 Live from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now, here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and John Wall. Well, good morning and welcome to day three here on theCUBE of our coverage of VMworld. We're in the Mandalay Bay and the Convention Center. Been a great three days we've had, looking forward to what we have in store for you on this Wednesday. I'm joined by Stu Miniman here and also with us here on the set is Michelle Borovac who's the Vice President of Marketing for Velostrada. Michelle, good morning to you. And Sasha Sankara, who's the CEO of Rackware. And Sasha, thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me on. You've been with us before on theCUBE. Yeah, you guys did an early interview of women in Silicon Valley. It was a great interview and we really enjoyed it. You guys came to visit our offices too. Well, just to familiarize our audience a little bit about with your individual operations. Michelle, why don't you go first? Just tell folks a little bit about Velostrada and what you do and in terms of cloud migration and the services that you're providing. Sure, absolutely. So we are a software company that is really focused on helping organizations move workloads from on-premises into the cloud and back. So what's really unique is that we can do that in a matter of minutes instead of weeks or months. Great, and Sasha? Yes, I am the CEO and founder of Rackware. So we do migrations. We also do disaster recovery as a service, backup as a service and things like auto-scaling into the cloud. We're partners with VMware. We're partners with IBM as well. Okay, so one of the big words we've been hearing mentioned a lot at the show is inter-clouding. We've been talking about multi-clouds, hybrid clouds, whether it is actually moving workloads or just managing multiple environments. We actually wrote a couple of years ago. Hybrid cloud is where people are thinking but a lot of it is, I've got composite cloud because I've got applications, lots of different places and managing that is tough. I know you both have commentary on that. Talk to first, what do you think of what VMware talked about this week and kind of the state of where we are, Michelle? Sure, we were very happy to hear on Pat Gelsinger's comments. It is what we've been saying for two years. We certainly believe that companies are really trying to get a handle on public cloud and figure out how do they truly make that an extension of their data center and take advantage of the cost efficiencies of pay as you go. The model makes a lot of sense for certain applications. Sos? Yeah, I fully agree. We've been talking hybrid for years and people sort of laughed at us when we brought it up but when you think about enterprises, there's certain applications that are going to remain on-premise. There's certain ones that are going to go in private cloud and then there's certain applications you're going to put in public cloud. You're going to need sort of a hybrid ecosystem to be able to manage all of that and when you're talking anything, 50, 100 machines, you're not going to put it all in one basket. You're going to spread that out and that equals hybrid. Can you maybe help us unpack when we talk about moving applications or other applications that span certain resources? What's real today? What are some of your more aggressive customers doing? So we have lots of aggressive customers. We sell to the enterprise. We've moved workloads for Procter and Gamble. We've moved workloads for Coca-Cola. We're actually working with HBO on Game of Thrones. This is her that does Game of Thrones so we've migrated lots and lots of workloads but I think there's a little bit of a myth out there. I think if you talk to Amazon, they'll say everybody's going to rewrite their applications. They're not. In the future, they will but there's a lot of existing applications that you need technology like ours to be able to take advantage of the cloud because people don't want to build data centers anymore. People don't want to be in the hardware business anymore. They need to move that out so they can focus on applications and their businesses. And just clarify, you're not only moving to the giant clouds like AWS or Azure but lots of service providers. What's that landscape look like? Yeah, so we've moved Softlayer as a big one, Rackspace. CenturyLink, we've had a long-standing relationship with a variety of clouds and there's the smaller players as well too. We're starting a relationship with Microsoft, Azure, Google Compute Engine. So we've supported a variety of cloud expedients. We're starting a relationship with them and we work with some of the smaller players as well. Yeah, Michelle, as far as applications Sasha was talking about, if I got a pretty big portfolio and I'm talking about a pretty big migration, a big decision, how do I know what's going to work where? Can I stick my toe in the water a little bit or what can you do for people like me to allay those concerns that I know I'm going to work in a new environment? Yeah, it's one of the larger customers that we're working with is a large electricity company and they have 2,000 applications. They are trying to figure out exactly that challenge. What's going to work? What can I lift and shift? What has to be rewritten? One of the things that Velostrata can really help with is to allow them to test the waters, essentially. In five minutes, you can clone an application, try it in the cloud, zip it up to Amazon, test it, see if it's going to work. We automatically adapt and insert all the drivers and everything that's needed to adapt that application for the cloud so they can really get a sense of what the performance and cost is going to look like. So 2,000 apps though, so how do you prioritize that? I mean, how do you decide or how do you help them decide what's going to go first? Right, so that takes some great consulting work for sure on the initial part, but the other thing is that the tools are getting better so that there's the analysis of figuring out what's going to work and what's not can take a lot less time. Yeah, I was going to just add on to that. We have a thing called discovery and analysis where you can go into that existing environment, get a lay of the land and you get all the dependencies of all those applications are tied together and then you can prioritize and group them as to how you move them. And again, she's right. It's not a matter of the old days of migration where you just move and you hope it works. You can now test it out before you turn off your current site before you actually move into the cloud. Yeah, bring up a great point. How much of what you're doing is software? How much of what you're doing is services today? Most of our stuff is software. The only reason we do services is if they're, do not have enough personnel to be able to operate the tool. The other thing is a lot of people are new to cloud. So we often do a lot of that education, whether it's vCloud Air from VMware, Softlayer, CenturyLink. We teach them what the best practices are for the cloud. So we augmented, but we're a software company. Yeah, Michelle? I would definitely agree. I mean, for us, obviously we're only a software company. We do some services analysis on the front end to help customers and figure out which applications are going to be their top priority. Okay, I'm curious. Coming to a show like this, you know, the developer angle sometimes is, well, we've got a lot of operators here. We really have a lot of administrators. Even when I talk about cloud, it's usually not kind of their number one or two skill set. Where are we with really the adoption of solutions like yours? How much education are you having to do? Pat Gelsinger talked about kind of this five year journey that we're going to see the next five years to public cloud. What's the state of the customer base? It depends on the company for sure. I think at this particular show, we see a lot of companies that are really trying to figure out what do I have today and then how do I figure out this cloud thing going forward? I think they've made a lot of progress around private clouds. So the virtualization piece of it is well understood, but the introduction of things like containers and again, moving applications to public cloud is a lot more challenging. I think we've come a long way. I mean, four years ago, we were at a retailer and I talked to an IT architect. He said, we're scared of the cloud. We don't want to lose our jobs, you know? And there were server huggers. And I think we've come a long way where people are realizing it's not about rack and stack. It's about how do I help my application developers? How do I get them to speed up their cycle so we can get a competitive edge in our business? So I think the adoption cycle is underway. We see large, even conservative clients. We have a big financial services company that we're going to be announcing soon. Very conservative, moving all of test dev to the cloud. All of it, so. So, I wonder if you can comment. There's three things that are usually kind of holding us back in some of this movement. There's the networking, just Amazon, Polsomston, security of course, major concern. And other operations, speak to, how's the maturity of those things? How does that impact what you're doing? Right, I mean, I think security used to come up and I'm sure you've experienced this. You know, four years ago, that was the reason no one wanted to go to the cloud. I think several things have happened. A lot of the cloud providers have improved security. It's new technology, it's new equipment. The thing is, data centers have old equipment, older software, that means there's security holes. That's more insecure than some of the clouds. As far as management, I think when VMware talks about hybrid, you can extend vCenter and do a lot of those things. I think the management kind of goes away. So I think a lot of those issues are being dealt with, management, security, and the risk that there is. Yeah, so just a quick follow-up on security. Sure, a few years ago, it was, oh, I'm not sure if the public cloud is secure. I do think we're past that. Do I have to have a security policy and ways of doing security that can actually live with my application wherever it is? We had a good chat conversation with Steve Herad, who's now a VC, former CTO of VMware. And that's where he's been spending a lot of it investing. So it's not just, oh, I'm going to trust Amazon or I'm going to do my own thing. I need to have something that can live anywhere. You really absolutely need to have something that lives anywhere. And you have to have security policies. Again, we're going back to this financial services company. The level of security that they live with, day in and day out, is amazing. But they've been able to translate those policies to the cloud, to particularly software. So I think it's important that you manage that. Of course you have technologies, we encrypt, we do data at rest, all of those things, the channel, the network has to be encrypted. You also mentioned network, that's a huge issue. So I think one of the things that we bring to the tables, we can help you more efficiently manage that network because you never have enough network bandwidth available to you. I think that's going to be important. I think on the networking topic to just build on that, I mean that's one of the exciting parts of the keynote announcement was this ability to transition the network to the cloud because that solves a huge percentage of that hybrid problem. I think organizations are going to take a while before they figure out how to tile those pieces together. What we see a lot of in our business is the concern about shadow IT and that because the cloud has made it so easy to spin up instances that IT starts to lose control over what workloads are being run in the cloud. And so there's a real opportunity for IT to really get back in the game there and take control over it. So she touched on a point a little bit ago that I think is, it's a pretty big consideration some people currently in the pipeline, they don't want to hear about cloud and they're worried about it because it's like, that's my job. I mean, how do you each deal with that? Because that is not a small consideration, big factor because you're dealing with people who have to make decisions that they find to be threatening to a certain degree. And that's absolutely what we dealt with in 2012 and 13. I think the market's obviously helped in doing the education is that there's going to be no options. People aren't going to spend millions of dollars on building data centers and all of that equipment. What we've been able to do to help that is working with the operators and training on the cloud. So you can translate those skills you currently have in your data center to the cloud so you're as valuable. Also to show them, making sure that your applications work and that you're really providing services to your users that's going to be much more critical than building more data centers and knowing how to operate a server. That's going to be a critical skill set in living into the future. What we've done from a technology standpoint to simplify that process is we've integrated everything into vCenter from a management standpoint. So they're using the tools they already know. It's literally a matter of right clicking on your VM and saying running cloud. So they don't need to learn the Amazon interface in order to make that happen. And before we let you all go, your takeaway from this week and what you want your lead behind to be as well about Rackware and Enneville Astrada. So what have you seen here big picture wise that you're going to take back and then what do you want people to know about your respective organizations? I mean, what I'm taking away is I think, you know, talking hybrid, it's now when VMware says it, it's market validation. You know, it's, you know, the biggest player, you know, is saying it, the partnership with IBM that they announced they're saying the same thing. So we feel validation walking away from this and we also want enterprise clients to know there's solutions out there to say, you can believe in hybrid, you can go anywhere, you're not locked into your data center, you're not locked into Amazon and you're not locked into VMware either. You know, you can go anywhere and that's really important. That's our, I guess our leap behind. Yeah, I would absolutely agree. I think compared to VMware last year, VMware world last year, we've seen a pretty significant leap in adoption for public cloud and that's obviously encouraging. We believe that a number of the reasons and the challenges that companies have faced around risk, around data gravity have, you know, there's tools and technologies now that can help overcome those. So that's really exciting to see in terms of, you know, what we'll do with this information going forward. You know, we were really excited for this year. You know, we're seeing a tremendous jump in our business. We're seeing, you know, increasing cloud adoption, you know, it's exciting. All right, well, thank you both for taking the time to be with us. Hope it's been a good week for you. It sounds like it's been very productive on a number of fronts and wish you continued success down the road. Thanks. Thank you for having us. Yeah, absolutely. You bet, it's been a pleasure. The Cube and our coverage of VMware will continue us here from Las Vegas in just a bit.