 Hi, I'm Stu Miniman joined by Brian Gracely and we're from Wikibon and this special presentation of theCUBE from 60 South Street in Boston for BMC Day. Happy to have on the program for the first time, Renato Bonamini, who is the manager of US operations with Moviri. Welcome to the program. Can you give our audience a little bit, you know, what's your background? You know, who's Moviri, a BMC partner? You know, why are you guys here today? So Moviri is indeed a BMC partner. We come as a spin-off out of an acquisition by BMC Software back in 2010. We used to be named Neptuni and as part of our offering, we had this capacity planning solution which kind of gained traction in the US market and one day BMC came at our door and said, you know guys, we really like your solution. Let's put it up and as part of that agreement, we spin off the software part of the company and we rebranded into Moviri. We used to be named Neptuni. All right, so Renato, can you give us a little bit of the landscape of that market? You know, I hear capacity optimization and I think most customers stink at planning. They're underutilizing everything they've got. You know, what's the picture out there and how are you guys helping? So capacity planning and performance optimization in general, which are really two sides of the same coin, they will always be around. Companies only want to save money. Who doesn't want to save money, right? So it's a wonderful exercise that can be done and it has to be done. Problem means that it takes very analytical skills. It takes a lot of effort. So what we have been trying to help companies and support companies in doing is in automating this, making less effort, making it more automated, get some of the knowledge of people that do capacity planning and get into a product. Most of the effort is spent in collecting data. Now, when companies had thousand servers for being large, you could handle them manually. Nowadays, we work with customers who have 150,000 servers. How can you manage that manually? You cannot, right? It's not just about collecting the data than once you have the data is using it to something. It's really like, for example, organizing your home, your pantry at home. So my wife, for example, when it's Sunday afternoon, she goes like, well, honey, what would you like to eat for the week? And I'm like, I don't know. I don't even know what I'm going to be on Thursday. How can I tell you what I'm going to eat on Thursday? And she says, well, you know what? I hate to throw away food. So if you tell me where you're going to be and what you would like to eat, I'll go to the grocery and I'll just buy what we need. So capacity planning essentially is very close to that. You want to make sure you have enough capacity at the right time and not too much. So it's something that if the economy's shrinking, you need it because you want to save money. If the economy's growing, you want it because you want to have enough capacity. So 20 years ago, companies were very much worried about having enough capacity. 10 years ago, people had too much capacity. How can we make sure that we can save money to our company? So even if things are going well or things are not going well, we support and have companies in making sure that have the right level of capacity. It's very analytical. So a lot of people right now say data scientists. So we were data scientists under literate. So I myself come from a digital senior processing background, high performance computing. I used to have a lot of fine aligning bites in the caches of top 500 supercomputers running simulations at night to find oil in the other ground. And when I entered the capacity planning field, I found that there's so much that can be done, so much that we know that can automate and make life easier. And when we applied that to the enterprise, there are millions of dollars that you just go into a customer. We do this sometimes and we prove to a customer that just spending a few hours, we save them hundreds of thousand dollars. So it's really a fascinating area where it's not sexy, let's face it. It's not something that kids when they go to college want to do. Ah, I want to grow up to be capacity planner now. Because people think of capacity planners as a mainframe, things that have been around for 20 years. And now things have changed because it is a complex and dynamic environment. Yeah, so a lot of people like the public cloud because I don't have to think about that as much. I can turn things on demand. People like Amazon and Azure have almost infinite capacity, at least more than any most given companies. I can turn it off when I don't want to, at least at a high level. How do you apply, or how do you help people get over that thinking when they want to apply it to their private environment? Because just in time servers sounds great, except most people have to do large capacity, capital planning or they do, so how do you work people through that sort of mindset? Right, right. So things have changed now that cloud is, it's really happening in customers. And we have a lot of organizations we work with who say now we're moving to the cloud, we no longer need a capacity planning team. That's a big mistake. You need it even much more. Because it's not just about deciding how many CPUs you need in a server. You can buy it just reserve an instance and get a new one. That's not a problem. But the first problem is how much do you need? I have customers who say, oh, we don't need capacity planning. We always buy twice as much we need. Okay, how do you know? Tell me again how you know how much you need if you buy twice as much you need. All right, so when you move to the cloud, what you'd be concerned about is cost. Because obviously these providers are essentially keeping an inventory for you, so at the end of the day, you're still gonna pay for it. So to keep cost control, you need to have a better planning on how much you're going to need. So it's very quick to dynamically extend and have capacity when you need it, but be aware of the cost. So we're even shifting how we do our practice right now in being able to size an environment which is not anymore that important, but being able to keep cost under control. And as I mentioned at the beginning, it's all about saving money for your company. Just making sure that you don't overspend. You don't have machines laying around and doing nothing, which is the problem that happens in virtualization. It happened 10 years ago. Virtual machines that don't cost anything, right? Oh, that's not really true. You keep it up, it's running, cost licenses, maintenance, cold storage, the same happens in cloud. You have a machine running and it has been running, no one's own it. So the way to do capacity planning, it's more management has changed, but it's still very actual. And you probably need it much more. So from a cost perspective, it's even more justified. So, Renato, so how does your cost fit into the equation? Is it percentage of the savings? Do you give them hero numbers? How do you price your product? And how much do you really save customers? So as a company, primarily we support BMC in selling capacity optimization because we still our product in our heart, right? We still believe that we have a big stake in that. We also partner in BMC in terms of providing, for example, third-party integrations. Recently, Herb Moon was talking about it. For example, we launched together with BMC, Hadoop capacity management. So that's the area where we work in terms of partnering with BMC. When we look at BMC as a partner back in the days before deciding that it was a better option to just let BMC do the work of selling it. We were trying to sell it ourselves, Renato. Well, BMC software is much better company at making companies aware of what is the value of the solution. So right now we focus mostly on consulting and providing this third-party engagement, third-party integrations to our customers. So that's what we focus. Most of our engagements are really project-based. So what we show, for example, is take a large financial institution in Europe, in Milan, where our headquarters is. We show to them, with a couple of months of working with them, we've been able to save them $4.5 million in just turning off virtual machines. They were not essentially doing any workload, consolidating them, cleaning them up, and we saved really million of dollars. And this was just a couple of months of work for us. So we would love to move to an area where, well, if you save you $4.5 million, well, you could give us 10%, but right now we're more honest and fair. We just charge the usual consulting fees. But we have a lot of projects where we work on a fixed visa rate, so we give a project and this is how much we believe that it's going to cost to us, so we just turn it back to you. So, Ronaldo, are there specific use cases, applications or verticals where you kind of find the worst offenders of setting up their capacity? Right, so, traditionally, we have two different point of views. Deciders, which everyone is pretty much familiar with, like storage capacity planning, network, middleware, mainframe. In that area, we see one of the issues that we see in companies out there is the disparity of level of maturity. You have extreme mature capacity planning, the mainframe space, because people have been doing that for 20 years, so they're extremely mature. And then maybe you have someone doing VMware capacity planning and it's just a kid who have been told, you are the capacity planner for VMware, so there's a lot of knowledge that can be recycled, reused, same technologies that apply to mainframe from a mythology perspective apply to VMware as well, so just apply them. So that's an area where things could be improved, but the biggest that I see, the one that makes me laugh every time is when I hear people say, oh, we have a Windows capacity planner. You have a what? A Windows capacity planner? There's no such a thing as a Windows capacity planner. It's running on a sort of platform, so that's the worst one from an infrastructure perspective. The opposite point of view, it's the application point of view. What we try to get customers into and organizations is this idea of aligning capacity to business. If your business is growing, your capacity should be going. So if you plan on having 10,000 additional customers, you should have enough capacity available so that you can sustain those 10,000 additional customers. Very often what we do find is that, and users or end customers facing applications are very often, there are dedicated teams managing that. For example, we work with one of the primary retailer companies here in the States, and there is a capacity planning team dedicated to .com. So that's all they do. But then the old traditional enterprise solutions, billing, voicing, there's still applications that are running. They're chewing up a lot of your infrastructure. Those are usually the ones that are, oh yes, we have enterprise applications. We really don't do capacity planning. There's potentially a lot of saving that can be applied there. And the same technologies that are being applied to new and cool applications like .com applications, like moving things to the cloud, virtualizing, are not applied there because those things are dealt with more traditionally. So there's a much more area for improvement in that direction. So you just mentioned real quickly, there's a lot of new technologies coming. We hear about containers and talk about virtualization. What's the one or two kind of things people should be looking at to make sure that the investment they make is going to keep up with this new stuff that's coming out? Right, so looking again at the cost, because capacity planner have, wake up in the morning and think about cost saving. That's really capacity planner job, and which on the other side of the coin is performance because you need a certain level of performance, you need a certain amount of capacity so they go together. For sure Hadoop as I mentioned previously, that's a big area. And this whole started when I was in another retailer, another customer of ours, and I overheard a conversation, I shouldn't have, I overheard a conversation from the Hadoop team, and they were saying, we'll start with 500 terabytes and then we'll see how much we need. And I'm like, 500 terabytes, do you know that's probably a few million dollars of storage and you don't know how much you're actually going to plan. So Hadoop for example is an area that it's growing very rapidly. People are just throwing data at Hadoop because it doesn't cost. Well, it's not so true that it doesn't cost. Another company we've been recently piloting this technology that we partner with BMC in developing Hadoop capacity management, part of the capacity utilization solution. They have a 900 nodes Hadoop cluster. If you don't manage that, you're really incurring a lot of additional costs. Containers are coming right now. There's not really that much adoption with the traditional customers that we work with. A lot of people are handling that as DevOps and just playing with them. So I haven't seen that right now with the kind of companies that we work with which are usually Fortune 500, Fortune 100. So it hasn't entered the main demissionaire yet, but it's coming for sure. No, and the Hadoop story is great. It's big data, analysis is great, but you got to make sure that you're managing it properly. A lot of companies are using it without a clear purpose, but they're spending a lot of money. So let's just make sure that that follows the same procedures and processes from a capacity planning perspective that can be applied anywhere else. There is no reason why it should not be. You shouldn't be afraid. At a local conference in Connecticut, it's called CMG. It's a group that they do performance and capacity. I gave a speech once and was more of a peep speech about why you as a traditional capacity planner should not be afraid of Hadoop capacity planning. A lot of companies say, oh, we don't deal with that stuff. That's DevOps, that's new things. We don't want to hear about it. It's not true because you can handle it. It's just yet another application running on top of things you already know. So just take what you know and apply it to a different area. Yeah, well, a great line I heard on the space is that the cheapest infrastructure you can ever get is the stuff you already own. So you're helping customers with that. And Renato, really appreciate you coming by. Great to catch up with you on everything that's going on in this space. And we'll have lots more coverage here from BMC Day. Thanks for watching. Thank you.