 Live from Seattle, Washington. It's theCUBE, covering DockerCon 2016. Brought to you by Docker. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Brian Gracely. Okay, welcome back, everyone. We are here live in Seattle, Washington for DockerCon 2016. It's a SiliconANGLE media flagship program. We go out to the events and inspect the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Brian Gracely. Our next guest is the CEO of Docker, Ben Golov. And I'm a CUBE alumni. Many times, welcome back. Thank you for having us this year again at DockerCon. Oh, my pleasure. It's great to have you here. More space this year. 4,000 plus people. Bigger convention, Moscone West next year. You went from the hotel to here. Yeah, so we outgrew the hotel and Moscone's clothes. So, you know, it's either here or Vegas and I spent too much time in the Sands Convention Center as it is. It's a nice place. Good place, great venue. Really impressive, the crowd size. Just go back three years ago. First DockerCon, 500 people. It was two years ago, actually. Two years ago it was 500 people. Last year it was 2,000, now 4,100. And you know, one, two KPIs, key performance indicators to me, I'll share with you, it was kind of a CUBE person goes all the events. One, the kind of attendance and booth profile. IBM, Docker, Cisco, Google, and then two, how many VCs I see in the hallways. Oh, okay. So that means you have commercialization at a tier one level in business. And then two, you have VCs and a lot of entrepreneurship. And that really kind of encapsulates the dynamic that you guys have right now, which is really impressive. And for the folks watching is that having that magic of entrepreneurial activity combined with the explosive commercialization on the business front, it's really lightning in a bottle. So I got to ask you, as someone who's the chief of the business, for Docker Inc, you have the Docker ecosystem, how do you balance that? Because that is really a tricky balancing act. Keep that fostering innovation and commercialization. Yeah, I mean, it is very tricky, right? And, you know, probably worth mentioning just some statistics since you mentioned the VCs. We understand there have now been over a hundred startups funded in the Docker ecosystem. And if you search on GitHub, you'll find 95,000 projects with Docker in the title. So clearly there's a lot of innovation that's happening in the small company level, a ton of innovation and partnership and co-op petition happening with the larger guys. You know, at some level, I think we just try and stay true to our roots and we say, listen, if we build amazing products that serve the needs of developers and serve the needs of operators, then we can democratize the use of containers and now democratize the use of orchestration and adopting the enterprise. A lot of great business will come our way and in the process, I think if we have a good platform, hopefully the ecosystem makes $10 for every dollar we've done and that's great. But you guys are taking the VMware Play, but we had Mariana Tressel on earlier. She shaped that program and it really needed help. She took it in the right direction. But the interesting thing about Docker is that VMware had a complete change over in the ecosystem at that time, which is why they had some challenges on how they managed and they found their groove swings. Docker doesn't have that problem. You have a huge winning formula on the DevOps now going mainstream, application developers using Docker. But now the challenge shifts over to IT operations, which is now becoming DevOpsized or becoming more ops dev. And so that's kind of like blocking and tackling enterprise stuff, compliance, security, identity. I mean, a lot of in between the toes details of stuff. Right, right, right. And so a lot of that we're trying to deal with, right? So we're trying to make Docker easy to deploy, but also easy to procure, easy to train, do a good job at change management, do a good job at understanding the fact that enterprises have a lot of different developers and a lot of different roles to play and a lot of different compliance issues. So some of the holes we fill ourselves, some of them get filled by our ecosystem. We have deep partnerships with systems integrators like Booz Allen and Accenture. We have deep partnerships with systems vendors like HP, deep partnership with Microsoft, relationships with all the cloud vendors, and of course a wide variety of different people doing everything from security to networking. Are you happy with the global SIs, global system integrators right now? You mentioned a few of them. Obviously, you know, you got Deloitte, Accenture, Capgem and IPWC, they all go on and on. They're looking to really differentiate right now. And how do you view your relationship with them? Well, I think our interests are pretty well aligned, right? I mean, Docker enables organizations to transform themselves, but we do it in a pretty incremental way, right? You can start with a single data center, you can start with a single app, you can start with a single organization, but you know, if you're a global SI, you want to help people transform their business operations. You also want to help them move from one technology set to another technology set. And so as a result, it makes sense, right? They can get professional services revenue, we can sell Docker, and together it's a wonderful thing. Yeah, you know, last year, I remember you were talking in the keynote, you said, you know, I'm here because I wanted to be part of something that's going to make a huge impact on the world. This year, you're talking about democratizing a bunch of things, right? Like you guys do tons of meetups. I mean, you're all over the place that you joked around, you want to be in Siberia and Greenland. And Greenland, yeah, yeah. I didn't say I want to be. If you want to set up a meetup group, that's fine. How much do you get feedback from developers that say, you know, I feel more empowered, I feel more free to do things. I mean, like, what's the temperature of developers these days? I mean, it's amazing. This really has been a transformation for developers. I mean, if you think about it, you know, a few years ago, developers spent the bulk of their time not writing amazing code, not experimenting. Instead, they were worrying about dependency issues and, you know, why is it working on my laptop but not working in production? Or how am I going to get it to work in production? Or how am I going to scale? Or how do I deal with all these issues of distribution and production? And, you know, now they've been liberated. And not only been liberated in terms of what they write, but also been really empowered in the sense that they can be a lot more collaborative. And the way you tend to build an application with Docker is you sort of assemble it like you're building something out of Legos, right? So I can borrow a great fundamental building block that is built by my colleague in one area, another by getting off the shelf. And so as a result, we're hearing tons and tons of innovation. You know, I spoke this morning about the fact that this DockerCon was kind of different. Not only do we have people talking about things like doing protein folding to solve Parkinson's using Docker, but it's 13 year olds and 10 year olds who are doing it. It's absolutely amazing. And the cloud gives it that canvas, that tower base, the compute. So I got to ask you the business model question, being the chief executive officer. You got to look at the 20 mile steer. You got to look at the current execution that you got to figure out again, 3D chess, whatever metaphor you want to use. At some point, I'm sure, pretend I'm Jerry Chen. Ben, when do we do a business model? It's really good, man. I need some more heads. I'll be Jerry Chen. Ben, we need a business model. So I know this pressure, so I'm not going to say is there pressure? Of course there's pressure. The timing's critical, I mean, you know, and there's certain growth aspects of your company. When do you guys really start getting down and dirty in the business model, or have you, or is it? Oh, we have, we have. I mean, so last year we were selling commercial support. In February, we launched Docker Data Center, which is our commercial management plane, which basically enables organizations who have lots of developers, creating lots of apps and lots of containers on lots of servers to manage that whole supply chain. And that's structured as a subscription that grows based on. A SaaS. Yeah. No, it's actually not SaaS. We have SaaS, but we also have behind the firewall. So if you're running Docker on hundreds of servers behind your firewall, or on hundreds of servers in the cloud, or some mix, we really don't care. We make the same amount of money regardless. But what we are seeing is that, we've now got over 150 customers for that. We've got 10,000 show customers for our cloud business. And the people that we sold two quarters ago have gone from having 40, 50 nodes to 100, in some cases a thousand. So we've gotten customers going from five figure annual deals to six figure annual deals and channels starting to push us. So the business model is there. It's growing. We still spend more money every month than we bring in. But the curves are- Well, you're funding for growth. But the curves are going in the right direction, right? So revenue's growing a lot faster than expenses. And we think we can cross, have those lines crossed well before we need to raise money again. So you think you'd be cashflow positive before the need to do a financing. So your fume data, as they say in VC land, is way out there. You're going to cross over. Okay, and any other on the horizon, business model opportunities. And this is a nice baseline, okay, great. Because you don't want to be mindful of being too dogmatic on the revenue model. Certainly, you got to get the cashflow positive. There's always another round of funding, technically, if you guys needed it. I'm sure they're not going to leave you hanging out there. But as the market changes, do you worry about the shifting sands of the competitive lands or the partner landscape or just the industry landscape? Well, I mean, look, I mean, I think it always pays to be paranoid at some level. And I try to find some healthy balance between something in between like Andy Grove and Howard Hughes in terms of my level of paranoia. But look, I think that we've set ourselves up with a fundamentally valuable service that will do well whether customers move to the cloud, whether they stay on-premise, whether they're hybrid. We will do well whether they migrate quickly from more legacy apps to next generation apps, whether they stay with legacy apps. We'll do well with big data. We will do well with the move to prices. First of all, we're big fans. So you know, we love you guys. And we think you'll do well no matter what. It's a question of how big. And the only thing I can use as a proxy when we were talking about this one before camera this morning was Microsoft bought LinkedIn for $26 billion. That's a Rolodex. I guess it's a job board. You can argue that data's there. I think it is. But $26 billion, Docker's got to be at least worth. I mean, if LinkedIn's worth $26 billion, if LinkedIn's worth $26 billion, you got to, I mean, with all the success you have, you might not have all the subscribers of consumer business, but you got 95,000 projects, probably a zillion machine learning engineers at four million a pop, average street value right now. You got to go. No, no, no, I mean, look, I think it's huge. I think we're touching almost every aspect of IT and really our catalysts of the most critical transformations. I constantly remind people at Docker that, look, we are a $0 billion company right now. We'll be double that size next year, right? Well, you guys are a billion value right now. I think that's great. Well, you're talking valuation, yeah. But if you're talking revenue, it's a $0 billion revenue business. Nice, but we haven't hit that mark yet. And honestly, I think that we need to prove our value every day, we need to build a solid business revenue, and well, I will admit that I did notice that $26 billion acquisition. Honestly, I think if you're going to build a great business, you don't focus on the exit, you don't run for the exit, right? You build a great business. Well, they had revenue, to be fair to LinkedIn, I'm just all joking aside, I love LinkedIn. The data was the value, so I got to ask y'all, see revenue you brought up is a good point. You got to get them revenue, put some numbers on the board. Probably be some other opportunities to look at emerging business models as they surface themselves to you guys, as you guys continue your progression. But is there a KPI that you look to internally, strategically, that is core to Ben Gallup and the team where you're saying, this is a core kernel of a KPI? Is it the number of projects? Is it the growth and the ecosystem? Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of things we, we probably dragged too many metrics, but we certainly have metrics that, sorry, you said, take three. Top three, what is top three? So for me, I think it's the number of developers who are using Docker. I think it is the number of nodes under management, because that drives workloads, and what would the third one be? Revenue. Revenue. Oh, they got to work on that one. Oh, I forgot about that one. If Jerry were here, I would have said revenue right off the bat, but. No, but honestly, I think revenue is a, to some extent a trailing indicator. The more developers we have, the more enterprise we get into, the more workloads they create, the number of workloads that are under management, the number of engines that are under management, drive description business. Well, you have a critical mass business. I mean, my analysis would be, if you go too early to try to force the business model, you got to have it out there and nurture it and develop it, but if you go too far into it, you really could blow the strategic aspect of the flywheel and the critical mass that you guys are getting right now. Absolutely. And so, what has been really exciting for us and wonderful is that the Docker tends to come into the organization, obviously, through open source. People adopt it. It's very low friction for them, very low friction for us. And what we see is people start building Docker, they get successful, and as you go from one developer to many developers, as it's from developer to operations, you go from one application to many applications, at some point there's a need to be able to manage it and that's when we come in and generally speaking, we get called rather than us having to do profit. Brian, you want to get a question in? Yeah, sure. Yeah, so it was interesting. So last week there were a whole bunch of surveys that the various companies did and a lot of crazy, I mean, you guys are tons of crazy numbers, billions of downloads, but there was a bunch that were like 75% of our applications run on Docker in production and you would see people go, who are these people? Who are these people? And what I'm trying to figure out is, you just gave us some rough customer numbers and we won't take those for it, but who is the Docker buyer? Who is the Docker Lighthouse? Like, who is it that some people know them intimately like you do and some people go, I don't even know the things, like how, what does that look like? I mean, it's somewhat hard to characterize it because we have everything from two person startups all the way up to the largest financial institution, US government, the GSA uses Docker, you're going to hear people talking tomorrow. Goldman Sachs has come out publicly and said they have a goal to move 25% of their applications over to Docker this year and 90% ultimately. You have major manufacturers using Docker, you have major retailers using Docker, and of course, the large web companies using Docker and so look, I don't know whether the percentage of enterprises using Docker is 20% or 70% or something in between, but what I do know is this is no longer an early adopter technology. This has moved into the early mainstream and that's both a wonderful thing and it's also a scary thing for us. I mean, if nothing else, it says the people responding are passionate enough that they're trying to push a whole lot of what they're doing in that direction. It's driving what they do. It's been really gratifying for us. For example, I think like a year and a half ago, people would have said, oh, I'm interested in Docker, but if I use it, I'll use it despite my concerns about security. Now they're saying I'm adopting Docker because it will help me address my security concerns and it's fundamentally more secure. It's not if Docker, it's how and when. It's not only how, but Docker will actually make them more secure. The fact that you can deploy something quickly, know what you're deploying and fix it if something's wrong, that makes you actually much more secure as an organization, not more vulnerable. Yeah, it's been phenomenal growth. I think the DevOps has won. DevOps has won in the enterprise. That's gone mainstream. Certainly hearing HP talk about it. The issue is how the operations 2.0 is going to happen in IT. And that's certainly changing radically. And that's interesting. That brings up the question on the business model again. And I asked Mariana about this when she was, and she brought up a great answer. She said, the key for us is integration points. Really being clear about what we want Docker to have as integration points and what's clearly established to the ecosystem to what they do. In other words, clear line of sight, swim lanes, whatever metaphor. What are those in your mind? Because those are evolving in real time. Have you guys sat in a room and said, these are our key integration points. That's going to drive our competitive advantage. Yeah. Yeah, I mean. What to stay away from, basically, if you're a partner. Sure. Look, I think that what has become very clear to us is that obviously it's important for us to be part of development. And in the new world order, right, what gets developed, gets instantiated as a container or a group of containers. And that has on it the information that let you deploy it into operation. So that's a very clear integration point for us that's important. But it's also important for us to be there in traditional operations, right? Almost every large customer has a mix of traditional and hybrid and traditional and next generation apps and traditional and next generation infrastructure and cloud, right? So that for us having a deal with an HP for example, HPE for example, where every server that ships is by default going to have Docker's commercial engine embedded in Docker commercial support available with a click of a button, that's hugely important for us. That's a revenue deal for you too, right? It's an absolute, it's a revenue deal for us both with the initial adoption as well as any incremental upsells. And we're partnering with HP and their channel not only on commercial engine but also on Docker's data center management product which is nice. We also have integration points with the major cloud providers, as you can imagine. We want people to be able to push a button and deploy Docker in a cloud, deploy it on-prem and actually in both places. We also are finding interestingly enough that there's sort of key integration points that enable us to work well with people's existing converged infrastructure, hyper-converged infrastructure, networking infrastructure. And so as people are migrating we are going to be part of it. Ben, great to have you on theCUBE and thanks for your support. Any more questions? No, I think it's fantastic. Congratulations on all growth and excited to be here again. What's going to be for day two tomorrow? What are we going to hear? So I think day one was all about democratizing the use of containers, democratizing the use of orchestration. Day two is really all about the enterprise and how do you democratize, if you will, the adoption of Docker in a complex enterprise with all of the concerns that the enterprises have. And it's always about democratization. Can we just say it's been democratized? Can we use that? Do you think it's democratized? You may have noticed that even well-established democracies occasionally have. We need some democracy in our area. Warriors lost. Trump might be in president of the United States. What the hell's going on? Ben, stop embarrassing me, man. No, no, so yeah, no. We believe in democracy. We believe in evolution. We also believe in intelligent design at least in terms of our products. Yeah, intelligent, open source and transparent too. Final question, just give us some numbers. Headcount, stats on the company, fee areas you're hiring in. Yeah, we're up to 250 people, which feels big to us. In one building in San Francisco now, right? No, total in the company. About 170 of them are in San Francisco. At the first DockerCon, we were 38 people. So we're growing fast, but there are 3,000 people who work on Docker. Most of them, of course, are outside the company. Great, and revenues? Growing. Almost. Greater than zero, less than a billion. Greater than zero, less than a billion. That's right. Well, you got the HP deal, I think it's very impressive. That's going to be good. I think you're going to start to, I think you're going to start to see more. Yeah, and you're going to hear about a lot of the impressive commercial customers tomorrow, so that's very impressive. Well, congratulations on all your success. Thanks for having us. Hey, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Live here at DockerCon, this is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, Brian Graceley. You're watching theCUBE, we'll be right back.