 Hey, welcome back everyone to SuperCloud 22. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, we're here all day talking about the future of cloud, where it's all going, making it super, multi-clouds around the corner and public cloud is winning. Got the private cloud on premise and edge. Got a great guest here, Baskar Gorty, CEO of Platform 9, just on the panel on Kubernetes and Enable or Blocker. Welcome back, great to have you on. Good to see you again. So Kubernetes is a Blocker enabled, with a question mark I put on that panel, was really to discuss the role of Kubernetes. Now, great conversation, operations has impacted, but the thing about what you guys are doing at Platform 9 is your role there as CEO and the company's position, kind of like the world spun into the direction of Platform 9 while you're at the helm. Right, absolutely. In fact, things are moving very well and since they came to us, it was an insight to call ourselves the platform company eight years ago, right? So absolutely, whether you are doing it in public clouds or private clouds, you know, the application world is moving very fast in trying to become digital and cloud native. There are many options for you to run the infrastructure. The biggest blocking factor now is having a unified platform and that's what we've come into. Baskar, we were talking before we came on stage here about your background and we were going to talk about the glory days in 2000, 2001, when the first ASPs, the application service providers came out, kind of a SAS vibe, but that was kind of all kind of cloud-like. It wasn't. And web services started then too, so you saw that whole growth. Now fast forward, 20 years later, 22 years later, where we are now. When you look back then to here and all the different cycles. In fact, as we were talking offline, I was in one of those ASPs in the year 2000 where it was a novel concept of saying we are providing a software and a capability as a service, right? You sign up and start using it. I think a lot has changed since then. The tooling, the tools, the technology has really skyrocketed. The app development environment has really taken off exceptionally well. There are many, many choices of infrastructure now, right? So I think things are in a way the same, but also extremely different. But more importantly, now for any company, regardless of size, to be a digital native, to become a digital company is extremely mission critical. It's no longer a nice to have. Everybody's in the journey somewhere. Everyone is going digital transformation here, even on a so-called downturn, recession that's upcoming, deflation's here. It's interesting. This is the first downturn in the history of the world where the hyperscale clouds have been pumping on all cylinders as an economic input. If you look at the tech trends, GDP's down, but not tech, because the pandemic showed everyone digital transformation is here and more spend and more growth is coming, even in tech. So this is a unique factor, which proves that that digital transformation is happening and every company will need a super cloud. Everyone, every company, regardless of size, regardless of location, has to become modernized infrastructure. And modernizing infrastructure is not just some new servers and new application tools. It's your approach, how you're serving your customers, how you're bringing agility in your organization. I think that is becoming a necessity for every enterprise to survive. I want to get your thoughts on super cloud because one of the things Dave Vellante and I want to do with super cloud and calling it that I personally, and I know Dave as well, he can speak for himself, we didn't like multi-cloud. I mean, not because Amazon said, don't call things multi-cloud. It just didn't feel right. I mean, everyone has multiple clouds by default. If you're running productivity software, you have Azure and Office 365, but it wasn't truly distributed. It wasn't truly decentralized. It wasn't truly cloud enabled. It felt like they're not ready for a market yet, yet public clouds booming on premise, private cloud and edge is much more dynamic, more real. Yeah, I think the reason why we think super cloud is a better term than multi-cloud. Multi-cloud are more than one cloud, but they're disconnected. You have a productivity cloud. You have a sales force cloud. You may have, everyone has an internal cloud, right? But they're not connected. So you can say, okay, it's more than one cloud. So it's multi-cloud. But super cloud is where you are actually trying to look at this holistically, whether it is on-prem, whether it is public, whether it's at the edge, it's a store, at the branch. You are looking at this as one unit. And that's where we see the term super cloud is more applicable. Because what are the qualities that you require if you're in a super cloud, right? You need choice of infrastructure. But at the same time, you need a single pane or a single platform for you to build your innovations on, regardless of which cloud you're doing it on, right? So I think super cloud is actually a more tightly integrated, orchestrated management philosophy, we think. So let's get into some of the super cloud-type trends that we've been reporting on. Again, the purpose of this event is to get the conversations flowing with the influencers like yourselves who are running companies and building products on the builders. Amazon and Azure are doing extremely well. Google's coming up in third. Cloud works in public cloud. We see the use cases, on-premises use cases. Kubernetes has been an interesting phenomenon because it's become from the developer side a little bit. But a lot of ops people love Kubernetes. It's really more of an ops thing. You mentioned OpenStack earlier. Kubernetes kind of came out of that OpenStack. We need an orchestration. And then containers had a good shot with Docker. They repivoted the company. Now they're all in an open source. So you've got containers booming. And Kubernetes has a new layer there. What's the take on that? What does that really mean? Is that a new de facto enabler? It is here. It's for here for sure. Every enterprise somewhere else in the journey is going on. And most companies are 70 plus percent of them have one, two, three container-based, Kubernetes-based applications now being rolled out. So it's very much here. It is in production at scale by many customers. And the beauty of it is, yes, open source, but the biggest gating factor is the skill set. And that's where we have a phenomenal engineering team. So it's one thing to buy a tool. And just to be clear, you're a managed service for Kubernetes. We provide a software platform for cloud acceleration as a service. And it can run anywhere. It can run in public, private. We have customers who do it in truly multi-cloud environments. It runs on the edge. It runs in stores, there are thousands of stores in the retailer. So we provide that. And also, for specific segments where data sovereignty and data residency are key regulatory reasons, we also run on-prem as an air gap version. Can you give an example on how you guys are deploying your platform to enable a super cloud experience for your customer? Right, so I'll give you two different examples. One is a very large networking company, public networking company. They have hundreds of products, hundreds of R&D teams that are building different, different products. And if you look at a few years back, each one was doing it on a different platform, but they really needed to bring the agility. And they worked with us now over three years where we are their build test dev platform where all their products are built on, right? And it has dramatically increased their agility to release new products. Number two, it actually is a light-sourced operation. In fact, the customer says, like a Maytag service person, because we provide it as a service and it barely takes one or two people to maintain it for them. So it's kind of like an SRE vibe, one person managing a large- 4,000 engineers building infrastructure. And their tools, whatever they want to do. They're using whatever app development tools they use, but they use our platform as a service. And what benefits are they seeing? Are they seeing speed? Speed, definitely. Definitely they're speeding speed. Uniformity, because now they're building able to build. So their customers who are using product A and product B are seeing a similar set of tools that are being used. So a big problem that's coming out of this super cloud event that we're seeing, and we've heard it all year, ops and security teams, because they're kind of two part of one team, but ops and security specifically, need to catch up speed-wise. Are you delivering that value to ops and security? Right, so we work with ops and security teams and infrastructure teams, and we layer on top of that. We're like a platform team. If you think about it, depending on where you have data centers, where you have infrastructure, you'll have multiple teams, okay? But you need a unified platform. Who's your buyer? Our buyer is usually the product divisions of companies that are looking at, or the CTO would be a buyer for us functionally, CIO definitely. So it's somewhere in the DevOps to infrastructure, but the ideal one we are beginning to see now, many large corporations are really looking at it as a platform, and saying we have a platform group on which any app can be developed, and it is run on any infrastructure. So the platform engineering teams. So you were in just two sides of that coin. You've got the dev side, and the infrastructure side. Another customer, I'll give you an example, which I would say is kind of the edge of the store. So they have thousands of stores. Retail. Retail, food retailer, right? They have thousands of stores that are on the globe, 50,000, 60,000, and they really want to enhance the customer experience that happens when you either order the product or go into the store and pick up your product or buy, or browse, or sit there. They have applications that were written in the 90s, and then they have very modern AIML applications today. They want something that will not have to send an IT person to install a rack in the store, or they can't move everything to the cloud, because the store operations have to be local. The menu changes based on- It's a classic edge. It's a classic edge, right? They can't send IT people to go install racks or servers. Then they can't sell software people to go install the software. And any change you want to do that, you know, truck rolls. So they've been working with us where all they do is they ship, depending on the size of the store, one or two or three little servers with instructions that- You see little servers, like, how big? One, like a- Pigeon box. Pigeon box, yeah. Pigeon box, right. And all the person in the store has to do, like what you and I do at home and we get a router, is connect the power, connect the internet, and turn the switch on. And from there, we pick it up. Yeah. We provide the operating system, everything, and then the applications are put on it. And so that dramatically brings the velocity for them. They manage thousands of them. Two plug and play. Two plug and play. Thousands of stores. They manage it centrally. We do it for them, right? So that's another example where on the edge, then we have some customers who have both a large private presence and one of the public clouds, okay? But they want to have the same platform layer of orchestration and management that they can use regardless of the location. So you guys got some success, congratulations. Got some traction there, that's awesome. The question I want to ask you is that come up is, what is truly cloud-native? Because there's lift and shift of the cloud. That's not cloud-native. Then there's cloud-native. Cloud-native seems to be the driver for the super cloud. How do you talk to customers? How do you explain when someone says, what's cloud-native, what isn't cloud-native? Right, look, I think, first of all, the best place to look at what is the definition and what are the attributes and characteristics of what is truly a cloud-native is CNCF Foundation. And I think it's very well documented, very well- Two con, of course, the droid's coming up. So it's already there, right? So we follow that very closely, right? I think just lifting and shifting your 20-year-old application onto a data center somewhere is not cloud-native, okay? You can't port to cloud-native. You have to rewrite and redevelop your application and business logic using modern tools, hopefully more open source, and I think that's what cloud-native is. And we are seeing a lot of our customers in that journey. Now, everybody wants to be cloud-native, but it's not that easy, okay? Because I think it's, first of all, skill set is very important, uniformity of tools that there's so many tools. There are thousands and thousands of tools. You could spend your time figuring out which tool to use, okay? So I think the complexity is there, but the business benefits of agility and uniformity and customer experience are truly being done. I'll give you an example. I don't know how cloud-native they are, right? And they're not a customer of ours. But you order pizzas, you do, right? If you just watch the pizza industry, how Domino's actually increased their share and mind share and wallet share was not because they were making better pizzas or not. I don't know anything about that, but the whole experience of how you order, how you watch, what's happening, how it's delivered, they were the pioneer in it. To me, those are the kinds of customer experiences that cloud-native can provide. Being agility and having that flow through the application changes what the expectations are for the customer. The customer's expectations change, right? Once you get used to a better customer experience, you will not, that's got to wrap it up. I want to just get your perspective. Again, one of the benefits of chatting with you here and having you a part of the SuperCloud 22 is you've seen many cycles. You have a lot of insights. I want to ask you, given your career, where you've been and what you've done and now the CEO of Platform 9, how would you compare what's happening now with other inflection points in the industry? You've been, again, you've been an entrepreneur, you sold your company to Oracle, you've been seeing the big companies, you've seen the different waves. What's going on right now? Put it into context. This moment in time around SuperCloud. Sure, I think, as you said, a lot of battle scars being an ASP, being in a real-time software company, being in large enterprise software houses and a transformation. I've been on the app side. I did the infrastructure and then tried to build our own platforms. I've gone through all of this myself with a lot of lessons learned in there. I think this is an event which is happening now for companies to become cloud-native and digitalized. If I were to look back and look at some parallels of the tsunami that's going on, is a couple of parallels come to me. One is, think of it, which was forced on us like Y2K, everybody around the world had to have a plan, a strategy, and an execution for Y2K. I would say the next big thing was e-commerce. I think e-commerce has been pervasive, right, across all industries. And disruptive. And disruptive, extremely disruptive. If you did not adapt and adapt and accelerate your e-commerce initiative, you were, it was an existence question. I think we are at that pivotal moment now. In companies trying to become digital and cloud-native, that is what I see happening. I think that e-commerce is interesting, and I think just to riff with you on that is that it's disrupting and refactoring the business models. I think that is something that's coming out of this, is that it's not just completely changing the game, it's just changing how you operate. How you think and how you operate. See, if you think about the early days of e-commerce, just putting up a shopping cart didn't make you an e-commerce or an e-retailer or an e-customer, right? So I think it's the same thing now, is I think this is a fundamental shift on how you're thinking about your business. How are you going to operate? How are you going to service your customers? I think it requires that just lift and shift is not going to work. That's great. Thank you for coming on, spending the time to come in and share with our community and being part of SuperCloud 22. We really appreciate it. We're going to keep this open. We're going to keep this conversation going even after the event to open up and look at the structural changes happening now and continue to look at it in the open, in the community, and we're going to keep this going for a long, long time as we get answers to the problems that customers are looking for with Cloud Cloud Computing. I'm John Furrier with SuperCloud 22 in theCUBE. Thanks for watching.