 Okay, we're back here live. We're in Santa Clara, California. This is theCUBE. This is SiliconANGLE and Wikibon's exclusive coverage of O'Reilly Media's Velocity Conference. This is theCUBE. CUBE is our flagship program. We go out to the events to extract a silhouette from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm here on this segment with Bailey Caldwell, Vice President of Bistro and RightScale, a company that knows a lot about the cloud, knows a lot about Amazon, made their bones with Amazon Web Services. Going back, I can't remember what year it was, years ago. I mean, it seems like 40 dog years ago. Bailey, welcome back. Welcome back. Back to theCUBE. Thanks for having me. So what year did RightScale start? While we, since you brought that up, I just want to get that in- So we began in 2006, and actually our CTO, Torsten Von Eichen, when Amazon came up with EC2, realized that the management tool of the future would really be cloud native. And RightScale is a enterprise cloud management platform targeted at helping customers run software on private, public, and hybrid infrastructures, which is really the trend that we see in the market today, that there's multiple options and choices in the market. Why not allow yourself to use those choices to the best way possible? So, obviously I brought that up because I've been following you guys. I didn't even know what year it was, 2006, still very early. If you go back then, that was really EC2 hitting the scene. And I've always called Amazon the junkyard for cloud where you cobble your own together, not the high-end commodity cloud they call it now. Certainly the competition calls it the commodity cloud. It's a way to kind of backhand and diss on Amazon. But since then, Amazon has really grown. You guys were the front-end provisioning system for Amazon. But Amazon has just grown with this really, really powerful and elegant stack. And they're adding more and more tech everyday. They're far from the junkyard cloud now. People can roll out high-end services, got Netflix on there, the rest is history. So talk about your relationship with Amazon because we are very interested in Amazon. I just wrote a post about Amazon on my Forbes account where HP claimed they won Workday. Workday said, no, we're on Amazon. Turns out Workday's having their own cloud. So everyone got caught in a Barney deal right there. So that's what we call a Barney deal and essentially who's on Amazon, who's cloud as anyway was kind of my post. There's a cloud war going on right now. There's the cloud wars. Amazon has put everyone on notice. All the enterprise guys. And then you got Azure out there. And you got Google. So to me, the big three in the public is Amazon, Azure, and Google. And the rest are all kind of value cloud. Let's focus on those three. What's the current state of those three guys? Sure, so first, you know, the relationship we have with Amazon is great. We have a unique model of them. We're both an ISV partner because we built our product for multi-cloud management on top of AWS originally. And we're an SI consulting partner because our team of professionals who know Amazon and all the other clouds really well have implemented as many apps as almost any other company in the cloud architecture. So we have a great relationship with them, but it is interesting times as these other large-scale providers coming to the market. We've done a lot of work with Rackspace in the past as well. What we find is that, again, it's all about choosing the right infrastructure resource for your company, your business model, and your software apps. Some of the things that other clouds do are unique differentiators. I think Amazon certainly has a very broad feature set. They innovate at an amazingly rapid pace, but there's a lot of demand for choice. And really, the enterprise of the future is thinking about how do I take advantage of all these resources? Because I have geographic requirements. I have cost requirements. I have SLA requirements. And ultimately, AWS is fantastic, but Azure and Google and Rackspace and others, software just got acquired by IBM, really relevant event in the industry. We're big fans of what they've done. It's a different take. They do a lot with bare-metal provisioning. Ultimately, I think our goal in terms of rightscale is to provide access to all these different resources because ultimately that's the value proposition we provide to the industry. Well, I mean, Amazon is your big, big partner, right? I mean, you guys still do a lot of business. Yeah, absolutely. Are they number one? So there's more, they're the biggest cloud in the market as far as we can see, yes. Okay, so obviously they're doing, adding more stuff every day. So does that change your strategy? What's the rightscale strategy right now? So ultimately, it ties back to what enterprises really need to be successful in this model. And in our view of the world, it's a hybrid cloud world for them, which includes private cloud infrastructures that are going to build in their own data centers, public clouds that are geographically segmented and resources that they can take advantage of. So ultimately, the things we're focused on are innovating on top of all these platforms and unifying the experience of compute storage and networking through a single management console and a single interface. There are a lot of ways for companies to execute their cloud strategy. We think that we've proven there's a way to do it in a multi-cloud world that brings this new generation of IT services to your enterprise and lets you focus on the things that really matter, which is actually executing on your business plan, not managing cloud infrastructure. That's what our platform does really well. And so you guys have, again, people may know you in the industry as being the front end to Amazon, but because Amazon's been so growing so fast, you guys have shifted to that business model, right? Enterprise, cloud management. Yeah, we started on multi-cloud in 2000 and late 2007, 2008. We were very early at that stage, but we always thought there would be multiple choices in the market. And I think that everyone who's watched technology in the past would agree with that. There's always going to be a number one and then there's going to be several competitors. And sometimes that stays that way for a long time and in other cases, there's some disruption that occurs. Do you think Amazon has a chance in the enterprise? And don't be too political in the sense that I know you're going to say, oh, of course they do. But I mean, obviously they don't, right? And enterprises, you know, OpenStack has shown that Amazon's just not there yet. Are they on a path to get there? I'll say that we've said in the Cube, yeah, they are. And everyone's noticing it. I mean, IBM buying SoftLayer, like you said, the seminal moment in the cloud business because it's unheard of. That's a major tell-tale sign from IBM. They're going to get the cloud. They're not going to be left in the dark. So everyone wants their own cloud. Okay, so, right? So we just want to be the cloud for every person who's using it, right? So that's our goal and strategy. And you know, I mean, Amazon has like thousands, tens of thousands of enterprise customers. So the question is really the wrong one. It's not can they succeed in enterprise or can public cloud play a role in enterprise? It's absolutely proven itself to be able to do that. And I actually wanted to bring up a test we did on Google Compute Engine just over the past few weeks regarding the scale and performance you can achieve by running applications on public infrastructure. So we basically took a really common technology, WordPress Blob, a simple MySQL or LAMP stack. And we set it up on GC with right scale automation with our partner, Pika, who does load testing. And we did this not to compare it to anything else, but just to explain and describe the experience of running an at scale infrastructure on public cloud resources. And you know, in an hour, we went from zero to 200,000 users and we pushed 2.4 gigabits in network traffic. And that essentially resembles, you know, the largest blog in the world right now in terms of total volume of users and page views. And the cool thing about it was we were able to do it with almost zero issues. And we had to tune and tweak the things on our end, but the Compute Engine platform ran exceptionally well. The servers all performed and network all performed. And the point is companies can run their apps in the world's best data centers and infrastructure, whether that's Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Rackspace, SoftLayer, all of them have their benefits. And it's our, you know, view that providing those choices is really going to be the key to the most effective enterprise cloud strategy. So we covered MapR, which did an amazing benchmark on the Compute Engine. It was massive, they spun up. It basically showed a little different scenario. The bare metal provisioning cost and time versus spinning up the same kind of benchmark. I forget which benchmark, it was the famous benchmark, I put the name of it. So you did a bit, so your benchmark's a little bit different. You're saying, okay, I can spin up scale with Google. Okay, got that, Google has scale. So I want to ask you a little bit different question though. What is going on with Google right now? Can you just share with the folks? There's a lot of misinformation. Some of it's under private beta, some's available, I know from some of my early reports that they're targeting a lot of high-end financial institutions before they open the kimono to the world, but they got some availability on some of their stuff. What's the story with them? Can you lay that out? Sure, so I can share what is already public, but also I have some more direct information just because I work with them every day. And the confusion around the beta was really their launch at I.O. Where they said, hey, anyone in the world can come to Google Compute Engine and use it. Some people confuse that with them saying it was GA. I think their GA target is in the future. But one of the reasons we did what we did with regards to this performance test was to kind of prove out that what Google's been claiming, which is this is our infrastructure that we are now turning into a commercial product. And to be honest, you can't go from the launch date of I.O. a year ago to today, and Google could, but it's hard to get to the level of scale that they wanted to. But what do they have available? So is it available or not? Yeah, it's available for anyone who wants to use it. It's in technical previews still, so the GA date's going to be later this year. So you've got to apply, basically, right? No, you can go sign up on their website right now and purchase Google Compute Engine directly from Google, or you can buy it from RightSale. All right, so you're reselling their cloud? Yes. Okay, great. So who would buy that? IT departments for private cloud, top of cloud? No, it's, well, what we've seen is there are some peak demand infrastructure. So for example, online learning, where you have a set of classes running in the fall and you need a lot more infrastructure because there's classes running versus in the middle of the summer when there's a lot less load. And those work really well in a large-scale compute environment. So there's interest and usage from customers who have variable workloads, and I think that is an area that Google has focused on early because the theory is if you can scale to 200,000 concurrent users, running a broad portfolio of enterprise applications, it's certainly not going to be an issue from a scale and architecture perspective. So while it's easy for the industry to say, yeah, well, of course, it's Google, they can scale, we thought it would just be interesting to go actually do it and run that. Yeah, so it's a great failover option. It's a great resource elastic option. It's like basically why people go to Amazon. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of similar reasons behind that. I think, you know, our view is that Google has a platform out there with App Engine and with BigQuery and with Cloud SQL and with all these other services that are very compelling. I mean, App Engine does a lot of work and now you can start mixing the entire cloud platform into composite architectures and apps. It's very much what Amazon's strategy has been, build more and more services and that way you can enable more and more apps on your infrastructure. Well, I got to say, you know, you guys live in a good part of the country out in Santa Barbara. Yes, we do. Shout out to my son, Alec. He's going to Santa Barbara. Be down there visiting. So I think you'll see a lot more of me down there. Do a little meetup down there, do a little CUBE technology day, hit the golf course. In all seriousness, I've always been a big fan of right scale. I think you guys have a good perspective. I think you've seen the evolution of the cloud up front, front row seat and an actor and the participant in the business. So you guys bring a lot to the table. So my final question for you is, what's going on in the cloud business that people should know about? Vis-a-vis, even just 12 months ago or even three years ago, what is the big thing that's happening right now and what is the mega force, the mega trend that's lifting this mark? Because cloud is now based on our assessment and our data, more popular than big data. Because cloud is the top level architecture. Big data is part of cloud, if you think about it. So we're seeing more and more and more cloud reality happening now than ever before. So I want to ask you, what's your view on what people should know about the cloud right now? So, I mean, I think that it's clear that cloud is a viable technology component of any enterprise IT strategy. I think that the most important thing for companies who view cloud as a strategy, in other words, it's not just cheaper infrastructure. It's actually part of how you're going to enable your business. The key understanding there is that there is a suite of tools that you need to enable that. And that looking at all the options in the market is really important and critical. I still don't believe in a single source view of the IT world. I think there's going to be composite architectures both for applications and for how IT has managed. So there's a lot of VMware out there that's not going anywhere. And that can be left as a virtualized infrastructure or converted into a more cloudy model. And then there's a lot of newcomers. I'd still consider right scale a newcomer in the grand scheme of things that have a set of tools that are deep and specialized to really enable the agility that you want to achieve out of cloud. So it's really about a strategy, not about a set of technologies. Those are all enabling parts of what your core competency needs to be as a company. And also look at your own skill sets, right? This is a very technical conference. There's a lot of people here who know and understand cloud and cloud architectures. There's a whole generation of IT users that we need to bring forward into that cloud model. And I would encourage that population of the IT world, which is massive to come to conferences like this to watch theCUBE and learn about these sort of tectonic shifts that are happening in the market. Yeah, and one of the themes I will share, and I totally agree with you. I mean, this is really, I think this velocity conference has evolved into being having the pole position of leadership because even though it doesn't get the buzz, maybe a generic cloud conference we get, this conference is really about the design of the future. And that's an integrated stakeholder mix. Front end guys going to sit with the back end guys. They got to trade off design decisions, design decisions on how they do the infrastructure, provisioning should be flawless, should be seamless, it should be agile and quality. I mean, these are things that they're being talked about here technically, not like hyped up. So companies are actually doing it, right? And those are the ones that are here as well presenting. Yeah, if you're watching this live, go to the Fluent Conference hashtag. It's Fluent, C-O-N-F. And hit us up, we're watching that feed right now. We'll answer all your questions. I guess my final, final question will be then, multi-cloud is a big deal. We're just at the HP Discover event. We had IBM Edge last week and the Worldwide Developer Conference at Apple with theCUBE. And the trend is very clear. The consumerization, we don't even want to talk about that anymore, done deal. It's really the multi-cloud is really where it's at. So HP is saying, hey, you know, we'll take on Amazon because we think we can compete on value. IBM saying we're going to buy soft layer but we want to fix our storage group. We're going to be bringing all integratively and everything else into this one platform. So you got the platform wars, you got the cloud wars. But customers aren't going to buy HP only. They're going to buy the suppliers that they have relationships with. So we're back to multi-vendor. Remember the old days, multi-vendor support. What is the multi-vendor landscape look like for cloud? And how do you guys manage that? Because you have to do all the business deals with the folks to be multi-cloud. And what does multi-cloud mean? Well, I mean, it's a good point. I think from a business model standpoint, we've been lucky enough to forge really strong relationships with all of the providers that we happen to support as well as the private cloud technologies. And I think that's part of why we are so sort of confident in our potential and our ability to deliver for these enterprise class workloads and customers that should really view right scale at some level as the cloud. Because if you deploy and provision on our platform, we've taken care of a huge amount of complexity with tens of millions of dollars of engineering involved. And that's all we do every day as we wake up thinking about how to support this multi-cloud world and what are the key enabling factors that will allow the cleanest interface and the easiest way for companies to adopt these infrastructure. Okay, so give the folks out there a poster, bumper sticker or a poster of what right scale is now and what you guys want to do this year, Bailey? Well, I mean, the way I always try to sum it up is if you're going to use cloud, you have to put right scale into your decision matrix. We have to be one of the options you consider as you're looking at all the choices. And the reason I say that is because of our expertise and our background. We have that experience, we can help guide you. Hopefully you become a customer of ours, but if not, even our website, rightscale.com, go there and look at it. So I mean, we're still focused on building the base infrastructure of our platform. And you know, we are going to extend our capabilities in areas that we don't believe the core cloud providers will be yet. And that's our strategy, is to continually innovate in front of this wave, you know, continue to surf it and focus on our customers and their needs and requirements. And absolutely, Google Compute is pretty hot. How about Azure? Any comments on what Microsoft's doing? Yeah, Azure is very interesting, right? Because they have the enterprise agreements with these large companies and they're able to do all kinds of interesting things on those licensing structures. So most large companies buy a lot of Microsoft software. Well, they can bake Azure into that agreement and deal. And we see a lot of interest in people who have those pre-existing relationships to use Azure. Okay, we're here live in the Velocity Conference. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE. We're here live getting all the data. We're at RightScale, early cloud player. Very notable to point that out. You guys have a lot of goodwill in the community. Congratulations. You know, and in your tech company, you guys have done some great tech. Made a lot of people's lives easier. And deploying to Amazon initially and now to other clouds. So RightScale props to you guys. Bailey Colwell, VP of Business Development. We're here. This is theCUBE on Silicon Angle. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. Thank you.