 From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. Welcome everybody to this CUBE Conversation. My name is Dave Vellante and we're here in our Palo Alto studios. Moodu Siddhakar is here. He's an investor, an entrepreneur, and a friend. Moodu, great to see you again. Thanks so much for coming in. Thank you for having me. It's been too long. It is. You and I sat down and had a conversation on the CUBE. So welcome back. It's been two years, a year. Yeah, well you've been on the CUBE a bunch and you've seen some great conversations that you've had with Peter and John. So thanks for making the time and coming back in. Thank you, Dave. So I want to start with, when I go around and talk to executives, every CEO is trying to get digital right, whatever that means. They know it's important and they're trying to figure it out. They know it relates to data. They know they have to leverage data. They know this buzzword of digital transformation. What are you seeing when you talk to executives and companies? How real is this digital transformation? Is it a fad or is it a substantive? Good question. So look, from my viewpoint of you, digital transformation is a word people use, but at the end of the day, CEOs have to disrupt their businesses. Every CEO has to figure out, am I cutting the cost? Am I helping companies grow in revenue? From a look at from a board perspective and what people are looking at an investor perspective, most CEOs are looking at, somehow running their operations on a day to day basis. To that point, I think most CEOs are expecting CEOs to do the new innovative things. You're probably hearing that people are adding CDO as a title. So it's up to CIO to see, will it be the innovative CIO? It's like you have two kids. Like in your case, you have four kids. You have to, how do you make sure that all four kids are given the equal responsibility? So CIO has to decide, look, I have budget X. X by two goes to my existing business. X by two goes to the new business. That decision making is not happening with the CIOs today. And that's why the digital transformation has to be going on in a what I call, not in a disruptive manner, but the CIOs who have figured out how to disrupt it are really taken to the next stage. Next thing that people are interested in is, where do I start, right? I have all, should I start with my CRM, supply chain, should I start with my IT? You got to figure out whatever there. But start some place, you pick one area, but that has to be disruptive in the sense, we are living in the age of, where I call it autonomous everything, right? There's a data, there is cloud, and there's AI or machine learning, whatever you want. These three are such a large disruption in our industry. CIOs have to figure out and say, what can I do in terms of cost saving, in terms of revenue growth, but that can't be incremental, it has to be revolutionary. So I often say, for decades, we've marched to the cadence of Moore's law in this industry. That's where innovation came from, no longer. It's, as you said, it's data. Now for the last 10 years, and you were involved in this, we were collecting all this data, we lowered the cost of collecting data and running data warehouses with Hadoop. But now data is plentiful, insights aren't. So you have data, you have to apply machine intelligence to that data and then cloud gives you scale. So that's like the new innovation cocktail. So you agree that digital, I agree, digital transformation is real. And the other dynamic, Moodoo, is you see, companies are, because it's data, are able to traverse industries. Used to be you're in an industry. If you're in financial services, that's it. If you're in healthcare, that's it. Now you see Amazons in content, Apples into financial services. So people are afraid of getting disrupted. You've got this new innovation cocktail. So your point was, where do you get started? So you've got to shift resources. You don't have unlimited budget. So how do people do that? How are they taking cost out of their business and how are they reapportioning that cost for innovation? Very good. So I will give you two examples from again, again, thinking of where I see it. One is for CIOs has something called IT operations. IT operation is a very big piece that people need to figure out how to get the cost out of it. The IT operations cannot be there when you've been running IT for the last 30 years. I mean, whatever the word they use, I know Gartner uses the word called AI ops. I don't care what the word is, but the key is you have to run your IT in autonomous manner. We are living in the age of, your trading is autonomous. Your 401k and my 401k are being traded through hedge funds. Your ad technology is autonomous with Facebook, Google and Amazon, without data. When I saw with Caspid and Splunk, we made cybersecurity autonomous to whatever action threat detection. But when it came to IT operations and IT customer support, today is still manual. If I'm a CIO right now, I'll invest on customer service and support to start as a point of what can I do to make my service agents better? Or what can I do to make the end users or the users experience better without going to a human? Can I eliminate the human in the equation here? The mileage may vary. It's like the driverless concept. It's level one to level five. They may like to have autopilot. Some people may have a fully autonomous car. Depending on the organization, you got to have a right amount of autonomous city in your organization, both for IT operations and IT service management. That hasn't happened. And that will be happening in the next four, five years. So let's talk about that, because you were at service now for a period of time. They've obviously disrupted the old line help desk and they really did a job on BMC and Hewlett Packard, et cetera. Are they in a position to take that next step? And when you go to service now analogy here, folks talk about AI and infusing AI. Obviously there's a lot of data being collected. Is that the right model? I mean, they've automated forms, but I think you're talking about something more. Help us understand that. Sure, look, service now is in a great position. They'll continue to do well. It's a great company, right? I think what's going to happen next is, how can companies like service now take it to the next stage, right? Either become a partner with service now or service now itself will do it or there'll be new companies will be formed. One angle is, first is enterprises. Is this game going to be for enterprises? Same playbook as the playbook for the cloud. So imagine an app that are born on the cloud. Their IT operations data, their ticketing data, where will that go to? That needs to be think through. Enterprise data, which is enterprise apps and services, they need to figure out. So if I am a company today, if I am Dave Inc, I need to decide what will I do for my enterprise applications and services? What do I do for my cloud application services? So that's the decision you have to make it at the top. Once it goes down to the next level, then you already decide, is it for IT support, customer support or IT operations? What can I do in terms of augmenting there? If I do is just to make my agents better, you can't take the cost out of the equation. The cost should be, can I automate to the point I can eliminate 50% of my DevOps, 50% of my SREs. My role of the thumb is, in the next four or five years, at least 70, 80% of DevOps, IT and SRE jobs will be gone. That should be automated. It should be driverless IT, autonomous IT. That's not even a moonshot goal. We all in America, let's make America great again. This is our time. It's IT. If we don't do it, some other country will do it. China is going to eat us for lunch. So he basically put in forth the scenario with DevOps was essentially a stepping stone and you see that largely going away. It has to be automated. I'm not going to hire hundreds of tuners. I call it manual tuners. Yes, I'll need some DevOps people. I need some IT admin. Things that system cannot do it algorithmically should go to humans at some point. But there are enough things like, if you want to install something in your laptop, why should I talk to somebody else? If I want to upgrade to Microsoft Office, if I want to buy a CRM license, if I want to get a Zoom provisioning, why do I need to talk to a human being in this equation? Can I automate that? Complete autonomous. Can I get to a level five autonomous in IT? That's what I'm looking for. Does robotic process automation play a role here? Can our RPA, we've done some events with automation anywhere and UI path. You see huge valuations UI path. Supposedly has another six billion dollar valuation. I mean, you know, amazing unicorn plus, plus, plus. Can those technologies be applied to solve this problem? Yes and no. I think it depends on what each RPA vendors are doing. RPA is a great topic, right? RPA vendors are very successful. What I'm talking about is IT operations and IT support and customer support automation. Can RPA guys take their technology, their subsidiary platform? Sure, they can try it. But these are all have to be grown organically. Doing this in IT, doing for customer service and support, doing it for the cloud has its own skin, its own platform. Like you and me were talking earlier. If I'm doing this thing on Amazon, why wait and launch a VM? I won't even do it. Like if a new ticket comes in, I should be doing through Kinesis. I should be doing through my Lambda functions. I shouldn't be, my cost of goods will be so much that I won't, it should not cost me anything until the point Dave generates a ticket to me. First of all, why should Dave generate a ticket, right? Look at the very much extreme model of the Teslas. Tesla car today tells me, when should I service my car? Why should you do the same thing? Like I should be coming and telling you, your share point is going to go down Dave today. Your cube application cannot do an interview with me today unless you fix it. That is what the world wants to go. So back to service management for minutes. So in the old days, the service manager was too cumbersome, he really didn't have a single CMDB. It just really didn't work that well. It didn't change anything. A lot of tickets is what it did. Service now obviously solved that problem, but what I'm inferring from what you're saying is it's still too expensive, the entire infrastructure. It needs to be more streamlined and automation is the answer. Absolutely. So I think if you take it at layers and layers, the first is in the support, starting with even from CMDB. Most organizations say my CMD data is still old or stale or it's never accurate. How can I get a dynamic view of Dave's ink, right? I should know when. That has to be done at the level of services and apps and at Kubernetes level to container level. Once I have a blueprint of what my organization is, then I need to know how do I handle the tickets against it. Then can I do a health monitoring for all my CI's? I should be telling you outage predict. At the end of the world, business care is my business running correctly. You do have a downtime. What is going to happen? Even though if I'm false positives a few times, people are expecting, saying that tell me proactively what services will impact and who will be impacted? So I can take a corrective action. And that will happen starting from CMDB automation. I actually call it cloud CMDB or dynamic CMDB. In the world of cloud and dynamic, let's make a good CMDB which is dynamic and accurate. Then take it to the all the way to outage prediction. If I can give you a business of time and outage prediction, that would be nirvana. Are you telling me that IT cannot solve it? You and me are seeing in Palo Alto driverless cars are going around. We are going to see it in our lifetime. IT can't be so complex that the car can be autonomous, but IT cannot be. I don't buy them. Well, I mean, you hear about all the systems are down or my systems are slow today. That's a form of outage. That costs Fortune 2000 companies money. I mean, it's $50,000, $60,000 a minute in some cases. So I think sometimes people aren't aware as to how much revenue is lost to downtime or lost productivity. So there's huge, huge gains to be made there. And it seems that the cloud is the platform which you're going to build these new apps. It's natural choice. It has to be. And it has to be multi-cloud too. You can't say we are in the age if you are a new cloud, you are building it. I tell people, build it as a multi-cloud. Your same code should work on GCP, Amazon and Azure, right? And on VMware, if you want to do a private cloud, but it should be the same code base should be able to compile and run on all multiple platforms. So Kubernetes and microservices, that's the enabler there, right? Right at once, run it anywhere. Interesting conversation, multi-cloud. You're hearing a lot of discussion, certainly in DC, the Jedi case, oracles contesting that. When you read the rulings from the general accounting office that basically the DOD determined that multi-cloud is less secure, more expensive, more complex. Now that's the DOD. Everybody's going to have multi-cloud because multi-cloud is multi-vendor. But it's interesting, you don't hear Amazon talking about multi-cloud, other than you don't want to do it because it's too expensive. But everybody else is talking about multi-cloud. Is Kubernetes somewhat of a threat to that Amazon posture? I don't think, I think if you look at it, Amazon is saying, they call it hybrid cloud. The word may be different, multi-cloud or hybrid cloud. So they've already partnered with like the best public cloud, partnered with the best private cloud. Yeah, Outpost is awesome announcement, right? So VMware, when I talked to Pat Galsinger and his team, I'm like, they got VMware working with AWS vice versa. So that's a great, I mean, maybe you can call it a two ecosystem, but they got that whole thing working there. Same thing with Azure is going to do with their public cloud on Azure with Azure. Azure Stack. Azure Stack on-prem, right? Everybody, same thing, GCP will figure out. So then after a while, if you and me as a customer, I should be able to move things. Many times it happens, I'm not going to move things dynamically for anybody. But if I want, I don't want to vendor lock in. I want a code such that if tomorrow something happens, I should be able to have an option to move my code base to a different cloud. And that's where multi-cloud will happen as a requirement, as you build it. How much you exercise or not? People will design software going for multi-cloud. So it's a whole new vector of conversation. I would love to get your opinion on that multi-cloud opportunity. Obviously Cisco's going after it. VMware is in a really strong position there. Certainly Microsoft is vying for that. You have a ton of startups looking at this. IBM with the Red Hat acquisition now is in a pretty strong position, given its open source chops. How do you see that whole multi-cloud vendor landscape shaking out? I think, very good, I have a theory for this. At the end when the dust settles, you won't have 100 aircraft carriers. You'll have only four or five. So it's like what happened in 90s, compact went away, deck went away. So same thing is going to happen here. There will be four or five vendors who will survive. There will be Amazon, Azures, maybe GCPs, VMware, maybe it's Cisco and IBM. That's about it. I mean, they're like, maybe Ali cloud in China. You won't have hundreds of cloud. So the number is already decreasing it. Will it be 10? Will it be five? Will it be four? That's still, you'll see with our eyes, but it's already been, the whole consolidation happening. So if I'm a customer, if I'm a vendor, if I'm a startup or a public company, I'm going to build it only for few these multi-cloud vendors. I'm not going to across 100. Yeah, because the marginal economics of those hyper-clouds, we've been saying this for years, there's just so much more compelling. And at the end of the day, if the economics are 10x less expensive and more attractive, that they're going to win. And I think even though you have thousands and thousands of service providers who call themselves cloud, we're talking about a different kind of cloud. It's got one of those, you know it when you see it types of things. And I want to add something. So if you take this back to your earlier question about where the disruption is happening, we talked about all the customer service support and IT service management industry, but imagine if an app is born on the cloud, call it cloud native applications. You have millions of new apps that are there on these cloud platforms. What is they're going to do? Where is their data going there? They want another customer service and support app on their platform. It currently, it's like, I'm in your house, I'm drinking your wine, but when it comes to managing my customer service operation, I will take your log data, your event data, your taking data and put it in somebody else's house. Even though John is your partner, would you put it there? It doesn't make sense. You should run it inside your, so all these vendors would want a native application that is running on their platform, solving their customer data, which hasn't happened yet. Well, this is interesting. So obviously Oracle has its own cloud, but you're seeing, well, let's see, Workday, Salesforce, ServiceNow, all these SaaS companies, used to build their own clouds, they're building their own data centers. Chuck Phillips of Inforces, I don't, friends don't let friends build data centers. So maybe he's prescient, maybe the trend is that these apps are going to largely, predominantly run in the public cloud. Oracle, IBM notwithstanding, they've got the resources to maybe tough it out. Is that the scenario that you see? I am, like, take the consumer companies, whether you take VWork, Airbnb, Uber, all these guys, you're already seeing them, to some extent, maybe they have their own data center, but they're all vastly running on public clouds, right? And you've already seen that's even the big SaaS vendors, whether it's Adobe. Adobe is already partnering with Microsoft Azure. Workday is partnering with Amazon. You saw Salesforce partnering with Google Cloud and AWS, so you're already seeing these vendors, the large SaaS vendors, already seeing, you know what? For me, for economics-wise, it doesn't make sense, whether it's for my marketing cloud, my service cloud, my e-commerce cloud, I want this to run on this cloud platform to get scale, cost of economics, and also I need my services that are built there with a new substrate. Like we talked about, whether it's Lambda functions to Kinesis, I'm not going to do it on my platform. And that trend is going on, it's just accelerating. So how are you spending your time these days? You've had very successful entrepreneur, investor, you've been CEO of multiple companies. What are you doing these days? No, I'm look, I'm very happy with what I'm doing right now. So I spend a lot of time with this company called Isera, right? You and me talked about it. It's a startup company in Palo Alto. Their vision is to apply, like what we taught AI ops, applying AI for digital transformation for AI customer service, IT, RPA. So I like the vision. Look, I want to spend time with companies which are taking a big bet, right? It's like in our IT industry, nobody talks about moonshot goals. Let's take a bigger bet. Let's take a much vision of four, five years, 10 years, what can we disrupt, right? And I look at those companies, I invest with those companies and spending time with them. I'm learning a lot in the process. I'm contributing back to those companies. Well, you know, it's interesting, I was on Twitter yesterday with a little group who were having an interesting discussion about how things are changing, the dynamics of where innovation comes in. So we started this conversation with that sort of new innovation cocktail. And there just seems to be a whole new fabric of services. Not only, it's not just remote cloud services anymore. It's these embedded services that can think, they can act, they can sense, and it's ubiquitous, namely the edge, autonomous vehicles. We're entering a whole new era. It's very exciting. Right, and again, one thing that we didn't talk about, my concern and my, again, it's society has to have regulations and will come. If you look at the what's happened in this whole call center customer service industry, if autonomicity will happen of any level from level, even if I automate 30% of your customer service and you don't touch a human being when you are at home for your Comcast to your Nest, imagine all those services inside your home from field service to, if they get automated, what's going to happen? First of all, your service is going to improve. Your costs are going to reduce. If I'm a business, I can take that money and invest somewhere else. But more importantly, most of those things, there's a big disruption happening in the outsourced industry, right? These are your jobs in China, India, Philippines, Vietnam, my concern is that, saying that there'll be a disruption is going to happen. People are not paying attention to that. And this train has already left the station. It's going to come to a platform again, some next platform, but next four or five years, you'll see a tremendous disruption in this area of digital transformation. Well, I remember a couple of decades ago, there was a lot of talk about, well, people spending a lot of money on IT, but that you don't see it in the productivity numbers that all of a sudden, because of the PC revolution, the productivity went through the roof. You're hearing similar sort of discussions now. We feel like productivity is about to explode because of what you're saying here. Absolutely. And again, back to the RPA has already shown the value. RPA is no longer a niche category. As you said, we talked about successful vendors from UI path, automation anywhere, blue prism, that just on the back end of the supply chain and the RPF side, taking that to front office, applying that to customer service, facing to your CRM, facing that your IT hasn't happened yet. Can I automate your tasks? Can I automate your actions, right? From an employee experience to customer experience, that productivity, if you employ it, you'll get more customers doing that. It scares people, but it's the future. So you'd better embrace it and lean in. Moodu, thanks so much. Always good to talk to you, Dave. Always a pleasure to see you, all right. Thanks for watching everybody. This is Dave Villante from our studios in Palo Alto, and we'll see you next time. Thank you, Dave.