 Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE studios here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE and co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media Inc. Joan here with Tom Joyce, CUBE alumni. Some big news, new role as a CEO of Pensa. Welcome back to theCUBE. You've been kind of freelancing out there as an entrepreneur in residence, CEO in residence. You've been on theCUBE, commentating. Great to see you. Good to see you too. Thanks for having me back, you know, fully employed. Congratulations. You know, finding where you land is really critical. I talked to a lot of friends like, you know, they want to get a good fit and a gig. They want to have a good team to work with. It's a cultural issue, but it's also you want to sink your teeth into something good. So you found Pensa, the CEO now of the company. You got some news which we'll get to in a minute. But, you know, what's going on? Why the change? Why these guys? You know, last time we talked, last time I was in here, I was running a consulting business and I did that for almost a year so that I could look at a lot of options and, you know, kind of reset my understanding where the industry is and where the problems are. And it was good to do that. You know, these were some of the best people that I met. And I got interested in what they were doing. They're smart technical people. I wanted to work with them. It was a good fit in terms of skills because when I joined Pensa, just a couple of months ago now, they were all technical people. And they'd been heads down developing core technology and some early product stuff for almost three years. So, you know, they needed somebody like me to come in and help them get to the next level and it was a really good fit. The other thing is, frankly, in my last job, I was running an IT shop and I also had about 1,000 people out there selling and about 300 pre-sales people. And I saw, when I saw this, I saw a product that I could have used in both of those areas. And so, sometimes when you resonate with something like that, you start to think, well, geez, this is something that I could, a lot of people are gonna need. And so, there are many aspects of the technology that are interesting, but ultimately, I saw that this is a useful thing that I could go make a big business out of. You've had a great career. We know each other going way back. EMC days and certainly at HP, even during the corporate developments work that Meg Whitman was doing at HP, you've been involved in a lot of M&A activities. So, you've seen the landscape. You are talking to the VCs and all the conversations. We've talked about that in the past on other interviews. You can check it out on YouTube, Tom Joyce, if you're interested in checking those conversations, that's worth looking at. So, you landed at Pensa. What do they do? What was the itch for you? What was, why are they relevant? What are they doing? Well, the first thing is, the company was founded about three years ago by people that had hardcore experience in big networking and virtualization environments. And, you know, they've been tackling some of the hardest problems in virtual infrastructure as you move from the hardware to everything being virtualized on multiple clouds. These guys were tackling the scale problem. And they'd also drilled down into how to make this work in the largest network environments in the world. So, they had gotten business out of one of the largest service providers in the world as their first customer. So, you know, you look at that and you say, all right, these are smart people and they're focusing on hard problems and there's a lot of longevity in the technology that they're going out and building. And basically what they're trying to do is help customers go to the next level with all software-based or software-defined, if you will, infrastructure so that you can take technology from a whole bunch of different sources. It's going to be VMware, OpenStack, DevOps, the DevOps stack, as well as the whole, you know, constellation of people in the security industry. How do you make all those software parts work together at scale with the people that you have? Rather than going out and hiring a whole new IT staff to plug all this stuff together and hope it works, these guys wanted to solve that. So, it's without a lot of expertise, this product can go design, validate that it works, build and deploy complete software-defined environments that can do it faster than you could do it any other way that I'm aware of and I've been around this industry for a long time. And so that's what I saw, you know, when I said, geez, you know, I could have used this before, I could have used it in my own IT, where our exposures were things like, we had all this old software that we needed to update and we're scared to touch any of it, right? Well, you look at things like Equifax, I was exposed in the Equifax breach and that was exactly that story. And they had four months in there playing around, who knows what they got. Well, to be honest with you, in my business, we were doing the same thing because we weren't comfortable with upgrading our software because we couldn't validate that it worked. You know, how do you move from the old stuff to a VMware 6.5 and make sure nothing else breaks? Well, we're kind of in the era of needing machine learning, intelligent technologies, autonomous kinds of ways to deploy this stuff because you can't hire enough smart people to go do it and that's what I saw. Well, we'll do a breakdown or a tear down how you want to look at it of the company in a second, but you guys have some news. Let's get to the news. What's the big news that you're sharing today? Okay, great. Well, there's a couple of key parts of it. First, we're formally launching the company. We've been heads down development and I've been there for a few months but the company hasn't been launched. So we're doing that. We're introducing Pensa to the world and the new website is pensa.ai. The second thing is we've completed our series a financing. So we've got the financing under our belt. Third thing is we've been hiring a team. We've brought in certainly me. I've brought in a fellow named Jim Chapel is the VP of marketing, long time industry guy in both large and small software companies. And we're rolling out the first product. So the technology is called- In terms of shipping. Shipping product, okay. Yeah, it's going to be shipping as a SaaS offering and it's available now. It's built on our technology which is called Maestro which is the smart machine and the first offering is called Pensa Lab and I can describe to you what it's used for but it's for helping people go figure out how do I design, build, run, try new scenarios and roll out stuff that's actually going to work and do it a lot faster than people can do with traditional companies. Congratulations for launching the company. Congratulations on the new role. Great job. I'm looking forward to seeing it. But let's get into the company, Pensa. So let's just go in, market, you guys are targeting. Take a minute to go into the market. What's the market? What's going on in the market? What's the trends? What's the bet in the market for you guys? You know, with an early company like this there's always a lot of things you can do and the battle is figuring out what is the first thing we're going to do. So I think over time we're going to be relevant to a lot of people. The first customers we're going to be focusing on are people in IT that are trying to manage complex virtualized networks. So a lot of them are people that are using VMware today. So the category is virtualization, cloud, what's the category? It's a SaaS product for design, build, run. So it's really designing autonomous IT systems that are built on software-defined environments. So it's VMware, OpenStack, the DevOps stack and being able to kind of bring all those parts together in a way that from an operational standpoint you can deploy quickly. And the first version of the product is going to be designed for test and dev. And next year we intend to bring out production versions of it. But virtually every one of these folks has environments for test today to figure out, all right, I want to go do my update, my upgrade, my change, I want to try a different security policy because I've got a hack happening and I want to do that fast. We're going to go after that. The other side of it is folks in the vendor community. So almost anybody that sell in a solution, again, like me and the job that I used to have has people out there doing proofs of concept, demos, building systems for customers. And what we can do is give you the ability to spin up complete working environments and do it basically like that. If you got a call this afternoon to go show VMware NSX running with some customer application with some other technology from a third, we can make that all work for you and then you can tear it down and do the next one at four o'clock in the afternoon. So is it VMware customer base you're targeting? I mean, it sounds like, and clarify if I don't get this right, you don't really care if it's private cloud or hybrid cloud or public cloud. We don't care. No, we don't. And there's a lot of folks in VMware. And VMware, is it a target market? VMware buyers? Yeah, absolutely. And we, frankly, we've had people inside of VMware working with us as the number of the beta testers on this and demonstrating that they can spin up their own environments faster. So that kind of proof point is what we're after. But then there's a lot of folks in DevOps, right? DevOps is one of the hot targets for our business and a lot of businesses. And what we see is folks that are focusing on the app development side of DevOps and then they get to the point where they gotta call IT and say, all right, give me a platform to run my new application on. And they get the old answers. So a lot of these folks are looking for the ability to spin up environments very, very quickly with a lot of flexibility where they don't need to be an expert in, all right, how's the storage gonna work and how do I build the network, right? So you're targeting IT and DevOps hybrid or is it one of the other DevOps developers? Okay, so, and you don't care which cloud, so you're going to draft off the success that VMware's seeing right now with their cloud strategy with AWS. Same long, software defined is booming. We can help those customers figure out, how do I do vSAN faster? How do I do NSX faster? How do I set up applications that I can move to AWS faster? It's kind of brilliant. So software defined cloud, software defined data center, all this is in your wheelhouse. This is what you're targeting. And that's the opportunity and the challenge. Again, when you're doing a small company, you know, the world is your oyster, but you have to kind of focus on the first thing first. So we're going to go in and try to help people that are dealing with, all right, I need to kind of update my software so that I don't have an Equifax or I need to fix my security policies. I need an environment like today that I can use to test that or I want to go from the old VMware to the new VMware, I got to make sure it works. That's good for the customer. It's good for VMware. It's good for us. Now comes productivity for the developer. Absolutely. Okay, so let's talk about the business and the business model. So you guys raised some money. Can you talk about the amount or is that confidential? It's confidential at this point and we have some additional points. Bigger than 10 million, less than 10 million. It's been less than 10 million. We're going to go lean and mean, but we're set up to make the run we need to run. Okay, good. Get that out of the way. Employees, how many people do you guys have? What's the strategy? Just over 20 now and we have a few more folks that we're going to be adding, but we're going to go, you know, fairly lean from here. Okay, in terms of business model, you said SaaS, can you just explain a little bit more about the business model and then some of the competition that you have? Yeah, this product was designed from day one to be a SaaS product. So we're not going to go on-premise software and old models. We're going with a SaaS model for everything we're doing now and everything we intend to do in the future. So the product sits in the cloud and you can access it basically on demand. We're going to make it very easy for people to get in and give this a try. It's going to be simple pricing, starting at about $1,500 a month. So a little bit of low cost entry, not freemium, so it's going to be some cost to get in, try before you buy, POC, wherever that goes kind of thing, right? Yeah, it's going to see a demo, do a trial, give it a shot. And we're going to, you know, if you give it an example, right? When I was at my last job, I had again 300 pre-sales people doing. Where is this? This is at Dell Software. Dell Software, we got it. Now it was called Quest. And they would go out and they'd use cloud-based resources to spin up, you know, their demo environments. Well, I'm going to give them, and I'm calling them, by the way, the ability to buy it for a very short amount of money and you're not committed to it forever and you can use it as much as you want. And get the ability to say, all right, let's spin up VMware, let's spin up OpenStack, let's spin up F5, Palo Alto Networks, whatever security I want. Get my app running on that and a very, without being an expert in all those parts. Yeah, so it all works. You can stand up stuff pretty quickly. It's a DevOps ethos, really, but it's about the app and the developer productivity. Right, and from a business model standpoint, it's how do I make this really, really easy? Because the more of those folks that use it in this phase, next year, when we get to say, all right, let's punch that thing you built into production on your cloud, you know, we'll be ready to go. So our goal is to grab a space cloud. Talk about competition. Yeah, I think the competition for this part of it, the kind of DevTest lab spin up scenario, the pencil lab that I just described, the biggest competition is going to be people that build their own. So in the corner, you got your test environment running on your old hardware, right? So that doesn't come with this automated software capability. The other ones are going to be people like SkyTap, as an example, that a lot of people use, and I've used in the past, that gives you a platform to run on, but again, a lot more cost and not the automated software capability. So there are a lot of scenarios like that that we can go after and it's almost universal. Everybody's got a need to have some sort of a test or dev environment, right? And we are going to prove to them that the software is better. So not a lot of competition. It's not like there's a zillion players out there. No, it is a big target, but there's not a lot of players. And for the most part, you're going to go into scenarios where customers have something they've cobbled together that isn't working as well as they might. And Pensa AI hints a little bit of automation piece, which is really hard as people know in the enterprise. Let's talk about the technology. What's under the hood? Is there AI involved? I'll see you at the domain name.a, which I love those domain names by the way, but what's the tech? What's driving the innovation and story differentiation? To be honest with you, inside, it's something that you debate, because that's what it is. If AI is a way to use technology to do things as well or better than people used to do before, that's what it is. And if you take all the hype and nonsense out of the conversation, you say, it's not about Skynet and computers taking over the world. It's really about doing stuff better than we can do and making people more effective. That's what we have. Now under AI, there's a bunch of different techniques, and we're going to be focused on primarily modeling and the core IP of this is how we build the model for all of those components and how they interact and how they behave, and then machine learning. How do we apply techniques to actually learn this? So you're writing software that's innovating on topology and configuration, tying that together, and then using that instrumentation to make changes and or adaptive-like capability. Exactly, but rather than go spend a month building the template that you're going to go deploy, the system will build that for you, and that's where the smarts are. And we'll use machine learning techniques over time to make that model better. And so that's kind of where we're digging, and frankly, it's a big problem for people. So software is your main technology. It's 100% a software platform, yeah. Okay, well Wikibon research was going viral at VMworld, and I'll make a note because I think this is important because automation is hard. This key point of your thing is that Wikibon showed that about $1.5 billion is going to be taken out of the market as automation takes non-differentiated labor out of the equation, which essentially is stacking servers and racking, stacking and racking. That plays right into your trend. That's exactly what we're doing, and what we want to do is- And by the way, that value shifts, too, to other parts. Yeah, and I think we're trying to focus on, automation isn't new. It's not new in IT. Certainly, there's been a lot of focus on it the last 10 years. The question is, how do you make the automation smarter so you don't have to do the design and say push play? There's a problem with automation in these really complicated microservices multi, the problem is, if you build that template wrong, you can make the same mistake 1,000 times in a row, right? And so, I mean, I've had products in the past where they worked great as long as that template was correct, right? Well, what if the template changes? What if I need to put new security policies in there, changes? Maestro is going to build it for you. That's what the story is all about. That's your product name. Well, that's what DevOps is all about, programming the infrastructure, and that's always going to change. So that's really the DevOps ethos. And that's why, you know, if you expand out from the first play around this test dev scenario, where frankly, we'll learn a lot. We'll learn a ton about different patterns that we see. We'll learn a lot about the interop environments that customers want. I want you to add this or add that. The system is going to get smarter to the point where when we punch it into production, it's going to know a lot more than it does today. Well, congratulations on the launch. My final question for you is really the most important one, which is, if I'm a customer, why do I care? What's in it for me? What's the value? Why should I pay attention? Depensa.ai, what's going on? What's the value to me? Why should I care? Why should I call you? Give me the bottom line. Yeah, it's about risk reduction. It's about making sure that the things you need to change, you can actually do it without it blowing up in your face. And it's also, frankly, the other side of the thing. Well, the infrastructure blowing up in my face, or just apps. If you make changes to your environment and you're not sure if they're going to work, but you know, again, take the eco-fax thing. If they had made those changes and put them into their environment, they wouldn't be on the front page of every newspaper in the world. Frankly, my information wouldn't have been hacked. What would you guys have done if I was eco-fax and I knew that potentially I had to move fast? How could you guys solve that problem? We have a problem upgrade the software today. And what we would have done is given them the ability to... Do you think they knew they had a problem? I don't know if they did or not. But you can see this scenario over and over and over in other companies where they say, we know we need to do an update, but we're not doing it. We're going to wait for six months. Because it breaks stuff. Because we're scared. Scared or that breaks stuff or both? It breaks stuff and we need to test it, right? So we're going to bring test velocity into that. And we're going to bring intelligence to make sure the design is right, right? So that you can do it more quickly. It's interesting, in the old days, remember, in the old days it was like patch management was a big thing. That was the on-premise software. But with DevOps, you need essentially test and dev all the time on. You do. And if you're developing these applications with DevOps on the front end and you're dropping new versions of them in hours rather than quarters, the infrastructure on the back end has to kind of speed up to DevOps speed. And that's where we're going to focus our attention. All right, here's the hard question for you and we'll end the segment is, when does a customer, your potential customer, know they need you? What's the environment look like? What's the pain points? What are the signals that they need to be called on pensa.ai? What's the deal there? Yeah, I think we're going to talk to, again, the DevOps people that are looking to get their applications out and get them built and deployed. So need for application pushing, that's one. That's one. The other ones are going to be folks inside of any IT organization that need better velocity, need to be able to test. We want to take cost out of it because we're going to do it for a lot less than what it costs you to do it now. And the third one is the vendor community. Folks out there selling software, VARs, pre-sale. No, I guess the question is more specific. What is the signs inside the customer that make them want to call you? Breaking, stuff's breaking, upgrades not happening fast enough. I'm just trying to get to the heart of it. If I'm a customer, I don't necessarily know. Yeah, on the IT customer side, it's all about velocity. We need to push our apps faster. We need infrastructure faster. We need to test security policies fast. We're not going fast enough. But basically, if you're going slow and not getting the job done, they call you. That's our guys. All right, well, Tom, congratulations on the launch. Congratulations on the new CEO job. We'll be tracking you guys. Series A funding, congratulations. Who's the VC involved? We have the fabric, which was the seed funding source. And then March Capital has been very helpful to us in this era. Great, well, they got a great pro in you as CEO. We'll keep in touch. Cube alumni, good friend, Tom Joyce here inside the Cube studios on the conversation around the launch of the company, Series A funding, new team members and pensa.ai. This is the Cube. Cube.net is our URL. Check it out. Siliconangle.com and Wikibon.com is where you can go check out our stuff. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.