 From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and after many travels around the globe with theCUBE, really happy to be back in the Boston area studio and happy to welcome to the program first-time guest and first time we've had open link on the program, Rich Grossi, who's the CEO coming up from Long Island. Appreciate you joining me up here and looking forward to discussing with you. So first, open link, as I said, company first time we've had on theCUBE. Why don't you give our audience a little bit of background? How long the company's been existence on what the focus is? Well, we're celebrating this year, our 25th anniversary. So we serve the energy, financial, trading, and treasury markets. We're based in Long Island with offices around the world serving about 500 clients or so in those different markets and happy to be here today and talk about some of the innovation that we have going on. Great, before we get into open link, Rich, give us a little bit about your background. You've been with open link for a good part of the journey. I have, I've been with the company for 21 years in a variety of different roles. Spent some time in operations and development. Prior to the CEO position, I spent some time in operations and prior to this role, I was the CTO of the company. Okay, well, congrats on the new role, Rich. And so tell me, what is open link today? You talked about kind of the industries you focused on. How do you fit kind of in the markets today? So we are the market leader for the categories I mentioned. So we'll play in the energy and the commodity space. We'll play in the financial services, banking, treasury space. We're well known for our risk management capabilities and we serve top tier clients in all of those markets around the globe. Yeah, Rich, it's interesting. I think there's not a single segment in the market that's not going through some significant change, you know, disruptions on everyone's mind. What's changing for your customers and how is open link really kind of adjusting to kind of meet those needs? Yeah, it's always been a high degree of sensitivity towards risk. That's been our strong point as a company for a long time and we serve the clients through kind of advanced analytics that provide them with that capability. But more frequently we're seeing total cost of ownership, driving a lot of the decisions made by our clients, right? So in markets that have some headwinds coming in and just kind of steady state markets that are looking for how to use technology to benefit them, but also reduce the total cost of ownership. Okay, so explain what that means. You say, you know, risk, things like analytics, you know, data, super important to all customers. How do they make sure they have the right data? How do they make sure that there's not getting a tax on what they have, where does open link help there? What does the products look like? Yeah, so I mean, so we have a pretty advanced trading and risk management platform. We also provide treasury and cash management solutions. And in those spaces what we're doing is we're providing our clients with the ability to manage their risk, manage their positions, take a peek ahead to see what's coming in the markets, do sensitivity analysis to ensure that as they trade and as they transact, and to your point, as they manage to the logistics, it's all done with a system capture from front to back and it's all done with a view towards the risk of the application and the risk of the markets that they're in. Okay, you had a recent launch that was open cloud. I mean, maybe explain what that is, how that fits with kind of the broader discussion of cloud. Sure, I mean, open link's been in the private cloud space now for about 11 years. So this was our hosting application. And through those years we built up the technology to support more of the kind of online. So predominantly we were a perpetual based company on-prem and now our clients are looking for a little bit more ownership, a little bit more security and they're looking for that single vendor to manage their applications within the cloud. So there's a big transformation in our markets where many of our large tier one energy and financial services clients are looking for that reduction of total cost and they're looking for open link to be the provider that can offer them that service within the cloud environments. Okay, so is this a SaaS offering? Is it living on some of the public cloud? Help us kind of get the weeds a little bit here that you're former CTO. Sure, so I mean, it's a similar technology to what we've built over the years. So we're still managing scalability and performance. We still have great security in the application, still managing a lot of the monitoring and logging and application security within that but it is in the Microsoft Azure environment. So we're working with Microsoft partnered with them to build up a cloud environment for our customers such that they can manage this remotely as you would in any cloud environment and then provide all the advantages of Microsoft Azure on top of the technology that open links built over time. Okay, so sounds, you know, similar to what you were doing before but a lot of changes. How organizationally do you have to change for this and, you know, maybe walk us through a customer, you know, why would they choose one versus the other? What are some of the kind of big advantages of the new way? Sure, so organizationally, we do have cloud dedicated teams now, right? So a lot of knowledge required to take your product, not only cloud enable it but make it feature functionality rich for the clients within the cloud. So we've built cloud operations teams. We've built SOX and NOX. We leverage our employee base around the world. We've put a lot of technology advantages into the new software that's cloud enabled. So things like performance is just a big topic for us. So allowing our clients to drive greater performance through scalability and dynamic scalability within the cloud. That's a big advantage to our clients. Yeah, you think back a couple of years ago if you talked about, you know, Microsoft and Google and the Amazon to the world, it was like, oh well, I'm worried about the security. Governance is challenging, you know, was just at one of the bigger cloud shows and they say, security's actually opportunity. You've got to kind of get a redo on security. Governance seems to be something that we're sorting through. What's your customer's experience? Is there still hesitancy or are people, you know, kind of jumping in the waters nice? Well, I think there's still the question and I think it's changing very rapidly for our client base. So a couple of years ago, our clients were interested in the cloud but not necessarily moving to the cloud. And I think you're absolutely right in the sense that some of them were concerned about the security of their trading data being out in something like Microsoft Azure. Many of them recognize today that the security benefits of a Microsoft Azure as an example could be far greater than what they're doing in-house today. And then as you look at the technology of OpenLink, we've built layers of security on top of everything that we've used to have within the core application, encryption and the like. And now using some of the Key Vault technologies and some of the scalability technologies of Microsoft Azure, we feel like we're able to provide a higher level of security than they even had on-prem using the cloud up-clays. You know, one of the other big advantages if you plug into kind of that ecosystem and platform of the public cloud, what opportunities are there? You know, Microsoft, you think of like active directory, all of their business functionality. What do you gain today? And maybe give us a little roadmap as to what this looks like down the road. Yeah, so our clients are looking for a handful of things, right? So they're looking for that reduction in ownership. We've been able to save them on average about 30% just coming from their on-prem or their data centers today. They're also looking for that single source of support. So today we're working with their network engineers and their DBAs. In the cloud version, we're able to provide them with those same services coupled with our support applications so that we're providing kind of single line of visibility into their overall trading and risk management application. And they're also looking for performance, as I mentioned before, and security. So with the cloud application, we're not only able to provide them with the feature functionality of our application, but also the cloud technology that sits around it. Yeah, one of the other things, if you look at kind of managing the environment versus going to the public cloud, usually the public cloud, the joke I have is, hey, what version of Azure are you running on? Well, Microsoft takes care of that. Is similar thing in your environment? Very similar. So the ability to upgrade, the ability to leverage the scalability of Microsoft Azure, the new technology coming out in Microsoft Azure, all the cloud feature functionality, that all comes with it for free. And then to your point, providing our clients with a managed service so that we can manage not only their day-to-day environment, but we can also manage the infrastructure and the business needs that they have in using our application. So all that combined is provided our clients with a great leg up in terms of how they use our software and how they manage it moving forward. Yeah, I'm curious, do the customers have to choose one or the other, the on-prem or the cloud? Do you have some customers that might be migrating being to kind of the hybrid multi-cloud is kind of a big issue for a lot of customers? Yeah, so we have a large number of clients today that are still on-prem and they'll probably stay on-prem for a while. But the evolution of the cloud as it relates to our client base is quite rapid. So a couple of years ago, we would talk to our clients and they were interested. Last year, we announced our proof of concept coming in what we were building. We launched our public cloud just in quarter three of this year and the feedback from our client base was dramatic. So now they're all looking to kind of migrate over. We respond to RFPs quite often and I would estimate maybe about 90% of those coming in have some interest in the public cloud moving forward. Okay, Rich, what do you want your clients to really know about OpenLink? And the two pieces just kind of today and if they knew OpenLink say five years ago, you know, what's the big change? Yeah, I think, well, we have a tagline that says we like to solve the complex, right? And make it simple. So you'll see many of our clients some of the bigger named vendors that are out there using our software solve really complicated problems, right? So our software is pretty configurable and also addresses some of the larger challenges that we have within the spaces that OpenLink sits in. So our clients are well-known in that area and OpenLink is well-known in their our ability to solve those problems. When you take that and you take the total cost of ownership and you take the public cloud capabilities and you build all that technology that we've advanced over the past, you know, 25 years, it's a pretty compelling application and company that we work for. All right, well, Rich, appreciate the updates on everything happened in OpenLink. Wish you the best of luck with the cloud offering. We'll be back with more coverage here. Always check out thecube.net for all the coverage and thanks for watching The Cube.