 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2017, presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman here with my co-host, Justin Warren, and you're watching theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's live production of AWS re-invent 2017. Happy to welcome back to the program, Rishi Yadav, who's the CEO of Zettabyte and Bart Hickenlooper, who is the SVP of Client Services, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you Stu. So Rishi, yesterday you were on the other set with John Furrier and with Justin, and we were really excited to really launch Zettabytes, help you bring the company out. We've known InfoObjects in your company for a while, so of course we want people to go check out the other interview, but in today's kind of hybrid, multi-cloud world, we've seen Amazon kind of slowly moderating a little bit the way they discuss it, but why don't you bring us inside a little bit? What are you hearing from customers and what kind of led to the creation of Zettabytes? Yeah, so what we're hearing from customers is that, I mean there's a lot of talk about the cloud and the AWS, right, the challenge is that what I discussed yesterday also was that how do I take those baby steps towards adoption of the cloud? And that's where the challenge comes, right? On one side they say everything on-prem is bad, everything on cloud is good, I mean those kind of statements are okay, but somebody who has got billions of dollars of business running, right, for them it doesn't make any sense, they want to have logical steps and they also want to have with every step what value they're adding, yeah. Yeah. But we always hear, right, we dig in, it's like all in on any one thing, oh come on, you're using various SaaS providers, you probably have multiple cloud providers, yes you've still got something sitting in the back end of your data center or many things and that migration takes time. What kind of strategy and tactics do you hear customers doing that gets at a bite engaged? Yeah, well what we see in most enterprises is an effort to really modernize their applications, right? And they want to make those so that they're cloud native, leveraging really the innovation that's taken place in the cloud. And so that application modernization is really what's driving an enterprise to do some things and move quickly to the cloud, it's no longer the economics of moving to the cloud but that innovation engine that can be really ignited with those technologies. Getting there from their legacy platforms is a little tricky, they need a development cycle that works in a hybrid fashion to really go cloud native with those applications. So when they're starting off on that journey, where are you finding customers starting with? Like what are the applications that they do first and what are the functions that they use from AWS? Are they going with just EC2 type things? Are they using S3 for storage? What do they start with? So that's a good point that with the first phase of the cloud adoption, most of the work was on IAS, I mean you just, whatever you have on-prem, you just put that on the cloud, right? And then obviously you use S3 storage and things like that, right? And that's where there was a lot of talk. I mean if you remember a few years back, everybody would say, cloud is not cheap, cloud is costly and I was like, as Bart said, it's not about economics, right? It's always about convenience, it's always about the value add, right? And especially when enterprises started getting into the cloud, started adopting cloud a few years back, that's where those things became very important, right? Because that's what they wanted. I mean, you just cannot save someone 20% in an infrastructure cost and that may not even come, right? And say that it's worth the adoption of the cloud. Yeah. So we were talking yesterday about the 100 services, the number of services that you as an organization have to wrap your brain around and one of the things that Zeta Bytes helps with that is to kind of give you some focus. So again, what are the things that Zeta Bytes is focusing on that they find that customers actually really, really want from cloud? Because Amazon is so huge, making sense of the whole thing is quite tricky. Yeah, when you talk about application modernization, if you have a monolithic application, EC2 and S3 are great. If you're going to migrate it, you can do that. What we're seeing is really a switch to DevOps for application development, microservices development that leverage certain platform services from Amazon that are specific to enable an application. And those are things like Lambda, Kinesis, right? Elastic Search, and you can write microservices that consume those services in addition to your traditional storage and compute and really get cloud native. So we've selected those services on our platform to help with that application modernization and really enable a customer to make applications with microservices, enablement. So, you know, Wikibon's been looking at many years really, what's happening to kind of the transformation in the data center, the research we put out a few years ago is what we call true private cloud. Because we said what was happening, you know, kind of the virtualization plus, I mean, look, love virtualization. I spent 15 years on that wave, but it wasn't enough. And even when we started simplifying and even some automation on there, that application journey, and how do we get ready for modern applications even in, I worked a lot on kind of the HCI wave, it was let's modernize their infrastructure and then we'll worry about the application stuff later and maybe it's not a fit. So, what's different now? What are the toolings available? Why is now, you know, can I put that stuff? I mean, it's cloud native, isn't it? That means it should all live in a public cloud, no? Or can it live, you know, in many places? So I think that's a great point. So three pieces of the puzzle, the infrastructure, data and the applications. So there has been a lot of talk about infrastructure and not having infrastructure. Data, every other company in the Bay Area is backup and restore company, right? Nobody's talking about the applications. Yes, they are SaaS players, right? Where like, okay, we'll just host application for you and you don't have to worry about anything else. But what about a lot of these legacy applications which have been built over the last 20, 30 years, right? Nobody's talking about that. Everybody talks about green field applications, right? Whatever you start new, right? Everything is going to be the cloud, it's going to be cloud native, everything is awesome and then clients say yes, but I already invested $500 million in the applications in last 10 years. What's going to happen to them? Yeah, like I like to say that the first 80% of writing software is putting the bugs in and then the second 80% of writing software is taking them out again. So if you have to completely start with these core business applications that are generating revenue, there's a lot of risk there in going to something brand new. And I mean, we have Andy Jassy talking about if I was starting the company again today, I'd go completely all serverless. And then really, right now in 2017, is it really that established in that great way? What's your take on that? For an enterprise that has this investment already, should they be going completely all into serverless or should they be picking off some of these other more mature services, do you think? Yeah, I would say it would be really application-specific. If it's traditional transactional, you may or may not want to go serverless, right? Because you've got that relational database really kind of structure around it. If it's a modern application and you're a company that has, for example, a brand new mobile application, you're going to want to leverage things like Lambda in that application development. So you can trigger the correct service to spin up in that application. So I think modernization is really specific to the use case. What we're seeing is a digital transformation in most companies where they're really requiring some newer applications to leverage past services like Lambda, Elasticsearch, Kinesis and other things. So Rishi, one of the things that we've heard from customers for many years is they say that they'd like to have really the same in their data center as in the public cloud. We did a survey years ago and it was like 80% said that and then say, what do you have? Well, I've got VMware here and I've got AWS there. So is it about having the whole stack? Are APIs enough? How much commonality do you need? How does ZetaBytes look at this and how do you help customers kind of bridge this model? Yes, absolutely. So number one is that the VMware type of solution is still pretty much, I like VMware, but it's pretty much infrastructure as a service based. Second thing is the reason we have come up with our platform is that few core services and for few key workloads, IoT is being one of them, low latency workloads being another of them, few workloads which need special type of security and governance which clients are used to from last 20 years, right? So yes, AWS has amazing security and governance, no doubt about that, but still part of the workload they may want to run locally and they should at least have that freedom. So only those part of workloads are going to be run on ZetaBytes appliance, but rest of, but the API compatibility will provide complete. So whether you want to run it on ZetaBytes or on AWS, most of the workloads are going to run on AWS and that you can run from our platform. Yeah, I want to key off a word you mentioned there. You mentioned appliances. So we've seen lots of solutions over the last decade. It's done quite well with appliances, talk about kind of the HCI, talk about and kind of the back of recovery, lots of things there, but it's a software world now. Hex serverless, Andy Jazzy says we'll build serverless. Why an appliance? Talk a little bit about kind of the go to market. What do people get today? How do they buy it? Why does that make sense for your customers? Yes, absolutely, but we'll add it more from the sales perspective, but appliance from the optimization perspective is perfect. So in our case, yes, we have figured out a spec which is perfect, the perfectly optimized for to run our software platform and we can provide it to the clients. If they want to have the similar stack build themselves, that's perfectly okay. But the idea is that hardware has equally important role to play as the software has, right? So that's it. When you think about the platform services that we have, like S3, RDS and others, you definitely need hardware to support a real workload and for us to really standardize on something that someone can do, true development, with that depth on the platform is really critical. They can do, you can go to GitHub and get open source S3 and work around it, but it's a mock. Really what you need is a platform to develop the application. On the other thing is, I worked for Cisco for 10 years and the channel there is extremely powerful with companies like CDW, WWT. The route to market there is really compelling for a combined solution and I think part of the reason you've seen success with those combined solutions is the customers are used to a service model where it's one throat to choke on those types of platforms and the channel is a trusted advisor. It's a great way for us to go to market. Yeah, just to give my two cents on that, people kind of conflate that we've had some commoditization of what's happening in infrastructure. Doesn't mean you just grab stuff off the shelf. I read an article four years ago, AWS infrastructure is hyper-optimized. If you went to the Tuesday night keynote, oh my gosh, they spend way more on hardware than anybody else in this ecosystem, I'm sure, and spend more on it so it's not that you have IP in hardware, if I'm not understanding, it's you're making sure you've got your software's match for the package, I can do it, somebody else can do it, right? Yeah, go ahead. Yes, absolutely, I think that part is very, very important that one throat to choke, one company that supports everything. So in our case, yes, if you want to have your own hardware, then you can do that, but in our case, if you take the whole appliance from us, then we are providing you complete support, right? Hardware, operating system, as well as the software, right? And we're, in a certain sense, we're really trying to, like you said, to match the performance of those optimized environments on AWS for a client, so they get a similar experience from our platform that they would get on AWS, and if they build something on Zettabytes and then deploy on AWS, they should get the same experience. Okay, I want to give you the last word, sure, lots of customers coming by your booth, which is not far from where we're sitting right now, what are some of the key things they're hearing, what's getting them kind of excited, interested that they want to follow up more with? Yes, so I think most of the customers, when we talk to them, we said, okay, are you using AWS? They say yes, because they are at re-event, and say, okay, how far you are in the AWS adoption, and that's where the devil comes in the details, okay? Yeah, these applications, we have been able to migrate, we are not able to migrate, we are building our expertise around it and things like that, and the question comes, do you really want to go too deep into figuring out the problems which the vendors have solved or you'd rather focus on your business problems? So that's what I would say, as I said, one package, one platform where you get to focus on your business problems and we take care of the rest. Yeah, and I think in the keynote yesterday, Andy Jassy said it's all about the analytics, and what we're hearing is we've given a lot of thought to putting together a platform that supports big data and analytics in addition to the AWS abstraction that we've done. So those analytics workloads are really intriguing to people that are talking with us, our support of machine learning, converting what it may be a traditional spark job into a Lambda function is really something people are raising their eyebrows about. Bart Hickamoper, Rishi Adave, asking how deep are we into AWS? Well, here at theCUBE we're about 60 interviews in, which means we have a few more hours left of great interviews here. So for Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you so much for watching theCUBE.