 from the Computer Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE covering OpenStack Silicon Valley 2015, brought to you by Morantis. Now your host, Jeff Frick. Hey, welcome back everybody. I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE. We are live at OpenStack Silicon Valley 2015 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Really excited to be out here the second year of the event, second year of theCUBE's been here. We're going two days. Wall-to-wall coverage is a lot of vibe around OpenStack, a lot of vibe around cloud right now. We have VMworld happening next week. We were at OpenStack Seattle and Linux last week, so it's all about cloud right now. So we're really excited for our next guest, kind of a relatively new startup, Madura Meskoski, from Platform 9, BP of Product and Co-Founder. So welcome. Thanks. So for the people that aren't familiar with Platform 9, why don't you give kind of an overview of what you guys are up to? Absolutely. So Platform 9 is a startup that came out of VMware. So we're part of the V-Mafia that's happening in the Silicon Valley. It's a lot of V-Mafia. There's quite a few of them, and they're very helpful as well, so it's a good community. Good. But so what Platform 9 does is we are in a nutshell, our mission is to make private clouds at any scale for organizations of any size, extremely out of the box and intuitive and simple, right, and in order to do that, we have a very unique approach or model around OpenStack, so we package OpenStack and deliver it as a web service. So that's in somebody what Platform 9 does. So you're delivering OpenStack as a web service. So it's interesting. A lot of the early OpenStack players we've been talking over the day have been acquired by EMC and HP and IBM, et cetera. So now there's kind of this next gen of startups really approaching OpenStack in a new way, not necessarily kind of the fundamental core at the bottom, but new deployment methodologies, new ways to consume it. So that's a pretty interesting innovation and how are you finding the market uptake for that? You know, it's fantastic to be in this space at this time. We think the timing is perfect because if you look at the OpenStack mindshare in the small to medium to large enterprises, it's kind of reached at a point now where our buyers, right, our IT enterprise directors or administrators or end users understand the value proposition that OpenStack provides. So it's no longer a question about what is OpenStack and why should I care. They've gone way past that. It's more about, okay, I understand the value proposition and I know open source is the future. OpenStack is going to be powering clouds from now onwards and how do I align myself with it? What is my OpenStack strategy? And that's really where we come into picture and we can highlight what some of our unique differentiators and value ads are, right? And just coming from VMware, just having built vCloud director and having worked with enterprise customers, that gives us, I think, a little bit of an edge because we understand very well what some of the pain points of enterprise customers are in terms of building a private cloud and running it. Right, right, and how different is it working with an open source technology at the core and an open source framework at the core rather than building something on, something that was designed, inspected, built in-house? Yeah, it's a very interesting experience having come from a company that builds proprietary software but one that has been just phenomenally popular, right, and it has powered private clouds of the entire world for almost a decade. Coming from that wall to the open source wall, there's definitely a shift. There's a shift not only in terms of how you look at the technology, there is also a shift in terms of how, as a company, you want to market and present yourself. It's really all about community, right? Open source is all about community, OpenStack is about that, so it's about openness and that's a really important part of our culture as well. So you see that not only in the product we build but in terms of the blog posts we write, the support articles that we write and the culture we have within our team as well. Right, and clearly, VMware's got a huge, engaged community too, we'll be at VMworld next year, I don't even know how many tens of thousands of people will be there, but it's slightly different. Really, it's kind of an ecosystem built around it versus everybody really contributing to the core. And then like you say, so how do you manage being really active in open source versus building the stuff that makes platform nine, platform nine? And I always find that as kind of an interesting management challenge for somebody managing engineering, managing resources, how do you decide what that next unit of work needs to be for that engineer? Because clearly there's a lot of benefits to contributing back to the open source, people get a lot of personal kind of pride and recognition within the community which is very important in open source, so how do you kind of balance working for OpenStack versus working for platform nine? Yeah, no, that's a very good question and I think that's the key part of what a product person needs to play in terms of a role, right? Because you have to not lose track, not lose size of the fact that you are part of this open source community, right? OpenStack is part of our bread and butter right now, so and OpenStack is all about openness, right? So what's important to us is not necessarily that we create a proprietary modified version of OpenStack that we offer to our customers, we're not in business to do that. We're here to make all the goodness of OpenStack in its entirety and purity, so we're here to make the core open source OpenStack available to enterprises in a production ready way, right? So our focus is really on simplified consumption of OpenStack, that's been one of the biggest pain points with OpenStack, right? Which is, this wonderful powerful software which has so many knobs and different options that you can tweak to make it work for your environment, but you really need to know how to do it. And many times that manual is missing, right? Which tends to be the challenge. So we're here to provide those really simplified recipes to our end users and kind of hand hold them and say, think of us as an extension of your ops team. So let us do the hard work of getting your OpenStack cloud, getting it up and running, and then managing it on an ongoing basis. And you focus on just consuming it. And that's really the balance that we draw, and at the same time kind of going back to your point, we are really passionate about making OpenStack better, right, improving it. And so that community aspect is part of our team. We're part of OpenStack summits, the Vancouver one, the one in Japan. We're also taking initiatives and contributing back to the community on the VMware driver front, on the Docker front, et cetera. So lots of that is also happening simultaneously. Yeah, it's great. So let's shift gears a little bit back to the company. So you've raised some money, so I think you just raised a round, so congratulations. Thank you. Can you tell us who's leading that round? Who's your venture partners? Definitely. So we raised our series round with Redpoint Munchers. They've just been fantastic mentors and partners to have and to work with. They were the previous funders of CloudStack as well. And then for Series B. Who's your partner at the? Satish, Tamaraj, and Scott Rainey at Redpoint. And they've just both been a fantastic pair. We think of them as part of our team. So we love them. And then for Series B, we just recently made that announcement, and we were fortunate to have Menlo Ventures backing us, funding us. Mark Siegel is a partner there, who's part of our board now. And again, they're also familiar with the V-Mafia. We have our friends from Purnix Data and other companies. They're backing some of the same people. So really, really excited about the new team. It is exciting. Like I said, I think from here, sitting is kind of this next wave of startups that are kind of attacking the next wave of problems with the Opus Tech deployment. And you mentioned that often the manual is missing. Well, also the people are often missing too. I think every single person here at the end of their keynote gave a little plug, come work for us. Even the U and the AT&T Direct TV guys. So what's kind of your next challenge? What can we look forward to from Platform 9 next week at VMworld and over the next six months? Yeah, so while we announced our funding, we also made an announcement that we're officially in GA with our VMware vSphere support. And that was really a key announcement for us. We think it's a key enabler. Not only from the perspective that if you think of the virtualization market in total and the percentage that's covered by VMware customers, customers who run virtualization using VMware software, it's humongous, right? So it really gives us the opportunity to tap into that market. And we don't really see Opus Tech as an either or when it comes to VMware. Many times it's presented that way, but we don't see that at all. Partly also because we come from VMware, right? So we understand the power of that platform. And what we believe strongly is that Opus Tech only makes that platform a lot more easier to consume and automate in a more next generation cloud-centric way. So that's really what we're here to enable. So next week you'll see us talking a lot more about how do we natively integrate with VMware and really make that stack, you know, consumable as an Opus Tech cloud. So from a VMware end user's perspective, he doesn't have to change a thing. And that's a huge value proposition that we are making, which is take what you have today, including the workloads that you have and kind of magically transform them into an Opus Tech cloud. So in that instance, so customers are already running VMware, they want to deploy Opus Tech for a different application set for a particular reason. Is that kind of the use case? That's kind of, that's right. And then different use cases also come into picture. Right, because it's not really rip and replace. I mean, if you got a bunch of VMware infrastructure and things are running, you know, you're not necessarily looking to rip and replace that. Definitely not, yeah. And that strategy doesn't work well either, right? I mean, Diane Greene from VMware used to say, VMware's technology is the most disruptive, non-disruptive technology, right? Which is disruptive in what it does, but non-disruptive in how the customer gets to use it. And we have the exact same philosophy. Right, but to your point, there's different workloads that depending, it's really, it still goes back to this workload specific kind of driver based on the workload, what's the application, what are they trying to do, you know, then that should really drive the deployment. That's really from an operations perspective, from the actual app development perspective, I don't really care and don't necessarily want to care, right? It should just work. That's right, that's exactly right. And it's the use cases that really are the most important question, right? That the end users ask as well. Right. Which is we have this vSphere infrastructure which we really don't want to get rid of. At the same time, we as an IT team are tired of having to constantly respond to our developer's needs. We have tickets and, you know, the usual delays in process. So we really want something a lot more agile. And that's really what OpenStack enables, right? Through OpenStack heat orchestration, through just the simple self-service access. That's what we're here to enable. Awesome, well, Bandura, thanks for stopping by theCUBE. I wish you the best and we'll probably see you next week at Moscone Center. All right, well thanks for stopping by. I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE. We are live at OpenStack Summit Silicon Valley 2015. We'll be back with our next segment after this short break.