 Hi, this is your host up in Bhartiya and welcome to you for Let's Talk. And today we have with us Alex Freedland, co-founder and CEO of Merantis. Alex is great to have you on the show. It's great to be here. The big news is that you are returning to the role of CEO of Merantis. Most people may not know that you have been guiding the company through all these years in different roles like chairman and board member. But I want to quickly look at things from the perspective of a co-founder and someone who is returning to the role of CEO of the company. Let's just walk through the history lane. How much things have changed since the early days of Merantis, early days of OpenStack. And what role do you see of Merantis in today's modern world? Merantis was a services company. We're building infrastructure solutions for a lot of companies here in the valley. And that's where we started many years ago. But in 2011, if I'm not mistaken, we have pivoted into cloud. And the world knows this is a cloud company from that point on. And so I was a CEO when we just did a pivot. And then in 2012, Adrian joined as a CEO. I mean, he joined before, but he became a CEO. And he actually pioneered the early customers and our motion. And we did it together. We're the other co-founder Boris, whom I think you also remember. So this is a second time I'm coming in in the cloud world. And yes, the world is very different. Merantis is very different. And that's actually very, very exciting times. So when I compare the first coming, the debate was what is the role of open source? And if you remember, OpenStack was probably one of the largest new foundation that started. Linux Foundation was alive. And Linux at the time was a commoditization layer. So Linux was a technology that was built to give an answer to Sun microsystems and other proprietary Unix systems. And then a combination of Linux and commodity hardware from Intel actually ushered the whole IT revolution. So Linux was known to be a commoditization layer. And open source was just a cheap alternative to vendors in IT. And I think OpenStack and then Hadoop and big data vendors were the first ones who proved to the world that innovation can actually happen in open source. So it was a very beginning. And at that time, the debate was about innovation versus commoditization. And we, as Merantis, we pioneered this. We became the winner of OpenStack battle at the time. And then, of course, with Docker acquisition, more innovation, probably the biggest innovation in IT is containers that we're seeing in Kubernetes part of that wave. So nobody is debating today whether open source is about innovation. So Merantis is an established player. We have close to 1,000 customers who have Merantis as a baseline for their digital transformation. We have about a million people using our technologies for day-to-day Kubernetes and productivity and all that. And right now, the conversation is about how much innovation can one consume and how easily. Because there are so many communities. They're competing with each other. They're all very innovative. And today it's about how do you harness innovation in a way that companies can move fast and they can actually deliver on their outcomes. And this is the battle. And the conversation is no longer about whether it's innovative but how to do it fast enough and in a way that it can be consumed. Since you also mentioned Linux, there OpenStack there and, of course, Kubernetes today, one of the pain points that we see with Kubernetes is that as powerful as it is, and it was not meant to be easy, people do get overwhelmed with the complexity and you have a lot of initiatives to make things. You know, recently the CosmoTron and a lot of initiatives are there from Merantis side to ease that pain for developers. It's very important for just the way, if you look at Linux kernel, it's a complicated technology. The maintainers, they have to be very, very in-depth developers. Not everybody can become a kernel maintainer. But then there are a lot of vendors who do simplify things for us and it has become the de facto standard for building your infrastructure. So talk a bit about the complexity of Kubernetes and how Merantis is going to ease pain of developers' operators' teams. Very true. And Kubernetes is no different from any other major technology, right? That just develops, develops new use cases, develops thousands of people, tens of thousands of people are developing it. So every technology, even if it starts to be simple, becomes complex as time goes on. There are multiple ways to look at complexity. And traditionally, enterprise vendors would abstract complexity by creating vertical stacks, right? So that has always been the way traditional software was consumed. And big vendors, the likes of Red Hat, which is now IBM and VMware and all that, they just create the proprietary stack and you take the stack and it's productized. It has good user interface, it has all the use cases, and it's a wonderful way to consume things. The challenge is it by itself becomes complex because the stack becomes complex and it becomes expensive and it's a lock-in story. I mean, that hasn't changed. The other way to abstract complexity is through services. When you create and as a service experience and you give a simple way to consume it for each use case that matters, the complexity is hidden and it's managed by people who are delivering it. I mean, Amazon is really good at it. You can say that in AWS or in other public clouds, technology is very complex. But if you develop it as a service and you consume it as a service, it's greatly simplified and the experience is greatly simplified. So clearly as a service motion in software and in infrastructure is a way to abstract complexity. Now, the key to abstracting complexity though is how exactly do you do the service? If the service is done through services where you throw pee to the problem, it becomes expensive and slow. If you use a lot of automation to do this, then it becomes inexpensive, but potentially also slow unless that automation is very agile. And so what's happened? Mirantis took a path of abstracting complexity through managed service. We call it zero ops. And we've been very successful across our customer base to essentially deliver that level of as a service experience where our customers don't have to be in the infrastructure business. They can actually build things on top and they get an SLA from us for all of the operation. Not all of the customers are doing that, but a very large number of customers are actually moved to this level and they're very happy with that. So we've obstructed the complexity. In the last, I would say maybe a few years, there has been a lot of development in the community of smart adaptive operators and technologies that are declarative, that allows to actually manage the complexity and the speed of the ecosystem in a very simple and declarative fashion. And these tooling, they're available at Kubernetes as well, they're actually allowing us to, excuse me, they're actually allowing us to very quickly iterate through the innovation that's happening in the community and package it in exactly the way that our customers want. And I think if you look at what Mirantis is going to be looking at going forward, is actually harnessing this very layer of obstruction that will allow customers to consume that complexity but in a very simple way, but with the life cycle management kind of built in. So this is, again, a long answer to a simple question. We have been talking a lot about technology. Let's not talk about business side of it. Can you talk about what changed in the world, what changed in the market, the ecosystem, the open source world, the competitors or partners that Mirantis felt they needed this change to bring you back as the CEO of the company and can you also talk about what change are you bringing to the company? Last time I came, we were in the beginning of the creation of this specific ecosystem that we have pioneered. We were the co-founders of the foundation. We were eventually became the largest contributor to that technology and it allowed us to build the business and that was an early days of that particular motion. Now, as a tiny little startup, you have only one playbook. You make a bet and you make the bet successful or you die. We happen to make the bet successful. It put us on the map, but we were not able to pursue other ecosystems. So as you remember, container wave started and the best way to kind of see how mature companies are operating it, as OpenStack was still on the battle and container wave started, Red Hat started their second wave and third wave and they just had the resources with the Unix monopoly or Linux monopoly to actually play multiple games. Merantis didn't have the luxury to do this, so we ended up kind of missing that wave but then with an acquisition of Docker Enterprise, we became one of the largest container vendors in production, still are. So through an acquisition we were able to do that. Today, as a much larger company with 9-digit ARR, which is very, very profitable and growing, we have an opportunity not only to service and grow our existing customers and make sure we continue to build value to them in the motion that we've in the motion that we really perfected. This is one of our strengths. One of our major strengths is to be able to go to our customers and deliver this complexity in a way that they can truly rely on us and that's what makes Merantis who we are. So we have that and we'll continue to build on that. But also we have the resources, the engineering talent and the understanding of what the other waves that are coming that our customers and the market will need. So we have a luxury of making these investments and continue to apply the playbook of going where the puck is heading to actually innovate there, use the expertise that we have in packaging this to the right solutions and then take it to the market and to the customers. And that's what customers want from us and I think that's kind of the playbook that you will see us operate and talk about in the future. As you said, you folks paid a lot of path for a lot of ecosystem, the build the ecosystem. But for the new and unique challenges that you're seeing for yourself, for the company, the times have changed. These are the challenges that, yes, of course there are a lot of smooth sales but you're also looking at some of those challenges that you have to help Merantis navigate through them. So the market constantly changes and the larger players, as they become larger, they pretty much have to play the locking game because only the monopolies and channel and monopolies and technology give you the leverage that the shareholders typically require to be able to push. And we're seeing this with the consolidation acquisitions and the stacks are becoming a lot more strong and closed. So Merantis doesn't have the channels. We don't have the customer base that the incumbents do and that's always been a challenge that we had to do. So the message that we pioneered in 2011 and have been true to is the unlock story. One thing we cannot afford is to build our own stack to keep our customers fixed on that. So what we have to do is we have to go horizontal. We have to curate the pieces that are right and they work together in a high availability because most of our customers are using the infrastructure we give them in mission critical ways. It has to be working at scale. We have the world's most largest customers working at an amazing scale. And it has to continuously deliver innovation, so LCM. And we have to do it in a horizontal way without locking anybody in. So that is actually an extremely attractive value proposition for a large number of customers. Those who are maybe too large and they're spending a lot of money with incumbents and they have to spend that much money because of the legacy contract not because that's the value they're receiving. So they're looking around. There is the same thing happening on the public cloud where somebody who's been very successful in adopting public cloud finally got to a scale where the economics of working on the public cloud no longer makes sense and doing it exactly correctly on much more precisely optimized infrastructure and scale can give 5x, 10x savings and we have those kind of customers. And I think the larger the cloud native ecosystem becomes the more of those customers that will be looking for the type of solutions that I just described. And Miranda's as a result of the choices we've made in the technology that we've built and the approaches that we have is actually one of the best solutions for these types of customers and where we cannot of course go and out compete red hats in the things they're doing so well or VMware's or IBM's or their ecosystem. Those and same is true for the public cloud providers but there is ever growing number of very large customers who are actually looking for a solution that Mirantis has to offer. And the more successful the cloud ecosystem on those vendors are the more will be our addressable market in competing with those guys. And for our size and scale this is more than enough. So that's just on the infrastructure side. And as you're talking about some of these incumbents and building the whole stack when they're locking which also means that you have to also work closely with partners. So what will be the importance of the whole partner ecosystem for Mirantis and what is your kind of approach with building a very vibrant partner ecosystem so that folks because nobody wants to get logged in. So there are so many choices in the cloud native world and people want to be... I mean what's the point of having the flexibility of Kubernetes but fully opinionated. It just defines the whole purpose. So talk about the importance and what will be your approach towards partners and partnerships. So our view on partners is exemplified by our investment in Lens. And of course Lens is as I'm sure you know and it's been discussed you know Sean talked about it and others is the UI into Kubernetes. Kubernetes is becoming the standard way people run not just infrastructure but applications on top of infrastructure. Lens is a very, very convenient way to gain productivity. So it's actually a control plane into the user interface, user experience into the Kubernetes ecosystem. And the way Lens has been developed to begin with it has an ability to integrate components into it. Almost like you know Apple's App Store. And it was designed that way for a reason because we want you know if we are the entryway into the Kubernetes ecosystem and the user experience of that is something that we provide we want to make sure that other people who want to be part of that can actually integrate in this seamlessly and add those use cases and components. And we've built some of them there there are components for security there are components for you know the ones that we've actually acquired AppIQ which is the visibility into the applications and the like. And what you will see happening is more and more we will be opening Lens as a way to bring other partners and use cases into the ecosystem so people can the customers can actually use that but the vendors who bring point solutions can use Lens as a channel also to market and into our customers and we have today I think 20,000 or so enterprise customers using our product and million people are using it for development so as more use cases will come in that will greatly greatly increase and so this is an approach the control plane that we use to bring partnerships into the ecosystem Now this is a bit tricky question I'm not going to ask you about future plans or what is next on your acquisition radar but if you look at some of these acquisition that you folks made whether it's Lens or whether it's Docker Enterprise what's next first minute is what kind of company we are looking at as we peak into 2024 That's a good question and I have dreams and aspirations as a founder I remember incorporating it I can't even tell you how many years ago but I remember how it got incorporated and we paid a thousand dollars to a graphics designer in Oakland who came up with the logo that now changed colors and this is by the way this is Boris's legacy of more than 10 years old I found an old jacket but it changed colors and all of this but that same logo is still there so it's a thousand dollars well spent right and even imagining that here 20 years later we're talking about this and it's an open source story and alike we couldn't have imagined right so the way I think about what Mirantis can be is essentially the DNA of being innovative through community this is very important and then being open to the market the market moves and market momentum and the market always tells you what's happening right it always shows you where the next battle is and Mirantis needs to be a company that leads those market momentum and very importantly we are very much an enterprise company so we need to make sure that that innovation is delivered to our customers in the way that they can consume it and consumption models change but the innovation was always always happening right so I don't have an answer as to exactly how we're going to respond to this but this is the playbook that we've applied this is the playbook that actually Docker created right and that's part of Mirantis is Mirantis is proper now and we'll continue playing out this playbook and as we do that we'll choose larger market motions that can move the company of our size and of course we'll create space for then many spot solutions that will be required to make sure our offerings are ideal ideal to what the customers want so that's kind of a high level I don't know if it's an entrepreneur's view or a CEO's view or a founder's view but this is how we're going to approach this and then of course you have to walk the walk and it's execution that actually makes things happen so when I think about the last 20 years that Mirantis has been on this journey the world today is just extremely different from what it's been and the one thing that's been standard and constant for the market and Mirantis is change and Mirantis has been able to be agile and change not only change but lead the change for the customers that are looking to be agile and looking to actually change faster than their competition and I think that's the constant thing that is part of our DNA that will only continue and as change accelerates Mirantis will have to get better at that and this is the one thing that you know I'll promise you know to our employees to our customers is that the way we change the way we stay agile and the way we enable our customers to change faster and be agile this is the constant thing that we will you know continue to be excellent at Alex thank you so much for joining me today and you know of course talk about the history as well as the future of Mirantis thanks for all those great insights and I look forward to chatting with you again soon and I'm pretty sure that we'll be seeing you a lot thank you Neil thank you very much it was wonderful to speak with you and then