 Hello everyone, welcome to a special CUBE Conversation here at our Palo Alto studio with a special guest, Mazda Marvasti, CEO of AppLariat. Welcome to the CUBE Conversation. You guys have a big opportunity and an announcement. Tell us a little bit about what you guys are doing. Yeah, thanks, John. Essentially what we have is we've developed an application to bring cloud native capabilities to any enterprise without having to know the inner layers and details of containerization or running on a container cloud orchestrator such as Kubernetes, abstracting all of those difficulties and complexities away and bringing at scale capability to run those applications as cloud native applications without having to re-architect those applications. So this is our wheelhouse, we love this. We'll be covering this like it's nobody's business because this is a trend that's not going away. This is a transformation. You've done this before, you have been successful as an entrepreneur, you've seen an opportunity, you sold that company to VMware. Now you have a new vision. I love the vision. I want to take a minute to talk about your vision because the world's shifting. I talk about this all the time on my Silicon Valley Friday show. A revolution is happening and speed and software are at the center of it. What opportunity are you looking at with this new venture? So the opportunity that we're looking at is bringing fresh new capabilities to existing applications that just don't exist today without having to go back and re-architect those applications which is a non-starter for a lot of the companies. So what we do is essentially bring containerization to the masses, democratizing containerization without actually talking about containerization because it's just the technology and bringing those capabilities into those applications and then orchestrating them onto container clouds which means you can run it on any cloud whether you want to run it on a public cloud or your own private cloud and even making your internal vSphere environment behave like a container cloud. So those transformations can mean a lot to existing businesses bringing capabilities such as self-scaling, high availability, resiliency. All those capabilities that you would have to re-architect your application to get will be there natively. And so that's a real transformation and it can mean a lot to businesses that are trying to compete with smaller, more nimble organizations that have developed their applications to be cloud native to begin with. It's interesting, a lot of people make investments in new apps and it's almost as if the bigger the impact, the more scared senior management gets with making a decision, oh, maybe we'll just chip away at the 10% of this or 20% of that. Now this is an opportunity to essentially take all this software that's been built and actually make it portable, meaning you can actually encapsulate it, put a container around, you call it container, and create these containers and then put it in what you call a container cloud. So take a minute, what does container cloud mean? I mean, because that sounds, is it a cloud service? Is it just an organization concept? When you said container cloud, what do you mean by that? So obviously the containerization as a technology has been around for a few years and it's catching on very strongly. But once you have your application containerized, you actually have to run it in an environment that is suitable to run containers, right? So a container cloud is essentially a technology such as Kubernetes that enables you to orchestrate your containers into an environment that then you can run it in a scalable manner. So when I talk about container cloud, Kubernetes is an instance of that, but there's other technologies and you're right. Many of the existing businesses are not prepared yet to make yet another bet on which technology because it changes so fast a year from now, it could be something else. It's interesting though, Osla, we are seeing in our Wikibon research team certainly on our CUBE coverage and our reporting that the shift is happening and the opportunity is big in terms of size and numbers. I mean, you're talking about potentially billions of dollars of opportunity shift or cost reduction. I mean, cost reduction is what people love to hear. Hey, I knocked down almost a billion dollars when you're here in banks thinking about impact of over a billion dollars of operating budget, right? I mean, some people in the tens of millions. So now you're starting to get into the order of magnitude where the numbers are big. So again, the scared factor kicks in. So this sounds like maybe that might be the problem you're solving. So I'll ask you straight directly, what is the business problem that you're solving and what are some of those impacts? Because it sounds like what you're doing is having someone be able to lift, not lift and shift, but like manage these big apps that are in the cloud or somewhere. Right, so the business problem is I need to compete as an existing business against these smaller nimble startups that are popping up in Silicon Valley, right? They're able to hire these software artisans who can handcraft an application to have these capabilities that I just can't compete with without re-architecting those applications. That's a pretty big transformation for an existing organization to be able to compete better with their smaller startups. But the cost of doing that is tremendous in terms of- Then building their own software. Then building their own software or being able to hire these software artisans so they can do it at scale across all of their applications. Well, that's time too. The time to do it is also a cost, right? So like when you talk about putting a container around an existing application, we have a big Amazon customer here at Silicon Angle. We know that once you get locked in, it's going to cost me some engineering dollars if I wanted to move that somewhere else or have it on-prem. So my choice is either write the code or hire you guys. That's pretty much your value proposition. You say, hey, we can containerize your apps for you, so you don't have to. Is that kind of the value proposition? That's exactly the value proposition. And then once you have it in a containerized format, it becomes portable, okay? You can move it to any public cloud or you can move it to your own on-prem vSphere environment and run it as your private cloud. And why would they want to do that? Why would they want to just say, I just leave it in the cloud. So I get, first of all, I love the business model around having containers because now it's an addressable object, if you will, and you can move it. I get that. But why would they want to move it to the on-prem or to another cloud? So I'll give you an example of a customer where they have everything being done on AWS right now, right? Their production, their staging, their development. But after running the numbers, they figured that the cost of running their staging and their development on Amazon is just unacceptable. And they would rather move that to their on-prem vSphere because they've already have the sunk cost of having a vSphere environment. So that's an economic decision. That's an economic decision, pure and simple, right? So, but moving those applications off of AWS, just the staging and development on to on-prem is not such an easy value proposition, especially when you're running production on Amazon. How do you make sure? So conceptually it matches. So the CFO says, hey, let's move that off. And then the guys who have to do it go, are you kidding me? Right. Now that's what you're saying. And you solve that problem. That's right. Because what we make vSphere look like, it looks like an Amazon instance running. So from a developer's perspective, they're still deploying their applications the way they used to deploy, right? But they're now running it on-prem without having it be exposed as, okay, well, I'm just provisioning VMs. It's no longer about that. It's just, I have a Kubernetes instance. Okay, let's talk about how you guys view this, because it's just, as you're talking, I'm like, wow, I can see the benefits of this. Popping out clearly, you got a financial economic case, and then you got the implementation side on operations, that's a good business model. Okay, competition, opportunity. I mean, VMware just did a deal with Amazon. So wouldn't that be their thing? So what VMware is trying to do is essentially saying, if you're already running your applications, you love managing your VMs. What if you could manage the same applications running on Amazon the same way, with the same technology? That's a totally different value proposition. You're not getting new capabilities with those applications that you move to Amazon, because they're not behaving as cloud-native applications. They're just VMware apps. They're just applications running on VMs. So it's the normal VMware world just in Amazon. That's right, you're just purely lifted and shifted, right? Got it. What we're talking about is bringing new capabilities to existing apps that just don't exist today. And why are companies doing that? Because it's faster time to market for the apps with cloud-native, or that's just a trend that they're on. Why would they want cloud-native? Yeah, so they have the old apps, and they want cloud-native. Why are people wanting cloud-native? So I guess my question is, I mean, I kind of have, I think I wouldn't know my answer to that, but I want to ask you, is that why would people want cloud-native? So first of all, it'll make your applications more mobile. So if you choose to take it someplace else, you can do it easily, okay? Secondly, it brings capabilities to your applications such as self-scaling capabilities, high availability, resiliency, not resiliency of infrastructure, resiliency of application, which is a totally different value proposition, without you having to build anything into the application, those are capabilities that essentially impact SLAs, that IT is supposed to provide to its customers. And provide value. And provide value? I had one more thing. First of all, great, great answer. I had one more thing on that, and that people, it's cool to do cloud-native because it's faster to code, and there's more creativity opportunities with microservices and other new things. So it's a true development environment. That's right. And that's what the hot developers are doing. They want the cloud-native. They want the cloud-native. Developers are already moving in that direction. The problem is, how do you then take those artifacts that they've developed and run it at scale in production, which is a totally different value proposition now from the IT ops organization? That's where the containerization makes things work, and Kubernetes just kind of... Is the orchestrated. Is orchestrated behind it. Okay, great. All right, you go to MarketStrate. How are you guys going to succeed? Obviously, you got the big launch. You guys are a startup. You're series A-funded. You're growing, hiring, I assume, with this kind of strategy makes a lot of sense. Go to MarketStrate. What are you going to do? What's your plan? So we on purpose developed our product to be very easily partner-enabled. We think there is an opportunity with managed service providers of being able to provide these types of services to their private cloud customers. So getting in your own look and feel as a private cloud provider is very valuable to them. So we've done it in a way that is partner-enabled. Also from my background at VMware, I kind of saw firsthand, if you have a product that's partner-enabled and can easily get the distribution that you want. So you're going in partnership. We're going in partners, we're also doing direct sales as well. You need that for validation. You need that for reference ability. But primarily from the partners in terms of MSPs and system integrators, SIs. Because there's a lot of SIs that are involved with app modernization projects. And those are kind of right in our wheelhouse of bringing those capabilities to those applications. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. It's an ecosystem opportunity for you guys. And Cloud Native is just, that is just growing so fast. The Cloud Native Compute Foundation, which was KubeCon, we've done all their events since it was formed. Actually, we were there when it was formed. Remember the day, great stuff. I mean, to me, it's phenomenal. Final question for you on a personal level. I mean, you're an entrepreneur. Are you scratching the same itch or is it a new itch you're scratching? I mean, you had a successful venture in the past. Certainly the world's changed a lot since then. Is this kind of the same track and what made you go for this? Right. So after I left VMware, I just started visiting companies that I had friends who were in IT or were CIOs. And I was looking at the struggle that they were having on a day-to-day basis, managing their existing applications and wondering how they could compete with the startups that are popping up in their market with new capabilities in their apps that they just couldn't get. And so I kind of saw an opportunity and it was actually a great challenge and tried to say, well, how can you bridge that gap? Because there's a knowledge gap. There's a personnel gap. There's a technological gap. There's a business gap. There's all kinds of things that goes on in that. It's not just purely a technological issue that you're solving. There's a big business gap in there as well. So it was essentially just a challenge of being able to... And you know the world. I mean, this is your world, right? I mean, this is your wheelhouse. And it's interesting, we go back in the cube and we talk of the marketplace is that you have the intoxicating creativity of app developers right now. And then you've got the workloads under the hood that are, this is process, business process, business models. Some call it legacy or baggage depending on who's got what technology. But for the most part, it's power in the business. So you can't be just radically making changes to that. But you also want to encourage the creativity. And that's where I think you guys have a great opportunity. Any final thoughts on what you hope to achieve this year from DockerCon going forward? Well, what we hope to do is to be able to get our application obviously implemented at some large implementations. We think we can bring this up at scale and start showing the value that cloud native capabilities that bring to existing applications and how easily that can be done. So that's what we're trying to do. And you're lifting up the IT, you're giving them an extra boost. It's like a vitamin and a steroid and a huge vitamin to give them more power. Right. It's their existing stuff and make it cloud native. It's an order of magnitude difference in the SLAs that IT is charged to provide in terms of the cost that it takes to provide those SLAs. Yeah, awesome. Well, good luck, Mazda. Appreciate it. Great Cube Conversation. Watch out for this company. They're going to be doing well at DockerCon. Great Cube Conversation. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.