 Hello, and welcome to this CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Today we're joined by PTP, part of the Avis Simms and Cloud event in New York City next week. A little preview. We're fortunate to have Ethan Simms, CEO of PTP. Love the URL, PTP Cloud, check it out. He's here to discuss the relationship between them and spot by NetApp. Talk about the savings in the cloud. Again, this right size is happening. Ethan, welcome to the show. Great, thanks for having me, appreciate it. Love the flag. First of all, flying in the background. I just had for the July, great to see that. Let's dive into the relationship between PTP and spot by NetApp. How do you guys work together? What are you guys working on? Sure, I mean, we have a long relationship probably back since 2016. We're originally a cloud checker partner. We use cloud checker extensively for both our customers from a cost optimization and a management standpoint, compliance and security. We also use it as our billing platform for our customers where we provide the AWS resale for most of our customers. And as part of that, our managed services uses as a tool to help our customers cost optimize their AWS environments. What are some of the value that you guys work together with NetApp on? What's the key value provisions for you guys? What's the benefit? Yeah, I think for us it's really the, they have a deep understanding of the intricacies around cost optimization and really what to look for in the environment. If you try to do manually what spot does between an all, so spot and cloud checker together, if you were to try to do that manually, it would be an impossible task to do in real time. So having that automated AI approach to cost optimization really takes a lot of the legwork out of doing the manual piece of cost optimization. I love this conversation of savings in the cloud, cost optimization and the heels of this so-called recession people talk about. But in some areas it's not just a headwind or a recession, in some places it's a tail when you're seeing the growth of AI, you're seeing more open source software hitting the scene, a lot more cloud action happening, more data coming in. So this right sizing trend is really to me is just natural evolution of the next gen cloud, which is get your house in order and move from being a janitor custodian to operationalizing some of the mechanics and KPIs needed to scale cloud and automation is one of them. This is a huge shift. This is not just a one-time thing. What are you seeing with customers when they get into this? It's like, okay, did they get it? Are they totally on board? Are they leaning in? What's the perspective of the customer? Yeah, I think it's interesting. For a long time, we were leading with a cost optimization story over the last couple of years and really sort of fell on deaf ears. Wasn't a great conversation piece. People really didn't care. I mean, it's kind of boring, a lot of bean counter type stuff. So no one wants to talk about it, but over the last, I'd say starting last fall, we had more and more customers coming to us. They say, hey, I remember when you guys were talking to us about how we can save some money in AWS. How do we do that? So they definitely started coming around for us. It was an opportunity creation engine where customers were paying us or consulting with us to help them save money. So it really added on to our managed services interaction with these customers. So it was sticky, helps them move stuff forward as far as I can do other projects because I'm saving money here on this sort of my steady state AWS environment. And now I have more money to invest in moving projects forward. Certainly budget cuts are any kind of focus on cost. We're going to find that budget. Well, you know, if I can get tight here on these instances, I can use that dollars to buy some more higher level services or fund another, keep that project going. And then, oh, there's classic over provisioning from the app side. So these are all kind of factors in the current situation. How does it fix going forward? In your experience, what are the best strategies to take it to the next level? Obviously getting your hands on the tools to get it done. What is the best strategy? And what are some of the easy wins you'd see out of the gate for customers who want to start really going down this path? Yeah, I mean, selfishly, I'd say they should work with a partner like BTP. But I think the, you know, you really need to have a tool to do what you can. I mean, we've talked to customers that have, and we've talked to customers that have had, you know, people jockeying spreadsheets to try to manage our eyes. And it's just sort of a, you know, it's a wasted resource where it's something that can definitely be automated. So I think looking at, you know, the right tool set like spot, like Cloud Checker that can, you know, has the intelligence to do that type of cost optimization in real time and do it seven by 24. Cause cost optimization isn't sort of a said and forget type of thing. It's a, it's an ongoing service that needs to be looked at all the time. A lot of our customers don't have those resources. So they would look to PTP to provide that as a, you know, it's part of our managed service offer. Talk about PTP and NetApp, the relationship. You guys said, since 2016, you said you were together. How do customers engage with you guys? They go through NetApp that for you as a, what's the partnership? Can you explain more about the partnership? Yeah, sort of two-fold. Initially it was, we were working with Cloud Checker prior to the acquisition by NetApp. And then we were also working, and then we were working with Spot prior to, you know, then by acquiring NetApp. So I mean, they were acquiring Cloud Checker. So for us, it was a two-pronged approach. We were using Cloud Checker for sort of their traditional services and we're heavily using Spot for their RI management capabilities. And now those tools are merging together. So it's nice to have one tool rather than managing two. Our managed services team, you know, sort of has tool fatigue at times where they have all these different tools to manage. It's nice to bring that into one platform going forward. But I still think from a customer standpoint, they don't want to go out and buy these tools. They don't have the staff to use them and learn them. So again, I think for us, it's a great opportunity for more managed services. Yeah, and also there's a lot of discounting opportunities instances. What percentage of the workloads you think it gets covered by discounts over time? Is there like a order of magnitude, kind of like a best practice kind of vision and customers saying, okay, can you paint the picture for me? When I look at savings plans or reserved instances, things like that, I got workloads, I got my operations. Is there kind of like a way to describe it from a benefit standpoint to give people a taste of what's going to happen? Yeah, I think initially it's, you know, most of the kind of customers, you know, unoptimized, they haven't done a lot of work on it. It's a pretty quick, you know, 25% type of savings they can receive by their monthly bill. And then after that, the savings is, you know, you have to keep on doing it. Like I said, it's not something you just do once and forget about that people spin up new instances, create new S3 buckets, you know, turn on new services. So having those, you know, that real time always looking at the cost savings opportunities is key. And I think there's a, you know, it's a combination of things too. Like you said, there's over provisioning. So looking at right sizing, there's right typing. So am I using the right instance type? And then there's, you know, RII savings and savings plans, opportunities to save. And then there's all sorts of, especially around storage. Storage is usually the largest, you know, cost that most of our customers have. Us being, you know, heavily focused on life science, our customers have these massive data sets that are stored in these S3 buckets. A lot of times they don't know where they are or they're orphaned or they, you know, they turned off the EC2 instance but didn't delete the storage. And helping them identify those wasted resources that's a key part of, you know, things that they need to look at to, you know, heavily optimize their savings. I can imagine automation is going to be a great positions as being now with all the AI coming. I mean, storage has always had kind of storage tiering of data. Now with real time, you see AI start to get much more granular around where to store things more cost effectively. I'm already seeing conversations on the LLM side where people are looking at foundational models and, you know, the cost could be out of control there. So, you know, even around the corner in the future there's going to be more cost management challenges. This is just the beginning as someone who's been in the industry for many cycles, IT's changed a lot. There's the human capital side of it where the automation is really going to augment the human and there's a lot more to figure out going down the road. What's just your vision as you start to see automation really take us into this next wave of the role of AI and data and whatnot? Yeah, I mean, you've seen a lot of enhancements to, you know, cloud storage as three with auto-tearing and moving stuff faster after cold storage and more intelligent tiering of storage. Then now you have the LLM, the large language model. All this data now needs to be in hotter storage. So that's what's driving a lot of the costs where these algorithms need, you know, quicker access to data to spit back out these conversational chat scenarios. So, you know, I think it's really, it is that intelligence built into the storage to move it to the habit in the right place at the right time and trying to do it as efficiently as possible. And just another example of something that you can't really have people moving this data around in real time, it just doesn't make sense. It's really exciting. Dave Vellante, I've been saying this since 2010 when theCUBE started 13 years ago, never been against storage. The data is keeping coming. More and more data coming. And then now storage as a platform gets more interesting when you start thinking there's a software aspect of this that's going to be really software defined. Again, that's been discussed for many, many years now. You don't hear that anymore. It's all software still, but now you have this holistic data platform kind of vibe going on with data even more important from a savings perspective as you think about the role of compute and storage as more and more data needs to be integrated into the cloud native world. And this is just the beginning. Yeah, definitely. And you see it from, you know, there's constantly new, you know, enhancements to the tools, you know, it's HP, sorry, HP, there's constantly new enhancements to the tools, NetApp and Spot. You know, they're always adding new features. I mean, as AWS, you know, creates new features for their tools, but allows you to be able to, it really gives you the visibility that you need to take advantage of the features. So I think that's the biggest part. I mean, if you can't see it, you don't know how to manage it. So having that visibility is key. Give an example of a cool example of a customer that you guys have worked with that had great savings. Give us an example of a day in the life of a customer. Yeah, I just think for, you know, in our space, usually our customers are, you know, it's a scientist, bioinformaticians. They don't have, they don't want to spend their money on IT. They're out there trying to find a cure for a new, you know, for cancer or for disease. And their goal isn't to spend money on IT or to worry about, you know, IT infrastructure. And they're really, they're focused on time to value. So how can I use the funding that we have in this, you know, there is a startup phase or seed round or A round of funding. How can I get to a point where, you know, I can prove that my science works. And that's, that's really where, you know, our customers are spending their time and we're just trying to help them get there faster. So for us, it's, you know, the IT piece of it and the cost savings is, you know, it's interesting for us, but for the, but seeing the customer able to do their research faster is, you know, what really drives us and is an exciting part about what we do. For the folks watching out here in the CUBE audience and certainly we'll be in New York City for the event as part of AWS summit. It's going to be the cloud stage event that they're building the night before. We're a big panel discussion there. What should people know about SPOT and why it's important? You mentioned cloud checker and SPOT together. If they're watching this, what should they know about it that that's important that they should take a real hard look at it? Yeah, I think there's, I mean, one, I think on the cloud checker side, that platform has, you know, years of experience working with AWS and the intricacies around AWS billing and, you know, looking at all those opportunities for saving. Also, there's, you know, security involved. There is compliance. There's a lot of other aspects with other than just the cost optimization piece that, you know, really brings a lot of value to the table. And then if you're looking at, you know, the SPOT platform where, you know, they're enhancing the security assets of the platform, especially be getting into SPOT instances. Again, another one of those, you know, savings opportunities that are out there that's very hard to do manually that you really need some type of automated platform to take advantage of. So, you know, I just think they have, you know, a leg up, obviously there's some competition out there. We've seen a lot of competition try and do what cloud checker does, but, you know, a lot of them have given up and sort of moved on and, you know, using their platform for other services. So, you know, I just think that you need that depth of experience in order to, you know, really take advantage of all the savings opportunities. That's awesome. And what's your advice, folks, coming in for the first time? What's your advice, how they get in? And what's your advice to the more advanced customers that might want to start digging in cost optimization? Yeah, I'd say most customers sort of start off with some, you know, low hanging fruit. There's some easy stuff around storage and, you know, right typing, right sizing, but some, you know, more advanced customers are starting to look at, you know, R.I. savings. And there's also R.I.s that can be applied to other AWS services. So really getting into, you know, all those opportunities for savings is key. And I just think that it's, you know, customers just have to have the mindset of, you know, FinOps isn't just cost optimization. You really have to have other parts of the business involved where you have, you know, your IT team, you have finance, you have your cloud team, you have your applications teams. All those groups need to be working together. And I think that the tools that, you know, the NetApp have help, you know, sort of bring all those groups together so they can see where the opportunities are and how to better govern, you know, their cloud environment overall. Have you found a methodology or playbook or a way to integrate some of these financial CFO kind of incentives into the engineering and IT engineers out there who used to be, ah, leave me alone. I want to just play with hardware and get some software going and stand up resources. Now I love the cloud, you know, it's unlimited free money, the cloud's amazing. Now I was like, whoa, slow down. Let's clean things up a little bit. Let's get operating models. Let's start thinking about scale. Let's look at ROI. Let's start thinking about utilization. This becomes kind of an integrated kind of job discipline, almost like a CIO type thinking where you got to bring in more of that financial discussion. Are there ways you've seen that works well to kind of start bringing in that mindset? Yeah, I think, you know, there's a concept of a cloud center of excellence, the CCOE, which is a, you know, a team of, you know, from different departments across the company to come together. Always hard to sort of pull those people together and give it the right attention that it needs, but you need to have that mentality internally. And I think too, we see a lot of customers, they're like, oh, I'm too small for a tool like Cloud Checker or Spot. And really, you know, we go back to them like, you're never too small. It's starting now. It's much easier to start now and have the right, you know, compliance and tagging in place so that as it grows, you're not trying to, you know, put the toothpaste back in the tube after you have all these engineers that are out there spinning up instances and storage buckets all over the place. So, you know, we try to tell customers, you know, you're never too small to start. And then usually, and the cost and the pricing model for these tools is made to scale. You pay a little bit while you're small, as you grow, you know, it's commensurate with your consumption of cloud. It's like, turn the lights off before you go to bed. You know, it's like, come on guys, don't leave the lights on, let's get going here. Yeah, there's been a lot of that. Well, now, well, at least now this is more, you know, this is more automated. This turns the lights off for you after you go to bed. So you don't have to, you know, sit there and scold your kids to turn the lights off. Shut the door about the air conditioner now. Secure that S3 bucket. Turn that instance, get the spot instance. I mean, a lot of that's going on. But again, this is operationalizing. This is what I think is the key here is that you guys are on doing is you're bringing that operationalized mindset versus just the custodial, you know, clean out the mundane tasks. Someone's going to have to, you know, clean up the mess kind of thing versus, no, no, this is what we do. This is part of how we fund new services and or take care of the scale. I mean, this is at the end of the day. That's where it's basically money out, line out the window if you don't get it done. Yeah, I think my new hashtag is Phenops fatigue. I think everyone sort of, everyone hears about it and no one's really interested in it because it's work and it's, you know, not always the most elegant part of IT, but it's, you know, a critical part of operating officially in the cloud. Well, Ethan, great to have you on here with ptp.cloud. Love the URL by the way, get kudos to that. While we got a minute left here, give a plug for ptp, what you guys doing? What are you guys working on? What should people know about the company? How do people engage with you as a business? And again, congratulations on your partnership with NetApp, but put a plug in for the company. Yeah, I think our, you know, we're hyper focused on early stage life science companies. We took an approach that these companies are, you know, they're out there with a mission to make the world a better place. We're a bunch of IT guys. We're not all going to, you know, we're not scientists, we're not going to go invent the next cure, the next drug therapy, but if we have a small part in helping these life science companies do their research faster, do it more efficiently and, you know, bring these solutions to market faster, you know, we're glad that we get to be part of it. The AWS teams that we work with that are hyper focused on life sciences are being great at engaging and we're working with these life science companies all across the country. And it's been, you know, been rewarding for the team and we're looking to continue to grow. There's all these other life science hubs that are starting up around the country. So Boston, Cambridge is sort of known for that, but you look at Bay Area, San Diego, Austin, Seattle. It's an emerging market. And even in an economy that, you know, I guess there's pockets of it that are not doing so well, but in the life sciences space, certainly early stage life sciences, but it's still an exciting and growing market and there's new business creation going on every day. And AWS has a great vertical in that industry. You know, more computes coming, more AI's coming, large scale, Next Gen Cloud. And again, a great, great market to be in. Ethan, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Conversation here for the preview to AWS seems in the cloud event in New York City. Thanks for your time. Thank you very much. Looking forward to next week. Okay. This is CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier. We'll be in New York City next week on Tuesday. Check us out. We'll be at the AWS office as part of AWS summit in New York City the night before. Cost Optimization is the topic and saving. AWS saves in the cloud event. I'll be there. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.