 Live from Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE on the ground, covering KubeCon 2016, brought to you by the Linux Foundation and Red Hat. Here's your host, John Furrier. Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We are on the ground in Seattle for KubeCon and the Cloud Native Conference here in Seattle. And we're checking out the scene here and looking at the whole container madness. Kubernetes, really it's about the DevOps going to Cloud Native. This is the future of the cloud and certainly an area that's disrupting the world. And we're here with a startup, Ignia Systems and the CTO, Jeff Hughes. Great to see you, you guys are a hot startup in Seattle, cloud nation here, cloud city. Yeah, you know, that's exactly it. You know, I'm a Seattle native and so I love it when all the cloud native cons come to Seattle. I was here for DockerCon as well and saw you guys' coverage. So thanks again for having me. Yeah, we love it. I mean, obviously on Amazon here we've got Microsoft now, heavy duty push in the cloud, so some announcements. So the big guys are getting in, you guys are startup and you guys are doing something interesting. So I want you to take a minute to explain what you guys are doing because you're disrupting the old school storage market with a new kind of solution that is really built purposely for that developer that's working on this DevOps as cloud native around containers and microservices. What are you guys offering? What's your solution and why is it different? You know, that's a great question. I spent a lot of time with enterprises, in fact, with those old school legacy folks and what I saw was a lack of exactly that, the developer focused tools. And so what we focused on was how do we bring that same cloud experience was really developer focused for the data that just couldn't move to the cloud. And that was really the key is that we saw a lot of applications that we call sort of data centric computing and what was happening there is that there was just an inability to move the data to the cloud and take advantage of those primitives. So we're taking those same sort of cloud native primitives and bringing them to the on-premises world, you know, right to where the data exists. And so that's really our focus. You know, we're starting off with sort of a data service. And if you go look up, it's really just an S3 compatible store for those kind of new data repositories that are out there. But I think you'll see over time we're developing a lot more than just data. You know, last night I had a chance to sit down with Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon Web Services and I'll say his view of the future with Amazon is public cloud, everything goes to the cloud. Although true at some point the preferred state will be cloud, there's still always going to be an on-premise component. Whether that's a data center shrinking down to the size of a closet or just a desktop, it could be in the future. You guys have done a lot of things. You in particular were the director of engineering at Isilon, an old school storage company. So you've seen that before. So why is this data centric thing relevant for the on-premise? Why is that valuable? Is it because hybrid cloud is this current state of the demand? Is it a technical issue? Why is this on-premise data service that you guys are providing so important? Yeah, you know, I see two kind of places where this comes into play. And the first is really just the quantity of data. What we're finding is that applications and really the sensors that are out there collecting the data for these applications are growing immensely. So for instance, I can get a microscope. If I'm a biological wet lab now, I can get a microscope for, you know, call it 30k that can produce 100 terabytes a day. And that's an amount of data I just never had to even think about. You know, I used to have thumb drives and various things that I'd put my results on. Now it's huge amounts of data and moving that data is just really difficult. And so what we say is keep it in place. Let's go process it where you have it, but you need those new tools to actually go do it. Now the other asset- Tools meaning software from a developer standpoint. Right, yeah, you know, you gotta develop the tools to go understand that data. If you have hundreds of terabytes of data, it's not like you're watching that as a film or whatnot, right? You're building machine learning around it. You're building, so all sorts of applications that need to go do that. You know, the world is turning to this developer focused aspect. So that's really, we gotta supply those tools for where the data lives. And for us, we see that data living on premises. So how do you answer the question that people ask which is, hey, you know, Jeff, everything's moving to the cloud. So why should I even deal with it on-prem? Because my goal is to get rid of the data center and move everything to the cloud. How do you answer that? Cause that might seem like an inhibitor for you guys. And how do you answer that specifically? You know, it was something that from very early days, we thought of exactly that. We were like, why are we going down to this on-premises world? And so from day zero, a priority of ours was offering this in the same service and fashion that cloud has offered. So we offer everything as a service. You pay as you go. You don't even have to buy any hardware or anything like that. It's all inclusive. We put the infrastructure on your site and then we manage it and monitor it remotely so that you get the true cloud experience at that point in time. So let's talk about true cloud experience. I think that's an interesting point. I want to double click on that. One is customers that we talk to don't want to have the sales pitch and then it's a heavy lift of all this work and then it didn't come on. The benefit of the cloud, this cloud native philosophy is you get to show value quickly and then you can double down on it. That seems to be the modeling of operationalizing the cloud. Hey, we did some stuff, experimented, it worked, double down on it and operationalize it. So how do you guys fit into that culture? Yeah, no, it's a great question. You know, the first is is that we offer just the standard APIs that you would get from the cloud as well. So if you look at our offerings, they're all gonna be, for instance, container services with Kubernetes or with storage, it's S3. It's the same ways in which you would build things in the cloud and you can actually just go and experiment in the cloud first and then move the application to where the data is. And so that said, we also have some folks who want to start experimenting with where their data is and we have a very low entry point for them to go do that. You know, it's not quite credit card low so it's not like I can go just sign up for it today but it's very low friction from that perspective. So what is the pressure point in the drivers for you guys? So you guys have an on-premise service which includes hardware so that they can, they have, they're buying experiences like the cloud. Is it, is the driver that the data tsunami at the inside the premise is so large that that's the key thing that you're focused on? Is that the key driver? What is the, or what is the key driver for you? You know, I'd see it come in kind of two forms. One, definitely kind of that deluge or tsunami of data within your data center or wherever the data might live. The second is sometimes actually on a security focused consciousness. So do I need to expose everything out on the public internet? Do I need to, you know, we had a DOS attack for a bunch of internet of things. Maybe some of those didn't even need to be out there and accessible. Maybe they needed to be behind firewalls. We enable that ability of maybe I don't need my factory to actually sit on the internet and so we are part of that sort of security conscious focus as well. You know, it's interesting. If you look at the consumer internet, there's always the trans, you always see it kind of comes to the enterprise, certainly the consumerization. You know, geo data has been a hot thing to see region zones and all kinds of availability zones on Amazon. You guys have this concept of local data and that really kind of talks about some of the value proposition. What does that mean and how would you talk to a perspective architect or buyer that is dealing with the traditional storage guys? What's the pitch? How would you describe it as a CTO since you're not in sales but get the right answer here? What is the, what's the narrative? What's the pitch that you say to the buyer? Hey, working with us you get. You know, the interesting thing that is that that conversation has gone all the way down to exactly that, that admins, the IT administrators are there and they're wanting the tools. They're wanting to go turn back to their developers within their organization and say, I've got the right answer for you and it fits my policies as well as going to be applicable to what you want to go build. And so that's exactly what we see is that we're actually being brought in by IT organizations to developers and we offer sort of internal marketing if you will of saying, hey, here's this service that we have available internally and what can we go do with that? And so we actually see that both sides are very, very willing to bring us into the conversation. So you bring a DevOps focus really to the internal bridge between the storage guys and network guys to the developers. Is that would be kind of a way to look at it? Yeah, we developed this in a way that is very friendly kind of to a developer focus and DevOps style of culture, right? So for instance, our appliance has great SLAs just like the cloud. We are still deploying software to it all the time. So for instance, before where the IT guy was always going to the application guy and saying, hey, I'm gonna have to shut down your application for the weekend while I upgrade some hardware. They don't have to do that anymore. And so we offer all of those kind of high value SLAs but within their data center. And so they get to just offer that directly to their users. So you guys have that feature that's essentially provisioning stuff for the client on an elastic basis like a cloud model. What about customers that are on the journey to the cloud that all want to go there? Do you fit with that narrative? Do you fit with that positioning? And you guys, they can send stuff to the cloud. You guys are compatible with that? Absolutely. So one, we're API compatible with most everything in the cloud. And so it's a great stepping stone. In fact, I was talking to a CSO of a Fortune 100 company the other day and he said, I love what you guys are doing particularly because on our journey to the cloud, you're able to be a stepping stone for us. And we're fine there as well, right? We can go be the place where they learn how to use these new cloud native formats but within their data center and in ways which they can embrace it much more easily than going all in on the public cloud. And hybrid cloud is certainly the big focus right now. So you've seen the VMware deal with Amazon web services recently, we covered that on SiliconANGLE and theCUBE. That points to the kind of the steps that people are taking in the tranches of their journey to the cloud. That they deal with the on-prem first. So that's, does that fit into your positioning? It definitely does. You know, I would say that we're focused on the applications that need those cloud native principles. A lot of times when you look at things like the AWS VMware deal is that that's a lot for legacy workflows. How do I get a stepping stone for our legacy workflows? Where we see a lot of play is actually in the forward looking. There's this huge amount of unstructured data that's being captured but not necessarily being able to be processed because it's stuck at the edge, right? And that processing power, you need things like the cloud native paradigms and whatnot to be able to go build the tools to go do that. Final question, what are you guys disrupting? If you look at the incumbent, you have the old storage vendors, you got EMC, you got the HPs of the world out there, IBMs. Have storage, they bought storage systems. What are they not doing that you guys are doing and what specifically is a disruption point? Yeah, I would say that it's pace. You know, it's the same reason that why are containers beating out VMs? I can turn them over in seconds instead of minutes to days, right? And so we focus on that same principle. You know, if you look at our development of internally, we use containers extensively. We develop all on cloud infrastructure as well. And we're able to deliver innovation not on the order of, you know, years as you see the turn times and the kind of dels and HPs of the world. We're able to turn in weeks. And so even at the time that we've been out we've delivered features from customer ask to delivery within those weeks. So you guys really, it's a developer focus. It's the pace of change of technology in the developer suite, if you will, our community. That's driving the pressure point on the storage guys. Yeah, to be relevant today, you have to be talking about how can I deliver that in weeks, not, you know, months. All right, Jeff, great, great story here. Container, World here, ContainerCon, KubeCon, CloudNative. It's all about the application developers. It's all about making it work and operationalizing the cloud. Thanks for spending time with us. Yeah, great, thanks. Hey, I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching the Kube on the Ground. Thanks for watching.