 The Cube at OpenStack Summit Atlanta 2014 is brought to you by Brocade. Say goodbye to the status quo and hello to Brocade. And Red Hat. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're live here in Atlanta for the OpenStack Summit. This is The Cube, our flagship program. We go out for the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined by my co-host, Stu Miniman, and also at wikibond.org. And our next guest is Sean Lin, the CEO of MetaCloud. Welcome back to The Cube. We had him on last year. And then, you know, been on The Cube, we raised a B round thanks to them. A lot of thanks to them. Welcome back. Yeah, thanks for having me. Always great to talk to you guys. We always joke because one guy said, hey, I did an interview on The Cube, and I got a B round because of it. I'm like, well, because you used that as a literature, but I do remember our interview last year, and I remember it was very impressive what you guys have done. Give us a quick update, and then we'll go into some of the big things that are happening here for you guys. Sure. You know, client growth, customer growth has been phenomenal lately. We're, it's pretty amazing. We're seeing a lot of pool internationally, a lot of pool in Asia, seeing a lot of pool from the telco space. Our private clouds and our network that we're operating are growing about 10% per month compounded, just as far as instance count. So, as you might recall from our last interview, we deliver OpenStack as a service. We operationalize the whole thing, which allows us to kind of manage, from a code deployment point of view, the whole consumption model end to end. So our clients have gone from, cactus, Diablo, Essex, Folsom, Grizzly, without having to do anything. It's a wildly different model than anything else. It's like an integrated stack, but on the consumption side, you essentially turn key it for them. You turn key the whole thing. We come in in a day or two, we can turn up a private cloud, give you access to your self-service dashboard, it's all OpenStack. That's DevOps customer service. It is, it is. It's managed. We should coin that term. We like to say you get OpenStack without having to get OpenStack, right? You just consume it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, a lot of people have criticized OpenStack in the early days, mainly because you got to be an insider, you got to know which wires to connect, which buttons to push, and that's your advantage. When people just want to have, they want the solution, they want to look under the hood, they want to composite Lego blocks, but they want to be able to just get it in and play with it, versus being like fully inside baseball kind of thing. I don't think that they want to get in and customize the code or tweak it, because look, a lot of these enterprise IT organizations, they're not the special snowflake that everyone kind of acts like they are. They're really what they want, is they want multi-tenancy, they want self-service, they want horizontally scalable block storage, and they want virtualized networking. And if you can deliver that stuff as a service where they get the end result, they get the features, but they don't have to deal with the intricacies, they don't have to get into the Python code, and they want the end result. It's not so much tuning per se, it's more of they have requirements, like certain compliance stuff and existing relationships. That's right. We have SLAs and performance requirements, and we have all that baked into the product. All right, so one of the things Stu and I talked about on our intro this morning was, we're looking for where the meat and the bone is, where the proof points are, because last year was telegraphing, both with your code, you're seeing some use cases, where's the customers, right? So one of the things that was really exciting for you guys was, on stage this morning they highlighted Disney, which you're involved in. Can you give some folks a taste of what was that all about and explain that? Yeah, so that was awesome actually, because Chris Lonnie, he's the nicest guy in the world, he's director of cloud operations for, director of cloud for Disney Corp. And we did that deal, that was an early deal for us. We did it about three years ago, and to have him come out today and say, hey, we've been doing this for MetaCloud, we've been doing it for a long time. That's risk, I mean, you need to say that, that's a huge endorsement. Yeah, it is, it is. And I think they've been a phenomenal partner. Again, I think Chris is a phenomenal guy. The whole Disney organization has just been amazing. We love working with them. All right, so explain to the folks the product now, okay, so it says delivering OpenStack anywhere. What is the core value proposition? Literally just order some OpenStack and we'll drop it on your lab and deploy it. Is there services involved? Is it a service? So we tend to refer to it as SaaS-based OpenStack. It's basically, we're deploying OpenStack plus three and a half years of intellectual property on your bare metal, right? And so as incremental enhancements make their way like, you know, Cep integration, VXLan integration for big data workloads, you know, some of the work we've done with the dashboard, we've integrated graphite with the visuals with the dashboard, we've done a ton of work. And as this, we're doing the innovation and every single private cloud in our network benefits from that innovation. That's really the benefit. You pay a pretty nominal CPU subscription fee on a monthly basis to get it. There's no, you know, there's no licensing, there's no, it's not complex in regard to SKUs. You just kind of get the whole stack. So talk about the company update where you guys are in funding. I know Storm Ventures is a finance of you guys. I read the blog post Brian put out, which was awesome. I retweeted the last night. So give us an update on funding, employee headcount, et cetera. So we're, it's funny. I wasn't actually going to raise a series B until later in the year, but we've had VCs just a tremendous amount of inbound from VCs, raised the round, didn't even have to leave my desk. It was nice. How did that go? Come on, just give me a minute. So you sat back, took a phone call, hey, you want to raise a series B? Yeah, I don't want terms. Frankly, yeah. You'll lay the terms, deal. Okay, fax me the term sheet. We were going to raise at the end of the year and we were getting so much inbound. It felt like, gosh, the market's great. Let's just do it. We got a really strong syndicate, Pelley and Ventures, UMC Capital, SVB, Silicon Valley Bank, just a phenomenal syndicate of new investors and all the existing investors invested in. How much did you guys raise? We raised 15. Nice. And frankly, could have raised more. I mean, there's a lot of demand to invest in what we do. And you guys probably were in good cash position. We are. I mean, the nice thing about a SaaS business, especially one with the amount of operating levers that we have, is you hit this inflection curve, right? I mean, to be frank, if you're running a cloud of 500 nodes and it grows to 5,000, it may be an order of magnitude and subscriptions for us, but it's not an order of magnitude increase in actual effort to operate that thing. So I think investors like investing in a company like that. Yeah, I mean, your revenue goes up at your cost stays relatively flat. Yeah. So how much expansion you guys have in terms of facilities? So it's interesting. I mean, we don't actually have any infrastructure. We're a software platform, right? So we have an on-prem model, which is kind of our flagship product, MetaCloud on-prem, go figure. But we also have a hosted model where we're actually sitting on top of internet apps agile platform. And we can actually make API calls out to internet apps agile platform and allocate more bare metal as the hosted private cloud scales. And it's a real compliment to our on-prem offering. We deliver basically a hybrid solution between the two out of the box. So when you ask about data centers and facilities and stuff like that, it's really our customers data centers, their infrastructure in the on-prem model and internet for the most part in the hosted model. Some great economics. Yeah, yeah, it is. The scales very well. All right, so tell the folks out there what the show's all about here and what you guys are going to plan to do this year. So, you know, it's interesting with the series A, a lot of people asked us, what do you do with money? We said, you know, we're going to invest in sales and marketing. We're going to get the brand out there, build out the brand. I think we're becoming a little more of a household name now. So really I want to invest pretty heavily in product development. We're going to really ramp up the product engineering team, the development, the product development team and go real big there. We want to make sure that when people are paying for a MetaCloud subscription, the innovation is constantly happening and we're pushing that innovation down into the network of private clouds. So every day when you log into your private cloud, there's new cool features there. It's like, hey, great, I have Seth, I have scalable block storage, I have VXLAN, I have, you know, Graphite, I've got all these enhancements, HA and it just showed up and I didn't have to do anything or like I said, our customers, you know, Cactus, Diablo, Essex, Folsom, Grizzly, they didn't have to do anything. They just got it. Sean, can you talk about what it's like to build on the platform that is OpenStack? How do you add value on top of it? How easy is it to work with the tool set that's out there? That's a good question because we try to stay out of OpenStack Core to the extent in which we can. We don't really want to fork. So if you look at RIP, it's mostly additive. The HA work that we've done, you know, it's Corosync, it's Pacemaker, it's a scalable Quorum framework, but it's largely additive. The Seth work is additive, we're integrating with Cinder, we're integrating at the right places from a KVM point of view. If you look at the VXLAN work that we did, it's also additive and we're contributing that work back. So I think we play very nicely with OpenStack. So one of the top conversations on our crowd chat is from, it's got the most votes today, is the whole container discussion with Docker. What's your take on that? I think it's great. I think we need a place for that. I think Docker as a technology is pretty phenomenal. Frankly, we're talking about the extent in which we want to use Docker to incrementally push up software updates for our MetaCloud customers. So, hey, Horizon runs maybe as a Docker container and we can push that out independent of networking updates. So, we're looking at... Why is Docker getting so much buzz? What's helping people to scratch in their heads? Hey, containers have been around, even Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VM, was like, hey, VM, VM's a container. Yeah, I think the new thing is you have containers that can be orchestrated with libvert, right? So it means they get pulled into the larger orchestration stack and they can get treated as first class citizens, so to speak, from an OpenStack orchestration point of view. So it makes workload management a little bit easier. I will say though, I think, namely with big data environments, people tend to say big data and default to containers. And I think KVM sure does do great in Hadoop-based workloads, that's what we say. So I don't think container-based big data analytics is a workload. I don't think big data workloads need to sort of default to Docker or containers. I think KVM offers some advantages over container-based models and we tend to get our clients to try the KVM-based approach first before they just jump right into a container-based approach. Sean, thanks for coming up on theCUBE. We really appreciate having you back on again. I want you to explain to your own words. I'll give you the final word. Explain to the folks out there why this point in time of history is this market so crazy? Why is this technology industry? Why is there so much disruption? What, boil that down. Why is it so important right now? Sure, I think what you've seen is something you guys all realize, and that's the value has been completely ripped out of the bare-metal server. Completely, it's completely moved up-stacked. So it's about delivering the value for the end user, up-stack as high to the end user as possible, and really giving them the leverage of Moore's Law. Really getting them the leverage of server price performance increasing by 50% every two years, empowering the end user. I'm certainly, probably, as all the server vendors scared. So Sean, thanks for sharing that. We're live here in Atlanta, Georgia for the OpenStack Summit. This is theCUBE. We'll be back with our wrap-up after this short break. Thanks, guys.