 From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. I'm Stu Miniman, and this is a special CUBE conversation here in our Boston area studio. Happy to welcome to the program, Bobby Allen, who's the Chief Technology Officer and Chief Evangelist at Cloud Genera. Bobby, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Stu, thanks for having us. All right, so, Bobby, we had a great conversation with your CEO, Brian Kelly, talking about Cloud Genera, helping customers, in my own words, I'll say. There's this great mess of the cloud and service providers and data centers and things are changing all the time. And here's a great tool to help people understand this. Now, I've had people asking me for years. It's like, hey, I've got my app or I'm building a new app, you know, where do I do this? And, you know, I've always said, well, there's certain things that are really easy. You know, if it's going to be up for a really short period of time and it's something there, it's like, you're not going to spend the time to rack and stack and build and do this. You know, hey, cloud was great for that. And on the other end of the spectrum now, the public clouds might disagree, but if I have something that's just like, it's going to be cooking along and it's not changing and it's there, you know, the rent versus buy analogy once again goes towards kind of doing it in a hosted or my own data center. But there's a whole lot of stuff in the middle that is, well, it depends. So I got to, you know, there's this uncertainty in the world and that's where you live. So bring us in a little bit as to some of the thinking as to how CloudGener helps and, you know, where it lets to get into it. That's a great question, Stu. So we feel like the market has actually changed in the sense that information is coming faster and faster. There's more and more information that people are inundated and honestly overwhelmed by. And so when people ask us for more information, we typically tell them you don't need more information in our opinion. You really want to move from information and clarity to insight. What should I actually do? And so to go back to the real estate analogy you talked about, I think people think of Cloud as a house. Cloud is at least a neighborhood if not a state and you need to figure out where should I live within that state of that neighborhood. So let's take AWS for example. AWS is a vendor that has many, many, many services but also different flavors of how you can run things. So before people would look at CloudGener as a company that could compare different execution venues. Do I want to run this in Amazon or Azure or Google? Stu, we increasingly get people that want to understand which flavor of Amazon should I do? Do I do the multi-tenant? Do I do the dedicated? Do I do the VMware Cloud and AWS? And those are all valid choices for us. And so for us, we don't really care where a customer wants to evaluate. Let's define what you need and map that to the relevant or interesting options in the marketplace and then take the guesswork out of it so you have some data-driven decision-making. Yeah, I love that because I've been coming to cover on Amazon for many years and boy, I go to the show and it was like, all right, I thought I got my arms around Aurora and now there's the serverless-based Aurora and there's 17 different database options inside of Amazon. So, oh boy, and then, right, let's not even talk about all the compute instances. I think it's more complicated to pick a compute instance in the public cloud than it is if I was going to put something in my own rack these days. Yes, yes, it is. So, but that being said, I want to, for a second, before we talk about the public cloud, talk to your viewpoint, how are you helping customers in kind of the service provider to data center world and because that's a complicated and very, I'd say fragmented space. How does Cloud Gener help there? So, Cloud Gener deals with the consumer, so ones who actually want to benefit from the technology themselves but also from the service provider side. So, if you're Joe's Cloud Check, a regional cloud provider, a VMware service provider, anyone who's offering technology services, you may want to know, number one, how do you compare with the large hyper scale providers? And then, number two, how can you showcase your value proposition next to those? So, maybe Amazon and Azure and Google are on the top of people's minds, but how do your services compare to those? So, in our platform, you can actually show a Joe's Cloud Check next to an Amazon, next to something like a Synergy or SimpliVity. So, options inside and outside the data center that you thought about and then ones that you didn't can all be kind of presented in a fair way, so you take the guesswork out of how they compare to each other. Yeah, it's interesting. One of the big raging debates we've had out there is, oh, I wish I had a cloud concierge. And it's like, well, it's not a utility and therefore I could stand up something in my data center or I could put a pass in my environment or there's so many layers of the stack and so much nuance that it's the paradox of choice, I think that most people have. So, maybe walk us through a customer, when do they tend to come to you, what are some of those patterns and what are the things that really help get accelerated when they use a platform like yours? So, some of the things that people think about are, they have workloads that they wanna move, maybe they wanna exit a data center or what really happens commonly is there's a new leader in town. New CIO comes in, we're gonna have a cloud-first strategy and we're not opposed to that. The biggest principle for us is, do you understand why you're doing and whether this is the right time to win? Because if you don't do the right thing at the right time for the right reason, there's a hole in your strategy. And so what we look at is, okay, what is it that you're trying to move or change or transform? What are the things that are interesting to you or strategic? And then let's look at putting those things together. Now, when you define what you need, you shouldn't define what you need in terms of where you're going, right? I don't decide my venue based on the airline I wanna get on, I decide I need to be in Vegas for this conference at this time and then I see the airline that can get me there on time for the best price, hopefully. And we take that same approach when it comes to helping customers. Let's talk about what you need in a vendor agnostic way that's divorced from the options in the market because your needs are not impacted by Amazon or Azure or HPE or Dell. And so then after we define your expectations and your requirements, let's map those to the things that you're curious about or that your leadership says are strategic and then let's make sure that we understand what we call the concept of logical equivalence. The spirit of your requirement may be called X and one provider and Y and a different one. Are they really the same as a tomato tomato or are they really two different types of, excuse me, services or entities all together? So let's evaluate then how well your needs are met by these different vendors. Is it just a semantics issue or are these really two different things? Yes, they're both different types of block stores but the requirements are different. The latency is different, the redundancy is different. The pricing is certainly different. How close are these things to meeting the spirit of what you asked for? And the other parts do that I'll just offer that we see a lot is people are concerned overly about cost. How much does it cost? And we feel like the problem is not a problem of cost, it's a problem of value. People go to look for cost calculators but really what they need are value calculators, right? I take a portion in F-150. An F-150 is a bigger vehicle but the portion is more expensive for a reason. There's a different experience than just space. And so the reality is people don't mind paying more if they know what they're paying for. Transparency is really the key. On that cost piece though, how much of the total equation do you look at? So I think about my data center, there's everything like the power space and all those pieces. If I go to a service provider, if it's my stuff, if I still have to manage it versus some of the operational expenses, how much of kind of the, I hate to say total cost but how much of that spread do you look at? We try to be pretty comprehensive Sue. So if you go to a public provider, for example, you're not paying for power but you're paying for a certainly hourly charge typically on an OPEX basis that accommodates a lot of the things that I'll say are platform or hypervisor and below. Now where I think a lot of the other people that are in this space maybe fall short in our opinion is that they don't look at things above the hypervisor. If I move a workload to an AWS that may have some great services I can take advantage of, the labor and the licensing and the other considerations that we consider to be carryover costs are things that I still need to accommodate. If I put a workload in Amazon, someone still needs to patch the OS, maybe manage the database, maybe audit security. Those are things that have labor and licensing and software considerations that we try to look at. So we try to be as comprehensive as possible but we also look at SLA, we also look at security. So you may need to bring in other managed services or consulting or software packages to fill those other gaps. So we try to be as holistic and comprehensive as possible. Yeah, what other kind of patterns and data do you bring for cloud genera? So thinking things either from a vertical standpoint or kind of size of company. I just think there's been certain movements in virtualization and containers and the like where there's been kind of that data and how do I understand what's gonna make sense for me? So what does cloud genera get into any of that? We do get into some of that. So we try again not to force anything down someone's throat. We try to look at where you are but also understand that there are some patterns. So for example, when we talk about different industry verticals, it's very aligned to security and compliance for example. So we know that there are certain providers that are interesting but not ready for prime time because they don't have HIPAA, high tech, high trust. Things that are typically relevant for the healthcare industry. So we're very quickly able to say this is something that may not be right for you just yet or if you have certain regional concerns, maybe you're looking at GDPR in Europe, you're looking at IRAP in Australia. We can again typically guide them to this provider has some very interesting services but they don't have the security or the SLA that you need. So we try to do that to kind of whittle it down. The other thing that we're seeing those do is that honestly many enterprises are biting off more than they can chew. They try to do too much at once. And so some of the things that we talked about even off camera is I would ask the question, does the industry have a pot problem? Are we trying to do too much at once? And when I say pot, I'm using that to represent the acronym of to me three pieces we need to break this down to. Number one is parity. Number two is optimization and then number three is transformation. Many enterprises in our opinion are trying to eat an elephant with a spoon. They have no idea how to get there and they really don't understand what is too much in terms of the cost. And so when they're evaluating how much they can handle, how much change is too much in terms of people, process, and technology, the thing to us is what does parity look like? And that may mean a lift and shift in some cases it may not, but you at least have to define what success looks like if you take what you're doing in your data center and move that somewhere else. But then the middle ground is optimization. How do I take the spirit of what I'm doing? Move it to that venue and then kind of clean it up or optimize it a little bit. And then once I'm there and I can evaluate the unintended consequences of change, what are the things that I didn't think about? The impacts to my people, the retraining, the other software packages I need to put in place for monitoring and management and so forth. Once I have a handle on that, then I can finally move from optimization to transformation, but that's not glamorous. That's not interesting. People don't want to talk about that. They want to go whole hog and change everything all at once and we get in trouble doing that. But Bobby, you've given me flashbacks. I worked in the storage industry for a decade and migrations, you know, you still kind of wake up in the middle of the night, you know, screaming a little bit because it's always challenging. There's always all of those things to work through. You think you've gone through all of your checklists and then, oh wait, you know, so something didn't work. You know, database migrations, big discussion going on there. From Wikibon, David Fleurer has just been like, you know, it's so many horror stories. People get there, but it's, if you don't have to, maybe you don't want to, but there's so many reasons why you want to. So I guess I want to highlight, we're not telling people not to change. And moving faster and getting on board, some modernizations, a good thing, whether you, you know, everywhere. It's, you know, you've got a virtualization environment. There's lots you can do today that we couldn't do two or four years ago. So how do we get over this pop problem then? I think part of it is, so again, going back to the moving analogy, if I'm going to move, Stu, it would be foolish for me to move without getting an estimate. And there are times when an estimate should be able to come in my house and tell me, it's actually better for you to sell that piano than to try to move it, because it's not worth it. I would want someone, if I were CIO in an enterprise today, to tell me, don't waste your time focusing on this. This is really where you need to focus your time because this is going to be the Pareto principle that saves you the time and the money. The reality is bringing someone who's benefited from the landmines and the pitfalls. So in our opinion, bring in whether that's an SI, a consultancy, a data service company like Cloud Genre that's benefited from a lot of the things we've seen in the industry. Don't hit things on your own that other people have stumbled on, right? Benefit from others' mistakes to allow you to take a look at the whole thing. So the challenge that I think we're having, Stu, is that we're proficient in talking about these things. There aren't enough use cases in terms of mature cloud transformations to really look back at anecdotal data that's comprehensive. We're still figuring a lot of this stuff out, and I know people don't want to hear that, but that's my opinion. So Bobby, is there some place when I'm filling out these forms that I put in and here's the skill set my team has, and a little alarm goes off and says, hey, time to do some retraining, some re-skilling. Maybe bringing on some new people to handle some of these new areas. How do you handle that side of it? I think part of it is honestly, and this may sound a little trite, I think people that are willing to raise their hand and say that we need some help, or that we don't have this all figured out, or that there are some things that we need to bring in a little bit of help to help us get that estimate before we look to move everything. That's really the skill set you want to have. People that are not saying, I'm the grand negus juggernaut of everything cloud, because those people don't exist yet, in my opinion. There are people that have pockets of expertise and things that they have really deep knowledge about, but we need to mix that with, I think, a healthy appreciation for the fact that there's still a lot of things that we're learning about together. The other part of that, Stu, is it's a community and it's a network. You may know storage migrations. I may know database migrations. Let's put our heads together about how we can work together as an enterprise to make sure that we minimize impact to the users, because at the end of the day, that's really the challenge. It's not to do a cool project. It's to deliver value to the business, and that's what I think we're losing sight of with all this cool technology sometimes. All right, so, Bobby, you've got over 1000 people using the tool. What are some of the big areas that people are like, oh, wow, this is the stuff that's saving me either lots of time, lots of money, saving my business, and, heck, if I'm running the show, keeps my job. I think storage is a big one, so people are oftentimes unaware that there are so many different ways that you can run storage in a given provider, so Amazon, for example, has four to six different ways you can just run block storage in their particular multi-tenant cloud, and people aren't aware of that, so there's a case that we did for a major bank. We showed them that a terabyte of storage in Amazon can run from $300 up to $26,000, depending on the level of performance that you wanna hit. Egress is another one. So what does the network behavior look like in those applications? Because people often will estimate the resources, but not the traffic. What are the estimates to have a level of parity around security? So I don't have HIPAA compliance or SOC compliance in this particular provider. What is it gonna take me to get to that level of parity that I need to have? Because if I save money stew, but I have to spend all that on my lawyer because my data got accessed, then I've still got a problem. I've just kinda moved that down the road. So lots of things out there that I believe are hiding in plain sight. Again, information that's out there that we just don't have the filters defined. What I would say is a lot of people think that cloud is a commodity. We're not there yet. They're providers to this day. I can't give any names who protect the innocent, but the same service is literally triple in one provider what it costs in another one for almost exactly the same service. And there are examples like that that have been out there for years. We just can't see them. So Bobby, last question. Somebody wanted to get started with Cloud Generers. They're like a trial version or how would somebody get involved? Yeah, so a couple of things that are really interesting. So there's a try now button on our website that lets you kind of answer a few questions and actually get a sample mini assessment, download a sample report and actually see the type of analysis that we provide, number one. Number two, Cloud Gener is a software company but also services company. If you want to purchase the software, great. And we actually have trials that we can set up for you to do that. We also do what we call proofs of value. If you want to engage our team to come in and do five to 10 applications to see how those might look with our analysis and then to go at scale and look at your whole CMDB. We want to make sure we're meeting the needs of the business and not trying to bull the ocean if they're not ready for that yet. Bobby Allen, CTO and Chief Evangelist at Cloud Generer. Thanks so much for joining me. So much happened in the Cloud world. Be sure to check out thecube.net for all of our coverage as well as wikibon.com for all the research. Thanks for watching theCUBE, I'm Stu Miniman.