 Hello everyone, welcome to this CUBE special presentation, the CUBE on Cloud Startups with AWS Showcase. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. This session is the Accelerate Digital Transformation and Simplify AWS with autonomous cloud operations with Venkat. Krishnan Murchari, who's the CEO and co-founder here with me on remote. Venkat, good to see you. Great to see you John. So this is a session on essentially day two operations, something that we've been covering on theCUBE as you know for a long time. But the big trend is as DevOps becomes much more mainstream intelligent applications or agile applications have to connect with intelligent infrastructure. And your company, MontyCloud has the solution that literally turns IT pros into cloud powerhouses as you guys say it's your tagline. This is a super important area. I want to get your thoughts and showcase what you guys are doing as one of the hot 10 startups. Thanks for coming on. So take a minute to explain real quick what is MontyCloud all about. All right, thank you again for the opportunity. Hey everybody, I'm Venkat Krishnan Murchari. I represent my entire team at MontyCloud. We are an intelligent cloud managing platform company. What we help customers do is we help them simplify the cloud operations so they can go innovate and develop intelligent applications. Our platform is called day two because everything after the day one of going to cloud needs a lot of expertise and we decided that's a fun area to go solve for our customers. We solve everything on starting day two from simplifying provisioning to management to operations to autonomous cloud operations or platform dusters for our customers so they can innovate faster and they can close the cloud skills gap that is required to empower the developers. Venkat, I want to get your thoughts on day two operations. It's been a trend that's been people have talked about for a long time. As people move to the cloud and see the economic advantages, certainly with COVID-19, the market has said, hey, if you're on cloud native you win Andy Jassy at Reinvented's last keynote really laid out how companies can be proficient in becoming cloud scale advantages. One of them was have expertise in cloud. So everyone is kind of doing that. You're starting to see enterprises all build the muscle for cloud operations. That's day one, they get started. Then the kind of the challenges and the opportunity to kick in when you have to continue it in production. You have things that go on in the software. The underlying scaling infrastructure needs to be scaled out or all these kinds of things happen. This is what day two is all about. Keeping track of and maintaining high availability, uptime and keep the cost structure in line. This is what people discover if they don't think properly about the architecture they have huge problems. You guys solve this problem. Could you explain why this is important? Sure, thanks John. So cloud operations as you described is a continuous operations and continuous improvement in cloud environments. What efficient cloud operations does for customers is it accelerates innovation, reduces the risk and more importantly over the period of time that they are using their applications in cloud which is future, reduces the total cost of cloud operations. This is important because there is a huge gap in cloud scales. The surface area of cloud that customers need to manage is growing by the day and most importantly developers are increasingly and rightfully so, getting a seat at the table in defining and accelerating company's cloud journey which means now they are proposing microservices based application, container based application, traditional applications are still in the mix. Now this surface area becomes a challenge for the IT operators to manage. That's why it's very important to start right. See, we asked this question to our customers, right? Being having listened to our customers as hundreds of them. One thing is clear. When we asked this question to our customers, ever wonder why and how large scale companies like AWS are able to deliver massively scalable services and operate massive data centers with fewer people because it's automation and it's important to think about as you scale, automated way things that must be automated, eliminate undifferentiated heavy lifting and help your developers move fast. All of this is vital in the day and age we live in, John. Yeah, I want to double down on that because I think this idea of integrating into operations is a critical key point for how we're success and failure kind of happen. We've seen with cloud, certainly IT departments and enterprises going, okay, cost optimization, check. Get cloud native, get in the cloud, lift and shift. I thought it through. I put some stuff in the cloud and then they go, great, now I need resilience. I need resiliency and I want to make sure things are working, okay, water flowing through the pipes, clouds working. Then they say, wow, this is good. I got to integrate in with my on-premises or edge or other things that are happening. Then they try to integrate into their core operations. McKinsey calls this the value driver three, integrating into core operations. We heard from them earlier in the program here at this event. This is key. It's not trivial to integrate cloud into your operations. This is what day two and beyond is all about. Talk more about that. Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. And that is, that is, that's something that we've been working with customers to hands-on help learn and build it for them, right? See, the acceleration of cloud adoption during the pandemic and ongoing adoption is going to shift the software, security, compliance and operational landscape dramatically. It's no escaping it. Cloud operations will no longer be an afterthought, right? DevOps will integrate with cloud ops. It'll provide a seamless feedback loop so that bugs can be found sooner, fixed sooner and uptime can be guaranteed. I'll give an example. One of our customers is a university. During the pandemic, their core examination application went down and they couldn't fix it on time because of on-prem resources, lack of resources. For them, it's vital to have adopted cloud operations sooner, but the runway they had was very little. Fortunately, we had the solution for them where within a week they were able to take their entire on-prem application online, not just take the application, but provide an autonomous cloud operations layer to their existing IT team with our platform, upskill them, and then about 14,000 students took the exams without any disruption. Now this customer and customers such as themselves have come to expect that level of integrated cloud operations into that application portfolio. It's important to address that with a platform that simplifies it. Ben, can I real quick define what is autonomous cloud ops platform? What does that mean? So let's take an example here, right? Customers who are trying to move an existing workload to cloud bring a traditional set of application. Then customers who are born in the cloud build microservices of serverless based applications. Then there's containers. Now all three, the present surface areas that customers, particularly the IT teams have to manage. With the growing surface area, with the adoption of infrastructure as code, it becomes more nuanced to think about how do we simplify? And in simplification comes automation. When a developer provisions certain resource, previously they used to be filing a ticket. Central IT team has to respond. Developers don't want that anymore. They want to innovate faster, but at the same time, central IT team wants to have some governance and play. The best way to get out of the way of developers is automating it. And providing autonomous cloud operations means developers can deploy newer workloads faster, but with a level of guaranteed, God rail on security compliance and cost that sets them free. This is what we mean by autonomous cloud operations. Closing the gap in skills, closing the gap in tooling and powering your developers without thinking about the traditional model, but enabling them to do things that's more in a rapid pace. That's what we mean by autonomous cloud operations. You got a great market opportunity. I think this is obviously a no brainer as people say in the industry. Cloud is scale is proven. Even post COVID, if people don't have a cloud growth strategy, they're pretty much going to be toast. McKinsey calls this a trillion dollar at a minimum, not including potential new use cases, new pioneering applications coming. So pretty much well, the verdict is there. This is cloud. I got to ask you about Monte Cloud as you guys have a business. Give it, take a quick minute to explain the business of Monte Cloud, some vitals or how people buy the product, the business model, take a quick minute to explain Monte Cloud's business. Sure thing. John, see our entire goal is to simplify cloud operations. Because what we learned is what seems to be complex about cloud adoption is that everybody is expected to be an expert on everything in the new era. But most teams are not ready to run efficient cloud operations at scale as the cloud footprint is growing. This means we have to redefine certain conversations here. We talk directly to infrastructure architects, cloud architects, application owners. And in general, we talk to people who are leading the IT digital transformation for their companies. What we are enabling our customers is they must demand that the traditional operation model must change to enable newer application patterns. For this, we are expecting customers who want to standardize things, right? IT leaders are beginning to say, all right, I got to standardize my provisioning, standardize my operations, reduce the heavy lifting that comes with infrastructure as code and enable the business team and the application team to work closely together. The best way to do that is to go solve this problem with automation. So our platform is able to go help such customers, particularly leaders who demand digital transformation with clear KPIs. Our platform can help them ask the why question easily. And then our platform can also go perform the how part of automation. That's what we solve. Those are the kind of customers we really have been working with, John. So if I'm a customer, how do I know what I need to call multi-cloud? Is it because my cloud footprint is growing, which is a natural sign of growth? Or is it because I have more events happening, more things to manage? When do I know I have the need to call you guys? What's the signal? What's the sign? So we call it the day one mindset and also the day two mindset. Customers deciding to go to cloud on day one should think about day two. Because without thinking about day two, it can become very expensive. When a customer is thinking about digital transformation could be a lift and shift or could be starting a new application pattern in the cloud, we can certainly help starting right that day because there are a couple of things they have to do. They have to standardize the cloud operations, which means setting up the cloud accounts, setting up guardrails, enabling teams to go provision with self-service. You want to start the right way. So we are happy to help on the day one journey itself and we can automate day two along with it. So standardizing infrastructure operations, standardizing provisioning, security, visibility, compliance, cost. If any of this is an important milestone that customers have to achieve in their cloud journey, we can help. By the way, I would just point out that we were just talking on another session around lift and shift is not a no-brainer either. If not thought through and remediated correctly, that could cost could go through the roof. I mean, we've seen evidence of lift and shift fails just because they didn't think it through just to your point. I mean, that's not a no-brainer. Quickly explain why lift and shift is not as easy as it looks. Sure thing. See, lift and shift is great to get started, but why sometimes it fails is that the connotations about wanting to keep your OPEX down while giving up CAPEX is at odds with each other, right? Cloud is great for reducing your CAPEX, but ongoing operations, whether they do operations and add a lot of burden to the operational expenses. What customers find out is after moving to the cloud, the cost overruns are happening because of resources that are not provisioned correctly. Resources that should not be running. Wild, wild west kind of scenarios where everybody has access to everything and they over provision. All of this together end up impacting customers' ability to go control the OPEX. Then digital transformation projects are looked at from three different angles at least, right? Cost is definitely one. Security is another. And then the ongoing operational attacks with respect to monitoring, governance, remediation, all three, when it simultaneously hits our customers, they look at lift and shift and saying, hey, this was cheaper on-prem. But actually in the long run, this will be not just cheaper on the cloud, it can also be more efficient if they do it right. We can talk about some examples on how we help some customers with that helpful job. Well, I want to get into the cloud operations, the whole dashboard and cloud operation administration. Is there anything that you could share because people that are wanting more and more analytics, I mean, they're buying everything in-site. I mean, cybersecurity, you name it, there's more and more dashboards. No one wants another dashboard. So this is something that you guys have a strong opinion on. How to think this through, because again, at the end of the day, if you're instrumenting your network properly and your applications were intelligence, things are changing. Where's the data? It's true you're thinking around that. Sure thing. Your spot on, nobody wants another dashboard that is just spewing data at them because data without context is irrelevant in our mind, right? We want to be able to provide context. We want to be able to provide data within the context. And the dashboard to us means a customer that's looking at it, an IT leader looking at it, should be able to ask the why question without working too hard at it, right? Let's bring up our dashboard. I would love to show and tell, although it's a dashboard, it is a tool that can enable IT leaders do things differently. I hear it, this is it, right here. Okay, so this is the dashboard. Take me through this. What does it mean? What does it mean to everybody, right? The chart in the middle is the most important piece there. What we help our leaders, IT leaders do is over the fullness of time of cloud adoption, we know that cloud footprint is going to grow. The gray chart in the back, the stack chart represents the cloud footprint. As the cloud footprint continues to grow, we would like our leaders to demand that their security issues go down, their compliance issue go down, and their cost to become more and more often. When leaders demand this, they can make things happen. And our platform can help reduce all three, and leaders can have this kind of dashboard to ask the why question. For example, they can compare one department with another department as that why question. They can compare an application that is similar in one department, in another department, and ask the why question. Why is it more expensive? Why is it more having more compliance issues? This is the kind of why questions our dashboard helps our customers perform and ask those questions, and they don't have to lift a finger, right? This entire dashboard comes to life within few minutes of them connecting the cloud accounts, where we provide visibility into operational issues, trend lines of data on how much consumption happens. And over a couple of months, they can see for themselves with my overall operation cost going down. It's my IT infrastructure now in cloud, more resilient. And does it take more people to do it? Or am I able to turn on Monte-Claude's day two bots to go start reducing that burden over a period of time? This is what we mean by putting the power of autonomous cloud ops in our hands for customers. And this is why you mean by the IT powerhouse for the cloud. Is this on Amazon? So if I want to consume the product, what do I need to do to engage with you guys? What does it mean to me? Am I buying a service? Is it native? Are agents involved? Take me through what do I need to do? So great question. We are born in the cloud start-up thing, which means we are super thankful for amazing technologies like Amazon infrastructure has covered and the venting platform that's out there. So our platform is fully hosted, managed SaaS platform. A customer does not need to do anything, but log on to Monte-Claude.com, click a bunch of buttons and connect the database account. They get started in under five minutes, cell service. And as they go through the platform, it's a guided experience where they can get to that dashboard I showed you in just few clicks. They can get visibility, security posture assessment, compliance posture assessment, all in those few clicks. And when they decide to start using the platform more to automate and leverage the bots, they can always buy into additional services in the platform. So it's a easy to use, get started in 10 minutes, tasks, people, all kind of platform. Okay, great stuff. I want you to take me through the intelligent application flywheel that's going on here. So I can imagine that as the flywheel of success happens, okay, got some intelligent apps, I see the dashboard, I'm getting some more visibility on the value creation, unlocking more value, new use cases, all the things that happen in cloud, all good. And then I start growing, but I got builders trying to build more applications, more demand for more applications, more pressure on the infrastructure. The next question is, how do you guys simplify the cloud operation equation? Because I got to add more VPCs, I got to do more infrastructure. Is it more EC2, it can get complicated. How do you guys solve that problem? Because if the cloud footprint starts to grow, because of more intelligent applications, how do you guys make it easier and simpler to scale up the intelligent infrastructure? That's a great question again, John. I'm going to go into a little bit of a detailed slide here, but before I do that, let's talk about two customers that we helped, right? This slide on the left, right? Talks to both the customers. So what we have learned working with customers is, they have to build cloud accounts, manage cloud regions, use around voting, then they have to build networking infrastructure, then they have to enable application infrastructure on top of the networking infrastructure. Application infrastructure could mean they want high performance computing workloads, or elastic services such as, you know, queuing services, storage, or traditional VMs databases. That's a lot to build in the application infrastructure with infrastructure scope. On top of that, our customers have to deal with visibility, security, compliance, cost, you know, you get it, right? The path to intelligent applications is not easy because cloud is powerful, but it's broad, and the talent required is deep. We are able to say, how can we help our customers automate everything below the intelligent application layer? If we can do that, which we do, we can now propel our developers to go build intelligent applications without having the burden of also managing the underlying infrastructure, and we can help the IT operations team become cloud powerhouses because they get out of the way and enable. I'll give you two examples here, right? One of our customers is a Fortune 200 large ISV. They have about 10,000 servers in a particular department. And previously, when the servers were on-premises, they had about a four-member team managing compliance for it. When they lifted and shifted these servers into the cloud, the same model they wanted to, the leaders that asked, why should we continue the same model, right? They worked with Mardi Cloud. Now there is a day two compliance bot that's running, managing the 10,000 servers, automatically watching out for compliance trips, notifying them in a Slack channel, gets approval, remediates and fixes it. They were able to take those four folks and put them on the intelligent application side as opposed to continuous infrastructure management side. Another example, a Fortune 200 global networking company. They were, it's an interesting situation, John. So on Cyber Monday, they wanted to go big, obviously the Cyber Monday was very important for them. The Thursday before Cyber Monday, their on-premises data center and application went down. And their teams wanted to move the application to cloud. And the partner that we worked with had brought this challenge to us, saying, hey, this Fortune customer wants to go to cloud and we have this weekend. Well, we were able to go guide the partner and with our platform, they were able to not only take that application from on-prem to cloud, they set up the cloud infrastructure, the networking, the application layer, the monitoring layer, the operations layer, all of that within a day and on Monday, that application delivered three X sales for this customer without that partner or the customer being a cloud expert. That's what we mean by putting that kind of power in the hands of customers. Yeah, and I want to go back to that slide because I think there's a second section I want to look at because what you just referred to is I think this builds into the next one on the right-hand side, this day two kind of console vision here. The idea of getting in the weeds and getting into the troubleshooting of, say that Cyber Monday example, it's exactly the non-agility scenario, right? Because we all, if anyone's been worked in tech knows, when you have to get to root cause on something, it can take a while, right? So you need to have the system architecture built out. So here, classic cloud architecture on the left moves to a simple kind of console model. That's kind of what you guys are offering. Is that fine? Am I getting that right, Venkat? Is that kind of how this works? Yeah, that's kind of how it works, but the path to that may be a quick explanation there. If you look at what's on the right is- Let's put that slide back up, let's get that slide back. Okay, there it is. So what's on the right side is every layer on the left requires specialized talent and specialized tooling. That's how customers are currently experienced in the cloud. They either have to buy into an expensive monitoring tool or buy into an expensive security posture management tool. They have to hire, it's hard to find cloud talent, right? And then they have to use infrastructure code solutions sometimes that is, that can get more complex to maintain. What we have in Monte Cloud is that every layer there, they can provision by clicking away. For example, when they provision their cloud accounts, setting up AWS best practices, budget guidelines, security, logging, monitoring, they can click away and do it. Setting up network infrastructure, like VPCs, setting up AWS transit gateway, VPNs, there's templates, they can click and do it. The application infrastructure, which is a growing set of application infrastructure. Imagine this John, if a developer can come in and request the IT team, they would like to set up an RDS database, right? The IT team can now, what they do, can provide the developer options of, do you want it in dev stage fraud, and do you want snapshots, backup, high availability? These are all check boxes. And the developer can pick and choose and they can provision what they want without additional help from the IT team. And the IT team does not have to automate any one of this because it's pre-automated in our platform. Yeah, this is the promise of infrastructure as code. You don't got to get into the architecture and start throwing switches and all kinds of weird stuff can happen. Someone doesn't turn on, they don't enable auto-scaling, they test it for this, they forgot to revert back. I mean, there's a zillion things that could go wrong. Human error as well as automation. So once you set it up, then you provide a consumable developer friendly approach. That seems to be what's happening. Okay, cool. All right, well, Vinka, this is fantastic. Final minutes we have left. So I want to get your thoughts on the momentum and the vision. Talk about the momentum that you guys have now in the marketplace and what's the vision for the next five years? Great, it's a great question. From a momentum perspective, John, we take an approach of let's work with customers and understand where we can solve some problems for them, right? We've been working backwards with customers, right? We have customers that are startups that are born in the cloud. We have customers that are enterprise customers who are having a large footprint on-prem. Then we have everybody in between like university customers who are transitioning. So what we did is from a momentum perspective, we worried more about, do we understand the talent gap and the tooling gap that exists across the board of all customers? Because every customer, once they go to cloud, they look to achieving the same level of efficiency and simplicity like modern cloud companies. A traditional company that moves to cloud wants to act and behave like a born in the cloud customer. For us, it was very important to understand a variety of customers, a variety of use cases and then automated away. So momentum is that we're able to go help a customer that is a Greenfield customer to go to cloud easily. And we're also able to go help brownfield customers ensure they can reduce the total cost of cloud operations on an ongoing basis. So we've been seeing customers of all sizes. We've been helping customers of all sizes move fast. And there's a bunch of case studies out there in our website, we're a startup. So we've been able to help those customers and earn their trust by delivering results for them. So the momentum is that we're able to go scale up now and scale up fast for our customers without us being in the wake technically. Our customers can go to our platform, help themselves and accelerate the platform. That's a moment that we have. From a future perspective, we ask where things are headed. There are a couple of things. First things first, it's important to not just predict the future, we got to create it. About two years back when we founded Monte Cloud, the question in my team asked me, my CTO asked me is, what really matters in cloud banking? So we said, all right, this is provisioning, automation, management. Yeah, yeah, they all matter. But what seemed to really matter is there are three things that matters, right? That's how we came to. One is events. The cloud itself is an eventing machine, right? More than ever, the cloud infrastructure emits events at every turn, every resource, every activity is expressed as an event. So we made an early bet on building an event-driven platform from the ground up. We are the only platform that is event-driven. Every other platform we see or try and solve problems, which is awesome to have, but they take an approach of an API-based model or an inference into log-based model. So the future, we believe, belongs to eventing model because it's lightweight on the customer's infrastructure. It goes easy on the cloud providers. More importantly, it gets the customer as close as possible to when the event happens, right? That's very important to be able to be event-driven. If you notice, Cloud90 Foundation came up and announced recently, CloudEvents is the right way to deal with modern SaaS platforms. We've been in CloudEvents from the day one for us, right? So the future is the new model. And that's where the data angle, I think, connects here for this event and why you guys are a hot startup is observability, all these things. It's all about event-driven infrastructure. It's all events. It's monitoring, it's management, it's data. The end of the day, the data is the instrumentation is what it is, developers are coding, media is data, everything's data, everything has to do with data. You guys have a unique approach. Venkat Krishnamachary, thank you for coming on. Appreciate it. And thanks for sharing your story here at the AWS Showcase. First inaugural Cube on cloud startups, part of the 10 hot startups categories. Thanks for sharing. Thanks for the opportunity. And we hope to help a lot more customers. Simplify the cloud operations and innovate with some intelligent applications that's going to change the world. Check out Venkat and his company all on Twitter, on Facebook. They're on every channel. All the channels are open. Of course, the Cube, we're bringing you all the hot startups extracting the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.