 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back. We're here at VMworld 2018. You're watching theCUBE, two sets, three days, 95 guests. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host is you piss car and we've got a little bit of news to talk about. So lots of announcements made at the show. One of them is that VMware has purchased the intent to acquire Boston-based cloud health technologies and I am thrilled to have on the program. Back to the program, actually. I've had in my Boston area studio and seen it lots of shows. Joe Quincella, who's the founder and CTO of cloud health. You got it. Good to see you again, Stu. Good to see you. Absolutely. So just to get out of the way, the Boston Business Journal says for about 500 million, so I know you can't comment on the dollars, but this is a big deal. 200 person company, as I said, Boston based right down the road from us. Upstopping, your new headquarters is opening on Thursday, which I'm stopping at on the way back from the airport. So congratulations first of all and tell us what's the feeling like of your firm? It is exciting. We certainly weren't looking to get acquired. So as you know, we raised a fairly large D round last year and we were focused on building a big public company and what we found along the way of talking about a partnership with VMware was there's just a lot of synergy, both vision strategy as well as cultural synergies. And I think it somewhere along the way we realized this made a lot of sense. So it is a big deal and we're very excited about it. Awesome. So Joe, one thing I like, I see you and your company at cloud shows. Yes. You know, this is where we have, one of the things that excited me this week is we talk about like, I'm a networking guy. We talk about the networking. They're talking about multi-cloud the way that NYCERA was pre-acquisition. So VMware talking a lot more about multi-cloud. They had Amazon up on stage and I think the acquisition of cloud health technologies is how does VMware become more of a cloud first? So for people that don't know cloud health technology tell us a little bit about the origin, your founding and where are you playing the ecosystem? How much of a part is VMware today versus everything else? Yeah, we're down to that. So I founded the company six years ago and it was, I was an early pioneer in the public cloud. So in the 2010, 2011 timeframe I was building out large scale public cloud infrastructure. Sounds a lot less impressive when I give you the numbers now but then it was very impressive. And in the process of doing that just realized the incredible complexity that you had to confront to actually be successful in the public cloud. Both complexity of deploying and managing, you know, efficiently that infrastructure but also the complexity of all the tools that surround that management. And so I set out with cloud health to build a single SaaS platform that customers could use to what today you might call build out a cloud center of excellence is kind of the terminology which is to have one central platform where you can centralize and distribute cost management, security compliance as well as proactive governance all the way to integrating back into your back office and your service desk and your incident management to make the cloud just part of how you deliver your business services. And so that was the journey six years ago and it's been a tremendous journey to date. Yeah, no, you were definitely a pioneer in this. So congrats what you've done. Cause I remember six years ago, come on cloud was simple. I swipe a credit card and we'll just do this and everything. And now everybody kind of understands not only cloud but especially multi-cloud getting my arms around how I manage all this environment. Maybe touch on how, how does multi-cloud fit into this whole discussion? And what does cloud health do with VMware today versus everything else? Yeah, so when I started the company multi-cloud was part of the vision but let's be honest, there weren't a lot of companies really doing multi-cloud. Usually at best, especially in the enterprise if an enterprise was even doing cloud they were choosing a single cloud provider. They really weren't trying to actually, you know have multiple, multiple providers. I think what's happened is in the last 24 months is enterprises went from being a single cloud to pervasive multi-cloud is what I call it which is their portfolio now includes, you know dozens of SaaS products. It includes multiple public cloud providers. It includes multiple private cloud providers and it's just a very complex, you know heterogeneous portfolio they're managing. We were built for that. It finally come true and I think what it does is if you think what you need to be successful in that environment, if you're going to build out a cloud center of excellence across a pervasively heterogeneous environment you need a single platform that does that for you. So today our product supports Amazon, Google, Azure and it also supports VMware. So it integrates directly into vSphere, does cost management, does inventory visibility as well as migration recommendations to and from multiple different public clouds. So it's a great synergy between what it is that VMware does across its rich, robust portfolio and cloud health. So talk a little about the new possibilities you're now opening up being acquired by VMware. What does that mean for that multi cloud strategy? Yes, so I think Pat touched on it in his keynote and I thought he did a masterful job of describing how cloud health, the brand will be kind of a core brand of VMware and this will be a centerpiece property across integrating across various different kind of properties across their SaaS portfolio. But I also think VMware is very aware that there's a lot of choices that customers want. They may want to choose different products for log managing configuration management for application performance management and I think we're going to continue to provide that choice to customers so that it won't be just a VMware centric product. But at the same time, you look at the richness of the VMware portfolio, which is you look at what they do on premise and you look at what they do around cost management inside the data center. You look at VMware on AWS as an offering. There's just huge potential synergies between what we do and how we can extend our value proposition into those areas much faster as part of VMware. So as the founder of the company, what excited me about this was this was not taking me away from my vision, it was an opportunity to accelerate my vision which is really what kind of got me there to this idea that we would be acquired. How do you think your products will help VMware? For instance, in the VMware cloud on AWS, do you think you'll integrate on that level to help VMware accelerate their proposition as well? Yes, I believe I'm actually very excited about VMware on AWS because I think we all know that VMware has been optimizing its stack for so many years. There's incredible efficiencies that have been built into it that I would like to bring up to a business perspective so that our customers can understand them and take advantage of them in an easier way. And so I think there's great potential there. I probably don't want to get over my skis too far here on this one, but I do think it's one of the things you'll see early post-close of this deal. Joe, I think the timing's really good. If this acquisition had happened two years ago, we'd be talking about vCloud Air. My joke would be to say, okay, when does the update come that says all migration should push you to VMware at 99.8% of the time? No, but right, VMware, it's not only AWS. We saw the VMware presence at the Google show, you got to do a Google Cloud show and they're trying to position themselves more in this multi-cloud world, which is where your company sits. Joe, what advice do you give to companies that software companies out there? How do they help customers in this multi-cloud world? It's a big environment. You help with a bunch of things, but there's licensing, there's all sorts of variability out there. I say it's this giant elephant there and you might have a main course of it, but there's lots of partners you need to work with and customers have just the paradox of choice out there. So how do you as a software company and be successful in this space? Yeah, so I think myself as a software company or as our customers? Well, so what advice do you give to your peers out there and if you were given Pat advice as to how do we be even more successful as a multi-cloud player? Oh, I think their strategy is very mature and that was one of the things that got me excited about it, which is I think there was a time at which I think companies were very territorial about how they approached kind of the pervasive heterogeneity that we're entering now and I think being open in the way that they are, that all of the properties that customers may choose may not be a single vendor. There's going to be lots of different vendors and lots of different choices and freedom of choice, I think, is kind of one of the fundamental tenets of a successful strategy at this point in time and so I think I would just highly encourage that for everyone, which is I think the old world is the old world now, like we've entered kind of a new frontier, we have to think differently, we have to act differently and I think what I really love about what Pat's doing is he's harnessing the DNA and kind of the strength of VMware, which is just, you know, they've been a tremendous provider of great software for two decades and kind of bringing it into the next frontier of cloud and I think they've got a lot to bring that we have not seen yet that we're going to see over the next few years and I just hope to be part of that. So you mentioned the new frontier, right? So, you know, VMware is still somewhere in between the old frontier and the new. So one of the, you know, problems we've seen in the past is VMware and its relation with the service provider world. So what do you think you'll add to that mix to help service providers maybe move from the old world into that new world as well? Now, Yub, that feels like a fastball down the middle so I just have to tell you, so the relationship with VMware started 18 months ago and it started with an SVP at VMware and it was all about partners. And so one of the things you might not see externally from Cloud Health is that there's really two products in Cloud Health. There's our direct product that we deliver to enterprises and SMB and then there's a separate product that we sell to service providers and it enables them to deliver managed services to their customers on top of the cloud and we built it in a way where the products are really one product that actually are sold as two separate products and so I think what we're going to bring is a real strong opportunity for partners across VMware and that's why the opportunity, the business relationship started as a potential partnership around partners and eventually evolved into where we're at today. So we're excited for that. I think it's, I tell people that the cloud is the single greatest threat and the single greatest opportunity for partners and the difference between which one you're going to experience over the next few years is whether or not you can figure out how to harness the disruptive potential of the cloud. All right, so it sounds like I've got a question for AJ Patel tomorrow when I interview him towards the end of the show because yeah, service providers there. All right, I know you can't talk a lot but give us roadmap. What sort of things is it like, I see NSX being pervasive. Are there integrations today? Do you have visibility in Cloud Health? Is that something from the networking side that you do or would tie into? I think back, I've been in this long enough when EMC bought VMware, it was here's all the cool stuff we could do and I was in engineering being like, oh my God, it's going to take us five or six years to do most of this stuff. It got done, but there's long hard engineering work. So 18 months, what can you talk about that's been done and gives a little bit of what should we be looking for? Yeah, I mean NSX is tremendous offering and I think what you see is I'm really looking at this as more kind of like tier one, two and three integrations and tier one, I think you're going to see more around the cloud properties, probably things like VMware and AWS and you'll see the SaaS products such as Wavefront and things like that. I think that's, there's a natural extension and a natural movement and a natural value proposition we can bring on top of those. I think tier two, I think you'll probably see a lot more hybrid where you're going to see us kind of take advantage of that rich portfolio and VMware and extend it and add value on top of it to our customers and I think tier three, I'll think I'll leave quiet for now, but I think there's some really amazing potential of what it is that we can do together based on what I'm seeing exists in VMware and things that maybe are being built that are not yet public. I think there's some really great potential of what we can bring to the market around how they can manage their multi-cloud portfolios into the future. All right, Joe, last thing I wanted to ask you, Boston-based company. VMware had a strong presence in the Boston area. I know a lot of people in their Cambridge facility, but talk about the tech scene in Boston, being a founder, you got a new headquarters, getting acquired, I'm a bit of a homer, supporting people so that I don't necessarily have to travel across the country or across the world, so give us your viewpoint on the Boston area these days. You know this, which is it is incredibly vibrant what's happening in Boston, which is the businesses being built, the entrepreneurs that are there, just the entire ecosystem is working at a pace I have not seen in over two decades and they're building real meaningful businesses. When you actually lift up the cover and you look at what these entrepreneurs are building, they're going to be, it's going to be an important tech scene for decades to come based on just what I'm seeing happen today. I look today and a lot of people like to give the credit to the person who founded the company. There's thousands of people who touch this business, just including to the tremendous effort from every person who joined this company, there's been people like yourself and people who've added value in many countless ways along the way and it all came primarily from a Boston community that was there to support me and my company as we grew up in the Boston tech scene. So it's been, I've been blessed actually to be surrounded by great people in one of the best cities in the world. All right, well hey Joe, congratulations again. Thank you. If you don't know, they even have superhero stickers of this guy that they give out at Tom and Tessa. Joe Concella, Cloud Health Technologies, congratulations to you. I'm looking forward to seeing the grand opening back in Boston when I fly back after the show. For you, Piscar, I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks so much for joining us on theCUBE. Be back with lots more. Thank you.