 Hello everyone, welcome to this special CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We are not in the Palo Alto studio. We are in Napa Valley for a special CUBE event and we have a great CUBE alumni guest remoting in from Seattle, Napa Seattle, Ben Kat Krishnamachari, CEO and co-founder of Monty Cloud CUBE alumni. Ben Kat, welcome back to theCUBE, great to see you. It is great to see you again, John. Thank you for taking time. So we've had previous conversations on theCUBE because we're advanced technology partner with AWS and startup showcases going on again. We're back for a revisit there for a special session. We're going to go into deep dive on Monty Cloud. You've had tremendous success with very large enterprises with your product. Congratulations. And you're just emerging really with the rapid growth. Take a minute to explain for the viewers who's Monty Cloud and what's going on. Sure, thank John. So we are an autonomous cloud operations company. Like you called, we're also an advanced technology partner a public sector partner and an Amazon certified cloud management partner. What we do is we help IT teams simplify their cloud operations without platform or customers without adding any specialized cloud skills or adding any multiple point tools. They can still enable their teams to provision, manage, operate the cloud and reduce the ongoing cloud operations cost by 70%. That's what we do for our customers. You guys are solving a real problem that's emerging very quickly. It's actually more of an opportunity less of a problem but needs a problem if you don't address it. And that is the cloud migration is going the next level. Meaning people are re-platforming to the cloud with cloud operations, but now they're starting to leverage the cloud services and there's more and more coming on every day. People with serverless is doing the impacting microservices. Just everything is changing fast and people are refactoring their businesses with cloud services. This is where it starts to get into what they call day two operations where you've got to be day one every day and create innovation, but now you've got this day two where reliability, security, new things have to be nailed down and secured and stabilized. And so this is a big trend. You guys have a solution here. Could you take a minute and talk about the specific problem that you see customers and how you guys solve them? Sure thing. So customers like you rightly say, John, they're rapidly adopting the cloud. And what we are seeing here is there is a challenge of not just onboarding and consistent provisioning, which they perform on the metaphorical day one. They are also burdened with multiple operations, like you called out, right? Keeping the security of your application high, compliance, maintaining visibility into who's using what, why it's some things are costing more or sometimes they're not costing appropriately, right? Having a position on all of that is now an increasing burden and a responsibility on the IT team. And the IT teams are increasingly being held accountable to the business objectives because business objectives are getting closely tied with cloud and digital transformation. That's the area we help and solve. So I want to ask you one of the questions that's come up a lot. And I don't need to put you in the spot here Ben Kepp, but I think it's important to address. A lot of people say, hey, I'm buying into this direction. I just don't have the staff. My IT guys can't be trained fast enough. I got them on a reskilling track. I got to find some talent. This is becoming not just how to provision and stand up applications to put them in the cloud and grow them. Talent, the talent equation. Can you talk about how you see that problem being solved and what are you guys doing to help there? Yeah, that's a great question. I might skip some things to go directly to some of the value we add, right? Without platform, imagine adding a highly skilled cloud solutions architect in under 10 minutes to your teams. That's one of the value of our platform. Customers are trying to hire more and more cloud solution architects. They're trying to upskill their own team members so that they can enable rest of the company to consume the cloud safely. Which means a cloud solution, the architect role is to not only build the safe building blocks that others can reuse, but also put governance guidelines and drive for accountability so that developers can move fast. That's one of the areas customers are struggling to hire and upskill. With our platform, within 10 minutes, you can turn on autonomous cloud solution architect, which comes and helps you fast track provisioning. Customers can deploy any kind of application pattern from networking to data services to server-based or container-based applications. We have pre-built, well-architected solutions in the platform that acts like your own cloud solution architect. We address that skill gap immediately with our platform on the day one aspect of things. Yeah, I love it. It's like the old joke, AI bots are the automating things. You're essentially automating key specialized roles that traditionally were expensive. I mean, hard to find talent at that level. So I think that's a major wave coming. And I think you guys are on top of it. So definitely want to hear more about that. I do want to get your thoughts while I have you here about cloud operations, day one operations, day two operations. Benke, define for me what you consider day one operations. Yeah, day one operations involve helping your teams consume the cloud and fast track your digital transformation with an ability to have developers move fast, right? That's kind of day one, right? The top-down leadership decides, let's go to the cloud. They have to enable teams to consume it and safely. That is an area we help. One typical thing we've learned in our conversation with customers, John, is this, right? It's very expensive to let teams provision like the wild, wild west, right? And then later pullback control, later drive for accountability. Oftentimes we see that customers end up in this part where they wonder why this is costing them so much more than they originally thought. A lot of that is because consuming the cloud from day one itself has to be thought through, has to have well-architected principles in mind. So we help in that area. We call this shifting left, right? Customers, if they, the best way, right? The best way to consume the cloud and the right way to do it is to ensure that when you provision itself, that is a notion of well-architected principles in place. Security compliance costs are being addressed in the provisioning aspects. So we help there. For example, a Fortune 100 customer for us, right? They were looking to fast-track their application modernization and they were under pressure to do that. They use multiple pre-built templates which are well-architected. Their teams were able to fast-track provisioning of the resources, enable the developers with the CI CD pipeline that they needed and they could move their application fast. The key thing here is post moving the application, they found that the approach we took to solving the day one problem automatically reduces the amount of time they need to spend to drive for who owns the resources, why is it costing so much? All those problems go away to a certain degree if you think about day one the right way. That's one area we help with and that's how we think about day one, reduce the ongoing burden from day one itself. Day one's great, you give them blank check that provisioning all the services and next thing you know, you racked up a big bill, the engineers are building and they're waiting but what do we build? Great stuff. First of all, engineers want to get access. That's critical and we know that. That's where the innovation comes from. Now I want you to talk about day two operation because this word starts to get really interesting when you start to rein it in, you know the whole expression let chaos reign and then reign in the chaos. So define day two operations for us. What does day two operations mean for you? Okay, so this is our deep hypothesis that was driven by a really rich conversations customers, right? Ongoing operations in the cloud is the responsibility of multiple teams. And the cloud providers are expecting consumers and the customers in this case to have a shared portion of their responsibility, right? Security is a shared responsibility. Compliance is a shared responsibility. Cost management is a shared responsibility. And then the ongoing uptime and MTTR like the mean time resolution, they're all responsibilities that are wholly sitting on the customer side. All of this put together impact the bottom line of the business because more and more businesses are now cloud businesses powered by cloud applications. Managing this entire set of problems and challenges is what we call as day two operations. One of the things you guys have been known for in the industry, in your customer base and within some of the geek community is you guys turn IT teams into cloud powerhouses. That's been said. What does that mean? Can you take me through that? Because I mean, we know what IT teams do. The provision gear, they'd be mostly on premises and they moved to the cloud. They still got to do all the things that IT's task to do but then they got cloud and they got automation. So, but explain to me how you guys have transformed IT teams into cloud powerhouses. I'm sure. So maybe a customer example will help, right? One of our fortune funded launch, you know global customer, before they erupted cloud, they had a five member team watching over form of servers, right? More than 10,000 servers for compliance needs. Their position was to move those servers to the cloud and in essence, move the application to the cloud and continue to provide compliance to their entire organization. In that they started up skilling their five member team. When they met Monty cloud, we offered them a solution that not only helped them govern those servers in the cloud with a very simple no code approach. We also gave them four of their headcount back. They were able to repurpose four members on the team to other projects because we attached them, we attached with them compliance bot. We asked this question, right? To customers, wouldn't it be awesome if you were able to quickly add a cloud operations engineer, a cloud secured engineer, a cloud compliance engineer to every application in a dedicated manner? Customers go, how do we do that, right? Well, we have autonomous bots that have been built for this purpose and they comprehensive real time bots that customers can fine tune to their environments. And it's as if you added a dedicated cloud compliance engineer. In this particular case, there's a large customer is now operating a 10,000 plus server form with Monty cloud compliance bot with another individual on the team. And the other four individuals were given back to other projects. This is what we mean by empowering our customers and making that cloud team, the traditional IT teams into cloud powerhouses. They can do more with less and they can keep track of the cloud consumption in the right way. And they can do that without having to write a single line of code. That's what our platforms promises. Well, great stuff as enterprise buyers are out there looking at solutions. They're always trying to separate the winners from the not so good winners, if you will. I don't want to be polite there. Jerry Chen recently has been talking about this paper Castles in the Cloud where you can build modes within the cloud and build on other people's clouds. So that brings up the question that I wanted to ask you about Monty cloud. Your competitive advantage and how you compare vis-à-vis the competition and how should customers who are potentially evaluating your platform and your services look at you long-term and you're going to, what kind of value proposition are you offering them? Because that's always top of mind enterprise team. These guys going to be around. What are they? Are they like me? Are they going to solve my problem? Are they going to help me transform? Will they deliver the value? So the question is, how are you guys competing? Can you address that please? Yeah, like we have been sharing more than competition, it's a customer, right? There is so much more customer challenge to solve and solved in a way that's most meaningful to customers. The competition is good to have because they sometimes show us the way, but customers really tell us both their stated needs and the implied needs that we find out, right? John, we are the only comprehensive cloud management platform that enables our customers in every step of the cloud transformation, right? You will find in the market point tools that help with security, point tools that help with compliance, provisioning infrastructure as code solutions that you have to learn and write code and do. There's a lot going on. We are the only comprehensive platform that thinks about customers from the day one, from onboarding to provisioning and consumption to governance to security, compliance and ongoing operations with cost and context in mind. We are the only platform that offers that to our customers. And all of that without the customers having to write a single line of code they can fast track as if they onboarded a cloud center of excellence in their team with the molecular platform. That's our biggest differentiation. And this comes from deep understanding of the customer's interconnected problems because you don't only solve provisioning and then forget context. You don't solve only context and cost and forget security. All of these are interconnected challenges. So you need interconnected solution. That's what we're good. I think that interconnected systems mindset really is about the bridge to the future. And if you can be with the customer together and build that bridge and crossover together that to me is a relationship oriented value proposition. I think that's really needed in these transformative markets. So congratulations, I love the mindset there. I got to ask you, I know you got a lot of customers and you can't say their names on camera. A lot of large enterprises give us a taste of some of the things they say to you. Like, hey, Venkat, I love your service because blank. What are some of the anecdotal sayings that customers say about multi-cloud? Oh, we have some customers we can talk about. Some of the customers are going to come back on the stage. Actually, San Luis University is going to be coming on the QB event that's coming up soon, right? So we have a bunch of customers we can talk about. Some customers we are deeply working with them and we've solved some problems for them. So what we typically hear from customers is this, right? A lot of vendors come in and ask our teams to upskill and they teach our teams how to manage cloud. Your solution helps us focus on our KPIs. That's what we repeatedly hear from customers, right? Being able to help the customer, look it's not the customer's primary focus to build and maintain a cloud center of excellence that also involves dealing with multiple point tools that involves constantly keeping up with the growing footprint that involves upskilling the team constantly. It's great that we have a cloud focus, but every customer that we've engaged with even the large customers, tell us that the fact that they can go back to focusing on their KPIs, whether the application is providing services to their customers, how much uptime is directly impacting their business? What are the cost of a poor transaction? Those are the important things they really want to focus on. So consistently, our customers are able to come back and validate that when MonteCloud gets involved with them, they're able to shift their focus back to their business as opposed to trying to focus on things that is basically becoming an essential problem they need to solve. That's a common theme, we get us feedback and we continuously learn from that and continue to improve that. Awesome, great stuff. Pankaj, great to have you on and give me a cube conversation at the update. While I got you, take a minute to put a plug in for the company. Were you guys at on status, state of the company? Are you guys looking to hire? Soundbytes, anything you want to share? Give a quick, quick minute plug for MonteCloud. Yeah, sure thing John. Hey, we're a startup. We're always hiring. We're always trying to find the smartest people that you want to work with. We want people to come in and kind of show us what to do, right? So give us a shout out. From a growth perspective, John, the market is booming, right? We are with a small team, which I will give a shout out to my team, right? We are like 23, 23 member team, right? Being able to go deliver to a world-class cloud management platform expectations and deliver to Fortune 100 companies means we are thinking about the problem space deeply. So those who are interested in that kind of, you know, accelerated delivery to customers, you know, do more with less attitude are welcome to engage with us. From a self plug for the company perspective, here's what we offer. We offer a free trial today. Our platform can be turned on and start delivering value to customers in under 10 minutes. People can go to Montecloud.com, sign up for our free trial, connect their cloud accounts. Within a few minutes, they're going to get free recommendations on where they can optimize cost, where they can improve security, what are the compliance issues they can solve, and they'll get full visibility into the environment all in just about a few clicks. And that is the value prop or platform offers an ongoing basis. They can further customize the platform to their needs. So I invite everybody to go try it at Montecloud.com. All right, Ben Kett, thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it. This is a great example of how the cloud can enable startups to be a supplier for the biggest companies in the world. Montecloud, again, start successful in the cloud. This is what it's all about, the new model, new refactoring. It's the cloud. I'm Sean Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching this CUBE Compensation.