 Live from Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering DockerCon 2016, brought to you by Docker. Here's your host, John Furrier. Okay, welcome back everyone. You're watching SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE, our flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. We are here live at DockerCon 2016 and we are in Seattle. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Brian Grace here. Our next guest is Alexis Richardson who's the CEO of WeaveWorks, hot startup, hot company, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much, John. So tell us what you guys do. I want to get down and dirty, but let's get it out on the table. What's the core value proposition? What problem do you solve? What does your company do? We make it really easy for developers to build microservices applications with containers, specifically around areas like monitoring, networking and management of those things. So one of the things we've been talking about all week and certainly for months and certainly years has been DevOps, but more specifically around microservices and containers and the movement from speeds and feeds, what kind of containers, it's going to be containers everywhere if they did pretty much what we're seeing. That causes a lot of confusion to customers like they're trying to make sense of what the hell's going on out there. So can you clarify what's the signal from the noise in this market? Because again, a lot of posturing, a lot of noise, a lot of people have great tech, a lot of people saying they got this, containers make a lot of sense. How do you tease out the signal from all the noise here in this ecosystem? You want to find the people who have the best user experience. They have the signal, everyone else's noise. Developers need to build applications. They don't need to care about infrastructure. They don't want to care about infrastructure. This is the source of the confusion because there's some great infrastructure being developed right now. It's awesome, it's wonderful, with Docker, with Kubernetes, with Massos and many other things. But ultimately this is below the radar for the typical developer. So to make them less confused and to actually help them, you've got to speak to them in a language they understand. And that is the language of applications, not necessarily the language of infrastructure. That is getting out of the whole provisioning conversations, it's only just making programmable resources. Programmable stuff is great. Automation is great, but what is it for? I mean, if the boss goes away and leaves the development team for a month and they come back and they're all smiling and why are you so happy? And they say, oh, we switched over from VMs to containers. That is actually not exciting to the business. How has that helped the business? Are we acquiring more customers faster now? Do we have better uptime? Are we saving money? What's the benefit? If you can show that you can build more applications faster and thereby make your customers happier faster, that is a business benefit and that's what people want to hear about. So what is the, okay, so. Yeah, no, if you guys got started, you were really probably one of the most first prominent networking companies around containers. That was a complicated space. Moved into, you know, monitoring. That's a complicated space because containers are here, they're there. What are you seeing as the entry point? I mean, are you seeing, like you said, you're looking for great developer experiences. What's drawing them to weave? Is it still networking? Is it all of it? Is it just because the user experience is so much tighter? It's the user experience. I mean, that's what gets us the word of mouth adoption. If you look around the trade floor, you'll see some big companies like Amazon and IBM promoting our software because it appeals to their user base. It gets them customers and this is why. So I think one of the things that we've invested a lot of effort into is a highly graphical experience. It's not the only part of the experience, but it's very important to the modern developer that they can see something they can understand. It's no use if your graphics are half-baked. You guys just took a big round of funding. You brought on Matthew from VMware from an operations perspective, like what's the state of the company? And growing, well-funded, bringing on more leadership, what's going on? So the state of the company is good. As you say, just took around a funding of 15 million from Google and Excel. Previously we had five from Excel. The funding is about our commercial transition. So we're right now 21 people and we're probably going to go north of that pretty quickly as we roll out our commercial offering. Yesterday we announced Weave Cloud. This is primarily targeting customers on Amazon and other clouds first. It's an integrated stack of all of our products, including things like WeaveNet, the networking we went to market with and Weave Scope, which is our monitoring tool. This allows people to do things like run multicasts in the cloud, but in a secure manner, suitable for operations. So that's what's getting us a lot of our initial customers. People who start off saying, well, containers are great. Let's use containers on Amazon and then you run into some problem. And one of the problems they run into is the networking doesn't work. And you see this with Kubernetes too and we're popular on Amazon because we've made the networking actually work without you having to think about it. So what Docker did for machines, we did for networking with WeaveNet. So you're standing up networks? Very fast, you stand up networks and they are high performance. You can actually run real financial applications on them. Real production, not a test environment. Yeah, we have a very public use case on this international securities exchange, which is one of the biggest exchanges in the world. Equity options out of Manhattan and they switched over their DR strategy to include an Amazon cloud. And to do that, they adopted portable technology, containers and portable networks, WeaveNet. And they now have their entire market data system running over this in order to feed an active-active disaster recovery strategy. This is not something that you do with non-production ready technology. So one of the things we've been teasing out too is trying to get a visibility on the business aspect of Docker. Meaning, where's the beef? Where's the rubber hitting the road? Where's the business value? So can you share your thoughts on what you see through all that? I know some developers love to develop and talk about applications. Everyone has applications, but are they actually deploying more Docker? Is Docker fundamental in those specific cases? You know, let's take the App Store, for example. The business value of an enterprise App Store is consumers want an easy way to consume software when for some reason they can't consume it as a service and they have to install it on-premise. There are thousands and thousands of ISVs that make business out of this. If you're an ISV, writing your software for millions of different environments is not something you want to do. What you really want is to write for just one or two platforms. Docker have a chance to be the new platform for the enterprise application. This is of high business value because it simplifies the cost of deploying ISV applications and therefore customers will just have a much larger marketplace of apps they can choose from. An installation will be a breeze. You'll just be point and click like on your phone. So that's a rallying point, really, for developers. Docker is, there's a solidarity around, kind of a, I mean, I'm old enough for one of the Linux days where it all kind of came together and everyone slew the flag and makes it easier. That's what you're pretty much saying. Yeah, I think that's right. It's a, platforms are our enablement of other businesses. And Docker's challenge is to figure out how to be a platform and make room for everyone else to be successful too. What are they doing right and what do they need to work on? Because that's, again, ecosystems love signals. Signals, telegraph, what's happening, where the lines are, key integration points to, I don't want to be a developer to develop a product and then get rolled over by Docker. They come out with a new announcement now. Solomon says, oh, batteries included, swappable, I get that, but look at me. They glued in now. Oh, okay, exactly. So as a developer, they just want to know where the white spaces are. Where can I play? Where can I build value? What's your thoughts? So I think there has been a noticeable shift in Docker's attitude to the ecosystem. A year ago, there was a lot of talk about Docker either cannibalizing or otherwise ignoring or even mistreating its ecosystem. I think that came with uncertainty about revenue. But I've heard through my sources that revenue has started to become a reality for Docker. And that- Ben has confirmed that, by the way, here, yesterday on theCUBE. So that has brought with it a little bit of a more relaxed attitude to what they do and don't do. Because once you're sure that you can make money from something, you stop worrying quite so much about trying to do everything. When you start focusing on the thing that makes the money. And then you think, okay, now we need to have our ecosystem partners work for us, not against us. They need to be our allies in the industry. We can't do everything. So I think that's going well now. And you can see it on the floor. There's a real buzz out there. What's the one signal that Docker's making right now to the ecosystem in terms of what they want to own? Because at the end of the day, that sounds a little bit too, you know, owning. But I mean, ultimately, they have to have something in their arsenal. And the open source democratizes things a little bit differently than, say, other ecosystem plates. So they're out in the open, but they got to have their own little thing, right? That they own, own key thing. They want to own orchestration, which is the engine room of applications. You spent some, obviously you were at VMware for a while, a little bit of pivotal. You've seen enterprise software, package software. You know, Weave is now a combination of open source, you know, a commercial offering plus SaaS. We're seeing the same thing with Docker. That's the reality. Is that, I mean, is that the new, what a new software? The new reality for software companies. It means you have to raise two or three times as much money from your VCs, because you've got to sustain these offerings. You can't just say, well, we'll punt on software as a service of five years. Not in a world where Amazon is making 10 billion of revenue. Right. I mean, you've got to, you've got to write software. You've got to have an R and E, but you've got to have operations. You've got to have all those things. And marketing this stuff is not the same exercise, you know, between cloud and open source and on-prem. There are different channels that people pay attention to, different distribution models, different economics. And what's the formula for success? You've got to have amazing UX. That is the formula. You've got to be solving a real problem and your developers have to like using your product. If they don't like using your product, you won't get customers fast enough. Has it really gotten to that first five minutes or 30 minutes? It's got to be great. Otherwise, you're not viable. So, you know, one of my previous companies was RabbitMQ, which I co-founded. We put on the website, if you can't get this up and running in five minutes, send an email to legitimategreivance at rabbitmq.com. And some people said we really love it that you have that on your site. And actually, we only got one email ever sent to that. And then I met up with my friend, the late Ezra Zygmuntowitz, who was a Rabbit user, and he was talking about Redis. So I really like Redis, he said. I said, what do you like about Redis, Ezra? He said, well, it takes about five seconds to install. And I'm like, okay. The rules have changed. Five minutes used to be cool. Now it's really unhipped to be five minutes. It has to be five seconds. And because people don't care about you, they have a very short attention span. So the user experience and how you speak to the user is really important. You actually have to have value creation that's instant to go to the next step. It's just a different progression. Genuine simplicity, immediacy. It's the kind of appellation of everything. And these people have to be your marketing. I mean, I think that's what you're saying, is your marketing has to be at the meetup level. It has to be on the GitHub-Stars level. It has to be 360 degrees. Of course, the sill, the big magazines, the shows, but you also have to understand the meetups, the community, and how that relates to your ecosystem and how that plays into your revenue. And what's the marketing challenge, if you have now, you mentioned the three areas, you know, on-prem, cloud, and what was the other one, the open source, yeah. So those are three different distinct channels. Do you do all three or spray and pray? I mean, you have to, some focus. Spray and pray. That's how we describe it at the board meetings, of course. Now, we have punted on the commercial on-premise edition. So we're open source for on-premise. We can sequence it out, but I mean, you don't have to go all in on all three channels. We're going to focus for the time being on our cloud service for our commercial offering and stick to our guns on open source for everything else. Of course, some people want production support, but ultimately we'd like to sell them a commercial product. But we think that's a suitable motion. And we're teaming very closely with the big channel owners that are emerging in the space, who are the big platform providers. Amazon ECS, for example, but as I mentioned, advertising our products over there right now. Congratulations. If you could talk to the audience for one minute, spend a minute just to kind of explain what's going on this year at Docker. Can I obviously, the attendance is pretty notable compared where it was a couple of years ago. Short-lived company, only three years old. What's the big story here this year? Speaking very subjectively, I've spoken to many more people using our software with Docker or other things that we don't talk about at DockerCon in anger. And I've been really happy to see that. I mean, people coming up to our booth all the time saying, I'm already using your software and it's great. Which, you know, a year ago, we didn't have that. It was much more of an immature industry at that point. So people are going into production. People are trying things out much more than they were before. So they're accelerating their development? Yes. That's really their value. That is the story. So the Docker have been positioning this as, hey, we're twice as big as we were last time. Which is great for them, but actually, it's real. There's more than twice as much interest on the floor. Yeah, from real people. From real people doing real stuff. Who are driving the so-called digital transformation. Yeah. Which is really application. At the CEO level, that's what they're thinking about it. It's digital transformation. I need systems of engagement. You know, if I'm into continental hotels, why does my website look like an Amazon website of 1996? How do I compete with Airbnb, where all the cool kids want to hang out and rent rooms? It's just a big difference. Yeah, they're usually big data. I want to ask that big data question because Airbnb is a great example. You have a modern website. It's hip, okay, it's hip, but it's really using data. It's got good site sign on. All the social aspects there. It's got a network effect. It's not just a web app anymore. It's not the web app. It's a whole integrated. It's a big analytical engine. Where does data fit in? Because this is very interesting. It's one of Jerry Chen's hot investment areas. Obviously everyone loves Jerry. But now you have data that has to be horizontally scalable across resource pools, but yet vertically focused on a domain specific app because I'm an app developer. I don't really care where the data sits on a database. I just want my data from my app in real time. How does it fit in? People really value agility in this market. They really want to get more services delivered faster to compete and to retain customers and revenue. And they're powering those services using databases which have queries and analytics attached to them that allow you to do customer intelligence. But because there are so many different ways to do this now, everyone has been a proliferation of lots of specialized databases. That began about 10 or 15 years ago with no SQL. But it's just continued. It's no longer the case there is one database model. It's RDBMS and you get it from Oracle or IBM or Microsoft. And so this goes with the agility because microservices teams, DevOps teams, are told you pick your own technology and you succeed or fail based on your choices. So in a company you'll find lots more different databases being deployed because each team will pick their own and they'll need to pick the best one for the job. So that's what it means for data. Well that's the final question I want to ask you and we're getting the signal here on time. But if me, you and Brian were called in to be a consultant for VMware. Right. What will we be pitching them to do? What will we be proposing that VMware do in this current situation? Because obviously virtualization is still around. But this is really driving the train pretty fast with Docker and application development. What's our advice to VMware? What would we tell them you need to do? Wow. I wasn't expecting that question. You know, it may be too late. I mean, I think they had a chance to build a cloud and they didn't. They tried to run this kind of ecosystem model with a cloud and that proved to be a terrible idea. But then they had a chance to build a higher value at the application tier and they screwed that up as well. So now they left with, you know, the shreds of the virtualization business which has been totally disrupted by open source cloud and containers. Well, and I think you talked about it to a certain extent it's the agility you need in technology, business model, how you go to market is so, I mean like you have to, you guys started as a networking company now you're in monitoring, now you're in application. Like I can't imagine you started thinking like I'm going to be in three or four distinct things. It just evolved that way. Data told you where to go, the market told you where to go. Like people have to be much more agile and I think, you know, to your point, VMware struggled with some of that agility. VM, I do not have an offering that appeals to the development teams of today. My vSphere can do 10,000 machines versus 5,000. It's increasingly unimportant in this environment. I mean, it's useful, yes, but it's not the whole story. All right. Alexis, thanks so much for sharing insight. Congratulations on your success. Got some great financing partners, got a great product and certainly, you know, we concur with your future vision. It's a developer-centric app world in the enterprise and that is going to change the game significantly. Congratulations. And Docker's at the front lines of this with the developers and of course we are too. This is theCUBE live in Seattle. I'm John Furrier with Brian Grace Lee. We'll be right back with more after this short break. You're watching theCUBE.