 Okay, we're back here at theCUBE on this floor in Cloud City, the center of all the action at Mobile World Congress. I'm John Furrier, your host. Michael Card, CTO, VertiSan is here with me remote because this is a virtual event as well. This is a hybrid event. It's the first industry hybrid event. Great to be back in real life on the floor. Michael, you're coming in remotely. Thanks for joining us here in theCUBE in Cloud City. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. We were just talking on camera about you went to Michigan and football, all that good time while we were waiting for a matter from the studio, great stuff. But let's get into what you guys are doing. You got a great cloud news we're going to get to but take a minute to explain what you guys do first. So VertiSan helps organizations of any size thrive in the cloud. So we have a unique combination of proprietary technologies such as our cloud optimization platform that we'll talk about in a minute and a global team of experts that helps companies make the most of the cloud from getting to the cloud and building the cloud to optimizing the cloud all the way to managing the cloud at scale. Well, you got a lot of experience dealing with the enterprise. A lot of customer growth over the years, great leader. Cloud dynamic here is the big story at Mobile World Congress this year. The change over, I won't say change over per se, but certainly the shift or growth of cloud on top of telco. You guys have some news here at Mobile World Congress. Let's share the news. What's the big scoop? So we have an automated cloud optimization platform that helps companies automatically understand the usage patterns and reduce spend fully automatically. And we focus first on AWS as the biggest cloud provider, but starting this week, we wanted to announce is we're actually going live with our GCP product, which means people who are on the GCP cloud platform can now leverage our platform to constantly understand usage patterns and spend and automatically take action to reduce spend. So we typically see customers save over 50% when they use our platform. So now GCP customers can take advantage of the same capabilities that our AWS customers take advantage of every day. Talk about the relationships as you get deeper, and this seems to be the pattern. I want to just unpack, you don't mind a little bit, the relationship with Google and this announcement and Amazon. You're tightly coupled with them. Is it more integration? Talk about what makes these deals different and special for your customers. What's about them? What's the big deal? Well, I think for us, obviously we think that, the public cloud's the future, right? And obviously cloud city and all the different companies there agree with us. And we think that, you know, much like, you know, you don't generate your own electricity. We don't think you're going to, you're going to build your own technology infrastructure for the most part. We think that pretty much all compute will be in the public cloud. And obviously AWS is the market leader. I'm in the largest cloud provider in the world. But, you know, GCP, especially with Telecom has some compelling offerings. And we think that, you know, organizations are going to want choice. Many will go multi-cloud, meaning they'll have one, two, three of the big providers and move workloads across those. But even those who choose one cloud provider, you know, each cloud provider has their strengths and different companies will choose different providers and they're all, you know, they've all got strong capabilities and their uniqueness. So we want to make sure that whether, you know, an organization goes across all cloud providers or they choose one that we can support them no matter what their workloads look like. And so for us, you know, developing deep relationships with each of the public cloud providers, but also, you know, expanding our full set of capabilities to support all of them is critically important. Because we do think, we do think that there's, there's going to be, you know, a handful of large public cloud providers. And obviously AWS and GCP are among them. Yeah, I mean, I talk to people all the time and even, you know, we're an Amazon customer pretty robust cloud and the bills out of control is what's, what's this charge for? There's more services to tap into. You know, it's like, first one's on me. You know, and then next thing you know, you're, you're consuming a hell of a lot of new services, but there's value there and that's the benefit of the cloud. We all love that. But as a random aside here, I want to get your thoughts real quick. If you don't mind, this idea of a cloud economist has become part of a new role in organizations. Certainly SREs, DevOps. Then you're starting to get into people who actually can squint through the data and understand the consumption and be more on the economics side because people are changing how they report their earnings. They're changing how they report their KPIs based upon the usage and costs. And what, is this real? What's your thoughts on that? I know it's a little random, but I want to get your, get your thoughts on that. Well, yeah, it's interesting that that's been a development. What I will say is, you know, the economics of cloud are complicated and they're still changing and still emerging. So I think that, I think that's probably more of a reaction to how dynamic the environment is than kind of a long-term trend. And admittedly for us, you know, we hope that, you know, a lot of those, that analysis and the data that's required will be provided by our platform so you can think about it as a digital or AI-powered cloud economist. So I don't know, hopefully our customers can use the platform and get everything they need and they won't need to go out and hire a cloud economist. It sounds expensive. Well, I think one of the things that sounds like great opportunities to make that go away where you don't have to waste the resource to go through the cost side. I want to get your thoughts on this. This comes up all the time, certainly on Twitter, I'm always riffing on. It comes up on a lot of my interviews and private chats with people about their cloud architecture. Spen can get out of control pretty quickly and data is a big part of it. Moving data is always going to be cost-efficient. Amazon and Google, moving data in and out of the cloud is great. Now with the Edge, I just talked to Bill Vass at Amazon Web Services, the VP of Engineering. You can literally bring the cloud to the Edge and all the clouds are going to be doing these Edge hubs. So that's going to process data at the Edge but it's also going to open up more services, right? So it's complicated enough as it is. Spend is getting out of control and it only seems to be getting out of control even more. How do you talk to customers that want to not be afraid, they want to jump in, but they also want to have a hedge? Yeah. What's your take on that story? I think that, sure, I think there's a lot of debate right now as to whether or not moving to the cloud from a cost perspective is cost effective or more costly. And there's a pretty healthy debate going on at the moment. I think that the reality is, yes, the cloud makes it easier for you to take on new services and bring on new things and that, of course, drives spend but it also unlocks incredible possibilities. And what we try to do is help organizations take advantage of those possibilities and kind of the capabilities of the cloud while managing spend. And it's a complex problem but it's a solvable problem. So for us, we think that the job of the cloud providers is to continue to innovate and continue to bring more and more capability to bear so that organizations can transform through technology. The job of the teams using that technology is to really leverage those capabilities to build and to innovate and to serve their customers. And what we wanna do is enable them to do that in a cost effective manner and we believe and we have data to prove that if you do public cloud right, it's cheaper because those organizations, much like at the turn of the Industrial Revolution factories used to have their own power plants because you couldn't effectively reliably and kind of cost effectively generate power at scale. Obviously no one does that now. And I think with the cloud providers, it's the same thing. I mean, they're investing in for pride, very hardware, tons of software, tons of automation. They're highly secure. At the end of the day, they're gonna always be able to provide a given capability at a lower cost point. Like of course they need to make profit. So there's a bit of margin in there but at the end of the day, we think that both the flexibility and capability of it combined with their ability to operate at scale gives you a better value proposition, especially if you do it right. And that's what we wanna focus on is, the answer is there. You just need the right data and the right intelligence to find it. And you can have it. I totally agree with you. In fact, I had a big debate with Martin Casada at Andreessen Horowitz about cloud repatriation and he was calling this paradox. Do you focus on the cost or the revenue? And obviously they have Dropbox, which is a big example of the did that. And I even interviewed the Zynga guys and they actually went back to Amazon, although they didn't report that. But I'm a big believer that if you can't get the new revenue then you're in cost mode and there are other issues. But again, I don't want to go there right now. I'll talk about that another time. But I want to get the playbook. So first of all, I love what you do. I think it's an opportunity to get, take that heavy lifting away from customers around understanding cost optimization. A lot of people don't know how to do it. So take us through a playbook. What are some best practices that you guys have seen to help people figure this out? What do you say to someone, hey, help me, Michael, I'm in a world of hurt. What do I do? What's the playbook? Can you give some examples, day in the life? Sure, so I think the first thing is, know what you're spending money on, which sounds obvious, but there's, cloud environments are complicated, especially at scale. There's hundreds of thousands of skews and lots of different usage patterns. And I think the first thing is, understand what you're spending money on. Number two is, understand what you're getting for that spend. So what value are you driving with that spend? And then number three is, put the information in the hands of the people who can do something about it. And I think that is one of the things that we really focused on is, we built our product from an engineering focus first. It was engineers solving the problem of understanding how to keep cloud costs in control. And so our whole principle is, give the people working with the technology, the data, to make good decisions and give them the power to act on it. And so a lot of companies say, oh, we're spending more over here or maybe we should look at that. But what we believe is, actually be specific. Where are you spending money? Where exactly are you spending too much and what should you do about that and give that information to the people who can take action, which are the engineers. And then lastly, make it important in the organization because there's a ton of competing priorities. And what we've found is that where there's leadership support there's results. And so I think if you do those four things, results will follow. Now obviously you need to understand specific utilization patterns and know what to do with different kinds of resources and all of that stuff is complicated. But there are certainly solutions out there, ours included, who help you with that. So if you get the other four things right plus you have some help, you can keep it under control. And actually not just keep it under control, but operate an environment that's much cheaper than hosting all this technology yourself. And much more flexible. That's a great point. I mean, the fact that you mentioned earlier, the engineering piece, that is so true. People I talk to, our experience is in it's pretty common. The DevOps team tends to get involved in things like making sure you're buying reserve instances or all kinds of ways to optimize patterns. And that's also an issue, right? I mean, first of all, it makes sense that they're doing it but they're also the engineering time is being spent on essentially accounting at that point. Demonstrates the shift. I'm not saying it's good or bad. I'm just saying that it's got to be realistic. It's a time sink for the engineering when they're not engineering, accounting, or should they, this is a legit question. It's not so much they should or shouldn't. I mean, if you said to someone, hey, you're paid to build and write software and you're spending your time, you know, solving accounting problems. That's obviously a mismatch. But when you talk about SREs and DevOps, Michael, it's kind of what might not be a bad thing. I mean, so how do people react to that? Are they kind of scratching their head in the same way or are you guys the solution to that? Well, I think that at first they are, but for us at least it's, you know, we don't want them trying to understand the intricacies of a savings plan or understanding kind of the different options for compute instances. What we want them to do is we give them all the information. So our approach is give them all the information they need to quickly make a decision, let them make a decision, push a button, and then let the change happen automatically. So if you think about it, you know, the amount of time they spend is a minute and that's the goal because then we can use their expertise so it's not a finance person or an accountant doing research and then making decisions that may or may not make technical sense and then looping in a bunch of people and they all talk and then, you know, all that kind of whole process. It's now here's, you know, a data-driven observation and recommendation. You have contacts, say yes or no. If you push the button and then you say yes, then, you know, the change happens. If you say no, the system learns and it's- It's building right into the pipelining there. It looks like shifting left of security is the same concept. It's really a great thing. I really think you're onto something big. I love this story. It's kind of one of those things where reality's there. Michael, we've got 30 seconds left. I want to get your thoughts to share. Put a plug in for the company. What you guys are doing, what are you looking at higher? Give it, you got a 30-second plug. Go plug the company. What do you got up? Well, you know, we think that for any organization big or small, trying to make the most of the public cloud and be cloud first, you know, we bring a unique set of expertise, automation and technology capabilities to bear to help them thrive in the cloud and make the most of it. So, you know, obviously, we would love to work with any company that wants to be cloud first and fully embrace the public cloud. And I think we've got all the tools to help them thrive. Yeah, and I think the confidence of business logic, technology, engineering, working together is a home run. It's only going to get more stronger. So congratulations. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Okay, thank you. Adam, back to you in the studio for more action. theCUBE is out. We'll see you later.