 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our community partners. Welcome to theCUBE virtual and our coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. I'm your host Lisa Martin, and with me today is MRAM, Shachar, the VP and GM of Spot by NetApp. MRAM, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you, Lisa. It's great to be here. So here we are in this virtual world that we're all living in. Great that we can still connect with you, but I wanted to understand, you were the founder and CEO of Spot, which was acquired by NetApp earlier this year. Talk to me a little bit about Spot, about the technology and what's going on since the NetApp acquisition. Absolutely. So Spot is a company that was founded in late 2015 and was centered and concentrated about helping companies to optimize their cloud infrastructure costs through automation of software, of how customers are provisioning their compute. So we could possibly help customers to choose their best price of server infrastructure and the price and the best size of server infrastructure in the cloud. And since we launched the company, so we help over 1500 customers worldwide to use our technology, scale their revenues to tens of millions of dollars of revenue, raise money from top VCs, including Intel Capital, Vertex and Highland. And just recently, four months ago, we got acquired by NetApp. Excellent. So that's a pretty fast from launch to acquisition, less than five years, must have a neck brace collar on from the whiplash, that and COVID, right, whiplash. So talk to me about acquisition a few months ago, what's going on with the technologies and how is the NetApp customer base helping to expand your market penetration? Yeah, so it was clear during the rationality, when we did a rationality acquisition, so it was clear that spot is going to remain an entity within NetApp. So for example, we preserved our brand, so it's spot by NetApp. It's not going to be just integrated and that's it. So we're not going to see spot disappearing. It's actually the opposite. So we're going to leverage the market credibility that NetApp is 27 years, storage, leading storage provider has in the market. And we're going to use spot as a brand to lean forward and lead with cloud native applications. And what we're going to do is we're going to help to NetApp transform like NetApp existing customers that are moving through the cloud. So not only they can use NetApp storage in the cloud, they can also use the software and automation and optimization layers that spot provides actually. So talk to me about what's going on in the market today. We've been talking for months now about this acceleration of digital transformation, acceleration of cloud adoption given businesses now are working so differently. Talk to me about what you're seeing, what your customers are seeing and how you're helping them to manage and not just keep the lights on right now but be able to be successful and going positioned well in the future. So I'm seeing like two main trends. The first trend is like, yeah, more cloud usage but that's very general, very vague. But what I do see in addition to that is actually like priorities have been changed. And when I talk about priority like priorities not only moving to the cloud but doing it efficiently. So customers who are already using cloud or moving to the cloud, they really need to, you know, plan this in the most efficient way. So I can tell you, for example, a lot of customers that actually we were talking to them to use us at the beginning of 2020. So they intended to use us in like, you know, third quarter, fourth quarter of the year, like it all got accelerated and they started to use our platform because their priorities have changed and they want to have like optimization of cost right now. Yeah, that's been something that a lot of folks have been wanting and needing even to just keep the lights on get their eyes on visibility where are we spending costs? Are we using cloud efficiently? If not, how can we work with technology vendors to help us get that visibility and optimize our costs and spend? So tell me about from a conversation perspective, post, you know, during this interesting year the acquisition occurred. Are your conversations with customers changing? Are we seeing now is cloud rising even up the C suite stack to the board in terms of the conversations that you're having? You know, and I'm seeing this like for five years and like how our conversations are changing year over year and year over year we're seeing like improvement in our type of conversations because people leaning in like, you know, to the cloud more people thinking about about optimization is becoming a priority. As I mentioned, like, you know, four years ago, like it's not about optimizing cloud it's about moving to the cloud. And right now I have so many things in the cloud I just need to run it well. I need to understand what I'm doing in the cloud. So our conversation has gotten a lot better and especially in 2020. And if you think about cloud expenditure like this is probably the second biggest line item of every company's expenses. So it goes directly to the cogs which is the cost of goods sold of every company. So it goes directly go off the margin of companies. So cloud is definitely becoming a board discussion thing. So jokes maybe about some of the new products and capabilities that you guys have now that you're part of NetApp. So first of all, as a company, we really believe in like listening to customers seeing what they need and innovating on their behalf. I think this is like our mission. And I'm always like saying that like customers always want like cheaper cloud and more simple cloud. This is like a strategy to build a long-term business. Like, I don't know if customers will not need like cheaper cloud in 10 years from now. And I don't know if customers would want more complicated cloud in 10 years from cloud in 10 years from now. So in order to keep that momentum, so we're doubling down on like our existing technology which helping customers to optimize their pricing, purchasing. As you know, we're helping companies to purchase across the three pricing models in the cloud. And the first pricing model being on demand which is you pay by the hour. The second pricing model being reserved instances or savings plans, which is you basically reserve capacity for a longer time and then you get a discount. And the third pricing model called SPOT. And SPOT basically is like as idle resources, idle compute resources that cloud providers have and they're willing to sell you that in a low rate but they can take it away from you at any moment. So what our technology does in actually balancing in the most economical way across these three pricing models that we basically push the savings to the maximum while we also keep the SLA and the SLOs of the customers. So while we're releasing now and doubling down on the technology is we're introducing something called predictive rebalancing which is basically customers who are launching SPOT instances and they want to migrate between SPOT instances to different SPOT instances or to reserved instances. So we can do it much more proactively than ever before. We've been investing a lot of machine learning engineers on that problem. We've put a lot of brain power to work on this and we're gladly happy to release a new updated version of that it can help customers to get warnings of almost an hour before any interruption might happen. Predictive rebalancing you said it's called. One of the things I was thinking when you were talking about the three pricing tiers and what you guys help businesses do it sounds very dynamic and iterative in the moment. So based on what's it based on usage data volumes how do you help customers make that? How does the technology actually help customers with that dynamic that predictive rebalancing? So it's a great question because the way that it works it really matches the technology stack of the customer. So if we understand that this is like a web service running behind an elastic load balancer so that predictive rebalancing will have behavior X. And if we realize that this is a big data workload that requires some other type of compute provisioning so that predictive rebalancing will behave like Y. And there is also the new wave of apps which are cloud native containers and microservices. So actually the predictive rebalancing knows to identify that. So basically if you think about that what happens behind the scenes is that we migrate between different pricing models and we just move containers around the customers don't really know what happened behind the scenes but they that the output of everything is the most optimized and high available capacity they can possibly get from the cloud. So what sort of cost savings are we talking about? Can you share any examples of some what some of your customers have achieved? So yeah, we're talking about like I think the benchmark is anywhere between 70 to 90% we have a lot of public use cases with our customers and some of our really valuable customers like a check which is an educational tech technology company which are running with us their entire fleet of containers reported like over 65% of cost reduction on their compute. Also Gum Gum which is computer vision company that analyzes ads in real time. They also reported over 70% of cost reduction of their cloud infrastructure as well as the well-known ticket master which is also a very large customer virus and using us in all of their production Kubernetes clusters and also saved over 60 to 70% of their containers infrastructure. So big savings, I think the lowest number I heard you say was 60%. So big impact that the technology is able to make. Talk to me about the existing customers that and you've got some big brands you mentioned, Ticketmaster, how would things change for them or not change for them with the NetApp acquisition? You talked about maintaining the spot brand but talk to me about kind of that transition for your existing customers. So you know it's actually a very, you know I felt lucky like going through this process of an acquisition as a founder of a company and it's very pleasing calls to have with customers is when you call customers and you tell them about the acquisition and I was lucky enough to tell them like, hey guys, nothing is going to change. Like our roadmap is going to continue in the same way. Our name is going to remain the same way. The only thing we're going to bother you with quote unquote, as we're going to add storage capabilities into our compute capabilities. That must have been music to their ears but I got to ask you is it like doing an acquisition in the middle of a global pandemic and we're completely remote, right? You know, this is an experience I will never forget. You know, it's, you're just, you're at home. You know, I was also, I was really lucky to become a father for the first time and I know it earlier this year. So it's like, you're with your baby wife, family and just all day calls ongoing and you know, it's a really amazing experience that I think I will never forget. Yeah, I think I'm with you on that unique experience. Well, congratulations for being a new father but that also makes it challenging, right? You're CEO of a startup that's about to get acquired and you've got a newborn as a coworker. So all of a sudden all of these challenges that just add more challenges to the mix. So I'm sure it was great to be able to have the conversation with your existing customers about what little is changing. But also for them, what's the opportunity for those existing customers to really start taking advantage of all of NetApp's capabilities? So that's exactly the intersection between spot and NetApp, which I feel like super excited about because if you think about that, like we've built a technology of computer optimization over the last five years. NetApp is a big brand, credible company going for 27 years, more than 27 years. The last seven years, NetApp has been doing like a massive shift to the cloud, supporting their customers and moving from on-prem to the cloud. So NetApp actually did, and I was very amazed by that, which is they ported all of their on-premise technology and put it in the cloud. In the platform that they call cloud volumes, which is you basically you can get all of the features that NetApp provides, like advanced snapshotting and backup and fast restore and compression and deduplication, which I remember managing data centers myself from my military days, I was using a lot of NetApp stuff. And they took all of these great things and put it in the cloud. And now what we can actually do for our customers is that we can actually attach, like the computer they're buying from us and optimizing with us with the storage, the great storage that NetApp offers in the cloud and the cloud volume platform. There's a lot of opportunities there. In fact, NetApp has, we've been talking about this on theCUBE for a while for years, NetApp has gone undergone a big transformation, a big evolution, and it sounds like what they're doing with Spot and also the opportunities that it's providing to not just your existing customers, your prospective customers and your new customers, it's just kind of kicking that door wide open, which right now in this interesting time is essential as businesses are continuing to pivot as this time unfolds. And we know some things are going to remain permanent, but they've got to be able to pivot quickly. Otherwise, the competition is probably in the rearview mirror, maybe smaller, more agile and ready to take over. That's so true. And like, you know, generally speaking about like transformation, like modernization of applications. So like huge trend that we're seeing, and this is also a huge intersection between NetApp and Spot is everything Kubernetes and everything containers. So we're seeing that organizations moving to the cloud, but they're not like, not anymore looking at like just lift and ship, they're like lift, modernize, ship. Like people want to modernize their application for various reasons. And we see containers technologies just becoming like the de facto technology for shipping applications in the cloud, and we see Kubernetes on the rise. And one of our products at Spot called Ocean is a product that manages compute for Kubernetes. So our tagline is basically serverless containers, which is customers deploy their containers and then we manage the infrastructure under them. They don't need to define their infrastructure, think about their infrastructure, just like it's a really a near van for DevOps people responsible for Kubernetes. And then when we actually, you know, got into NetApp and we saw all of like the cloud volumes technology that I was telling you about, we said it like, hey, what if we can take this serverless compute of containers and we can actually make it for storage as well. And we basically can take all the good things that you get from serverless, which is, you know, no infrastructure management, billing, like utility billing, you know, scale to zero, scale to like, you know, infinite if you need and with no infrastructure management. And this is actually possible with the NetApp cloud volumes technology. So actually right now we're launching with NetApp something we call storage less volumes, which is basically for containers, we're going to allow that directly from our ocean product that you will be able to get storage less volumes that are going to be completely hands-free management of storage. And just to set the tone like, what is storage less? Like, is there no storage? Like, what is serverless? Are there servers there? Of course there are, but you don't manage them. So what storage is there a storage underneath? Of course there is, but you don't need to manage it. And is that something that your customers can take advantage of now? Is that coming in the next quarter or so? What's the timing on that? This is right now already in preview. So we already opened that to some of our, you know, advanced customers that are using like all of our latest and greatest, you know, features. So it's already with customers validation, working with them, they actually love it and love the fact that they don't need to manage storage because when you move to the cloud, you actually don't really care about storage anymore because it's becoming just oil for your applications. So, and it's going to be generally available hopefully in the first half of 2021. Exciting, something positive to look forward to. You'll have to come back and share with us some of the results. Amiram, it's been great to have you on theCUBE. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Likewise, Lisa, thank you very much. I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE.