 Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another theCUBE conversation from beautiful Palo Alto. Here today we were with Moodoo Sudhakar, who's a CEO investor and a longtime friend of theCUBE. Moodoo, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you Peter, thanks for having me. So one of the things we're going to talk about, there's a lot of things we could talk about. I mean, you've been around, you've invested in a number of companies, you've got a great pedigree, great track record. Thank you. ServiceNow and some other companies. I'll let you talk a little bit more about that. But one of the things we want to talk about is some of the big changes that are happening in the way that IT gets delivered within enterprises. The whole notion of IT operations management is on the forefront of everybody's mind. We've been talking about DevOps for a long time. It hasn't been universally adopted. It clearly needs some help. It's working really well in some places, not so well in other places. We're trying to bring that cloud operating model into the enterprise. What are some of the things that, based on your experience, talk a little bit about yourself and then use that as a lever into, what are some of the things that the IT organization business overall has to think about is to think about modernizing IT operations management or ITOM. Great topic. It's a very lengthy, we can go on for hours on this, right? As we were talking earlier, Peter, so I think IT operation management has been around for what, 20, 30 years. It started with, I guess, at the time of mainframes to client server, but as you rightfully said, we are in the age of cloud. How does cloud AI machine learning and the SaaS services going to impact ITOM or IT operation management? I think that's, it's going to evolve. The question is, how do you want to evolve? And the one area that you are always passionate about talking about the cloud infrastructure itself and the word that you use is called plastic infrastructure. The underlying infrastructure is changing so much. We are moving from virtual machines to serverless architectures to containers. So this whole serverless architecture presents such a new concept. The ITOM as itself should evolve to something new. I actually, I mean, there's industry world for this called AI operations. AI is just one piece, but how do you take hybrid cloud? How do you take the actual cloud substrate and evolve IT operation management? It's such a big topic on multiple areas and how it's going to change industry. So let's break it down a little bit. So you mentioned the term plastic infrastructure. We've written a bunch about this here at Wikibon. The basic notion of plastic infrastructure is that we can look at three generations of infrastructure, what we call static infrastructure, which might be brick. You add load to it, it might fall apart, but it was bound into the application. And then the world of, or the era of elastic infrastructure was really where the cloud started. And the idea that you no longer had to purchase to your peak that the elastic infrastructure would allow you to peak up and peak down, but it would snap back into place. It was almost like a rubber brick. But this notion of plastic infrastructures, how do we add new workloads faster? How do we do, but do so in a way that we don't have to manually go in and adjust the infrastructure, that the infrastructure just responds to the new workloads in a plastic way and snaps into a new form. Now, we are going to need to be able to do that. If we're going to add AI and we're going to add ML, machine learning, and all these other new application-oriented technologies to this, I can't imagine how we're going to add all that complexity at the application level if we don't dramatically automate and simplify the operating level. That's the basis of plastic infrastructure. What do you think? No, I completely agree. I mean, I think you kind of touched all the good points, but the areas that I can add on top of what you mentioned is if you look at the plastic infrastructure, the one area is so far IT operation management is built around a human being, around a DevOps and on IT admin. In the new world, it will be 90 to 80% will be done automated manner. Your trading is algorithmic. We are in a self-driving car age, but at IT operation management is around an IT admin and a DevOps. That got to change. I think the Cloud guys, the Amazon, Azure, Google, they're going to disrupt this because they have to do this in automated manner. So that means the plastic infrastructure should be able to run workloads. It should be malleable. It's like it should be changing shape and form, and that's where the serverless really comes in. I don't want to pick a compute and rent it for so many hours. That's still yesterday concept. I think this whole virtualization and virtual machines is gone to the point of serverless. So all these things, how do you manage the workloads? How do you manage your apps? To your point, apps have to be mapped downstream. I call it a service maps. How do you build this dynamic service maps for your application? How do I know which component is failing at what point in time? Asking what I call the root cause analysis. Do you expect a human being to identify that MongoDB or a SQL server is down because of this hardware issue? That has to be detected automatic manner, right? At least root cause and triage it to the point a human being can come and say, I agree or don't agree or able to take. Then the final thing is the infrastructure has to be, should be take actions. Allow it to be the point where the, once you detect a problem, the infrastructure should be able to say algorithmically, programmatically through an API. I should be able to impact the change. The problem and change of infrastructure today is very much driven through scripts and through admins. Can I do that in a programmatic manner? It hasn't happened yet. And it should be, I mean, when you stop and think about it, AI, for example, using AI as a general umbrella for a lot of different technologies that are based on pattern recognition and anomaly detection and all the other stuff that's associated with AI. But we have pretty good data sources in the infrastructure. We know how these tools operate. They are programmable, so they get a range of particular behaviors, but there are discernible patterns associated with those behaviors. So you think that infrastructure itself would be a great source to start building out some of these AI platforms, some of these new modeled, what we call data-first types of applications. What do you think? Absolutely, you nailed it. I think if you remember my previous company, Caspita, which was acquired by Splunk, we did that for security. We created this whole area called user behavioral analytics for security. Understand the behavior of the users, understand the behavior of the attackers, excellent insight. Same thing needs to happen. But all represented through a device that had known characteristics. So we weren't saying, we remember big claims necessarily about people, which have unbelievably complex, but when you start with, what is a person doing with a device, that set of behaviors is now constrained, which makes it a great source. Absolutely, so I think like, given the sources in IT operations area, if you are thinking about, for example, looking at the patterns and the behavior of the application, the storage, I call it like a, think of like the four layers. You have apps, you have compute, your network and storage. There are different patterns and behavior you can do it, you can do anomalies. Then you can understand the various workflow of the patterns, but I call it the three-piece problem with AI machine learning. The three-piece are, you actually said it five-piece. I'll count the three-piece that I usually talk about is the proactive, the predictive, and prescriptive nature. If I can take these data sources, whether they come from logs, events, alerts, and able to do this for those, I can do planning. I can be able to implement what changes I can do as a workflow in full actions, because detecting is no good if I can't take an action. That's where the prescriptiveness comes in. And I think that whole area of IT operation management, what used to happen is a mundane with a human being will be automated. And then the question comes in is, do you do this in batch mode or real-time? And you want to do in real-time, but let me get those straights. So the three-piece that you mentioned were proactive, prescriptive. And predictive. And predictive. So that's proactive, probably proactive, predictive, and then prescriptive. And just to level it out, I noted that all this is based on patterns that come out of some of these infrastructure technologies. So as we think about where ITOM is going, you mentioned earlier, AI systems management, AI services management, when we think about kind of some of the next steps, who do you anticipate are going to be kind of at the leading or leading a charge as we move forward here? I think there'll be new sheriffs in town. I may not be to your point earlier, there have been many sheriffs in town in this area. The great opportunity here is, whenever there's a fundamental change like this happen, there'll be new players who will win this market. Definitely the cloud guys have the right substrate, the Amazon, the Azures, and the Googles of the world. They have the right infrastructure. They're all moving towards the plastic infrastructure. They just have to do more on workload management. They need to do more on the AI operations. Well, they have an absolutely sense of urgency and pressing need. Their business falls down if they can't do this. Exactly. So I think those guys will definitely there. Then all the startups, I think there are a whole bunch of startups, each of them will be doing from a small niche player all the way to a platform players. It's a great opportunity, it's a green-filled opportunity. It's going to open up a whole wonderful new players who will come in, who will be in the next generations, AI operations vendors. So I'm going to ask you two questions, and one, do you think the big boys, the HPEs, the Oracles, the Cisco's, the IBMs, are going to be able to change their stripes well enough so that they can do both? We're trying to keep our install base and upgrade, enhance it, and try to introduce this new cloud operating model. And we'll talk about the startups in a second. What do you think? Are the big boys going to be able to make this transition? I think they have to. Their hand is already dealt. I call it cloud is a runaway train. Cloud today is $30, $40 billion. If you are those mega vendors, you don't, if you're not making on this, something is wrong with you, right? I mean, in this day and age, if you're not making money on the cloud, with what we are talking about this, so what they have to do is, how can they, either they have to offer a cloud services, public cloud app, if you're not doing that, might as well get into this game of AI ops so that you are actually making money on the apps and on the infrastructure. So all those big large vendors that you mentioned about the Cisco's of the world, the Oracle's of the world, they have a genuine interest to make this happen. Got it. So in many respects, trying to summarize that point, it's like, look, the cloud experience is being defined elsewhere. It's being defined by Azure, AWS, Google, GCP, and these vendors are going to have to articulate very, very clearly for their customer base, the role that they're going to play, and that could include bringing the cloud experience on premise when and if data is required on premise. Absolutely, and I actually call these clouds to be the aircraft carriers, right? You will, as a world when it settles, eventually it won't have 100 aircraft carriers. You will have these three or four large cloud vendors. On top of them, the people who manage apps and services will be few. You don't need 20 vendors managing your infrastructure. So there'll be a huge consolidation game. The question is, when that happens, the vendors doesn't have to be the legacy vendors. The history shows the legacy always loses out, so that's where the startups have an opportunity. All right, so let's talk about the startups. So are there any particular class of startups out there? Is this going to, are some of the security guys through managed services going to be able to do a better job because they can make claims about your data, or is some of the companies coming from middleware, where do you think the startup kind of epicenter is going to be as we see new companies introducing to the space? That's a good question. I think I don't have any one particular vendor in mind, but I think definitely the vendors that will come into play will be people who can do log management better. We already know, I mean, I.S. Plunks of the world. People who can do events and alerts management. People who can do incident problem change management, right, all those things. If you look at the whole area and people who can do the whole application management, as earlier you talked about the workload management. So I think each of these functions, there'll be winners coming in. Eventually all of them will be offered by one single person as a full stack solution for the cloud on the cloud. The key problem that I keep noticing is most vendors are keep still tied to the old infrastructure which is mainframe or physical servers. Nobody's building this thing for the cloud in the cloud again. So somebody who has the right substrate to build this as a playbook will end up winning this game. Yeah, it's going to be an interesting period of time. Now when we stop and think about, I made an assertion earlier, that for us to build more complex applications, which is where everybody's talking about, it's essential, in our opinion, that we find ways to simplify and bring more automation to the infrastructure. We think about servers, storage, network, those types of things. Is there a particular part of the infrastructure that you think is going to receive treatment earlier and therefore is going to kind of lead the way for how the rest of the stuff is. Is storage going to show CPU and network or is network going to step up because of some of the changes that are happening? What do you think? Very good question. I think the key pain points for most people today, if you look at the way the complex questions are, if there's a problem in the network infrastructure, it's very hard to triage that. So that area has to be automated. I mean, you can't expect a human being to understand why my switcher network is not performing it. It's just happening. Like why Wi-Fi is not working in sixth floor and seventh floor, it's a very, so network will be one area, it's highly visible. Second will be in the database and storage area. Just because my storage disk is full, I don't want my database to be down. It's such a known pattern behavior. People will catch those things in automated manner. So storage network because where you see the higher order items is when an application is not performing well, is it a performance problem or why this component is tied to what component? If this application is built on a load balancer and a load balancer is talking to and the database, building that map of who is connected to who, that's a new graph, algorithms, graph theory you need. That doesn't exist today. So I think what happened is how do you manage an application given a problem and mapping that? That is I think the number one that will start happening first. Everything else people will happen over a period of time, but apps that are visible where a user and a customer can see the impact will happen first. Yeah, actually we have a prediction here at Wikibon, what we call networks of data. Where the idea that we're going to, the next round of network formation is going to be data assets explicitly connecting with each other and then using that as a way of zoning data assets and saying this application requires data from these places and then all the technology that allows you to either move it in or just keep pointers or whatever else it might be. So there's no, you would agree then that that a graph of data is going to drive a lot of the change forward. If you actually take it to that, I actually talk about saying that it doesn't require a single class of algorithm. I call it an ensemble of machine learning algorithms you need, you need some statistical, some probabilistic, some Markovian algorithm, some Bayesian and mainly graph algorithms. This data has to capture the behaviors and patterns that you want to put in a larger graph that you should be able to mine on. That doesn't exist today. So everybody's, most often when they talk about ML, they're talking about like dynamic thresholding, statistical, that's what is there in IT operation management. The next level of how do you build a graph like too big to fail or if my opinion fails, what is it relying on? Like if I come to Peter's house, how is your house looks like? Do you have one bedroom, one, you have two kitchens, you know what I'm saying? It looks like a network of data right now. Exactly right there. Okay, so I got one more question for you, Mudu. And that is you work with us a lot and some of the crowd chats who do your, you know, a great research partner for us. As you think about kind of the story that needs to be told to the CXO about some of these changes, how's it different from the story that needs to be told to the IT leader? I can imagine what some of the differences are, but you're talking to both sides. What would your advice and counsel be to companies that are trying to talk to the CEO about this or the board? What do you think? What should you be saying to them? No, I think you kind of did that yesterday in the crowd chat. I think the key thing that the CIO or a CXO or a CEO needs to have, this is we used to call the chief data officer where the data is the key. That element was applied for the overall business. That same role needs to happen within the CIO now. How do I use my data to make my IT better? So that maybe call it a CIO for the CIO is a big role that needs to happen, but the goal of that person and that entity should be is how can I do, can I run my operations in a light sort manner? I call it IT as a service. People talk about IT as a service, but IT as a service to me is a bigger concept, right? Let me make sure I got this because this is a crucially important point. So in many respects, we should be saying to the CEO, your data is an asset. You have to take steps to appreciate dramatically and rapidly appreciate the value of data as an asset and that requires looking at the CIO with the CDO data officer and saying your job is to independent of any particular technology or any particular set of ITOM processes. Your job is to dramatically accelerate how fast we're able to generate data, value out of our data, utilizing these technology investments. Because that person, once you have the data as a decision, what'll happen is you'll still use the existing process, but it gives you the new insights. What can I automate? What can I do more with less people, right? That has to happen, like if I'm a CIO, he should wake up and say, 90% of my things should be able to automate today. Right? Okay, so let's talk about last question. You've been, you've led a lot of organizations through a lot of change. We're talking about a lot of change within the IT organization when we talk about these things. What's the one bit of advice that you have for that CIO or leader of IT and help them take their people through the types of changes that we're talking about? Make bets. Don't be afraid of making bets. Unless you make a bet, you're never going to win. So every year, every quarter, make a new bet. Some bets you're going to fail, some you're going to succeed. Unless you make a bet, you will not innovate. And understand the portfolio and sustain those bets. And then when you've lost, don't keep putting money on. Exactly, keep moving on. Great. All right, so, Moodu, thank you very much for being here. Peter, always pleasure to talk to you, sir. All right. Moodu Siddhakar, investor, CEO. Once again, this has been a CUBE conversation. Thanks very much for being here. Thank you very much. And we'll talk to you soon. Thank you always. Enjoy.