 Hi, my name is Rupak Parekh. I'm co-founder and VP of Engineering at Platform 9. Platform 9 is a startup just about two years old this October. Awesome, thanks for joining us on SuperUserTV today Rupak. Can you tell me about Platform 9's origin story? Well, thanks for having me. Platform 9, the name is very interesting. I will come to that in a second. So Platform 9 and my co-founders, we were earlier engineers at VMware where we worked on vSphere, their virtualization products, and then later on on their cloud offerings. When we were working on the cloud offerings, we realized cloud is complex, and so we need to do something to make it easier for our users, for the administrators. And we realized we need to make it as a service. So we came up with Platform 9. Platform 9 makes cloud really easy by offering this as a service. And then we chose OpenStar because that's the open-source software getting momentum in 2013, that's when we started. And the name is very interesting because a couple of my co-founders are big Harry Potter fans. And when we were talking about this idea, they said, okay, this is like transforming from the real world into a magical world, and Platform 9 is the place where it starts. Actually, it's Platform 9 in three quarters, but we decided to name it Platform 9. I love that origin story. So what are some of the challenges of being a startup in the OpenStack community? I know that there's a lot of conversation around that in the ecosystem. So OpenStack is large and complex. There are so many projects. There was a keynote talk today, which essentially spoke about the same thing. So you need to decide, pick and choose what you work on. The other thing is, especially with distros like Platform 9, we need to figure out who do we integrate with? There are so many vendors. And so you need to make sure that you're certifying with the right kind of vendors. And OpenStack Foundation is now helping us with all the test suites that they're providing us to certify these different vendors. That's incredible. So what are some of the benefits that you see in Platform 9Cs as being a startup in the community as well? So this is a very interesting question and a very important one. Coming back to the complexity of OpenStack, OpenStack is an enterprise software. There are different vendors who are coming together. If you do not have one Platform 9, if you do not have one platform where everybody can integrate, just imagine what will happen if you are just a startup and have to integrate with all these different vendors. Having OpenStack Foundation kind of create a platform, all the vendors join in and then you can do your own work while everybody works towards that same goal. It really helps a lot. Perfect. So what differentiates Platform 9 from other startups or even larger companies within the OpenStack ecosystem? So we are unlike anybody else on the floor here. We are one of the very few companies, or I would say we are the only one which provides OpenStack as a service. We host the whole OpenStack controller on our data centers and we ask our customers to just bring their physical servers, many of these two, you have OpenStack up and running. We have SLA support and then we have 24x7 support for your cloud out of the box. Alright, and thank you so much for joining us today on SuperUserTV, Rupak. Thank you very much.