 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering DockerCon 18. Brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live at DockerCon 2018 on a stunning day in San Francisco at Moscone West. I'm Lisa Martin with John Chor. And we're excited to welcome two new folks to theCUBE. From SkyTap, we've got Lucas Botch, the Senior Director of Communications and Hey Michelle, Technical Product Marketing Manager. Hey guys. Great to be here, thanks for having us. And thanks for adding a lot of color, Lucas, to our set. Well, I just wanted to bring enough flair that you could realize I might have something interesting to say. Awesome, so speaking of interesting things, tell us about SkyTap. What do you guys do? Who are you? Where are you based? Great, so SkyTap founded in 2006, so relatively old by startup standards, but it's allowed us to learn a lot about where cloud adoption has been going. And what we've seen is there really is an overlooked challenge that enterprises are facing today, right? So cloud native development, growing rapidly, going to continue to develop. But what do you do with all your old stuff, your existing applications? And so SkyTap is a cloud purpose built for modernizing those traditional applications. And we do that through a process we call IPA, although we don't advocate that you drink on the job. It's infrastructure, process, and architecture. And the idea is to really get yourself to true modernization and making the most of cloud and containers and all of the modern technologies we can see on the show floor behind us, you first need to modernize the infrastructure to get yourself out of the data center. From there, in eliminating that barrier, you're going to be able to modernize the processes. How do you develop? How do you change your applications? And by getting better in that regard, adopting things like DevOps and Agile methodologies, finally you can start to make changes to the application themselves. So in short order, we are the cloud for modernizing traditional applications and we like to see ourselves as complimentary to the folks at AWS, behind us, and others who are best for that cloud native web scale development of new applications. There was a great conversation this morning at the keynote about modernizing applications. I think it's on everybody's mind because the world does not start fresh anew every day, right? We all are working with things that we've been carrying for, in some cases, for years and decades. So Docker is talking about, in fact, we modernized a .NET application, I think, this morning. So they showed a little bit of a demo with that in Kubernetes. Can you talk a little bit about how you work with Docker and some of the challenges that you work with in terms of modernizing applications? Yeah, Docker has a great framework with what they have with their MTA. And actually, our VP, our product, Dan Jones, presented yesterday on making modernization magical and really looking at how SkyTap complements what Docker has with their MTA framework. And I think SkyTap provides, with our IPA approach, like a great platform for enterprises to execute the Docker MTA approach. And then beyond that, what SkyTap provides, so the ability to move out of the data center and get away from the hardware side of things and start to leverage some of the scale that you can get out of the cloud. What are some of the things that a legacy application expects that it's not going to have if you just lift and shift it? Why do we need to shift? I think what's important to remember is, often, even just lifting and shifting it is very difficult because if you want a monolithic or traditional application that's very much wed to the infrastructure it was built on five, 10, 15 years ago, taking that and putting it in a hyperscale provider often means you've got to rewrite from scratch. And that's a really arduous process, often one that creates a skills challenge in and of itself because not only do you need people to manage the existing application, you need a whole set of new skills to take a cloud-like approach to that development. And so that can create a lot of challenges. And so what we see here at DockerCon, really the reason we're here, is both Docker and SkyTap see the next wave of cloud, the next wave of modern development, is going to be how do we bring all these benefits we've seen in cloud-native development to those existing applications? And what we see ourselves doing is eliminating that infrastructure barrier. So then you can really start to use containers to their full benefit, whether it's in SkyTap cloud and another cloud or both. So just to follow up a little bit, so it's not just some services like, I don't know, you've got to have authentication and you've got to have storage and you've got to have all the things that an old legacy application sitting in a data center expects. But it sounds like also there's operational services as well and being able to operate with that kind of cloud-level agility. Yeah, what we provide with SkyTap is, we have a concept of a SkyTap environment and so within that environment you can have your traditional x86 sort of VMware sort of based at workloads. We also support IBM power systems. So we're the only cloud that can run AIX workloads and Linux on power. And so alongside that, what we get is sort of the combination of being able to bring in containers as well and sort of as organizations go through that modernization journey, being able to receive or see value in the hybrid applications sort of along the way. Yeah. We saw a lot of stats, thanks Lucas. This morning, I think one of the first ones that I saw was in the press release, that Docker release, which was this morning, 85% of enterprise organizations are running a multi-cloud strategy, so that's pretty pervasive. We're also seeing stats like up to 90%, we had Scott Johnstone earlier, their chief project officer, up to 90% of enterprises are spending, sorry, enterprises are spending up to 90% of their IT budget, just keeping the lights on for traditional applications. As you said, lift and shift, it's a practical for a number of reasons. You also talked about skillset changes there. So I'm curious, what are some of the kind of common challenges you're seeing in the customer environment where they might be trepidatious to go to the container journey and how specifically to sky tap and Docker, knock those out of the park. Yeah, well those stats I think are really indicative of the challenge and then the new approaches that companies are trying to take to solve that challenge, which is you have so much invested in what's made your company successful and if you're a long standing enterprise doing well in your market, you've been doing this for 10, 15, 20, maybe more years and you've done very well to get yourself to where you are. You've invested millions, if not billions in your infrastructure, your talent and the people that build the systems that run your business. So to burn that all the ground and start from scratch doesn't make a lot of sense and so I think one challenge you run into is inertia, right? It's like, hey, we did well to get here, why do we need to suddenly change everything we're doing and sky taps recommendation is you don't need to change everything but you do need to prepare to be able to change much more rapidly as our economy continues to be more driven by digital techniques. So you have inertia as a challenge. I think you also have that idea that if you're spending 90% as you said, right, on what you've just got with the lights on, where is the money and where's the time going to come for net new and how can you bring those two together and so that's really where I think sky tap can play a big role is bridging that gap from where you are today, allowing you to leverage the people that you have, the skills that they have, the technology that you have invested in so you don't have to throw that all out overnight and instead you can get more and more value out of it as you bring it into the cloud, gain incremental agility and then over time make the modernization and evolutionary changes you want to make based on business needs, not having technology drive what your business does. How much of that is a cultural change that you guys can help companies understand is essential? Because changing culture is obviously, especially large enterprises, they can't pivot that quickly but culture is essential for a company to successfully undergo digital transformation. Just wondering what kind of conversations are you seeing with inertia? How much of that is culture needs to change and mindsets to embrace moving forward? Yeah, I mean, we see a lot of this in the conversations we have with customers. We see a lot of it comes out of the market from what analysts sort of have to say as well and I think recent sort of analyst article that she had sort of publicly sort of talks about actually enterprises who have adopted DevOps first are actually more successful when they move to containerization and that's what we see with the customers who come to us and what we're able to provide and what the customers see in SkyTab is actually the simplicity of the UI that we provide is actually a good step from what they currently have without sort of needing to get into what can often be multiple UIs and screens and some of the hyperscale cloud providers and then on top of that sort of the on-demand access to environment. So you're taking away sort of what is typically a reactive approach from corporate IT when they need to reach out and go, hey, I need another environment or I need another VM like this and these organizations, it's often taking maybe six to eight weeks to get those environments turned around. We can provision a complex environment in less than sort of 30 seconds in SkyTab so it enables those teams to be a lot more productive in what they're doing and that's sort of the first phase of starting to sort of adopt the change in culture before sort of even getting into that move from sort of often again with legacy applications you've got a waterfall SDLC and so actually moving from there into sort of more agile approaches and looking at how you can increase release cadence and what sort of comes into that from a people aspect and a process change and a methodology and how SkyTab sort of supports that along with integration with other third parties sort of automation tools as well. I think you nailed it on the culture point and I just wanted to not forget about people as being a big part of culture, right? And you have fear is a very real thing, right? Fear of change, fear of net new and so in our own adoption of Docker and containers and Kubernetes internally so our cloud runs on a very large Kubernetes cluster of containerized services so internally over the last few years we went through our own modernization journey and I think that paired with some research we've seen we recently did a study with 451 research looking at what enterprise tech leaders are experiencing the fear of change, the reticence to change and then just the lack of knowledge of okay what is required of me? Like you're asking me to change overnight all of a sudden I've got to take classes at night while I do my day job. I think these are really very realistic and human questions to ask and I think you need to take that into account when you're looking at digital transformation modernization so thinking about hey, how do we communicate with transparency what we expect in the timeframe? Let's be upfront about the challenges we expect to run into and where we're going to have problems and how we'll deal with those together and make sure that communication is crisp and clear and consistent so that people at least know what's going on even if they may not like it upfront. So Lucas you brought up Kubernetes and containers, right? We're here at DockerCon so obviously containers on the tip of everybody's tongue but you also work with legacy apps which traditionally I suppose at this point traditional means of VM. So how does that go together? What are you looking at your customers? Are they able to transition to more containerized infrastructure? Are they sticking with VMs? I mean how do modern containers fit into the SkyTap platform here? Yeah we're seeing a lot of adoption with our customers who are moving into SkyTap with their traditional applications and we continue to sort of learn and observe in what they're doing and for us it's sort of two types of customers that move to SkyTap and the first of those are really looking to migrate their whole data center or evacuate the data centers going where can I put these legacy applications in not many places they can sort of go and so they move them into SkyTap, get them up and running in there and sort of see some benefits in that and then almost organically start to sort of look at going well how else can I get my team to be more sort of cloud native and cloud ready and it's sort of the evolution of the people component we're talking about before instead of going all right well as I get my teams more ready for cloud native they start to sort of move towards containers and cloud native services. For us sort of other organizations that come in and those who already know and probably have already experienced other cloud sort of modernization and sort of looking at what have they been able to achieve and what have they learned from that and seeing the value in SkyTap and actually come to us with the approach of going right we want to come in here we want to move to more agile sort of methods and we want to sort of start to take our traditional monolithic applications break it down into microservices and move it into containers. I'm curious one of the things that Steve's saying the CEO of Docker said this morning during his keynote was about half the room and there's about five to 6,000 people here at DockerCon their fifth conference that only about half of them are already on this container containerization journey. I'm curious and I know there's no one size fits all but when you're talking to customers who are at the precipice going all right we've got to do this. This is really an essential component of our transformation. What's the time frame that they can look to see measurable business impact once they start working with SkyTap and Docker on this container journey? Yeah well I think we've got to move away collectively as an industry from the idea that there's a big bang or silver bullet approach to change, right? I spent the five previous years before joining SkyTap last year at a company called Chef Software, competes with Puppet who's here on the show floor automation software and what I saw there in terms of both DevOps adoption, adoption of automation and the transition of the cloud is that if you think you can get everybody full sale on the same amount of change at the same time to do that effectively in a relatively reasonable amount of time you're going to not only fail but by failing you will actually set yourself further back than as you take in a more iterative approach. So I think from a time perspective I think the first answer is you'll never be done. So presume that the journey will continue into perpetuity because continuing to gain agility, continuing to get better at delivering software to deliver value to customers. I don't see an end to that in any sort of near term in our economy so I think that's going to go on for a long time. So digital transformation, modernization, whatever buzzword people may want to use, the idea of evolving and changing is an ongoing process. I think then, business leaders will say, well that's baloney, I need change now, I want results. I think start with a project that has a deadline associated with it. We need to be able to deliver our customer banking app online via mobile by January. Okay, well bite that off singularly and so that you focus on that first. You learn from how you do that process and then you can take those learnings, communicate them and pick another project and another project. So we recommend kind of an iterative progressive approach that will put time and measurable goals around a specific project, meet those deadlines hopefully if you're successful and then give you a lot to learn and operate off of the next time. That's great. I'm really kind of curious about looking forward and economic models. Everything is as a service at this point, you have a lot of traditional providers, the Dells and HPEs of the world who sell a lot of hardware still and sell a lot of things up front and the analysts and everyone that's scratching their heads about how they get to be sell more services along with that. Skychap's already there. You're selling at your cloud provider, you're selling a service in some ways you're replacing some of the infrastructure or an adjunct to it. I'm just kind of curious going forward. I mean, is this the future of cloud as a service provider? How do you see the economic model of the DNA of Skychap partnering with people? We've ended up talking about process and people more than we've ended up talking about technology today which was kind of fascinating but is that, I mean, projects us into the future. What do y'all see? Yeah, I think what we see today with cloud and the microservices in container models really the evolution of what was sort of the virtual data center and developing in sort of VMs. And so sort of going sort of a step beyond that. We see the container model grow and as you rightly pointed out we've talked a lot about people and process and I think that sort of was what's holding back a little bit the enterprise adoption today and I think as organizations get into this sort of process and mindset almost as sort of going hey, things are going to continue to evolve over time and our organizations need to be ready to adopt a lot of these and this isn't just sort of at your development level as well, I was looking at right how do you, how does your corporate IT teams, how do your security teams and other parts of the business realize this is going to continue to evolve really quickly? And I think that's sort of what we're going to continue to see sort of up front and it's going to drive a lot of the adoption of the cloud-native services and containers but it's going to take a bit of time for some organizations to get there. Yeah, I have a soap box, I want to stand on it real quickly, I think cloud is the way for it, right? So no one wants to be in the infrastructure business long term, so I think regardless of what your deployment model will be most businesses five, 10, 15, 20 years from now I don't see them owning a lot of data center real estate, right? So make the infrastructure someone else's problem. Whether that's SkyTap, whether that's AWS, whether that's Azure, frankly whether it's all of us to your multi-cloud statistic, right? We see the same thing. It's much like the data center was today and has been for a long time. Use the right tool for the right job. You've got a mix of technology so you're not locked in any single vendor and you're able to fit technology your business needs. So I think one, we're going cloud and that's going to be the way it is. I think two is open source, right? I mean that's where containers gained all their momentum, we're docketed a fantastic job of really giving a vibrant community of developers an opportunity to do their work much more easy, much easier and much faster. And so I think you'll continue to see open source play a much larger component and how even very large long standing businesses develop what they're doing and then you bring those two together, right? You look at how can the cloud ecosystem best support open source tools to deliver and develop software that's going to add value at the end of the day. Well guys I wish we had more time. Thanks so much for stopping by and sharing with us what SkyTab is doing and how you're enabling customers to not just evolve from a technology standpoint but I think as we've all talked about here really what might even be more important is evolve the people in the processes. So thanks Lucas, thanks Hamish, thanks for your time. Thanks so much for having us. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. Again I'm Lisa Martin with John Troyer from DockerCon 2018. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest.