 Live from New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering Lenovo Transform 2.0, brought to you by Lenovo. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Lenovo Transform. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We've got two guests on the show right now. We've got Nash Hussein, the CEO of Cloudistics, and we're welcoming back Rod Lappin, who is the Senior Vice President Sales and Marketing here at Lenovo. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Great to be here. Nice to meet you. Rod, why are you so lazy at the show? MC in the show, on theCUBE twice. I know, it's been an exciting day, hasn't it? I've actually done a few meetings between I saw you last time as well. So, I think I'm living on two and a half hours sleep last night, and I'm running hot. So, I'm looking forward to a drink at the end of the day. A well-deserved drink. Sleep fast, sleep fast. Exactly. So, I want to start with you, Nash. Tell our viewers a little bit about Cloudistics. It's based in Reston, Virginia. What do you do? Yeah, so we build a private cloud with a premium experience. We founded the company in 2013 on the idea of simplifying infrastructures. In our previous world, we actually lived the problem. So, in our previous company, we actually took Amazon as an analog and tried to move our QA resources to Amazon to simplify it, because we were tired of managing complex infrastructure. So, as a company of 500 people in a software development company, we wanted to simplify our world. So, we went to Amazon, we spent three months or so developing code to implement QA. Great, real simple. You don't have to worry about hardware at all. It's a great value proposition. All of a sudden, we started to implement this thing. Month after month one, it was 100,000 bucks. After month two, it was 150,000 a month. After month three, we're creating the 200,000 a month in fees to run Amazon, right? While the value proposition is all about simplicity is awesome, the problem is very, very expensive. So, as a company of 500, like I said, we had to figure out what to do next. So, I spoke to my CTO and I said, how can we solve this problem? So, he said, okay, I can bring the infrastructure back on-prem. Great. So, he priced that out. It costs less than one month of OPEX in Amazon. So, we did. And then we had a problem where, okay, now we need software to run on it to make it work. We needed a virtualization platform. So, he looked at what was out there and the cost for at the time in 2012, 2011, it was a million dollars in virtualization software. So, we can't do this, right? It just were too small. We don't have the funds to do that. So, we decided at that point, we're going to found a company to go solve that problem and democratize IT, to give companies of any size the ability to implement cloud computing behind the firewall at an affordable price. And you call it composable cloud. We do. So, when we looked at the market at that point, there was different types of technologies out there and there was things called hyper-converged and traditional converged infrastructure. And what we did is we took a page out of how the public cloud operated. And the way the public cloud operates is they have composable resources. So, you can scale resources independently. So, I can scale network separate from compute, separate from storage. And that's a big deal when you're running a cloud because you have to worry about economics. So, when we architected the product, we started there. So, we started with this scalable architecture that's composable so companies grow as they need to grow. So, they don't have to tie resources together, right? So, there's no resource drift we call it. So, it's independent scaling and that's one of the big differentiators in our platform. So, Rod, why don't you help bring in some of the, your customer views that you hear on this. I know, I'm sorry, but I smirk a little bit when I hear we're going to simplify things. Because in my career, I've talked to lots of companies and everybody, we always have the goal to be simple. But, oh wait, I need to change this a little bit and I need this other thing and, oh wait, I've got this Lenovo product but oh, you've got this other product that's good and how do I manage all of these and cloud is supposed to be just an easy button and low cost and everything. It's helped but it's also added new silos and new things that I have to now get my arms around. So, maybe set up for why the OEM relationship and what you hear from customers. Yeah, to Naj's point, firstly, I think the cloudistic solution is really unique and it's very compelling. Actually, it's a very compelling offering. Firstly, because under one management set that they've got, you can basically run storage, compute as well as networking, sitting over the top of the hypervisor on-prem to his point. To Naj's point, you're at like 50% of the cost of a normal cloud infrastructure that you'd be going out into the market for and still have the management suite sitting up in the cloud that they obviously manage for you and that's very cool but one of the other things that's very cool about the cloudistic's offering is you can scale up and scale out depending on customer's requirements. So, once you've got yourself in this composable cloud model and you're actually running with cloudistic, instead of saying, okay, my business is growing, now it's getting bigger, I have to pay this much for an extra amount of X, whatever it might be, if you want more compute, you can add more compute. If you want more storage, you can add more storage. You can actually add the components of the cloud that you require based on the consumption that your business is actually running to and that's one of the very, very compelling events that the cloudistic's offering actually has. It's composable and customizable. Yeah, and very simple. One of the key tenants of the platform is making this thing really, really simple. So, when we designed the product, when we started, we started with the application first because at the end of the day that's what you're trying to run. You're not here to manage infrastructure, you're here to develop business, be agile in your business. So, we focused everything on making them really simple to deploy, making the hardware invisible, automating all the updates so you don't never have to see hardware. And all you can focus on is delivering your services. I want you to get really specific for a second here because many of the things I hear it, I think, oh, it reminds me of what the companies that do hyperconverge say they're doing. Simplicity in the enterprise, easy to manage, things like that. Is this a software offering? Is there hardware involved? How does this all go together? Is this a management suite that ties into what I have? It's a great question. Make sure I understand. Yeah, so it's a completely integrated hardware software platform. So think of it like your iPhone. When you buy an iPhone, it's hardware software beautifully integrated. Better all of fun, by the way. Yeah. Okay, better all of fun. But it's a phone that's integrated with hardware software. You connect to the network, you're up and running, you download your apps and you're done. It's a beautiful experience. So we took that as an analog for our platform. So literally, it's completely plug and play cloud. You roll it in, plug it into your network, go to our marketplace, log in, download apps and start running them. You can run containers, you can run Docker, you can run Windows SQL. All those apps are available for you to run with a click. So businesses now can be much more agile, right? Because now they're worried about delivering services not messing with multi-solid hardware, right? So now generalists now can manage this platform. DevOps can manage this platform, just like the public found. And so to make the setup really simple, in our OEM agreement, what we're doing is we're taking the Think Agile solution, which is our pre-configured preset rackable solution. So compute, storage and networking all in one solution. At factory, we're setting it up with all of the cloudistic structure that we need to set it out and basically ship it on site for customers. They only need two plugs, right? They need plugs for the network and a plug for power and basically it's ready to go. It's amazing. Roy, can you help it? So we were just talking to you about the big news with NetApp. You've got no OEM relationship with Nutanix. How does this fit in the portfolio? What are the customer kind of pain points as to when Lenovo would lead with this? Yeah, I think that's a fair question, Stuart. I think if you have a look at what our go-to-market strategies in the hyper-converged space is largely guided by customer demand. So basically a customer demand point will go in and we'll obviously lead with our customers and understand what are the pain points they actually have in their environment because many customers have got different environments, right? And three years ago, everyone was like, I'm going to be an AWS shop or I'm going to be an Azure shop or something. The reality is everyone's got so many different clouds in their environment. They've got so many different environments set up. You know, whether it's the Adobe cloud in marketing or AWS or whatever it might be, you've got to manage all these different environments. So it sort of is dependent purely on what the customer's environment is as to where we actually go. Now, from our perspective, this is a brand new relationship. It's only six months old. We are setting up dedicated people specifically to sell this with Cloudistics and I feel like it's got a really good future. We've got to get this business growing and I think we've got to be talking to more customers about it. Yeah, yeah. So who is your sweet spot? You said that the impetus of starting this company was that companies of any size could be able to do these things and act more agilely, as you said. So who's your sweet spot? What's your target? Yeah, so we target medium-sized enterprises. So, you know, 500 employees to 5,000. Kind of in that range is our initial target. And we drive into applications like Windows SQL applications. Applications that rely on performance potentially or even general-purpose workloads where they just want to simplify management of the stack. And as Rod was saying, the management of the platform is pretty unique in the fact that that's in the cloud, the management of the platform's in the cloud. So it makes it very simple to manage. So from one central spot, I can manage my multiple stacks throughout my company and it makes it very easy to deploy applications and manage everything. Do you have any specific examples of sort of the pain points that you've helped solve? Yeah, so in our case, it was really around drive and simplicity. So in many companies, many medium-sized companies, they struggle with the complexity of multi-tiered infrastructure. So I have to have a VM or a virtualization expert. I have to have a storage expert. I have to have a network expert. Then I have to have an app expert as well. And I got to make all those people have to work together. So businesses now are trying to be more agile to push applications out the door so they can run their business. So by all those interdependencies, it creates a lot of complexity. So we've cut out all that and we've created a platform where you don't need all those interdependencies. It's done for you. So it's literally plug and play. So businesses get right to their work of deploying applications. So there are a number of things that we've looked at from a research standpoint at Wikibon as to what makes a private cloud and a lot of it is kind of measuring the bar against the public cloud. And you said simplicity, absolutely a good one. One of the ones that, you know, we're starting to see some movement in the private cloud is starting to go to more OPEX or as a service office. Actually was walking through the show floor and talking to the Lenovo people doing that. Is that part of the discussion today? And maybe talk about how that fits. The platform is fully multi-tenanted, for example. So we took a page out of the public cloud where if you go into any public cloud you can create yourself a virtual data center. And then within that virtual data center you can deploy your applications. With our platform you can do the same. So you can have a pool of resources. We have extracted everything to pool. RAM, cores and storage is all you need. You can allocate those to your constituents, your customers, your departments. And they have a completely multi-tenanted, fully secured environment to work under without impacting anybody else. And with our core technology around networking we've completely isolated it at the layer three networking layer to make sure that it's highly secure within that box. Okay, so I understood. So they can almost be like a service provider themselves. Yes. But I guess one of the things is what about from the financial standpoint is are there things to allow me to scale up and scale down, you know, is it just within that box I can carve it up or, you know, Lenovo has some options that was like, oh hey, I need to burst up for a certain season but I'm not going to have to pay or there's certain things they can do financially. Very interesting, yes. So the platform is elastic in a sense where you can plug and play resources. So you can add memory, you can add cores, you can add storage, you can add network on demand and jack it in and scale the resources. We are working on coming out in a future period hybrid where you can burst and scale into public clouds which is a big deal, right? Because we have very unique layer three networking technology we can eventually stretch those networks into some other cloud which is very interesting. So that means that our Lenovo customers can then burst into on demand on a monthly payroll system into the public cloud as necessary. So that's a future thing we're working on. And to your points, you know, as a service stuff you heard today obviously when we had a little bit of a keynote up there Kirk hinted at the fact that we're trying to drive an as a service solution around on the hardware which would really match in perfectly with the cloudistic solution that Naj was just talking about. We're really, really close to this. I would have loved to have been able to announce today but we've got a few other things going on. So we will come forward with a market with an as a service, a fully metering as a service solution that we think is very compelling in market to match up with the cloudistic offering very, very shortly actually. It's fun. How are you getting the word out? We already know you need to increase your budget. That was our last guest who said that. Exactly. So Naj and I were on our phone call about this just this week. We need to get out the word out a lot more aggressively, a lot more compelling than we are today. So we have dedicated resources now in Western Europe and North America. We're about to expand our dedicated resources into China and Asia Pacific and then down into Latin America. So we're going to start off by dedicating people on the street that are actually going to be able to start talking to customers. Then we're going to have to drive into a marketing campaign of some description. So we can actually start to drive a more compelling story to market so they actually get to know what Naj's company's developed because once again, it's really compelling. Right, great. Well, Naj, Rod, thanks so much for coming on the show. It was great having you. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from Lenovo Transform and the Cube's live coverage in just a little bit.