 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2016. Brought to you by Red Hat. Now here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and Brian Gracely. Welcome back, very happy to have on the program as our final guest for theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2016. The co-founder and CEO of Threescale, which now as of a week ago is a Red Hat company. Steve, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Thank you very much. Before we get into it, your co-founder, can you take us back, you know, what was that kind of founding moment, the core idea for why Threescale was begun? Sure, I could do all my things like yesterday in a lot of ways, even though it was quite a few years ago. So way back in 2007, we were playing with all sorts of different technologies and kind of so our integration technology, we were working with a lot of companies and a few people started putting out web APIs, so very simplified ways of doing that integration. And just there was this in our high moment of one day the web is all gonna be API driven, which was crazy back then. And there were quite a few years where people were like, what the heck's an API? Why would I do anything? But our vision was to help people do that, to enable that process to happen. And it's become, you know, that's really come true. Now, every customer we speak to is integrating APIs in some way and basing their infrastructure in it. So that's where it came from. It was a little crazy way back then. Certainly the last few years have paid off hugely and it's been exciting. So can you give us some of the basics on the company, how many people you had, what your customer base looked like? Sure. Yeah, we have about 700 customers today from very large enterprises. So folks like Johnson Controls, the telegraph in the UK with airlines, we have aircraft manufacturers, all sorts of different companies that use us. And what we do for them essentially is help them manage the APIs that they have in the infrastructure, make them secure, make them fast, basically enable all the tracking that they need to do that. And the company is actually 45 people. So with 45 people, 700 customers, that was great. But as our customers grew in size, it became clear that, you know, we'd have to scale up a great deal. And we'd had a great partnership with Red Hat. So this is part of that, you know, now we're a bunch part of a bigger entity. Those 45 people will scale a lot more as well. Yeah. We've heard a lot about, like you said, we've heard about the sort of quote unquote API economy for a number of years, you know, sometimes things are buzzwords, sometimes they're reality. Where are we in sort of this API economy? And who's using them? What are the really critical factors people need to be looking at? Yeah, no, I think that's a good question. I think the API economy used to be about people have a public API that you might, for example, pay for, you pay for some data. Yeah. But actually it's much, much deeper than that. Most of the customers that we have, only about 15 to 20% of them actually charge for access for the API. API has become critical for mobile, it's become critical for IoT. Internal APIs that companies use to build new products. It's just a huge, I don't think I can think of, you know, any fortune 2000 company that isn't doing something with APIs in some sense. And there's always business value behind it. Now, it might not quite look like the API economy from a few years ago, but a lot of the business that's being driven is API related, so. Where does Red Hat expect to see you integrate the three scale technology? Will it be OpenShift? Will it be Jboss? I mean, where are the different opportunities for you guys to bring value to Red Hat customers? Yeah, great question. So we've really seen with a lot of our customers that people are using Red Hat technologies like Jboss and obviously Fuse and OpenShift. So OpenShift is more on the obviously containerization of systems that's driving microservices adoption. And pretty much when you have microservices, you want to have an API on the front of each of those services because it's a component being pulled, you know, being called by something else. And then things like Fuse actually enabled you to create the APIs in the first place. So the capability that three scale brings is being able to wire all those up to put security on them, keys and tracking and allow you to see the universe of things you've created. So it'll be fairly broad, I think, and I'm sure there's other technologies we'll be integrating with as well. Yeah, one of the conversations that's been going on this week is we've heard about words like citizen developer and citizen scientist and, you know, you can't go anywhere these days or somebody doesn't go, well, it's got an API, just go access the API. When do you think we'll start getting to a point where you don't have to maybe be a developer to access that API, but you still want to, because maybe the API is the only way to get to some set of data. Do you see that evolving? Yeah, I think that's huge. And I think it's almost the biggest story because right now to create value with software, you still mostly have to be a developer, right? And what API has allowed you to do if it's done well, you're pulling data, or you're able to even just do something like make an API call and have a book shipped to you. So you're affecting the world, but it's still very hard for citizen developers to do that just by calling these endpoints. So I think one part of the puzzle is enabling more APIs to be out there and to be easier to use. Another one is sort of the composition technologies on top of that to allow a simple drag and drop. Like if this than that type of approach, right? You know, if something happens in this system, trigger an event and do something over here, I think we're not quite there yet, but the power as it arrives with the APIs and that is gonna be huge. Many more people being able to produce things. So Steve, I'm sure it's been a whirlwind for you the last few weeks. What's the initial feedback you're getting from your customers, you know, both here at the show and around from your customer base? It's been great. Like I think it obviously from the founding of the company and all the way through, we've seen it grow and it's been fantastic. And you interact with your customers day in, day out, but when an event like this happens, you kind of get that feedback and say, we're so happy for you guys and you know, I'm, you know, the team interactions have been fantastic. I think that Red Hat is a company from a cultural point of view where the fit is fantastic. We've always tried to do open source, we've always tried to be very community orientated and our customers really looking forward to having that, you know, the larger Red Hat entity in our technology together. So I've seen nothing but positive in that. So yeah, we're looking forward to it. Usually you can expect after an acquisition more resources become available to you, you know, the opportunities. What can we maybe look for, whether it's in mobile or IoT or analytics where APIs are going to, you know, start to do some really interesting things. Yeah, so we're looking forward to working with the mobile team at Red Hat, for example, helping the customers that are using that to expose even more APIs. IoT is another area where we already have customers where we'll be looking to see how we can align with Red Hat's IoT systems. One very, very big thing is that we will be releasing an on-premises version, complete on-premises version of 3Scale, which doesn't exist today. So that's a major thing for many industries that really need to keep all of their systems in-house and they'll obviously be an open source version as well. So we're excited about having everything available. Yeah, and that's big. It gives you customers more chance to get at your technology, more buying models, more purchasing models, all those types of things. Yeah, and we already have a large user community, but I think with an open source product and people able to get the code as well, it'll really be something where we're gonna push the envelope even harder. As you look forward, what should customers be looking for in kind of the maturation and growth of the API economy? So I think the companies that are doing it right, they really are already treating their APIs as a first class entity. Often you would just say, let's hit this database over here and then the system will work, but you need to kind of bring them up to be first class entities. The customers that are really doing it right are already thinking about almost every endpoint they have in their organization to be public. And I think that if you look at, so I don't know if you guys have an Amazon Alexa at home and Echo, either of you. So I bought, it's a great device and when you start to use it, you realize how much web usage is gonna change. We've all got used to the transition from the web to the mobile device, but you can now write a very simple skill. We've done that for multiple customers that sits on the Amazon Alexa. You can just talk to it and get data. And as a brand, you're suddenly in the customer's living room with a voice interaction. That's all API driven. I think most consumer brands are gonna want to create those kind of experiences and I think we're gonna see a huge growth in APIs and also the interfaces on top. Steve, I wanna give you the final word. Take away as you want people to know coming out of Red Hat Summit. Sure, yeah, and the summit's been amazing. I've just seen all of the different Red Hat technologies and the customers we've interacted with and we're excited for the future. I think, like I said, for the team, it's kind of a dream connection in terms of the kind of company and philosophy that Red Hat has and yeah, we're excited for the future and thank you for taking time to talk to us. Steve, congratulations to you and the team. We know there's a lot to hard work ahead. Beginning, not an end. So we'll be back to do a wrap up here for Red Hat Summit 2016. You've been watching theCUBE.