 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. Welcome back to Las Vegas, theCUBE's coverage of Dell EMC World. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Keith Townsend. We're joined by Rodney Rogers. He's the CEO of Virtus.Dream. Thanks so much for joining us, Rodney. Oh, awesome to be here. Always is. Cube veteran, a cube guy. Look, you're veteran. Exactly. I was in that top 16 thing that you guys are. All right. You know, March Madness? Yeah. Or the Cube Madness. The Cube Madness, that was awesome. I think I might have made it to the Elite 8. I know it was top. Who knocked you out? Sweet 16. Who knocked you out? I can't say that, man. So it still hurts too much. Oh, sorry. Okay, I didn't mean to bring it up. I know. We didn't mean to bring it up. But before the cameras are rolling, you were talking about how you accomplished the improbable by running these mission critical apps in the cloud. It was a mission impossible and you, to run mission critical. Right. How did you do it? So, you know, when we started Virtustream in early 2009, we, AWS's EC2 was just coming into mainstream IT awareness, I would say. We took a look at what they did. You know, they kind of made a market for creating ubiquitous access to developers to develop cloud native apps to run distributed scale out type of applications. We were venture backed. We were startup. Start from scratch. And, you know, when you're an entrepreneur, you kind of need to build what you know and sell it to whom you know. We were enterprise application guys. So we said, we'd love to take this, you know, kind of unique innovation and apply it to the types of application landscapes that we've grown up knowing and managing and implementing and things of that nature. And so we specifically purpose built software to run a cloud infrastructure as a service that focused on solving the engineering problem of IO intensive scale up applications. And you know, what you have with those types of applications is IO centricity as opposed to compute or distributed points of failure, distributed points of computing challenges that the general purpose public clouds are very well suited for. And so we, you know, kind of invented this software. We kind of melt the cloud into its molecular components so we can control the individual attributes. And it allows us to run public cloud economics because we're not bound by instance sizes, things of that nature. But it allows us to control throughput in a more acute manner to service the application environment. And that makes us the only guys that provide actually an application latency SLA for the apps that run on our cloud. And that's really critical if you go to a Fortune 500 CI and say, put your mission critical, you know, your spinal fluid apps, your order to cash apps in production in a multi-tenant cloud, they've got to be assured that there's not going to be a resource contention that'll actually affect and bring that business down. So yeah, we were kind of viewed a bit like we were crazy back then, you know? And we stayed very determined. You know, we were probably the least cool guys in the cloud. Nobody cared what we were doing five years ago. Now as you read in the press, everybody's pivoting towards enterprise. That's where the big adoption cycle is. And we are so confident in our IP and our kind of first mover position for this type of marketplace. We have an architecture that's purpose-built, software that's purpose-built, particularly for these types of apps. So we're quite excited about where it is today. Rodney, I want to get back to that, talking about how you were the least cool guys. But one of your claims to fame is that you helped realize two back-to-back unicorns. These are startups that start from scratch that are then valued at over a billion dollars. What is your secret sauce? How are you able to see so far ahead? You know, I think kind of, it sounds very basic, but one of the things you see in the venture-backed technology community a lot is product-centric initiatives. So building products for the sake of the product, we really focused on where the market demand was, right? So we saw emerging space in cloud automation. We didn't see that automation servicing what large enterprises spend 60 to 70% of their IT budgets on. So we were just like, you know, the big legacy OEM guys that have dedicated hosting, we're kind of more servicing that. And we were like, look, you know, last thing in the world needs is a subscale AWS. That'll be venture capital suicide. Let's go prosecute this opportunity and bring this automation and compete more with the guys who can't compete with us, you know? And so I think we were, you know, back in, you know, four or five years ago, there's been a lot of religious wars around cloud. It was public versus private. There's API standards that you can adopt at AWS. You know, there's open stack build around things of that nature. And we were, there were many cloud purists. You know, they said, if you can't re-architect, rebuild your app to run on the cloud, then, then, you know, don't run it in the cloud. Hunt, you know, rebuild, re-architect the app. Are you talking about an SAP system and a Fortune 50 company? They've literally spent hundreds of millions of dollars, not billions of dollars. That's not going to get rewritten, at least not in my business lifetime, right? It probably will eventually, and it'll morph into various SaaS models. But there's a core part of the application estate, running any business, especially large enterprises, very well suited for what we did. So, you know, perhaps if there's a secret there, we stayed, you know, we, it wasn't a sexy thing, right? You know, my co-founder, Kevin Rina, we're kind of the antithesis of the Silicon Valley hipster, right? We were like East Coast middle-aged guys, right? They focused on enterprise. Like, it couldn't have been less interesting, I think. But we saw a prosecutable opportunity. We brought on some really smart people that wrote softwares. All of it, you know, listen to cloud infrastructure as a service. You think compute storage network. It's not really about that. It's about the software that controls it, runs it, drives your feature sets. So, we furiously wrote code. We were told we were going to fail every day. You know, you'd go onto Twitter and read 2010, 11, 12. You know, we had no chance of competing with the scale guys. But we did. We created a software reason to exist. We got those economics. We were on a much more utilized hardware estate than anybody in the industry. Much higher memory page utilization. So, we used that compete to compete with a procurement scale. But we found a prosecutable market where we were patient. And we never pivoted, right? You know, in a lot of the Silicon Valley language, pivots are, I think, an over-aggrandized word, you know? When you pivot, you generally made a mistake, you know? And we never pivoted. Let's talk about that focus. You guys were laser focused on SAP. You say it's not sexy. I have SAP rules, so I don't, I don't. He's a geek. Yeah, I'm a geek. Yeah, he's a geek. I like to argue against that. He's a lot of people. I think you're saying that. So, you guys did some amazing things with automating deployment of SAP. I will call you a COE, Cloud of Excellence for SAP. So, talk about the maturity of moving from focused on SAP to what we hear today about virtual streaming being for enterprise applications, not just SAP. Where's the secret sauce or the new advantages that customers can realize? So, we started with SAP because, again, building what we knew with my co-founders and I, they grown up around that ecosystem. So, they knew the application very well. Sort of two levels to our IP. One is the infrastructure automation. And that's actually agnostic to the app. We run thousands of apps. In an SAP, when you go run an SAP environment, the cloud may be 50, 60% of workloads are actually SAP. The rest are all the workloads for the supporting apps that satellite around and interface. The interface management gets quite tricky, things of that nature. Ultimately, the second layer of automation is application control automation that we built. That is very application specific. So, there's a part of our core capability that can run any app. And we do very well with those apps that have that IO centric challenge. That is just a different engineering problem. High IO apps place great degrees of memory burden on the underlying of infrastructure versus compute burden for scale out apps, generally. What we've now done is we kind of built the foundation of the business along a horizontal line. We're kind of associated with SAP because of our heritage and then for the application control that we've built. We've now expanded that to a number of different applications. And today, or this week at Dell EMC World, we announced a healthcare vertical. We've gotten big into the federal and public sector. So we wanted to build a foundation using a horizontal technology. And now, to really scale this, we're going to develop very specific vertical solutions. That's great. Well, Rodney, thanks so much. We're going to see you tomorrow night at the Gwen Stefani concert. You'll be dancing in the sky. Absolutely, absolutely. I wouldn't miss it. We're both seeing, what was that, Hollaback girl. Hollaback girl. Yeah. We'll do a, we'll be on the table. We'll be on the table. Awesome, awesome. Great. Rodney, thanks so much for joining us. Pleasure to be here. It was great to have you on the show. Awesome, thank you guys. Good night. Back a night for Keith Townsend. We will have more from Dell EMCworld. 2017 after this.