 Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage here in Seattle, Washington for the Avis Marketplace Seller Conference, part of the APN partner network merging with the marketplace to form the Amazon Partner Organization. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Walter Wall coverage today. Christian Gorkash, who is the VP of Alliance is at KONG Inc. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. Thank you John, really glad to be here. Exactly, yeah, it's awesome. So KONG, we've been following you guys for a while, so DockerKONG, you've been part of our CUBE conversation, also part of our startup showcase, fast-growing startup, working on stuff that everyone loves, APIs, I mean APIs are so popular now that they're now a security concern, right? So like, guess what, they're everywhere. I won't say API sprawl, but APIs are the connections and that are, is the web, that is the cloud. Okay, now with cloud native developers who are now on the front lines, have taken over IT, everyone knows DevOps, DevSecOps is now the new IT, and it's the developers. Security and data, they're below, they're the new ops. So this is where microservices come in, open source, service meshes, new automation is coming down the pike that's super valuable to businesses as they look at cloud native architecture. What are you guys doing in there? Take a minute to explain KONG's value proposition, the hot products, and then why you're here. Yeah, so I joined KONG an hour or three years ago. We were still just reaching our 100 employees mark, which is a very important very startup, but even back then, KONG was relatively well-known in industry, so we have one of the most, the most popular open source project in API gateway area, so KONG API gateway. We crossed now 300 million downloads. Even more important is just the scale at which the product's being used. So between our open source community and enterprise customers, we are now crossing 11 trillion transactions per month. Let's just give you a comparison on this 18, 19 times more than Netflix per month. So for any company that has a technology operated at scale, you need to hit a few things out of the park. As he mentioned, cloud native developers, they want simplicity, they want automation. They also want performance and scale and security, which are all critical to how KONG starts as an open source project. Now, of course, we have the whole suite of enterprise products, we also have our service mesh offering, as well as our cloud offerings. Yeah, and this is how open source is doing it now. Obviously, I still remember, I still tell the story to the young startups. Hey, there was proprietary software when I was in college. Open source is now everything. Now you've got cloud scale, so the dynamic between open source, which has become the software industry, open source success doesn't mean it's game over. It's the beginning, the commercialization that you guys have gone through is super important. Trillions of transactions, now you have enterprises working with you. What's the big advantage of the seller relationship that you have with Amazon? Why are customers using it? What are they buying it for? Give the pitch of KONG for the marketplace customer. Yeah, it's actually, we are relatively new in AWS marketplace. So our first transaction that we ever done was actually in July in 2021. So we're just over a year on that journey. When I look at what Chris Groos talked today, he was talking about, hey, just publishing a marketplace is not enough. You need to understand what's your value proposition. You need to make sure your operations are ready, your sales is ready, everything is set. And we kind of did this for the first year and a half. We spent a lot of time improving our integration with AWS overall. All the first party services are relevant to KONG. We also understood, well, what does it take to kind of find your value proposition? We have like three specific sales place. And when we launch our flagship product with KONG Connect Enterprise and got our first transaction, that was great milestone for a Star Black KONG. But then what we've seen is just that work that we've done before really paid off. I mean, right now- Like what, we'll give you an example. Yeah, so we are focusing on, as measure three sales place, one is we are focusing specific on helping customers who are modernizing and their application going to the cloud. And you have a lot of these lift and shift and re-architects and modernize, but most of the attention is on the workloads. What about the connections? You know, so a monolith application had to authenticate all the users, understand where's the network and so on. When you build those, when you now decouple this, it built like 10, 100, 1000 microservices, you don't want to repeat this for every microservice. So that's where KONG brings the whole suite from service mesh to the API gateway to help manage the journey and really support these environments. And we spend a lot of time to just find to that message so that customers understood, how can we help them on their journey? Beyond what, for instance, cloud native or AWS API gateway offers them. So we can really have them from day one on a journey and accelerate and use the complexity. It's a no-brainer for a customer or a buyer to come into the marketplace and say, click, I'm going to buy some data analytics services. I'm going to buy a gateway through KONG. But when they start getting into these microservices, this automation opportunity, there's more behind the curtain for them with KONG. So I have to ask you with the keynote we heard from Chris, the leader of the marketplace now, he said that he wants the ISVs to be more native in the cloud. That probably resonates with you, you guys. Well, with KONG is relatively simple because we were built as cloud native, you know? So very briefly, the whole story of KONG was, this was before John, our founders actually running the very popular API exchange, called Mesh Shape. And they had to build their own gateway just to handle the scale and was built on cloud native technologies. And then when everybody's calling you, what are you using to running this? Are you using ITG or using something else? No, we built ourselves. Oh, how can we get our hands on it? That's how KONG actually came to us. And that's how the big winners usually happen too. They started to build their own, solve their own problem because it's a big scale problem. No one's had that problem. Yeah, and what we have seen, especially what was very, you know, through the pandemic, what we have seen, and it's interesting, you know, being in the start of the pandemic, it's like, well, will the light just shut down or what are we doing, you know? But actually what we have seen, customers prioritize the new business capability. For instance, you have large current companies that overnight they had to understand where the assets are, or banks who are like 45 days of, you know, approving process for the loans, they need to reduce it for a day or two. And they're adding more developers too. Exactly. To build the modern applications so they need to have that infrastructure as code aspect. Correct. Yeah, I need to, like you have, you know, I don't think that many customers still have waterfall cycles, but that they have pretty long developers, development cycles, and now you need to, you know, do this multiple times a day. It's interesting, we talked to a lot of cloud architects in CIO, CSOS, and you know, the executives, just hire more developers, take that hill, build it, just build a new app. It's not that easy, boss. So when the cloud architect says, we have to be fully operationally ready with cloud native and infrastructure as code. So with that, you're seeing a lot more enterprises come in now that are more savvy, getting better, we're seeing Kubernetes more and more, you're seeing containerization, you're seeing that cloud native enterprise acceptance. What does that mean for you guys in the marketplace as you look at the value proposition? How are you guys working with the marketplace today and where do you see customers buying in the future? Yeah, so we, as mentioned, you know, we are now a year into that journey. We already seen tremendous benefits just in terms of reducing the friction. You know, the whole procurement, you know, you come as a startup with some of the largest companies in the world. They used to buy five, 10 billion in software and they have all these processes and you're like, well, but we only have like two people in finance. Sorry, how can you do that? And where marketplace can really helps us is, you know, improve this experience both sides. Because they understand, like, we a fast-moving company, they want us because of our speed and innovation, that we're product strong. Yeah, they don't want us to get bogged down in all these procurement processes either. And so that's the first benefit. We also are working very hard to make sure that customers can provision KONG in AWS and automate across the board. So essentially reducing their time to value dramatically. And another thing that we found tremendously beneficial for us as a startup is the whole concept of a standard marketplace contract. So instead of us coming with our little MSA or come like 50-page MSA from companies, we now have a middle ground. So we can just agree, you know, there's some differences or some specifics to KONG software and it's tremendously reduced cost on both sides. Great for you guys, great for the buyers. You get deployed services. They're not just buying, they're managing and deploying. Yeah. Exactly. Quick final question, put a plug in for the company. What are you working on now? What's the big news? What's the KONG update? Well, that's an interesting part because I can't tell you because next week we have our KONG summit in San Francisco. The cube is not there. So 28, 29th, I think we're going to fix that in the future. But anyway, this is our first time after pandemic to do this in person. We have a number of very exciting announcements on our KONG products, as well as you may hear some news about our AWS partnership. We like KONG. We believe that DevOps has happened. DevSecOps, whatever you want to call it. DevOps is now the developers. They're in the front lines. They're in the CI CD pipeline. They're shifting left. That's the new, they took over IT. That's what DevOps does. It's not a title. Now you have security and data ops behind the scenes. That's going to be middleware that's going to have tons of microservices. So more action coming. All API based. Exactly. The more complexity we can take away from that, the better we, you know, the whole community. You've spent the time to come on theCUBE here at the AWS Marketplace Seller Conference. What do you think about the APN merging with the marketplace, formed the APO, the Amazon Partner Organization? Thumbs up, thumbs down, what's your verdict? It's excellent. We have a great friend at APN, a great friend at AWS Marketplace. Now both of them work together. We just think it's fantastic. Make it easier. Yes. Okay, CUBE coverage here in Seattle. I'm John Furrier, APN Marketplace Together. APO is the new organization making it easier. Of course we got all the coverage here. Thanks for watching.