 Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are in our Palo Alto studio for a CUBE conversation talking about containers and kind of the next gen of containers and enterprise containers and cloud native. And we're excited to introduce a new startup actually, App Lariat, and we're excited to be joined by the co-founder and CTO, Wayne Watson. Wayne, great to see you. Thanks for having me, Jeff. So starting a new company, you've been planned in this enterprise application space and integration and all kinds of nasty stuff for years and years and years. Saw an opportunity. Give us a little bit of the story of it. Why did App Lariat come about? So actually myself and my two co-founders, we've worked together in the past in another startup that got acquired by VMware in 2010. And at that point, we're heavily focused on the management space, but in metric management and operations and everything. And my role as part of that company was really to go out and help our customers succeed with our software. And so I ran all of our professional services. I worked with every customer as we came into VMware. I basically took over doing global deployments of the management software for VMware. So I met with hundreds, if not thousands of customers over the last several years. And one thing I think kept on resonating. One is a lot of enterprise software out there is very difficult to deploy, right? It's very difficult to get up and running and it takes a lot to make it successful. So one of the areas that I really wanted to focus on as we started up this new company was how can we start delivering software that's really gonna work for a customer and solving real customer problems in what they're doing. So with that, we started talking about what are the real kind of problems that customers are facing today and what is it taking for them to be able to compete, right? And a lot of effort had been put in over the years and certainly virtualization technologies have helped with a lot of it, which is how do you run your apps better, right? How can you be more successful, whether they're existing apps or new apps or just in general, how do you really become successful with running apps? And so VMware offered a set of technologies that started to help in that, but it was still very infrastructure-based, right? And then containers started coming and emerging and the container orchestrators like Kubernetes and Docker Swarm started to show that there's ways to rise a little bit higher in that and really start managing the applications, right? So instead of treating each VM as an entity where you had to control HA and high availability and fault tolerance and all that kind of stuff at the VMware layer with containers, you could really start doing that at the component layer, right? So now I could treat my Tomcat services as HA and run them across and scale them up, scale them down much quicker, make them much more flexible. So really the genesis of the solution started kind of from those premises, right? How can we help customers really go out and manage the apps that they have today, new apps that they want to develop into a common platform and make it effective for them to use? Right, because you see kind of where the rubber hits the road, right? The sales done, everybody's ready to deploy, then you and your team show up and we actually have to make it work. So how have the challenge landscape changed from kind of the classic, kind of old school enterprise IT apps, which are still there? We had some terrible stories that we won't repeat off air before we went live. To kind of now, and even more importantly, how's the expectation and the expected behavior of these things and the expected ease of use been impacted by things like our mobile phones and kind of the way a lot of IT seems to work out of the box? Again, you actually go for the, for actually implementation, what are some of those really crazy challenges that are still there? Well, I think actually one of the common things that you see today is that the driver has been, how can I get started with this application really quickly, right? How can I get it spun up and developers have certainly latched on to that, right? It's like, oh, look, I can spin up this app in four minutes and I'm working with it and I'm ready to go, right? And then it's like, okay, well, now let's hand that to IT and say we've built this new app, now go run it in production, right? And by the way, we're gonna support thousands of customers and millions of transactions and they aren't equal, right? You can't basically just take that same little script that started it up and assume that you're enterprise ready to run, right? It's not taking into account security and compliance and all of the other issues that go along with it, right? The networking controls, load balancing, all of those other pieces that have to go with it, right? And with a solution like App Lariat, we actually are helping to abstract a lot of that away so that you can bring a lot of these capabilities and make it much more simple like it is to get things started up the first time but taking the best practice expertise for actually running this as an enterprise-grade application. Okay, and so what is your guy's secret sauce then without giving us the secret sauce? Were you some opportunity to apply some technology and process to take advantage of this? So I think our secret sauce lies really in two areas. One, we're very much focused on leveraging the best-to-breed solutions that are out there, so taking advantage of the orchestrators that are on the market like Kubernetes, right? It is a great tool that has a lot of capabilities that come with it. It's just, again, it's not easy to become an expert at it and it's not easy to make it ready for running your enterprise on top of, right? Whether that's for lots of dev test loads or if it's running production staging or anything else, there's a lot that goes into actually getting Kubernetes stood up correctly and so that it will be effective for you, right? And then on top of that, you have to get your app ready to run on it, right? So not only do you have to bring up the infrastructure layer which is this orchestrator being Kubernetes in this case, but now I have to get my app ready on top of it and if you go into an organization that is new to the world of containers, there's a lot of learning that goes into that, right? How do I build my containers? How do I get them built and stored into a repository? How do I then pull them down and then execute with them? So the first layer that I think is really part of our secret sauce is that we hide a lot of that away, right? You can basically give us your existing code artifact, we will automatically build it into a container for you and then we'll run it on top of that orchestrator. And then the second piece comes into the policy layer, right? Which is basically for all the day two operations and beyond which helps you then run it on a long going basis, right? That includes the ability to scale it, the ability to tear it down when it needs to be torn down, right? So if I'm running a workload that is for, let's say dev test, I don't want someone, a developer to go out there and deploy it for, where he only uses it for two hours but then forgets about it and it stays there for three weeks, right? We can control those things with policy. Also, scaling up and managing the cluster and then doing things like upgrades, right? And being able to help in controlling that overall operation. So we've really focused on building an end-in solution that starts at the beginning of and being able to fit within a customer's existing software lifecycle process and then taking that all the way through to the end of that operation. So you've mentioned Kubernetes a couple of times and obviously Docker is also an open source project. I'm curious as a CTO, as you look at kind of operating in kind of this hybrid of open source and being a participant in the open source community, which you have to be if you're going to be involved, right? You've got to contribute versus the parts that you need to keep as your own proprietary IP in your startup, right? You don't have obviously the VMware resources so you don't have infinite engineering resources. So as you're kind of planning your allocation of resources and how you attack the problem and how you're going to grow your portfolio, right? How do you kind of sort through and prioritize kind of the open source and contributing back versus the proprietary IP stuff that we need to do? Yeah, so like I said, I think to us, what we want to be an expert at is how do we bring best practice into the customers and really help them better manage their environments. But there's also, like you said, an important side of how do you help contribute back into the projects like Kubernetes and that kind of stuff. From our perspective, where we really want to focus is in the app space, right? What we're really looking at is how do we deliver to our customers an app cloud, right? Not just a container cloud or a container orchestration engine, right? We want to give them an app cloud. And so things like that we focus in on contributing back to our improving network management and storage management pieces, right? Because those are things that are still kind of some of the tough problems that need to get solved in this whole new paradigm that we're looking at. Also in the end-end operations of some of the common open source tools that are out there, right? So how can we bring best practice to how you would run a Mongo database or a MySQL database? And working with the other people that are also focused on that, that all belongs in the open source space, right? Because anybody should be able to leverage that. What we're going to help them do is how to run it better, right? And then that's the other thing, right? With the API-based economy and all these different solutions and all these kind of crazy hybrid infrastructure systems that people are running, it's really not even for a particular customer. It's really application-specific and maybe not even application-specific, but like lifetime application-specific. Where is the, yeah, but it's lifetime competitive deployment or test dev or global issues with data sovereignty and these types of things. So it's a pretty complicated world in which you're entering and you got to interplay with all these different pieces. Absolutely, yeah. There's a lot of moving parts, right? And it's in the other, I think, key thing that we're focused on is really trying to stay agnostic to those underlying solutions, right? Because we have no idea. Kubernetes is rapidly changing. So is Docker Swarm, so is Mesos or some of these other platforms. And at any one time, even a new player may emerge that says, hey, we've got this and we're doing it better than anybody else. And again, our goal is to deliver the best possible way to manage your apps on top of whatever it is, right? And so we want to stay agnostic to those pieces so that we can shift and change as we need to, but still by making sure that we're delivering the best possible solution for our customers. So I want to shift gears a little bit. Sure. You guys are from Orange County. Yeah. Just a little bit of a flavor kind of what's the Southern California texting, I'm sure you're hiring. All great startups are always looking for talent. Give a little pitch about what's happening in Orange County from kind of a software enterprise tech development scene. So actually I think there's a lot of excitement in Orange County. There's a lot of tech companies that are up and coming. There's a lot of existing tech companies that are out there. I'm pretty excited. We're talking to a lot of them in that area. We're finding a lot of good opportunities for potential customers for our solutions. One that especially wanted to adapt and really charge forward with this new cloud native approach. Okay. And then just in terms of where you guys are as a company, I know you've been in stealth mode for a while. Yeah. Are you shipping product? Do you have some beta customers? Kind of where are you kind of in the life cycle? Yeah. So right now we're working with a handful of customers to kind of beta and get some real world examples. Again, being a customer problem focused company, really trying to solve those problems that our customers have, the best way to do that is actually get out there and work with customers. So we're working with a number of companies from some smaller startups that we've found that have some problems to some bigger mid-sized companies and starting to talk to some enterprises as well that all suffer from these kinds of problems. How can we start to move pieces into this cloud native type of environment? How can we better manage our apps? How can we deliver our solutions quicker to the marketplace? And so the big launch that we're looking forward is at DockerCon, and so we're making sure that we get everything ready to go, get our customers ready for that launch. All right. Well, Wayne, I think I was going to ask you what gets you up in the morning, but I think you just answered the question. Solving customer problems. That is what gets me up in the morning. Yeah, that is what gets me up in the morning. I don't know if there's that many CTOs that come from kind of a customer deployment point of view. Usually you think of them as more the guys that are not mahogany row, but whatever the engineering row equivalent would be as opposed to out getting their hands dirty. Yeah, that's true. And I think I am a little bit different in that sense because I haven't come out of the pure bread development background and all that kind of stuff. I've really come out of architecting solutions that work and trying to take lots of pieces of software, figure out what does work about it, what doesn't, and then adapting that into the customer process. But I would think that it gives me a unique perspective when it comes to really trying to build out a new product because from my point of view, I have to think about not only how does it impact the technology, but how is it gonna impact the customer from a process and a people perspective, right? And if you forget about those other two pieces, if you just build technology and think that the customers will adapt to it, you're gonna probably end up failing, right? Because no matter what, it's going to impact their process somewhat or it's going to impact the people, they have to adapt to this new solution and you need to be prepared on how are you going to meet that? Wayne, I love that. I mean, who else do you want as a vendor partner than somebody who just says it just has to work? You know, it's just all about making it work. So congratulations and we look forward to watching the story unfold. Great, thank you very much. All right, he's Wayne Watson, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE Conversations from the Palo Alto Studios. Thanks for watching.