 Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage here in San Francisco, California. I'm John Furrier, here with Dustin Kirkland, contributing analysts for theCUBE, and also we've got our full team coverage, Rob Streche, Lisa Martin, Rob Hove, Mark Hove, some whole team, getting the stories, writing them up, pumping out the videos, getting all the data from the experts, from the senior executives at Google, to the startup founders and ecosystem players that are growing in large integrators all here on theCUBE for three days. Our next guest, John Grosu, CTO of Aptium Technologies, applied all the way in from Romania to give us this CUBE interview. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, John. Thanks for having me. So, love what you guys do. Take a minute to explain what the company does and your role as CTO. Okay, so my role as CTO basically revolves around shaping the technological vision, guiding innovation, and making sure that all of that aligns with the business needs and goals. I'm deeply involved in everything related to strategy, security, architecture, and customer experience. I come from a background of startups and the startup incubation. So, that's my primary love, and that's my primary drive. With that said, I'm deeply involved into everything that's related to product vision and product management. And how far along is the company in terms of size, age? In terms of size, we are in the hundreds right now. So, in terms of age, we have more than 10 years. Can you tell us a little bit about Aptium's core business, what you guys do, who you serve, who your customers are? Yeah, so, our main mission is to seamlessly blend the digital transformation expertise with the cloud commerce solution. So, we strive to empower businesses by using integrated and automated solutions to foster growth, efficiency, and innovation. Our ecosystem orchestration platform basically does just that. It provides a central hub for our customers to be able to do everything related to cloud transaction and cloud commerce. How did the platform get started? What are the challenges? What was the problem you were solving? Yeah, so the history of the platform is actually very long and has a lot of twists and turns. So, it originally started with the problem, and that problem was, can we reverse engineer the cloud metering and the cloud building solutions that the cloud providers had at that time, okay? And once we had that solved, we were able to take the same mechanism and replicate it in an entire model. That basically allowed us to solve for everything related to cloud selling and reselling, so basically reselling of cloud services. Once we did that, we basically had started to tackle all the rest of the problems related to cloud commerce, which were providing a marketplace, a catalog for all the customers to actually be able to plug mission of their own, be able to surface that on a very customizable, tailored solution marketplace that they can share further downstream. So yeah, that basically became what we know today as cloud commerce platform, which is CCP, Optium CCP platform. Yeah, and you're here at Google Cloud Conference. Can you talk a little bit about how Google Cloud fits into your solution? So, Google Cloud is one of our main vendors within the platform, and it's been evolving a lot, and we're benefiting and also providing a lot of benefits to Google Cloud by integrating all the solutions that Google Cloud provides, doing provisioning on behalf of our customers, or on behalf of the resellers. We're also doing consolidating billing with Google Cloud, and we have the full circle of doing the cloud commerce for GCP to the end consumer. What's the role of AI, if any, that you see coming into play, because the duet AI demo was impressive, and you see Google positioned very well for this. That was impressive, and AI is really the future. I think by this time, everybody can recognize that. Okay, for me, it's a little bit scary because I know it's just the tip of the iceberg, but with that said, at Optium, we're deeply involved into AI technologies. One of the original solutions that we benefited with AI from was basically providing a cost optimization engine. We consume a lot of data on behalf of our customers. We consume a lot of data, billing data and usage data and all that stuff. So we've created a cost optimization engine, which basically analyzes all those data points, and since we have the exact workloads that our customers use, we can provide a very, very exact forecast on how the future is going to look like financially. So that was the main thing that we experimented for. Nowadays, since everybody's talking about generative AI and all of that stuff, we've started also experimenting with various solutions like providing automatic marketing content generation for our customers to be able to easily publish into a catalog. So they're seeing the benefits of that. The extreme benefits. So this is a new term for me, but in the prep for this conversation, ecosystem orchestration. I'm not sure I know what that edit is. Can you explain it and what that means? For us, ecosystem orchestration is basically the process of managing and coordinating multiple parts of an ecosystem. So basically, by doing that, multiple actors and multiple players can create consolidated value and share that value across a common set of customers. So for example, our ecosystem orchestration platform basically handles the full circle of cloud commerce. So it's dealing with the root of the problem which is where you buy from. So vendors, cloud providers, service vendors and all of that, handling the financial aspect of things like doing the actual billing on your behalf, doing the generating invoices for your resellers, for your customers using that output data to submit to, I don't know, other invoice systems or PSA systems and all of that. That data is also, can be retrieved by API so that they can, whoever wants to augment it further or could customize it further, they're able to do that. And if you move like further down, you have like a fully fledged catalog that you can benefit from either on direct selling or indirect selling. If you're reselling like cloud solutions or other vendor solutions, you are able to basically distribute those, augment the pricing and augment things and publish those in your own catalog and distribute those in using the marketplace to your end customers. And another thing that we handle on the end, consumer on the marketplace, okay, we also have built a subscription engine and the metering engine, which basically can detach everything that's between reseller and end customers to whatever consolidated billing is done upstream. So basically at the end of the day, we can consolidate all of that so that we provide a full central hub in which any seller can see exactly what's going on on all aspects, financial and all of that related to what their base cost is, what their price and how their business is doing at any time of the day. Sounds like a complex space. So there's a lot of work for you to do to help customers simplify all of that, right? Yeah, it's like super up to say it like that. It has a lot of components. Super apps. Yeah, it has like a lot of components and basically the term that you're mentioning, ecosystem orchestration, is basically the central hub that coordinates all the parties or the art actors and all the relationships in between. Yeah. I love that super app because we like to call multiple clouds super cloud as that layer creates these new capabilities. I can see in my mind's eye how AI might work by bringing all these pieces together at runtime or assemble services or create shortcuts and reduce the steps it takes to service a customer or get more insights or signals. I mean, I can just imagine that. What is your service model look like without AI and with AI? I don't think that in today's world we can say without AI because we- It's already- We already took that direction, okay? And for us it's central because we invest a lot into- You have a lot of data. We have a lot of data and we already provide deep insights and reporting and analytics and providing that consolidated view or what the state of your business is but we're going to do so much more with AI. So for us it's not a question whether we're going to take the known AI route. I want to ask you a question if you don't mind. You know, in AI one of the things we like about it is the benefits it brings obviously we see that. The interface as consumers and users of AI, even in the cloud, whether you're a developer or putting a solution together or serving customers, the user interfaces are changing and they need to get simpler and cleaner. So you can abstract away complexity but I know that you like incubating technology bringing products to market. These of use is a big part of the product and making it feel like a good clean product. What's your vision on how to make AI simpler for folks watching and using your products? What's your strategies? How do you think about making the product beautiful or more elegant or easier to use, simpler, reducing the steps? We're at a time where we don't want more complexity. We want faster. Exactly. So yeah, since I'm coming from this startup space one of the main core values that we bring to the table is basically making sure that whatever complexity that is in the back, the focus is always on simplicity. Only that experience to make sure that whatever complexity happens in the back we keep things very simple and we abstract the complexity away from the customer's experience. That's extremely, extremely important for us. With that said, since we asked about how that can be done with AI or for AI, for us, all the AI technology that we use are basically technology that we use in the back. The customers cannot see those. So for example, one of the things that we are working on right now is basically a recommendation engine using AI. That's 100% tailored for cloud commerce because there's a lot of solutions out there for recommendation engines. You're saying the end customer doesn't directly interface with the AI, but they're clearly seeing the benefits of what you're doing in the background, right? So it's just transparent and that's part of the value that you add is hiding the complexity. Exactly. Exactly, so I was saying about that recommendation engine since we consume a lot of cloud data and we have deep insights into how people transact on everything related to cloud and our vendors. We can basically tailor a recommendation solution specifically for cloud solutions, which in our experiments, it's super exciting, it's super neat. John, I really appreciate you coming on theCUBE. As we conclude this interview, what gets you most excited about AppDM's business prospects and what message would you want to share to the audience watching about the company and your role in the future of the company? So there's a lot of things that excite me about AppDM, but what excites me the most is the limitless technological innovation and true impact that we can do. With that said, we are on the verge of deploying a lot of solutions that we believe that are going to change the whole cloud commerce scene, okay? So for the people that are thinking of joining AppDM's family as a partner, okay? We are saying that you are not investing in a company, you are investing in a community that's fully dedicated in making solutions for real world problems today, okay? We are not following trends in this space, we are committed to setting the trends. So I thank you very much for this opportunity. Great, congratulations on your success. Thank you for spending time with us here at Google Cloud Next in San Francisco. Thanks so much. Okay, John Grosso, CTO of AppDM Technologies here in theCUBE, live coverage, bringing all the action from the CUBE's team coverage. 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