 Here's your host, Jeff Frick. Hi, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're on the ground for a very special segment in downtown Seattle, Washington at Blue Box Group. Recently acquired by IBM, which has been great for them. Jesse Proudin has been on theCUBE a number of times. Won CUBE Madness last March and really kind of a personification of what's going on at OpenStack. And really we're excited to be up in the Northwest. We came up here for LinuxCon and OpenStack Seattle. So excited to come spend a few minutes here at the office. First guest is Hernan Alvarez, Chief Product Officer. Welcome. Welcome, thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks for having us. So I was looking at your LinkedIn as a little bit of prep for this and you've got that startup bug I can tell. So you've been in a few of them and now you're here and clearly a successful cap or what do you call it? Anquisition. Well, we don't say, yeah. But not an exit, it's a cash infusion for you. And a resource infusion. The best kind of cash infusion. Absolutely, so congratulations on that. Let's talk a little bit about what makes BlueBox successful. What makes it kind of a special place? We walked around the office a little bit before we got started. The little good vibe, a lot of activity. You've seen a lot of startups. What's so special about this one? Well, I think it's passion for the space that we're in. Everyone here is really into infrastructure and infrastructure services. Everyone's come up through engineering or systems engineering or network engineering. So it's a continual passion for the work that you're in and what you love to do. I've been in operations and product management for 20 years. It's what I always love to do. I love building data centers and cloud services. So you just put that on top of an opportunity in a marketplace with OpenStack and Private Cloud and you have a recipe for success. Yeah, and really Jesse already just had a vision that he's talked about before in the OpenStack Silicon Valley last year about really providing it as a service, trying to really separate the ugly stuff from the customer and really deliver to them the value. So what's your pursuit from the product point of view? What's your roadmap look like? What have you done this work? Where are you going next? Yeah, so the idea here is that we have a really seamless experience for the customer. They should be able to consume the type of infrastructure services that they need to consume to satisfy their internal customers. IT is changing and they have internal customers and they have services they need to deliver, whether it's networking storage or value added services, database of service or platform as a service. The idea is that you can consume that in a model that makes the most sense for your business and what we're doing now with the BlueBox acquisition inside of IBM is we're delivering that across three different fronts, an on-premise solution in a dedicated host solution and also in a public cloud solution. So really giving the customer what they need in order to be successful and that makes us successful ultimately. Yeah, and it's great you bring that up because we're obviously, we're here, this is arguably the home of the public cloud, right? Amazon is just down the street, AWS and Microsoft as you were, but as we hear over and over again at these enterprise events, it's really kind of workload specific, which of those solutions is the one that's right for whatever you're trying to do and that might even change over time. It sounds like you guys are really offering really the choices based on OpenStack depending on whatever the customer wants for that particular workload. Yeah, that's right, that's right and really focusing on their needs, ultimately what it boils down to is a lot of it has to do with the consistent service delivery for the customer and that's really important. Yeah, and talk about how customers are viewing cloud. It's been around for a while, right? AWS has been around for a while. The whole shadow IT thing is kind of gone. We never even really hear that phrase much anymore, but really it's the value and some of the attributes that cloud-based computing deliver that are the things that customers are really looking for. So how's that kind of changing what you see on the customer side and the way that they develop, deploy and go to market with applications? Yeah, so I think you're still seeing a transition in IT. There's still a long ways to go. There's a lot of the early adopters that jumped on public cloud early and there's a lot of customers that are doing that for specific workloads. There's still a lot of legacy IT workloads that are in transition. They're either gonna be rebuilt into green field applications with new providers or new solutions and that's a long transition but you're seeing it happen. People are starting to put cloud first inside of IT in terms of their rollout and it has a lot to do with distribution delivery mechanisms that customers don't necessarily want to own their own data centers anymore. They might want to own their own data centers but the idea is that they are moving forward. There's still a long ways to go. I think there's opportunities for the next five to 10 years to continue to shape that in really important ways. Yeah, at least and now you're part of IBM. So from your point of view as a chief product officer what does that mean for you in terms of resources and in terms of development, in terms of go to market, in terms of marketing, clearly that's a huge opportunity on the other extreme anytime you get acquired by a big company there's people are afraid are we gonna lose our culture or are we gonna get just kind of washed out. So how has that been going in terms of excitement in terms of resources that you can bring to bear and then how has it been going kind of culturally in terms of how IBM is treating you within their portfolio? Yeah, it's pretty interesting. IBM has made a large scale transition themselves to thinking about cloud first and customer first and really focusing on the five to 10 year roadmap. And this is one of the reasons why they bought Bluebox because of the fact that we're looking at a multi-faceted service delivery to be able to help their customers through that life cycle and transition. And so bringing Bluebox in helps build that seed and foundation and to your point about resources they're layering in tremendous amounts of resources development and program management, product management and marketing and sales. It's a 400,000, 450,000 person company and they have experience and resources that are over 100 years old, right? They founded modern computing as we know it today. They founded the PC, they're at the forefront of this and so they're able to bring in everything from kernel experts and storage experts and networking experts into this new paradigm of cloud computing and that's really important. It's great to have the energy that we have, Bluebox, a new way of thinking about cloud delivery but it's also great to be able to pull on engineers and executives and leadership that have years in this field that can leverage their knowledge in the enterprise workspace and the technologies that we're deploying. So how does that impact your roadmap? What are you looking at? What's kind of your, I hate the one, three, five-year thing that's forever in this world but kind of your next road to Hill that made these resources have opened up or releases that are coming out shortly and then kind of, again, not the long term but a couple of medium term goals in terms of your development of where you're going next. Well, we have some exciting announcements that are coming out in terms of where we're deploying Bluebox Cloud and those press releases are coming out so I look forward to those. Okay. If you have any specifics on them. But we'll be deploying Bluebox Cloud in a lot more pervasive way, leveraging the assets of IBM, something that a small company like Bluebox itself couldn't actually do before now being able to bring into bear their assets, if you think about large scale hardware data center provider that they might own that can help us deliver that. So there's a reach aspect to that and there's also a velocity aspect. So now we're bringing in additional engineering. We went from really a company of 60, 65 people before the acquisition to now being a part of hundreds and thousands in the cloud unit. So that's really exciting. So we can bring in all the talent necessary and all the resources necessary to hit those road maps. So a velocity and a breadth of services now we have experts in areas that we as Bluebox could never actually could actually capture. Right. So last question here to kind of come full circle again to your journey and all the startups you've been at. You came here, it's been successful, grew, now you're part of IBM. What's getting you up today? Now that it's kind of a new day here at Bluebox, what gets you excited and want to come to work? Scale. The number of opportunities that we have in front of us now being a part of IBM are so large and vast that it's super exciting. Before it was being super scrappy and upsetting the large companies like outmaneuvering HP and Cisco and IBM and the other companies, that's super exciting. But now what we have is an opportunity inside of IBM to really scale it. The customers that we're talking to or customers that as Bluebox we'd never really have an opportunity to do, never have an opportunity to talk to. And now we can deploy solutions for them that are well beyond what we were really dreaming of just the last year. So that's exciting. Excellent, that's a great close because scale is what it's all about, scale is what cloud computing is all about and scale is kind of the modern area that we're living in, right? How do we get these things big and fast? Well, Rene, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day. I'm Jeff Frick. We are in downtown Seattle at the Bluebox headquarters. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching.