 Ground in San Francisco here at the Engineering's office. I'm here with their CEO Gus Robertson. Gus, great to see you. Great to be in the office. You guys are kicking some butt here doing some great work. We saw each other at DockerCon. Congratulations. What's going on with the company? Tell us the update. We're growing really quickly. You know we've now got a 60 staff globally. When I think back to when I joined the company two and a half years ago, we're only 10 people. Now 60 in three different countries. This office that you're in today didn't even exist until about four or five months ago. So just dealing with the growth of the company and the growth of our technology. IngenX now powers over 140 million websites globally. Almost 50% of the 10,000 busiest websites in the world are running IngenX. So technology is growing rapidly and the company is growing strongly as well. Your rise to success really has been driven by the fact that the major trend towards cloud and DevOps has been powering analytics, mobile, at web scale. And obviously in Silicon Valley we've got everyone here, Facebook, Yahoo, all the key pioneers. What's happened with the company relative to the technology innovation? Because we're seeing that the DevOps is now going mainstream. Dockercon proved that at a developer level. But yet the mainstream market is seeing things like Oracle, Amazon, really putting up some big numbers. Business models are changing. So there's a real race to operationalize DevOps. Is that powering the growth or what is really powering your growth? I think it's a number of things. Definitely there's the business drivers around the fact that speed to market, competitive advantage is key. If I think back in the industry four or five years ago, CIOs were focused on reducing cost. Now the business, the lines of business are demanding new applications, new ways of communicating with their customers. The digital world, the digital experience is relevant to every business now. And bringing those apps to life requires new technology. You can't do it with old tools, monolithic apps. People are moving to new distributed web application architectures. They're requiring developers to be creative in the way they bring these apps to market. And tools like Nginx are fundamental to how they're delivering these applications today. You guys are really, in my mind, the microservices coming. You guys are powering a lot of the glue that puts things together. We're living in a Lego block kind of world, as people say. But what Dockercon and what's proven with the developer communities out there now is that people got to move faster, open source is a big part of the formula. What is this all about? How do you explain microservices? How do you explain the glue to put things together? I mean, developers are under a lot of pressure to go faster. What's some of the concepts you can explain to folks out there what this all means? Sure, absolutely. When I joined the company, one of the first things I did was go and meet with all the core users of Nginx. And really, the early adopters and innovators that adopted Nginx technology were the large scale web companies. So the Facebook, Netflix, Hulu, Pinterest, Living Social, Yammer, Eventbrite, all these large scale web companies. And to deliver those type of applications across the web really required a new architecture. And they were the leaders that created microservices architecture before anybody in the industry was talking about microservices. We would visit them and they'd talk to us about how they're using Nginx and how they were breaking their application into individual components. The catalog would be here, billing would be a different part of the system. And companies like Amazon who had built their retail web application had 170 plus different microservices that all came together when you typed in Nike shoe to give you that page that gave you the product, the pricing, the images, recommendations, reviews, you know, and Nginx was the glue that was bringing all that together. So that's the role that Nginx played in those companies. And we didn't really drive that those companies to find that on their own. What we're finding now is that enterprises are needing to adopt that same architecture. And what we've been able to do with our commercial product is really give them those same tool sets, but in off the shelf software that really improves their speed to market and the delivery of their applications. You know, I always talk with Jerry Chen at Greylock and Pete Sunstein was on your board. And you know, the hottest trends right now is software driven innovation or developer led developer driven innovation, these kinds of things are happening. What does this mean? I mean, and and share with the folks out there what it means. But also what is the core problem that you guys solve for people? Well, let's start with the first part of the question is that what it means is that developers wanting to if you want to be able to deliver a great application, you can't constrain your developers, you've got to give them the tools that they want to use to be able to develop and deliver that application. So what you're seeing in these microservice architectures is that developers are building individual components in different languages with different infrastructure with different scale and security requirements. And you need to be able to give those creative tools to those developers to let them do their job. The role that engine x plays in that is bringing those components together with a glue that allows you connect a Ruby app here or Java app here or PHP app with a glue that connects those things together. So when you're the front end user coming to the application, those things are hidden to you. All you see is typing in Nike shoe and getting all the information that you need. That's the role that engine x plays is bringing those components together while allowing enabling developers to have the freedom and creativity to do what they need to do behind the covers. And they're the ones now in control, right? I mean, if you look at, we've definitely seen this change of control of, you know, typically developers used to go into a company and they were told here are the tools that you use, right? Now we're seeing that developers bring their own tools with them and can create the app any way they want. And the microservices architecture gives them that capability. It's a lot like open source fashion in a way because what happens is that the communities also support the tool. So having a one tool fits all really is not the model. Absolutely. These monolithic app models in that scenario, it does work because everyone has to be using the same tool, the same component tree, because the application rolls out as a single binary. In this world of microservices, absolutely not, that doesn't, that doesn't work. And what's this core problem that you guys solve? You got to go into a CIO's office and say, hey, you know, I've heard about you guys. I'm moving to the cloud. I'm going with containers. I'm going to have orchestration, Kubernetes, all this stuff. And I got to, I got to ramp up my developer staff over the next five years. I need some guides. What do I do? Well, delivering an application into Microsoft's architecture is a lot more complex than the monolithic. You have to think of a lot of different components. So as the client comes into the application, how do you connect that client? Is it going to be an encrypted connection? What information are you going to cache closer to the front of the application to improve performance? How are you going to route that traffic within the application so that the end user experience gets access to the right data and information they should get access to? All of those decision points need to be made within tools like Nginx. Also, as you think about security, DDoS mitigation, all of those things are really becoming more and more important. So the delivery mechanism is becoming more complex and Nginx reduces that complexity and gives you a single tool across the application platform to deliver the app. So you guys make it easy for people to roll out with. We make it faster. We make it more reliable. Nginx is known as the fast, high-performance web delivery platform. That's how we know it. And we do that in a very reliable way with our support and our commercial products. You guys are making a name for yourself, certainly as kind of a microservice is the key player there. I got to ask about the culture of the company. Talk about the culture of the company. What's the culture about here? Well, there's a few things. I think obviously being open source, we're very open and transparent. So up here in the refrigerator, so I might have one on the right here before I go home. I'm only kidding. Seriously, with culture, talk about it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we've grown out of open source. And with that, I think comes that openness that we all have, transparency. We share the board decks. We share financial information with all employees. We're frugal on our costs. We don't have extravagant office. I think this is relatively nice, right? But we don't have big cafeteria and all the fancy things that some of the other San Francisco companies have. We're cross-culture because we have the team and engineering out of Moscow and all the sales and marketing operations here in San Francisco. So we work, you know, the cross-cultural dynamic. And I think that we have taken on a lot of the development culture around elegance. So our developers and engineers are super focused on bringing as much functionality into EngineX with the least amount of code, right? EngineX today is around 150,000 lines of code. And one of the things our customers constantly tell us is that your code and your product is one of the most elegant in the market. It's lightweight, it's high-performance and just don't screw it up by bloating it, right? And so... What does that mean for them? What does that code-based mean for the customers? Easy to deploy, easy to work with? It means it does what it's meant to do and it does it in a reliable and high-performance way, right? And so, you know, we were at a customer just yesterday and the customers couldn't, his eyes lit up when he starts talking about the code and the product and how well the product actually does what it's meant to do. And I think that really is more a reflection of other software, right? When it hasn't always done what it's supposed to do and it isn't as reliable and performant as EngineX is. So, we try and take that same cultural dynamic of the elegance of the code into the company as well. Well, software is really the key value of having good software is a competitive advantage. It's software everything. You know, we're seeing, you know, when I came into the industry, I came into Red Hat and we were really helping customers move from heavy proprietary hardware into commodity Intel boxes with Red Hat and Linux. We're now seeing that software defined networking. We're seeing software and EngineX is part of that movement and we're moving technology away from data centers and infrastructure and boxes in front of your applications more into the application architecture which is really where traffic and load balancing and caching and reverse proxy and all those capabilities really should be the HTTP. Talk about how many employees you guys have. What's the vision for the next couple years? Well, we've got 60 employees today. We'll probably be closer to 100 by the end of the year. I haven't done our full planning in terms of height headcount for the next few years, but we would imagine to be on the same trajectory that we're on now. And just overall product vision where you want to be in the market. What's what's the goals out there? So I think there's a real opportunity as we look at the ecosystem now of microservices. You mentioned Docker earlier. There's a lot more components to it. There's Docker obviously for the containers. There's tools like Puppet and Chef Enhance around automation, continuous integration and delivery with tools like Jenkins. If you look under the stack tools like Mesos and MongoDB, Nginx is part of that core ecosystem around delivering a microservice or distributed web application architecture. And today there's not one single vendor that owns that space. I think Nginx has a very strong role there to help customers deploy these microservices architecture and we obviously plan to continue to help customers deliver these applications in a simple and less complex way as we can with our product. So I think our role will continue to grow and we hope to help customers be the sort of connective tissue if you like between the microservice architecture and to work with the other vendors in the ecosystem. What about customers you work with? Names? Can you share some names? Big names? Little names? Just kind of across the board. I mean we've worked with customers all the way from SMB to Enterprise but we've got customers like GoGo, Discovery Education, Zendesk, MuleSoft. Customers that are in tech, in media, in finance, all across the board. So anyone that's to be... Who's your biggest customer? I can't tell you that, John. I appreciate you asking though. Airbnb? Netflix? Netflix is definitely a customer of ours, yes. Trying to get the data here. Okay, final word here. Just what's the outlook for the customer? We've got over 500 commercial customers since we launched our offering Nginx Plus a little under two years ago. And what's the outlook for the customer environment? What's your vision there real quick? Outlook in which regard? What's their landscape look like? What's their challenges that you've got that they're going up against? What are their key things? I think, as I mentioned before, I think it's really speed to market. How do you, you know, when you've got 80% of your budget going into just maintaining existing technology in your infrastructure and your applications, how do you bring innovation to your IT department and you constantly lines of business that are asking you for new products, new applications, new innovation. What we do is we help customers release, speed their delivery of their application, both speed to market and actually delivering it. And we do that in a very cost and cost effective way. So I think what we're seeing with customers is we're helping them move from these monolithic legacy, heavy weight architectures to lightweight, high performance, mobile, internet of things, you know, applications. Alright, Gus Robertson, CEO of Nginx here on the ground in San Francisco. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.