 Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're having CUBE conversations at our Palo Alto studio getting off the road, you know, getting ready for the holidays, a little bit of a break in the conference action and we're excited to have our next guest, David Green. He's the CEO of Zerostack. David, great to see you. Thank you, good to be here, Jeff. So again, for those who aren't that familiar with the company, you give us kind of the quick and dirty on Zerostack. So Zerostack is a software company based here in Mountview. We're building a new kind of private cloud infrastructure. The idea is to use automation to simplify operations while still keeping IT in control of that infrastructure. Really trying to deliver a public cloud-like experience to users while keeping IT in charge and in control. It's funny, your website and what I've been doing in my background work, self-driving private clouds, like the autonomous private cloud. That's kind of what we're trying to get to, right? I mean, the idea is that too much of the work that IT has to do is bog down in day-to-day administrative tasks and manual operations and kind of working with boxes. And instead, if we can start to bring automation to machine learning and intelligence there, IT can move forward on other things that are more important and move faster more importantly in support of the rest of the business. And Andy Jassy might argue with me, but I don't think he would necessarily, but part of the genesis of public cloud was this friction between the dev and the ops because I'm on the hook. I have to develop a new application. I don't have time to wait for the IT guy to provision me a new box. I don't know exactly. No kind of box is asking me questions. It's a ticket you submit and then in two weeks we'll get back to you. Operating system. And then we'll get to the dev. And you got to order it from Michael Dell and it's coming in the mail. So really it's that tension that probably really created the demand for a quickly provisioned, easy to provision, swipe my credit card and it just appears on my desktop. So that's the piece of cloud that you're trying to emulate. Exactly, exactly. I think that's a good analogy, right? I mean, I think that it's interesting when you go back to the origin of kind of dev ops the idea was that developers would take care of operations as part of building the applications, as part of the application life cycle. In reality, I'm yet to meet an application developer who has any interest in operations, right? So really dev ops today is about how does the IT organization better support the development organizations and the application teams. And it just says, in context, keep in mind that every organization today is becoming a software company because every customer interaction, every business process, every service delivery is somehow being instantiated in a piece of software that the organization's looking out for, right? So when the business is driven by software and the developers need to move at the speed of the business, now how does IT keep up? And that's where this idea of IT being able to provide the kind of that experience like you talked about, the swipe and go becomes so critical. Right, but at the same time, for all the reasons that have been well documented, there's just certain stuff that's not appropriate for public cloud, but what we're talking about is really has nothing to do with the appropriateness of whether it is or isn't. It's really trying to deliver the benefits of that type of a working model to whatever your infrastructure is. And in your case, it's private cloud. I know it's my own data, it's my own infrastructure. May I think it's important to acknowledge that I think there have been people in the industry who have said that the whole world was going to become public cloud, right? I think our view is that that's not the case. And as you say, for a variety of good reasons. I mean, there are some really important external factors in the world right now that say that's not the case. As you start to see the current political climate, the current geopolitical climate, you have more and more barriers going up around the world that says that, you know, my data shall be mine to remain in my country, it's not going anywhere else. I mean, every time something rash unexpected happens, I even know another set of customers in some European countries saying, my data will never leave this country, okay? So that's one external factor that says, you got to keep control of your data in your workload, right? There's also a set of internal factors that says, people are discovering that as is always the case, it's much more expensive over time to rent than to own. You know, you have houses and you have hotels. You know, you don't live in a hotel, you use a hotel when you need it, you go live in your house, right? And so as public cloud has spread and gotten more mature, people are realizing that there's a need to bring that home to better control the costs around them. And I think there's also a human dimension of this too, which is that you have an entire ecosystem of IT professionals with deep expertise, deep knowledge that is only relevant and only applicable in a world that still has a notion of on-premises private cloud infrastructure. And you can be sure that those people are going to do their best to make sure that their livelihoods, their careers and knowledge stays relevant. And so we see all those dimensions playing out in kind of as a motivators for organizations to want a private cloud. Now, the flip side's been, it's typically been hard. I would argue that the appeal of public cloud's been, the user's like it, but it's easy. And so by trying to bring what we do with that self-service view and add an ease of operations around it, now IT can participate fully in this new ecosystem. Now it's interesting, right? Obviously the incumbents are not just taking it lying down and all the existing big infrastructure providers like Dell EMC and HP have been pitching hybrid cloud or they accept some stuff's going to be in the public cloud. So they're also trying to put in place to make their infrastructure more cloud-like. So what are you guys doing differently than say what might be coming down the line from Dell EMC or coming down the line from HP in terms of your customer's point of view? I think what's interesting is that we're going to work with the Dell EMC or an HP or a Lenovo, whoever, as part of that infrastructure, right? Every cloud at the end of the day needs a set of compute resources, a set of storage resources, a set of networking resources and those companies you've listed to make excellent products in those areas and we're going to use those and apply our software on top of it. Where we see the bigger gaps around past cloud solutions have been around the software layer, right? And so look at some of the generations that have existed. You know, your VMware is kind of the point of reference. You know, a VMware cloud, it's complicated. It's multiple products that have been acquired over time, different architectures, different code bases they don't integrate together, hard to hire people, they're expensive, they're hard to keep those challenges. So what have we tried to do to make that better? Well, you've had an open source old server that came with OpenStack, okay? Right. Better software, lower cost software but even more difficult to operate. At least that's the feedback we get from our customers, right? I love the idea of OpenStack, it's too hard to keep it running, okay? You've got a solution like Nutanix that says I'm going to restrict your options by restricting your options to just my world. I'm going to make it simple to operate but people don't want those restrictions. People still want access, particularly developers want access as very rich set of tools that are available out there and are only available in kind of more of an open world. And then of course you've got the ease of operations that the public guys have done. So what we've tried to do is to take that same excellent base of infrastructure that the HP's and the Dell's and the Linoa's or else provide, take that great foundation then add software onto it that says let's try and drive for the better software stack like you would have gotten with OpenStack. Let's try for software to find infrastructure like you would have gotten with Nutanix. Let's try for automated operations like you would have gotten from a public cloud. Let's wrap machine learning around that to make sure that we're continuously monitoring the behavior of this cloud. Such that it can more effectively deliver what's a part of it. So what does an engagement look like with a customer? Because obviously they've got this infrastructure, right? They want to get more cloud like and the deployment of that and the accessibility really. Do they carve out a piece? Is it a Greenfield project? Is it some percentage of allocation of their infrastructure? I mean, how do they go about it? Because clearly stuff's up, it is running. There is still the IT piece of keeping the lights on. How do they carve it out? Kind of what is their, I would say go to market with their internal kind of project plan to start to bring this capability in-house. I mean, I think that it can take a variety of forces. The driver of a typically is DevOps, right? There typically is a pain point that where IT isn't keeping up with its application developers, right? That's usually the catalyst for the project. And what's the screaming, the screaming bloody, I need help right now, kind of. The screaming bloody helping right now is if I don't get my developers with it any more quickly they're all going to Amazon. They're just going, right? And they're not allowed to do that and I am out of a job. I'm trying to stop that knee-jerk reaction that says in Amazon's answer. But I can't because my current infrastructure is too hard and I can't keep up with it. And so that's simply the catalyst of how do you break that gap. And then what we'll see, kind of probably two use cases to the examples you gave. Now one, it may be in the context of a new application being deployed. I'm going to deploy a new application. It is a cloud-based application. It needs a more flexible infrastructure. I don't want to put it on the stuff I have which doesn't work. Help me set up a new environment. That's the New Year's case. Same where we also see the, I have a set of applications running already. The infrastructure is on, it works, but it's expensive, it's cumbersome, it's complicated. Let me move some of those applications as your stack as a better place in which to live and operate and be managed. And we'll operate in both those models. So some cases, new infrastructure, some cases using what customers have. Okay. And then you've mentioned it a few times a machine learning piece. So a really important piece of this is not only the easy access and the easy kind of interface with the infrastructure, but now you've got a different level of intelligence around the use of that. So I wonder, are you seeing, do you guys flag? Oh my gosh, you not only have the cloud attributes of ease of use, but now you need a cloud attribute of big explosion, you better get some POs in. Michael and Meg. Exactly. Don't call Meg anymore, she's going to answer the call. Antonio, he's a people alumni. We love Antonio. I think that is the answer, right? That's a great use case for machine learning in a cloud that says, hey, given your current usage trends, this is when your resources are going to be consumed, let us help you get more. But machine learning is also helpful in how to get the most out of your infrastructure. Here are the resources people have said they needed versus what they're actually using. How do we better match for people actually using to what's available and what's on demand there, right? And over time starting to watch the behaviors in the systems, these are the patterns we see of events. But the whole idea here is that there's too many tasks, I said earlier that IT has had to do manually, and we want to be able to automate those tasks. We're not trying to eliminate jobs with automation, we're trying to eliminate tasks with automation. And machine learning really is the key that allows us to do that intelligently. Right. It's funny the whole job discussion because on one hand all you hear about is the machines are taking all of our jobs, then you just go to the newspaper, whatever's your favorite, LinkedIn, and there's no shortage of jobs, right? There's plenty of IT jobs, so they're not eliminating jobs, they're shifting jobs, I think they're even looking for truck drivers still, even though we're going to wipe out all the truck drivers in a couple of years. So, that's a different discussion. That's a whole different level of automation. But it is interesting, and it is about getting people to do higher order work, and as you said, IT's no longer about keeping the lights on, it is the business. Yeah, yeah. It's not support. It's about how do we grow with the business, how do we flex with the business, what's the right policy to support the business, and that's not about configuring network addresses, right? Let the machines do that. Let the cloud do that. Let's figure out what a strategy should be for connecting with our users and how IT's going to enable that. So I'm curious, so you've had some deployments, you've got some early customers, kind of unexpected results, or kind of second order impacts that you didn't necessarily expect or weren't that obvious that customers are starting to utilize by taking this approach to their hardware. Well, I think, so a couple of things to get by, one is part of what we do is we provide this idea of a workbench, we call it the DevOps workbench, which shakes a set of leading DevOps tools, Jenkins Ansible to make your choice, and makes those available really in one click down to the users. What we've seen is people go very far in terms of linking together those tools to fully automate their deployments. So being able to literally, software provisions, the infrastructure, configures the application, deploys the application, spins it up, gets going ahead. I have one server spotter who's actually allowing users to go to a web portal, use a credit card to order an application that they want to use, which then creates the VM, installs the application, runs the application, and makes it available to the user. So these people are just running with this idea of fully automated operations in a good way, right? I think the second thing that's been interesting is that IT guys are loving it, and it's like they're making them heroes. One of my, for a very, very large pharmaceutical company, the IT guy sat in the room with his DevOps peer and said, hey, the more he can do without me, the better, and that's what we're trying to do, right? The second or anything that's been, that there's quite a few companies where I just say they're tired, right? You've got people who've been struggling with these cloud infrastructure questions of years, and at this point they're like, you know what? I don't want to deal with it. And so we've had quite a bit of demand and some of our big projects right now are actually in partnership with cloud service providers, with managed services providers, who have been kind of asked as a trusted advisor by their customers to come and say, build the next cloud for me. As an enterprise, I'm going to focus on the software, I'm going to focus on the applications, I'm going to focus on kind of managing my resources, you run it. Right. And again, I think that opens up a new set of possibilities in terms of how IT can evolve and where they can focus going forward. That's a really interesting kind of underreported subset of probably new infrastructure providers where it is, it's kind of a private cloud managed by a service provider. So I get the benefits of it, but I'm not having to run it. It's still undifferentiated heavy lifting in terms of my core business. Yes, and I added that, all those things, and it's for someone you trust, because most of the time we see is this is a, this is a long trusted relationship. And so, if you're going to go to the cloud and you're not going to run it, you want to be able to look somebody in the eye and know that they're taking care of your data and they're securing your information and they're taking care of your workloads. And you can count on that partnership with Japan. Well, I think it definitely supports the, it's a multi-cloud world, right? It's a multi-cloud world, yes. But the cloud benefits are still there, right? It's about being agile, it's about being fast. And like you said, it's about freeing up the devs to do dev and not to do ops. Exactly. Let ops do ops and do it better and faster and easier than ever before. Let the developers focus on the application. All right, well, David, thanks for taking a minute. Thank you very much. If you can tell us all about ZeroStack, I appreciate it. He's David, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios for a CUBE conversation. We'll see you next time. Thanks for watching.