 In Las Vegas at Amazon Web Services Reinvent Conference, this is SiliconANGLE and Wikibon's theCUBE. It's our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. And our fourth year now hitting the cloud, we've got storage, big data cloud, next will be mobile. We'll get these markets one at a time. And it's always great to have alumni come on, CUBE alumni, Martin Mikos, who's the CEO of Eucalyptus Systems. Welcome back to theCUBE. My co-host on this segment is Stu Miniman from Wikibon. Welcome back to theCUBE. And you've got a prop to show us. So welcome back. Thank you. It's sort of prop. This is a functioning private cloud, an AWS compatible cloud in a backpack. 12 core power, 20 gigs of storage, battery power for 10 hours. So when we talk about private clouds, this is what you can do today. So this is cloud mobility then, right? This is, yes, mobile and cloud are the big new trends. So we combined them. We got to get a picture of this. I want to get a picture of this. Do you need another picture? We have a private cloud on theCUBE. That's a record. So, little bit. I love that. Yeah, this is good. This is good. Good stuff. Okay, so obviously compact. So take us through that. What's going on with that? So tell us, tell us about the product. So when you build private clouds, it's very important that they are easy to use and easy to operate. And we show that by building it into a backpack so that we, you can operate a cloud without any sus admin with no extra work, no extra labor. You have everything in here. It's very compact, very easy to use. So Martin, at Amazon, of course, is the big leader in public cloud. And it was kind of interesting, we saw Andy this morning, kind of bashed a little bit on private cloud and talked about, here's all the benefits of public cloud, here's private cloud. But then when he walked through the use cases, hybrid cloud is two of the six. And you guys have been working with Amazon for a long time. So can you give us the update, your take on what you're seeing about that public versus private dynamic? Every economic system has shown that over time you have a division between owning and renting. And we don't know yet where the percentages will fall, but we do know that they will always be on-prem computing, always be public computing. And what we make sure is that we have the same API on-premise as you have in the public cloud. And that's why we are AWS compatible. Okay, so do you have any metrics or decision points that you help customers to decide what goes on-prem versus off-prem? Because once again, Andy this morning talked about the traditional players think that three quarters of the business is going to stay on-prem, but Amazon thinks it's more like 10% is going to stay on-prem. Where do you see that and how do you help customers justify when to put something on-prem versus off-prem? It's easier than that. You start using AWS, you start using Eucalyptus, you have both, and you grow them to the degree it makes sense. But you don't have to know the answer upfront because it's impossible to know. You have different reasons for going to the public cloud and going on-prem. Data gravity, control, compliance, performance, cost, margins, many things that affect it. And if you think you know ahead of time, then you're probably wrong. But it's very easy to get going both on-prem with Eucalyptus and on the public cloud with AWS. And because the API is the same, you can move workloads at any point between the two. So talk about the company positioning now. You guys have been in the business for a long time. What's changed right now? What are you guys focusing on? Honestly, Private Cloud is one here and they're actually demonstrating it live here. What's the positioning right now for your company? Share with the folks where you've come from and where you are right now. Right, we've always had the same positioning for this company. We believe that public cloud is innovating a new way of computing. AWS is the dominant player there. We are enabling that same power on-premise inside your firewall on your own servers. So that's why we're building an open source AWS compatible cloud platform. And that ultimately addresses the big thing that we talk about on theCUBE, certainly on the enterprise side, the lock-in feature. People are kind of nervous. They think, okay, they like it. We have a lot of people saying Amazon's great and it is good. We use it for some of our app development but large enterprises don't want lock-in. So when you hear that term kicked around, some are using it as a fud with Amazon. How do you talk to customers and saying, what is lock-in? Is it the data? Is it the applications? It's kind of a moving train lock-in, that term. So what is your view on lock-in? And obviously open source helps everything there but in general, how do you talk to the enterprises about lock-in? I think we provide the ultimate relief from lock-in because we're using the industry standard API that anybody can use. We deliver all our software as open source code so anybody can use it. They don't have to be our customers. I don't know how you can go further on the line of reducing lock-in. So people can use the same API. They don't have to be customers of ours. It's fine if they are but they have no locking into us or to any vendor when they use Eucalyptus. So Martin, if you talk about kind of application mobility you can do public cloud, you can do private cloud. One of the things I found interesting, you're also, from what I've talked to you some of your folks about, you're helping a lot of customers that are moving from VMware to KVM. Can you talk a little bit about that dynamic and what you're seeing? True. So when we talk about lock-in, of course, VMware is a company that people are very much locked into and if they deploy a Eucalyptus cloud we can support the existing VMware environment and we can support KVM. And you can start moving workloads and you can even move machines from one to the other. So we allow people to have the flexibility to decide exactly how much VMware environment they have and how much they have open source, non-lock-in environment. Yeah, I guess to poke at that a little bit. I mean, VMware, you say they're lock-in it's really, there's licenses, they have workloads. I mean, they're not doing anything special to the workloads. It's not like I have to recreate my workload to work on VMware. It's comfortable for most of the enterprise customers. They like VMware and what they're doing. Is it really a cost play that you're doing? Are customers really saying I'm locked into VMware or is it a cost savings that's helping them to move there? So if we start from where we are today, VMware has an amazing set of products and people are very happy with that for traditional enterprise workloads and they may never move. What we're enabling customers to do is move from there into the cloud world and run cloud workloads on the public cloud and on the private cloud and without being beholden to a VMware or anybody else. So I got to ask you about some questions we had on our crowd chat from Caroline. She says, I want to get your perspective on this. Anyone talking about, this is the question, anyone talking at AWS reinvent about getting data back from AWS should I want to leave the service? So what's your perspective on that? Is the data, how does the data model fit? Is that something that you've heard about? You know, can you talk about that? Is that something that you can address with that question? Well, I think data will always be vital for all IT environments and where you put it determines what you end up doing with it. So you put data on the public cloud if you're fine keeping it there. You keep it on premise if that's important to you and then you let compute power go close to the data. So you have what we call data gravity. If you have the data in one place and you're wondering whether you should remove it then maybe you should if it's a worry for you. But you can always move it back again. So moving in there, okay, so that's fair. So also the other top conversation we've been here I want to get your perspective on is security. You've seen, and this has been some good sessions here on security. What's your take on the state of security relative to the cloud from your view? You've seen this movie from the beginning and living it right now in a cutting edge. Where are we with security? Well, first of all, I would say it's a very real concern for people to have. So they should be focused on security and that's a good behavior among customers. But I do believe that we have already achieved a high level of security, generally speaking, in cloud offerings. So we don't believe that one or the other environment is more or less secure. All of them are secure. And the security breaches that anybody has are typically originating in human beings and many times in the human beings who are inside your own organization. So it means that security at the end of the day is about discipline and having an organization that behaves well to you. Martin, when you talk about kind of lock-in and data portability, a lot of people have said that Amazon's a lock-in. So Amazon's not open source, they might have the APIs that are pretty much standard for the industry, but right now you're focused solely on AWS. Are you looking at other clouds that you could connect with via your APIs or is it an Amazon world, Amazon take all in your opinion? Well, our mission is to make sure that there's an on-premise environment that can connect with the leading public clouds. Today there's just Amazon and nobody else is leading. When the day comes that somebody else becomes a leading public cloud provider, yes, we will support such an API. But right now we have our hands full serving customers who run on Amazon and Eucalyptus. We believe we will do it forever probably. So it's not like it's changing there, but there could be some other vendor becoming the second big public cloud vendor we would then support the API. Okay, so let's spitball on that a little bit. So it'd be easy if say Google GCE or Microsoft Azure step up and really go toe-to-toe with Amazon, but what's your take on OpenStack? Because there's a whole ecosystem building up for OpenStack and OpenStack, you guys have your tagline as kind of open source AWS. So it would seem that OpenStack might be a good fit for what you're doing. What's your take? I think OpenStack has a very different philosophy from ours. We focus on being the best, bringing the power of the cloud into your own environment, being the best complement to the public clouds. OpenStack is trying to define a new API. OpenStack is trying to compete with Amazon. We do neither of those. And OpenStack has based on who, on the vendors who participate is a project that is everything for everybody. They're embracing every feature, every new project, every new roadmap direction you could take. That's not us. We're focused on one thing that we do very, very well. And therefore it's fun to compare OpenStack and Eucalyptus and CloudStack, but at the end of the day, the differences in philosophy will take us to different parts in the market. And I think we've found our market which grows very fast, is very attractive to us, and we don't really mind what happens elsewhere. You're laser focused on your plan, which is open source to the enterprises who want Amazon-like functionality on-premise. That's pretty much- And who want a cloud that really works, that doesn't require a whole army to keep it up and running. Yeah, so you basically interface into Amazon, effectively, and allow these guys to build their own clouds, pretty much, like that. We do that. We have it in the backpack. What else do you see? Since you're up here, because you're such a luminary and open source veteran, I got to ask you the open source vision. It's a little bit off subject than the private cloud is. Open source is growing and it's so mature now. We just, you know, it's just so awesome to see it grow so great. What's the next evolution in open source? How do you see these communities and projects growing? What's the next gen of open source look like? What's that next 20 mile journey in the open source communities? I mean, obviously everyone knows it's table stakes, but you're starting to see people play in open source, still have their differentiated software product, and you get the pure open source players, like say Hortonworks, and you're an investor in Cloudera. That's just one small example in the Apache stuff, but in general, what's your vision of open source? Is it going in the right direction or not? Or what's your take on that? I think it is going in the right direction. I think open source has shown that it's a superior way of developing and deploying software, and over time it produces more secure, more stable software than any other method. The difference we are now seeing is that if I compare back to 10 years ago when I ran MySQL, it was all about the source code back then. I believe now it's mostly about the APIs. The source code better be open, but it's also about the APIs so that you can combine different parts of the software stack. We used to have just one database inside an application. Today in a website you have MySQL, MongoDB, Hadoop. You can have another Cassandra, a few other databases in one single application, and dealing with the APIs there is becoming as important as dealing with the source code. It's in the assessments, it's systems programming at a large scale. These new applications are dealing with multiple issues. I'm using Mongo for this. I use Hadoop for that. I use HBase here. So there's a variety of different programming techniques. So that's what you're kind of saying is that there's no one use case anymore. There's more kind of buffet of open source code. Sort of, but I meant that when we had the attention on the source code, now you must have attention on integrating software. We talk about continuous integration, continuous delivery. And the method of producing great software is changing. And that's why you have companies like GitHub and Atlassian who are serving this new group of developers who develop on the agile method very quickly. They combine products very quickly and things therefore move faster. Even though the human brain moves no faster than 50,000 years ago, but software development still moves faster. So that's an accomplishment that our fingers can produce code faster, although our brains are the same old slow that we've always had. Well, 1,000 ants can move a mountain, right? So I asked a young developer in comment, it was funny because I'm in my late 40s so I remember the early days of downloading patches. He goes, what, why would anyone want to load Linux? So his whole mindset was load software. Right. Why not? So that's the software stacks. So that's changing the game. The engines are moving. And are they going in the right direction? Does that create, how do you have that kind of philosophy of integrated stacks without lock-in? What's, is it a balance? Is this a balance? At some point you need functionality. Well, let's be clear on lock-in. Every leading company becomes greedy and will drive for lock-in. There's nobody that can avoid it. Greed infests every successful business. And it's sort of, it's part of the game. So to really have, They call it differentiation. Right. That's what we call it. But to really have avoidance of lock-in, you must stick to open source, open APIs, and open data. Then you have complete avoidance, but not many are ready to commit to it. But look at those three. Source code, APIs, and data, and make them open and you have no lock-in. So open source is not about free. It's about freedom as was said on the cube once. So step back down the private cloud. So what needs to happen for you guys to be successful? Obviously the backpack of the private cloud here is amazing. What's going to be your driver right now in the enterprise? I think Eucalyptus is very successful. But of course we strive for world domination. And we have built an amazing product that now can serve anybody who needs an AWS compatible cloud. It's interesting, in your history, you've been successful, it's like three-peating. It's like you're now on your third leg of the journey, right? Early days. Let's not go there, but I have been unsuccessful as well. Hey, can't win back-to-back championships every year. Right, yes. Stu, did you have a question? So I was just building on the ecosystem. You said you're the board of directors of a couple of companies. You know, we're here at AWS. You know, what do you see as kind of the big opportunities for startups, you know? Would you recommend that everybody be all in on Amazon? We talked about open source. What advice are you giving to entrepreneurs in this space? Well, I would start by saying that the best entrepreneurs don't listen to advice from people like me. They just do. But I do believe that the new way of developing and deploying software is changing the world and building tools and mechanisms for it. Like, take code envy, a really innovative startup that provides you a development environment online. That's an example of a very creative way of approaching a very old problem in a new way. Okay, great. Martin, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. We wish you the best of continued success with the private cloud. Again, at RecordablyCube, we have a functional private cloud actually on theCUBE. Great innovation there. You're a legend, open source legend. Again, thanks for your perspective. Appreciate you coming on, taking the time. We are live in Las Vegas on the ground floor, show floor of Amazon, re-invent conference, all developers, all cloud. A lot of great action here. Stay with us for our next guest after this short break.