 Okay, we're back here live in New York City for SiliconANGLE, Wikibon's exclusive coverage of moonshot, HP moonshot, and I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE. I'm joined by my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of wikibon.org, and we're here with Brent Julik, who is the vice president of application services at SABIS, a big cloud service provider, many of you know. Brent, welcome to the Cube. Oh, thanks for having me. So we saw you on earlier doing the Q&A. That was a good session. So I want to start with with SABIS. I mean, you guys are a very strong brand in the cloud market space. Give us a quick update on, you know, SABIS and then specifically your business, the application services side. Yeah, definitely. I'd be happy to. SABIS is a century-ling company. We specialize in cloud as well as managed hosting. We operate 55 data centers globally and with more than 2 million square feet of floor space. So as you can imagine, that's a lot of space to compress a lot of servers. So Moonshot, it really means to us is how can we better provide application services on top of these compute platforms? My group specifically deals with the product management and engineering of the applications that are our sales and other divisions offer to our customer base. So we're constantly out there trying to figure out better ways to deal with web performance, content, big data, database, middleware, and how we can offer that as a more affordable model with more scalability to our customers. Yeah, John and I often, you know, talk about the applications really where the business value is being driven. It's the connection to the business. So you touched upon some of these others, but what are you looking for from an application development standpoint? What do you want out of an infrastructure? I mean, clearly, we want some of that's reliable. We want something that we can rapidly expand. We want something that has really much more geared towards our applications. And this is the reason why my group is very excited around Moonshot is because we see for the first time that we're starting to produce more physical hardware, much more geared towards certain types of application workloads. Now, you know, yes, we could do these things on blade technologies, on server technologies and virtualization technologies. But it is kind of exciting to see that we're starting to now to evolve to the point that we're looking at very specific application workloads geared towards the compute that they have. So when we start to look at public clouds, now we're starting to get into much more specialization of those certain types of workloads. And that's very exciting for us. What does that mean from a business value standpoint? Well, it means that when I go off and I engineer and I build out that application service that I can figure out how to automate it, how to provision it, how to deal with all the bells and whistles and security and thoroughness that that people expect. And really, it means that I'm able to offer that service at a cheaper price to the customer. Brand, I was asked, I want to ask you during the webcast during the Q&A session, when someone had a direct question for you and said, how will this affect your service offering? You kind of gave kind of a canned answer, it will affect our service offering. But can you elaborate on that because that really I want to drill down on that not because of their answer, but more of because it's complicated. It's a hard question to really answer because it spans a lot of different things. Take us through the data center environment for you guys, because you guys are what we call a modern environment. You get to deal with diversity of applications and take us through the last couple of years and what Moonshot does, given this new capability, and how does that affect up the stack? Well, certainly, I'll try to approach that. But as you can imagine, that's a very multifaceted question that I'm sure there is a wide range of answers. Twenty minutes just on that one question from a SAVS perspective. But clearly, what I've seen over time is that we started with really looking at how can we offer compute, right? SAVS was born out of the co-location hosting arm with the network component. And as the networks kind of evolved, we've moved from co-location into hosting into now cloud. And now we're trying to get down into more and more application workloads. We have a common phrase that we like to use at SAVS, is moving up the stack. And as we start to find the hardware and the services, what really what we're hearing from our customers is that's great. You're able to offer it in the cloud. You're able to offer all these great options. But at the end of the day, I just need someone to manage my application. I need it as a platform, as a service. I need it as a SaaS based offering. So what we're finding is that our customers are really asking for us to really move it up the stack. And that's where I see the market heading. And that's where I sense that you're going to find us spend a lot more time. You're going to see a lot more services all the way from cloud databases, which we offer today, to public, to private, to our SAVS direct brand, to more and more specific application workloads. And I think I totally agree with you, by the way, moving up the stack is the way to go. And the reason why I asked the question was, Dave and I always talk about this, but just when I was in my trip here in Boston recently, I asked some CIO friends who went out and we had a couple of meetings and they said, literally, they're like way behind the times. They're still living in the dark ages, only a few years ago, of rack and stack. And they have to deal with the challenges of having stacked hardware. So they want to go cloud. Amazon is risky to them because of the SLA side of it. But still, they got to deal with their legacy infrastructure, where the number one conversation is power and cooling. Huge issue. So can you elaborate, because you're kind of like way down the pike relative to what you guys are doing functionally. What's that migration for that kind of customer from a power and cooling standpoint and just deployment and putting it all together? You know, it's that's a very interesting question. And the challenge that I have with that is really we're in the wrong conversation. Right. Why are we talking about power and cooling? Why aren't we talking about how can I better manage your application and provide you a quality level of service that you can't get? With other clouds, you know, it gets into really more of a innovation and an approach of what we're starting to take more of and lead in that market space of how can we take something as simple as WordPress, right? Something as simple as WordPress that anyone can do. This is not rocket science, but how can you do it in a way that's secure, that's scalable, that's highly automated, that has all the enterprise features of cloud as well as security, as well as being able to move and rapidly expand it as well as contract it and offer that as a push button service. So, you know, typically when I hear conversations around, you know, power and cooling costs and yeah, those are really important things to get into when you're managing a data center. They're up to those are definitely up to issues. It really boils down to what's the value, what's the value of the service that we're trying to provide. And with something like Moonshot as well as all the other HP product lines, we've strived really hard at SAVS to figure out better ways to procure, to operate, to manage, to put those in place so that way we can enable IT to really be more effective with what they do, to bring that lower cost of ownership. Craig, can you talk about some of the apps that are really driving your business? What are customers and clients doing, you know, with apps? What are some of the more interesting ones? You mentioned big data on the Q&A. You don't have to start there, but I do want to actually at some point ask you about that because it's such a hot topic. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's surprising because any time you come out with something, there's always a customer that has another type of workload or another type of configuration that they want. What we've been seeing is certainly big data where you need to start off with a very small configuration of servers like maybe 8, 10 servers and then be able to rapidly grow that to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of servers. How do you do that is the key question. How do you do it effectively? How do you do it consistently? How do you do it so when the customer calls you up and says, you know what, I've got a bunch of data feeds that I need to ramp up. How do I go from 5 servers, 10 servers to 50 in a controlled mechanism? How can you deliver on that promise? And that's, those are the challenges that we're looking at and trying to figure out how do we, how do we solve those problems? And then how do we make it flexible? Because no one comes to Savas and asks, you know, that's great. I know in six months that I'm going to be here. I think I might be there, but I need to be able to go up to scale or maybe I need to be a little bit less than that. And by the way, I really want it to be more of a service. So I'm not investing the millions of dollars that it takes to put up the data center or the services around it. But I want to consume it as I use it. So these are, for instance, Hadoop workloads at all? Yeah, I mean, right now our big data initiative is focused on Hadoop. And we're looking at various distributions of that. Okay. So, I mean, and that's a good one for the cloud. The big data gives the cloud something to do. And so, but how about other sort of tier one apps, you know, Oracle SAP? I mean, you talk to customers and you're starting to see those, you know, migrate, certainly in test and dev, but in production as well. I mean, you know, clearly with SAP, it's typically a lot around HANA, which is a huge success. We're seeing the adoption of that and they've got pretty much preconfigured deployments of those. And I suspect that you're going to see us later this year coming out with more service offerings around that. We're working right now in the labs to build those out. But database workloads are a potential use for this as well. Certainly, when you start to compare really high end database workloads, perhaps this is not the right platform, right? This is not this is not geared for every conceivable application use. HP didn't come out and say, hey, look at our platform, it's going to solve every application problem that you have. It's going to solve certain ones very well. And you still have to be out there looking at the architecture and understanding what the various compute platforms can offer. And then size and design your applications accordingly. At the shift gears a little bit at the reinvent conference last fall, Amazon got very aggressive. And essentially made an attempt to deposition the traditional enterprise players, particularly the on-premise, the private cloud crowd. Essentially saying private cloud doesn't make any sense. It's really not cloud and hybrid cloud is all BS, but blah, blah. You, I would imagine, have a different take on that. That's not part of your marketing message. So talk a little bit about your messaging there and generally and then specifically how you guys compete with Amazon. And I broadly, and I know you're in the application side, but it'd be interesting to your perspective there. Yeah, I mean, it only takes customers one time to be hacked to understand that there are real security implications to what it is that we're doing. And not looking necessarily at the cheapest platform is always the right play. Certainly, there are software technologies that you spend millions, millions, millions of dollars on. The last thing you want to do is put it on a platform that can't possibly carry it. So, you know, when we start to look at what services does SAVS offer, what services does Amazon, especially in the application space where I spend a lot of my time, you know, we focus a lot on the expandability of those workloads as well as the management of those workloads. So with Amazon, you get a platform that the IT has to manage on top of, or you have to go to a service provider or another third party SI to manage that application. We come to SAVS and you buy the services that that my group offers, we manage that entire stack for you. So if there is a problem with the web server or an app server or a database that goes down, our DBAs fix that. And we also bundle in licenses of those most common platforms as well. So when you go to Amazon, you can't buy the Oracle license associated with it or the other ones where at SAVS, we've got very flexible models that we work very closely with those partners on. There's there's a lot of pieces in play here, but clearly from our perspective, it's more about offering it as a fully managed service with SLAs and being able to meet the needs of the customer and wrap around their entire environment. Yeah, I keep in mind there is not one solution. There's no major company out there that just says cloud. What we're seeing a lot more of is people have co-location environments that want to make use of the cloud and they need ways to connect into that. Right. So at SAVS, we can allow you to start off and co-loc, move into managed hosting, move into cloud and do all three at the same time. So not only that, but we can also wire up your network because we're part of CenturyLink and CenturyLink is the third largest telco in the United States. And we've got data centers globally, as I said before. But more importantly, we've got cloud offerings globally as well. We really like you guys are doing and Dave and I always talk about this cloud as a reality. And I think my point earlier about the IQ level of where the old enterprise guys are and kind of what you're doing is I think they're going to do a lot of cloud. And they want the SLAs. So I want to ask you a question about as you continue to innovate your business around putting workloads in the cloud and making it faster. One of the things that we heard from Dave Donatelli about was with this new architecture, the speed of announcements of new products. So your challenges do scale, too. So can you talk about the balancing between scale operating scale on your end to bribe these new solutions? The next analytics tool that's hosted in the cloud or other some of the workloads and expansion of your footprint, which is a physical plant challenge. Right. I mean, you know, there's no shortage of problems in our industry. Opportunities. There's an opportunity every day. So, you know, clearly, IT has been rapidly evolving. I think everyone in the industry understands that things are moving at a more rapid pace. A lot of the stuff that we try to do at Savas is we're trying to enable the IT department by by taking on those challenges, right? How do you provision? How do you auto scale it? How do you offer the SLAs? How do you what data centers do they go in? How do you deal with the procurement and logistics of getting it there? Those are really tough challenges. And really, we're trying to find ways to make that faster and better. There's a huge fear to go to Amazon and again, talking to all of our my buddies in the IT world over the years, you know, Amazon's an easy value proposition to understand, right? But no one knows how to use it. Yeah, you've got rights to get some tools to work with. But the guys who are like in the enterprise are used to certain things. This table stakes. What are those table stakes? And what would you say to those guys who are looking at Amazon, looking at cloud, knowing that there's some fear like, I know it's good. I don't want to put my I don't want to get fired for going to Amazon. There's a fear. There's a legitimate fear. And Amazon's obviously trying to correct it, but there's a legitimate business value table stakes. What are those table stakes? Well, I mean, first, I would say, certainly contact Savas. We've got solutions around that, especially around our whole Savas direct product line, which is geared more for that. Those types of users, those table stakes are, they want an environment to go up fast. They want to be able to use their credit cards. They want tools and services that are easy to consume, easy to understand, easy for their development teams to make use of. And then they want to be able to transition those because after you develop a platform, the last thing you want to do is then say, OK, well, I've got this this platform here. Where do I go for QA? Where do I go for production? How do I migrate that workload from the stuff that my guys have developed on or integrated recovery kind of all the way up the stack? Yeah. So, you know, we're holistically thinking about this whole piece here. Certainly, we've got a whole cloud strategy around our various cloud offerings of how all those tie together. What inning are we in in the cloud? So assuming, you know, that there are guys out there who want to get to the cloud, want those SLAs, but there's a lot of kind of like, you know, in between the toes, details around like disaster recovery. I got to run through all this like all this ops work inside the data center that you can't just put out in the cloud. So given that this is pretty complicated on the IT side, what inning are we in the cloud right now? Boy, I don't know if I could say what inning we're in, but I got a feeling it's going to go into a lot of a lot of extra innings in this industry. It might be that game early in the week that went to 16 innings. It's really hard to say, but the interesting thing is that, you know, the market's been evolving each decade, every year. And what's getting really crazy now is the amount of density, the amount of power, the amount of performance improvements that we're seeing, especially with HP and others in the space. You know, cloud is certainly a paradigm shift for a lot of our customers, and they're looking for ways of how they can really effectively use it. Kind of like I said earlier, you know, if you look at it just from a simple compute standpoint, you know, we need to take it up one more notch. I think it's going to evolve into much more application centric conversations than it is about how many cores, how much power, how much memory. Business value and workloads. So what are you seeing? I mean, what's driving? I mean, during the recession, a lot of people, you know, accelerated their move to cloud because they wanted to reduce their OPEX or the CAPEX and shift it to OPEX. But the cloud has got to be more than that. What are you seeing? I mean, you know, obviously, we're seeing a lot of customers wants the OPEX model. Specifically, what we're seeing is customers not only just want the cloud, but they want the platforms and the applications on top of the cloud to be easy to consume as the cloud is today. It's a service model. It's a service model that they want. That they can't necessarily get there. It's too hard to get there internally. No, certainly not everyone. But what we're finding is, you know, in my group, out of about 100 requests, we're seeing about 80 of those wanting Savas to offer more applications and platforms as a service inside there to leverage in the cloud technologies as we see fit to better help the customer operate that environment. So they want an app store for their enterprise? Yes, they do. What they're going after? Yes. And how about the whole notion of this hybrid extension of the private? Are you seeing that in a big way? Is there that drive for homogeneity from their private cloud to their external? You know, everyone wants to be able to leverage the assets that they paid for, right? So what we're finding is, being able to transition from co-location into cloud is a really big motivating driver, right? You've already paid for that capital sitting out there. And really what you're looking for is the ability to make use of more cost-effective models. And how you do that is really the key. And you also find, almost with all major enterprises, that you've got a variety of providers out there. I mean, they're not just all sitting in one data center. They're sitting in multiple data centers globally. And then how do you manage the disaster recovery? How do you manage the SLAs? How do you keep consistency across all those? And those are fundamental challenges that I see a lot of customers struggle with, especially as something as easy as an app server, right? Okay, so we're up out of time. Thanks for coming on the queue. We appreciate it. Brent, it's always good to have you eyes on, especially digging into some of those details around cloud. Obviously extra endings is going to happen, which means it's going to be really, really viable. Business of no brainer. Cloud is here. Cloud is here to stay. There's really no hype. It's a reality. How it gets rolled out is a whole nother ball game. So that's going to be a good service opportunity for a lot of folks out there and a good opportunity for an enterprise. This is The Cube. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.