accessibility that you have to those solutions but nobody takes into account that they're all part of a chain, a workflow, a supply chain and they're being hyped as well. So what we also have a lot of time in managing our customers is that the tremendous feature push that there is from technology providers, SaaS providers, whereas if you provide 10 features you only need one or two but the other eight are very distracting from your prime core business. So there's a natural way in that people are embracing SaaS solutions embracing cloud solutions but what's not taken into account as much is that we love to see it's the way that you integrate all those solutions to something that's workable for the person that's actually using them. And it's seldomly that somebody is only using one solution is always a chain of solutions. So yeah, there are a lot of opportunities but also a lot of challenges for us but also for our customers. You see that trend toward as a service continuing or do you actually see based on what you're just saying that pendulum swinging back and forth somebody comes out with a new sort of feature product and that changes the dynamic or do you see as a service really having legs? Ah, I think that's a very, very good question David because that's something that keeps us busy all the time. We do see a trend in as a service looking at, I'll talk about pure later on we also use pure as a service more or less and it really helps us but you see that sometimes people make a step too fast too quick, not well thought of and then you see what they call the sort of cloud repatriation tendance that people go back to what they are doing and then they stop innovating or stop leveraging the possibilities are actually there. So from our consultancy, guidance and architecture point of view, we try to help them as much as possible to think in a SaaS talk but just don't use the cloud there's just another data set. And so it's all about managing the maturity on our side, but on our customer side as well. So I'm interested in how you're sort of your philosophy and this relates I think in terms of how you work with pure but how do you stay tightly in lockstep with your customers so that you don't over rotate so that you don't incend them to over rotate but then also you don't want to be too late to the game. How do you manage all that? Oh, there's a world of interactions between us and our customers. So I think a well-known thing that people know as customer intimacy that's very important for us to get to know our customers and get to predict which way they are moving but the thing that we add to it is also the ecosystem intimacy. So know the application and services landscape of our customers, know the primary providers and work with them to create something that really fits the customers. So just not look at from our own silo where a cloud managed service provider we actually work in the ecosystem with the primary providers. And we have, I think with the average customers I think we have in a month we have so much interactions on operational level and technical level, strategic level we do bring together our customers also add to jointly think about what we can do together what we independently can never reach but we also involve our customers in defining our own strategy. So we have something we call a customer involvement board where we present a strategy and say, does it make sense? This is actually what you need also. So we take a lot of our efforts into our customers and we do also understand the significant moments of truth. We are now in this broadcast David there so you can imagine that at this moment nothing can go wrong. If the internet stops that we have a problem now so we actually know that this broadcast is going on for our customers and we manage that it's always on. Where in the other moments in the week we might have a little less attention but this moment we should be there and these moments of truth that we really embrace we got them well described everybody working out the line knows what the moment of truth is for our customers. So we have a big logistics provider for instance, he does not have to ask us to have a higher availability on Black Friday or Saturday or Monday. We know that's the most important part in the year for him or does it answer your question David? Yes, we know as well in these big game moments you have to be on your top of your game. The other thing, Emil, about this as a service approach that I really like is a lot of it is consumption based and the data doesn't lie. You can see adoption daily, weekly, monthly. And so I wonder how you're leveraging pure as a service specifically and what kind of patterns you're seeing in the adoption? Pure as a service for our customers is mainly never visible. We provide storage services, so bright source solutions and storage of it's part of a bigger thing of a server of application. So the real benefits to be honest of course, towards our customers all flash and they have the fastest storage is available but for ourself we use less resources to manage our storage. We have a near to maintenance free storage solution now because we have it as a service and we work closely together with Pure. So actually the way that we treat our customers is the way Pure treats us as well. And that's why there's a huge click. So the real benefits, how we leverage is that normally we had a bunch of guys managing our storage. Now we only have one. And knowing that's a shortage of IT personnel the other persons can well be involved in other parts of our services or in other parts of an innovation. So that's simply great. You know, my takeaway, Emil, is that you've made infrastructure at least the storage infrastructure invisible to your customers, which is the way it should be. You don't have to worry about it. And you've also attacked the labor problem. You're not provisioning loans anymore or tuning the storage with arms and legs. So that's huge. So that gets me into the next topic which is business transformation. That means that I can now start to attack the operational model. So I've got a different IT model now. I'm not managing infrastructure in ways. So I have to shift those resources. And I'm presuming that it's a business now becomes a business transformation discussion. How are you seeing your customers shift those resources and focus more on their business as a result of this sort of as a service trend? I do not know if they transform their business. Thanks to us. I think that they can more leverage their own business have less problems, less maintenance, et cetera, et cetera. But we also add new certainties to it. It's like the latest service we released was immutable storage. Being the first in the Netherlands offering this thanks to the pure technology, but for customers it takes them and give them a good night rest. And because we have some geopolitical issues in the world. There's a lot of hacking. People have a lot of ransomware attacks and we just give them a good night rest. So from a business transformation doesn't transform their business. I think now they give them a comfort in running your business, knowing that certain things are well arranged. You don't have to worry about that. We will do that. We'll take it out of your hands and you just go ahead and run your business. So to me, it's not a transformation. It's just using the right opportunities at the right moment. The immutable piece is interesting because of course, but speaking of as a service, anybody can go on the dark web and buy ransomware as a service. I mean, as it was seen, if he has a service economy hit everywhere, they're good and they're not so good. And so I presume that your customers are looking at immutability as another capability of the service offering and really rethinking maybe because of the recent ransomware attacks, rethinking how they approach business continuance, business resilience, disaster recovery. Do you see that? Yep, definitely, definitely. Not all of them yet. Immutable storage is like an insurance as well, which you have when you have immutable storage and you have a ransomware attack, at least if you part of data, which never, if data is corrupted, you cannot restore it. If your hardware is broken, you can order new hardware, if the data is corrupted, you cannot order new data. And now we got that safe and well. And so we offered them the possibility to do the forensics and free up the data without a tremendous loss of time. But you also see that you raise the new, how do you say the new baseline for other providers as well. So the security of the corporate information, security of the service, TIO, they're all very happy with that. And they raise the baseline for others as well. So they can look at other security topics and look from say a security operations center because now we can really focus on our prime business risks because from a technical perspective, we got it covered. How can we manage the business risk, which is a combination of people, processes and technology? Right, makes sense. Okay, I'll give you the last word. Talk about your relationship with Pure, where do you want to see that going in the future? I hope we'll be working together for a long time. I experience them as very involved. It's not we have done the sale and now it's all up to you. Now we're closely working together. I know if I talk to my prime architect, Marcel Haider is very happy and it looks more or less if we work with Pure like we're working with colleagues, not with a supplier and a customer. And the whole Pure concept is quite fascinating. I had the opportunity to visit San Francisco head office and they told me the vision how they launched Pure being, if you want to implement it, they had to be on one credit card. The menu had to be on one credit card. And just a simple thought of, put that as your big, heavy audacious goal to make the simplest implementable storage available, but fast gives me the expectation that there will be a lot of more surprises with Pure in the near future. And for us as a provider, what we literally really look forward to is that for us, these new developments will not be new migrations. It will be a gradual growth of our services or storage services. So that's what I expect. And that was what I and we look forward to. Yeah, that's great. Thank you so much, Emil, for coming on theCUBE and sharing your thoughts and best of luck to you in the future. Thank you, you're welcome. Thanks for having me. You're very welcome. Okay, in a moment, I'll be back to give you some closing thoughts on at your storage service. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage.