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Managing Cloud Complexity with Yan Ness of Verge.io – IT in the D 445 · IT in the D

0:00
Welcome. Thank you. Once again for hanging out with us,
0:02
this is the one and only it in the D show episode 4 45,
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Amir host, Bob Walton,
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spiel hanging out co-host producer extraordinary Randy Walker guest. This week.
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We are lucky to be hanging out with the CEO of verge.io ness,
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serial entrepreneur,
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Michigan lover should be a great conversation revolving, uh,
0:23
building up a startup, selling it and then doing it all over again.
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So can't wait to, uh, dive in, uh,
0:28
meetup.com/it D the meetup. If you're listening to us on drop night,
0:32
it's gonna be the 15th of September. We're got a new location. We're at 54 west,
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which is the patio of Mojave inlaws in Michigan. Hanging out with a bunch of it.
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Nerds. Um, no speakers, no cover, just,
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just a bunch of us bring business cards or don't just hang out, uh,
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always a good time. Never, uh, no pressure sales. So can't wait to, uh,
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can't wait to see you all. So, Jan, good to see you. It's been a while.
0:54
How you been, sir?
0:56
I've been great, Bob. Good to see you too. Thanks for having me.
0:59
So I got, I got it.
1:00
The first thing I thought of this afternoon when I was driving and I said,
1:02
how I wanted to kick this thing off?
1:04
Is there used to be this video from CRM magazine? Right? And, uh,
1:08
there was a bunch of little, you know,
1:09
eight and 10 year old kids going when I grow up,
1:11
when I grow up and it was all like these it cliches, and one of 'em was,
1:15
I wanna build up a startup and sell it to Cisco and then do it all over again.
1:19
I'm like, that's, that's YN you, uh, you know,
1:22
built up online tech up in Ann Arbor had a, had a pretty strong exit.
1:27
And, uh, now you went and decided to do it all over again.
1:30
And you jump back in with verge.io, I guess,
1:32
talk to me about not just on the entrepreneurship, but the exit and,
1:36
and I guess the starting up again,
1:37
we could probably do a three day story on that, but just, uh, you know,
1:41
just to get the story out on, on kind of how you went, you know,
1:44
that way and then started back up again.
1:48
Yeah. So S entrepreneur, um,
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online tech was an opportunity for me to get really,
1:53
really familiar with what it took to sell and deliver it services.
1:58
And also quite honestly like the power of culture and a whole bunch of other
2:02
stuff. Right. Um, and, um, it was, uh,
2:07
it was an incredible run. We bought this small dial up is P company.
2:12
I think it was five,
2:13
four or five employees and sold off the is P and then went
2:18
through the oh 7 0 8 period. And,
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and I always believed that, um, you, you,
2:26
you can always do well.
2:27
You just have to decide whether things are for sale or for, for, for,
2:31
for purchase. And in oh 8 0 9 things were, you wanted to buy things.
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And so we hooked up with some corporations here in Michigan and got access to
2:40
their data centers, pennies on the dollar because, uh,
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real estate was in a tough spot. And so were those companies and, um,
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you know, out of that, we, we, we, you know,
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in a very entrepreneurial way without raising, raising any professional capital,
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we built up basically, uh, the first HIPAA compliant and PCI compliant,
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uh, cloud, uh,
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and hosting and colocation provider here in the Midwest and drove it like
3:06
crazy growth growth, growth growth is, is,
3:08
is how you make these things successful and end up, uh,
3:11
seven or eight years later had a great exit. That was the start.
3:15
So typically, you know, person in your shoes, you're gonna, you're gonna retire.
3:18
You're gonna buy a nice little boat and you're gonna go fishing and you're gonna
3:21
hang out. But you decided to jump in again. Did you, uh, you just got the bug,
3:25
right? Is that what it is? Or what did, uh, what drove you back in?
3:29
Yeah, so I made two mistakes. Number one,
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I never thought about what was gonna happen next. I did. I just loved growing,
3:35
growing the company. And when,
3:37
when we decided we were gonna put up for market up, up to market for, for sale,
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um, which was a pretty conscious decision about a year in advance before we did,
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um, I had, I had two choices. One was, um,
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spent a lot of time thinking about what's next. So I was really,
3:53
really ready for it. And I had some people telling me I should do that, but I,
3:57
but, but my heart and soul, honestly, Bob told me,
4:00
you gotta run through the tape. Two reasons.
4:02
It might not sell in which case you're still running the company and
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don't build a company you don't always want to sell because every day you don't
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sell it, you own it. And you don't wanna own a piece of junk.
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You wanna own a nice high quality company. And, and so we,
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we worked hard to make that happen. And so the mistake I kind of made,
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but to the, my benefit in the end was, you know, really spent a lot of time,
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six months when we were shopping the business.
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And when we closed doing everything I could to make sure the company
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was in the best financial and operational and cultural shape I possibly
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could. Um, and, and I spent,
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and I decided I'm not gonna spend one minute thinking about what's next.
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And so when we sold the business, the, the new buyers didn't didn't need me.
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And so what was next was nothing, cuz I didn't plan for it. I don't golf.
4:56
I don't hunt. I don't fish. I don't do landscaping. I don't do woodwork.
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I do sailboats. So I did buy an nice big sailboat. But, but for the most part,
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honestly, I, you know, I kind of, I kind of, I spent six months, nine months,
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you know, traveling,
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doing all the stuff that you didn't do while you're working 80 hours a week for
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10 years. Um, but, but then I got really bored.
5:17
I'm I'm not good at filling my time and you know,
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the wife and I started arguing over the remote and just stupid stuff,
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you know where we're gonna go next weekend. And, and I, I literally Bob,
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I went to bed a couple nights and I was like, you know,
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what am I what's life all about? What am I doing here? You know,
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what am what's going on here? And, and so, um, I don't,
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I'm not sure whether it was, you know,
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sort of an escape or a, Hey, okay, I give up,
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I don't know how to do anything else. I'm gonna go back to it. But I,
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I ran into this company called yo bite, fell in love with the software and said,
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this could change the world more than any other company ever been a part of.
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That's all I know how to do is try to build early stage tech company.
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Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
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So I jumped back in and I'm I'm thrilled.
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So it was kind of like, uh, it, it, I don't wanna say it's a similar journey,
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but just the one story that resonated was, you know, I got into it management,
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no sales for the first time in my career. Cause I'm like, yeah,
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I've been selling for 23 years now. Um, and,
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and I got an opportunity and I took advantage of it and I loved the people
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aspect of it. I loved the, the, the mentoring. I loved everything about it,
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but I, I was missing that one was the, and it's always, you know,
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it's, it's, once it's getting your gets in your blood, it's,
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it's super hard to get out the blood. So no, I,
6:34
I can completely understand that. Yeah. So, so talk to me about what,
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so yada bite, and then did you rebrand or what was, uh,
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I guess walk me through that whole thing because I, I, you know,
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I kind of was familiar with them from back in, you know, when that started up,
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what did you know going to verge?
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Was that just a co a conscious decision to rebrand or what, uh,
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walk me through that.
6:57
Great, great, great Michigan and Midwest story, by the way. So, um,
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yo by had, um, the, the founder and CTO of yo bite's guy named Greg Campbell,
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Michigan guy one, I think one of the, one of the smartest tech guys in Michigan,
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but we can all debate that all day long. It's like a religion, but anyway,
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he came up with a way to do software defined storage about 10 years ago.
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That was, um, really revolutionary.
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And he's got about three or four inventions in the core of the code
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that he does that is, um, uh,
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enables a whole bunch of arch. You know,
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that architecture by itself enables a whole bunch of advantages.
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So it was called Tite and, and for a while,
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they were like the darling of Michigan. They, um, you know, they were,
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they were a huge, had big companies as customers,
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Gartner named them as one of the companies to watch.
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And they were doing really well, but, but they struggled as, as,
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as we do in Michigan.
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And this is the thing we've gotta figure out here is struggled with go to market
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in a big way. Not just like, you know, yeah. How to sit here and,
8:00
you know, you know, make some sales, but how to really like move the needle on,
8:05
on the perception and the adoption more, more globally.
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We really struggle with that here. Uh, get back to that in a second,
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cuz there's some interesting things I've discovered recently, but,
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but Yoda byte went through a couple pivots and couple changes and you know,
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a little bit of a founder, founder sort of discourse and you know, you know, uh,
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didn't get along and so forth and you know, every startup goes through that,
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but what's,
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what's really fascinating is if this technology had been in the hands of
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a startup in the, or west coast, San Francisco, Boston, anywhere else, it, it,
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it just, it would've been shelved. It never would've saw, seen the light of day.
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It never raised professional capital was always angel funded by,
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by some very high net worth individuals here in Michigan. So they,
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they kept going, kept going, kept building incredible technology.
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I ran into it a few years ago.
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And so we have this really mature piece of technology
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that, that, so there's not a lot of technology product risk,
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but it's like a startup company. So what we did was we said, all right,
9:08
software defined storage, just kind of been there,
9:10
done that sort of like back to the future kind of thing. Right?
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So what invested a bunch of money in building up the rest of the hypervisors and
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the software defined networking to the point where the entire data center's been
9:24
virtualized with this software. And so we said,
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it's not any more software defined storage and a Yoda byte by the way,
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is a trillion terabytes, right?
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So the notion was it's the only software that they could address a trillion
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terabytes, which, uh, um, uh, theoretically is possible,
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but practically is I impossible and never needed, never needed, but,
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but since the, you know, so we decided to rebrand it verge.io,
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and now it's kind of like ultra converged infrastructure,
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like Nutanix on steroids kind.
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Of thing. So I wanna dive into that because this was, uh, I, you know, I was,
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I was with HP when converge infrastructure came out. Right.
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And I was in Cisco when hyperconverged infrastructure came out and
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uh, and now I'm hearing, you know, what you're doing and I, I,
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I kind of wanna get your flavor, your sauce or what, you know,
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when you're talking, you know, then I, then I'm, you know,
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Nutanix introduced any cloud because, you know, cloud still wasn't ready.
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This was 2013. Right. We weren't, uh, it was there, but it wasn't there, there,
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like it is now obviously, but what's, what's your spin, what's your flavor on,
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on this, uh, on.
10:34
Yeah. So here's the way I describe it. I think of it like a spectrum, you know,
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the wor to me, the world isn't black, white, or it's like a spectrum. Um,
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think of it, like on the far left, you have virtualization. So VMware,
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you know,
10:49
actually virtualization's been around a long time when I was at Michigan in
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computer science in the eighties, by the way, we had these Amol four 70 S right.
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And they were, they, they, we had,
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and it basically used virtualization to slice up this mainframe so that I,
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as a student, could buy some CPU Ram and storage, by the way, and number,
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you know, and, and, and run my computer classes.
11:09
So virtualized general a long time, but VMware, you know,
11:12
98, 99 is fascinating to read their history. They virtualized the machine,
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the server, right. And all of a sudden I could move a server.
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I could snapshot a server.
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I could do all kinds of cool things you could never do because I turned this,
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the physical server into a bucket of bits, actually kind of like,
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kinda like digital music turned an album or a CD.
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My dad was blown away when I could email him a song. He's like,
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how does hell's that happen? He's like, I have a CD here. I have a record here.
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How can you email me something that's physical? And then I can use it here.
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Well, VMware sort of did the same thing to the physical server. I could, if,
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if your email could handle it, I could email you a server.
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I could virtualize it, take the VMT K file and email to you.
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Mm-hmm and you could use it. That's pretty amazing. Right? Well,
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well then the next thing was all right,
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I'm gonna virtualize the network and I'm gonna virtualize the storage.
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So server hypervisor, network storage, alternative bucket bits.
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Okay. So great. We got,
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we got complete virtualization then now that everything's virtualized,
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I could do some orchestration software,
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and now I can manipulate all three of those things because they're not physical
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devices anymore.
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I don't need hands and arms and manipulate 'em I can use software to manipulate.
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'em change this, change that, do this, do that. And I don't need any software.
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It's sort of all virtualized. Right? So convergence was there and then,
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you know, Nutanix and these guys, I mean, I'm sorry.
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Orchestration was the second stage. The third stage was convergence. Hey,
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now they're all three of these separate things, but they're all software.
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I can swoosh 'em together. Put a UI in front of them,
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make 'em look like one thing.
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So convergence came along and that was the next layer of sort of simplification
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or attempt at it.
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But underneath that lipstick was a really complicated network
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storage and hypervisor offer defined everything from,
13:01
from maybe five different vendors. Maybe they built them.
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Maybe they acquired them, but it was pretty complicated.
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Then everybody still said, no, I gotta move workloads around.
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So Kubernetes and containers came out containers. That's the answer.
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Now I can virtualize the workload. I can pick up a workload and move it. Well,
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we took it one step further. We think, we think the Le you know,
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the next level of encapsulation is the data center,
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the entire data center, not just the container, which is the workload,
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but the IP address, the DNS, your storage layers,
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your security, your compliance, everything, just like, like,
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like you were, you were at online tech with me, right? And we had, we had a,
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we had a big data center with all kinds of,
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and inside of it was like all these private clouds that customers had and,
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and think of taking that entire data center and virtualizing it into a bucket of
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bits. And each of those private clouds we had inside our data centers,
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we had seven of them were in, were nested virtual data centers that themselves,
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you could pick up and move around.
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And so our notion is that what we've done with,
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with our software since Yoda bite is we virtualized the whole rest of the data
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center. And so it's this encapsulated thing.
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The entire data center is one encapsulated thing.
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So we're like a container for data centers.
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That's the way we view that spectrum and where we are today.
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So, so this it's, you mentioned that.
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So I remember when converge infrastructure came out and software defined the
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kind of the stack, and the whole point was, you know, the, before,
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when you wanted to spin something up, you had to call the network person.
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And he had to, he, she had to provision ports in the data center.
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Then you called the, the server person. Then you called the storage person.
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Then they all, all, they all had to talk together. And then when,
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when software define came out, they were basically like, okay,
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now you don't need that.
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You can have one person managing this three tiered stack.
15:00
And then when cloud came out, almost the same thing right now, you don't need,
15:04
you know, you had to introduce cloud people,
15:06
and now you don't have to introduce cloud people.
15:08
And you brought up something when we were talking before the show is, you know,
15:12
the simplicity hasn't come to the, uh,
15:16
the it industry. And it's,
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it's when we look at all these things that were meant to simplify,
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we've almost gone back, not gone back to where we started,
15:24
but we've shifted where before the infrastructure person got the majority of the
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time, now it's more or less people doing, I guess, more productive things or,
15:32
or, or doing things that progress the, the, the business, right?
15:35
Like when you're talking DevOps,
15:36
when you're talking things that co you know what I'm saying? So, yeah,
15:42
the, the complexity's almost shifted, but it's still there.
15:46
Does that make sense where I'm going with that? I guess what take on that.
15:49
Yeah. Yeah. So here , um, so,
15:52
so our company and AWS and all these companies,
15:56
we didn't make it simpler.
15:59
We just made it, you know,
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easier for you to pay for and buy,
16:07
like inside our data centers or inside AWS,
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there's still, you know,
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massive complexity and they, and that's why look,
16:18
AWS experts are really expensive, like $200,000 a year.
16:23
Okay. Well, why are they so expensive if it's simple to use?
16:28
Cause that doesn't make any sense to me. And so, um,
16:33
the, you know, people that move to the cloud, so to speak, yeah, you're right.
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They don't need their storage and network hypervisor expert.
16:40
They need AWS DevOps experts. They need, they need here. Here's,
16:44
here's a whole new field, which blows my mind, Finn ops,
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Finn ops. Okay. As soon as you need fin ups,
16:53
things have gotten outta control. If I need,
16:56
if I need somebody to manage the financials of the operations,
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this has not gotten easier. This has gotten just more expensive,
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cuz you can't afford AFIN ops unless you're spending more money than you think
17:10
you should spend. It's like it's in, in the it's definitional. Right? And so,
17:15
so all of these, all of these approaches are,
17:18
have been changes in business model, not changes in the architecture.
17:23
It's kind of like kinda like, you know, windows versus dos.
17:29
You, you and I are the same age, you know, right. About all the audience here.
17:33
But you know, before windows,
17:35
you really needed to know what tech you were doing.
17:37
If you were gonna use dos in a computer and you were a computer guy and then
17:42
windows said, wait a minute,
17:44
it commoditized and simplified the use of a computer.
17:49
And nobody's done that with the cloud or virtualization.
17:53
It's just gotten, well now I need a pH. I mean, now I need a pH ops person.
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Now I need DevOps people.
17:59
Now I need somebody to manage my contracts and my compliance and my auditors.
18:03
It's, it's gotten it's, we'll never get there. The future workloads and the,
18:07
and, and,
18:08
and the mass digitization of everything is gonna require so much
18:13
infrastructure that it has to be 10 times simpler
18:18
and 10 times easier. And there's a great analogy, phones,
18:24
you know, in 19, whatever 20 something,
18:29
the whole world couldn't have a phone because we would need another two worlds
18:33
of operators, right? The paradigm didn't work.
18:37
You couldn't have a human take, a cable and plug here and plug,
18:40
Hey here so that Bob and I could talk, it didn't work.
18:45
And so all the mathematical models said, phones will never, ever,
18:49
ever be ubiquitous. And then the chip came out and changed everything.
18:54
And now we all have a couple. And so I, I,
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I know this sounds really crazy, but right here in Michigan,
19:01
I feel like with this software, we have a paradigm shifting opportunity.
19:06
And that's why I came out retirement, got off my sailboat.
19:09
And I'm sitting here with you. .
19:11
Do you think duo helped get, you know,
19:15
cause Michigan was always a pretty good bed for tech, um,
19:19
and then became like the shift where Randy, when did we talk to,
19:24
was it a Ford engineer or whatever? That's basically said,
19:26
we're turning into a software company.
19:27
We're not gonna be an auto company in 30 years, whatever. It was a bold,
19:31
bold prediction. Uh, it was probably two, three years ago.
19:33
It was at two or three. I felt like it was a longer time ago, but yeah, COVID,
19:37
it's like time more. Yeah. Um, exactly right. But like, you know,
19:41
getting into, um, completely lost. Oh. But like the,
19:45
then duo comes along and it's the first billion dollar valuation gets bought by
19:49
Cisco. And it's like, well, I'll be damned Ann Arbor. You did it. You know,
19:53
you got Detroit on the map. Um, why do you think?
19:56
Not necessarily we get a bad rap, but at least like, you know, you, you hit it.
20:00
The nail on the head of this was on the coast. You would've never got a blink.
20:03
Um, why do you think that, is it just, is it culture? Is it, you know,
20:07
they think we're still a rust belt.
20:10
I dunno. It's a little bit, uh, beyond my, my, my pay grade, but I, I,
20:14
I think that, um,
20:16
there's a long game here and, um,
20:21
I think governor Snyder said it, you know, sort of Michigan 2.0 kind of thing.
20:25
A little bit sort of,
20:27
I bet Ford has five times more soft engineers than
20:31
duo ever had employees.
20:34
I wouldn't doubt.
20:34
And duo and duo went for two and a half billion and Ford was worth 30.
20:39
So how come Ford is only worth, you know, seven, eight times more and they,
20:44
you know,
20:45
they have two or three times the software engineers then duo has employees.
20:49
Well, and then Uber's worth more than think.
20:51
All around the world.
20:52
Yeah. Yeah. And then Uber's worth more than the big three combined it's like,
20:55
and they don't own anything. Well, now that didn't.
20:58
Yeah. Yeah. So I, I think that, um, um, some of that is,
21:03
you know, sort of mega trend mega mega economics that I think, you know, the,
21:08
the venture capital industry, I think is in for a little bit of a, um,
21:12
a shake up,
21:13
I think there's 1.4 trillion of net asset value
21:18
on venture capitalist balance sheets in America right now.
21:20
And there's no darn way all their startups together with a trillion for,
21:24
there's just, no. Now if.
21:26
You look at, if you look at stocks right now, your traditional old stocks,
21:31
your Ford, your GM, your GE,
21:33
and you can lump riving in there because they're, you know, they're,
21:36
they're in that the auto space, uh, that don't let them hear.
21:39
I said that they'll probably get mad at me. Um, but those stocks, you know,
21:42
rolls Royce, you can get for a buck of share these days. You know,
21:46
these are like iconic old American brands. Like, you know,
21:49
the airlines are all in the fifteens, right. You have, you know,
21:53
carnival cruise lines, that's in the toilet right now, but then you have,
21:57
you know, your companies that quote unquote don't do anything, um, you know,
22:01
the hundreds and the thousand, you know, uh, just, it it's,
22:05
it's funny how it all shifted from like old,
22:07
old school to these software or these, like, you know,
22:11
I don't wanna say ghost companies, but you know what I mean?
22:13
They're almost like, you know, we lease, you know,
22:15
Airbnbs of the world that don't own anything technically.
22:19
Yeah. Well, I think, I think that's, I, I think at the end of the day, you know,
22:23
and, and I think this was actually the right way to go. It's,
22:27
it's a capitalist way is, you know, the customer's always right. And wherever,
22:31
wherever you get the most customers willing to spend money with, with you, for,
22:35
you know, whether it's a platform or a car or a ticket to a game or whatever,
22:41
you know, the ultimate goal really,
22:43
really is about trying to please as many people as possible and,
22:47
and get your hand deep to their pocket as possible. And, and, you know,
22:52
so, but it's really hard and sort of academic to figure out, you know,
22:56
why is Airbnb worth more than Marriott? I, I mean, right. I, I, I mean,
23:02
it's sort of, it's sort of for the capitalist to, to, to, to decide, but I, I,
23:06
I think that, you know, just to get sort of philosophical, I,
23:09
I think the opportunities grow don't shrink over time. And I that's, that's,
23:14
that's something that, um, I believe strong is it's a world of,
23:18
it's a world of resource. It's a world of abundance, not scarcity and sure.
23:23
And, um, so, you know, there's gonna be more of this.
23:27
So getting back to, to verge and getting back to like complexity, I had a, uh,
23:31
I got to speak today in front of 50 sales reps from one of the,
23:34
the big three cloud service providers.
23:37
And we were talking on our point of view on multi-cloud
23:41
and didn't know if it was a trap or not. Cause it was, you know,
23:45
one of the providers and, uh, but we came in there being as dead,
23:49
honest as we could. And they said, listen, most companies,
23:52
if you are with one of the big three cloud providers and you have, you know,
23:57
T office 365, or Microsoft 365, and you have Salesforce you're multicloud.
24:02
And he is like,
24:04
if you'd look at it from a cloud service provider perspective in multi-cloud,
24:08
he goes, it gets complex, cuz you, again,
24:10
it goes back to what you were saying before you need the AWS
24:15
expert, you need the GCP expert,
24:17
you need the Azure expert to find what person that knows all three they're
24:21
costing you three, you know, it's three,
24:23
400,000 a year to get someone like that.
24:25
So they brought the complexity back now.
24:27
So like everyone's talking multi-cloud and a lot of us don't see it
24:32
just because of that, what, you know, what's your, uh, you know,
24:35
being in the business, what's your take on?
24:38
I, I would find multi-cloud difficult, but, but comfortable. I mean,
24:43
cuz now you've got, um, but let me get back. Let me, let me, let me,
24:47
let me answer your, your Salesforce, you know, Salesforce is, I'm not sure,
24:52
but I think it's, I think it's hosted a lot in Microsoft Azure now. So,
24:57
you know, you might be, you know, you know, if you're, if you're,
24:59
if you're office 365 and, and XYZ SaaS company,
25:03
you might still be all Azure, you know? Sure. And so who knows and, and,
25:08
you know, use,
25:09
who knows what use HubSpot tech target or all these tools everywhere.
25:12
I do think that I think here, I think,
25:15
I think this is what they're all trying to do.
25:17
Every cloud provider to me is like an operating system.
25:20
And they're trying to get you to design your architecture or environment.
25:23
Your work process is your application.
25:25
Everything in as many tentacles as them as, as, as, as you can, as they can.
25:30
So that it's really hard to leave. It's stickiness is everything right? And,
25:35
and, and so at that same time, you know,
25:39
if you wanna go to multi, if you really wanna make use of a,
25:42
of a big hyper hyperscale cloud provider,
25:46
you sort of need to use their services that are proprietary.
25:50
You know, if you really wanna make use of Azure, you want to hit a,
25:53
you want to interact with your office 365 environment for your company,
25:58
you know, because that's sort of where the benefit lies. And so that,
26:01
that means you can't just pick up that application and move it to Amazon. Right?
26:05
And so they're all trying to get tentacles and, and keep retention,
26:10
um, because the one thing they all know and you know, and I know,
26:14
and Randy knows nobody is ever going to use less of this stuff.
26:19
Exactly.
26:20
And so I'm willing to overspend to get you to build
26:25
roots into my system today, cuz six years from now, those roots are so thick.
26:30
You can't go anywhere. So, and the cash are unbelievable. So.
26:34
So talk to me about that deployment. I'm just in my head,
26:37
let's say you're in an environment you have, you know,
26:41
you have your colo here where you have a couple stacks, you know, you,
26:44
you basically built everything out to workloads. Some workloads are better.
26:48
Local.
26:48
Some workloads are better in the cloud and you've used everything at exhaustion,
26:53
right? You have stuff in GCP of stuff in micro, you know, you have,
26:56
you have spread across all the platforms you come into play, I guess,
27:01
walk me through what, what that looks like from a, not just an architecture,
27:05
but, but from a, from a business, from, from,
27:07
from a complete holistic lens of where you kind of over arc everything.
27:13
Yeah. So if you have a standard sort of windows, Linux, workload, you know,
27:17
whatever, whatever you have and,
27:18
and you're not using custom services with Azure and AWS and so forth,
27:23
you pick up your workload. You, you, you, well,
27:27
you get some commodity servers, you install the,
27:29
our software on those commodity servers. We're an operating system and we're,
27:34
we're, we're now your sort of own, you know, your own private cloud,
27:38
you own your own cloud and you drag and drop those workloads
27:43
over to your now verge iCloud.
27:46
It can run on servers in your building.
27:49
It can run on bare metal servers at AWS. It doesn't care.
27:53
It just needs to be able to be installed as an operating system. And our, our,
27:57
our customers are, um, they're experiencing about 30 to,
28:02
uh, I'm sorry, 70 to 80% cost reduction.
28:06
And there's just so much agility and things that,
28:09
that are impossible to do. You,
28:12
you cannot do the things we do,
28:15
no matter how much you spend with these, with these other, um, um,
28:19
massive cloud providers,
28:21
you can't snapshot a 100 terabyte virtual data center with a hundred VMs
28:26
in, you know, 75 milliseconds,
28:28
click on it and start it and launch every single one of them anywhere. Anyhow,
28:32
anyway. And the only way you can do that is because of our, of our,
28:37
uh, uh, couple of, we have a few architectural advantages, way, way deep down,
28:42
where we store data, move data and de-dupe it and encapsulate data.
28:47
So, so at the end of the day, our customers are, you know,
28:51
compliance is easier.
28:53
Costs are way lower and a generalist it and a guy like
28:58
me, you don't need that network storage hypervisor, um,
29:03
expert,
29:03
because we built in all the machine learning and everything you need that,
29:07
that sort of replaces that human that is sitting there optimizing your storage
29:11
or tweaking your hypervisor or managing patch schedules across 12 different
29:16
vendors. All of that, all of that goes away. So our,
29:20
our north star Bob is to simplify it, period,
29:24
get it out of the public cloud guys where you have no idea what it's gonna cost,
29:28
or it's gonna be expensive. You can't snapshot things. You can't move things.
29:33
It's just so complicated. I just, I mean,
29:37
it makes me lose hair when I watch these guys and what they have to do to, to,
29:42
to move workloads around. It's just, um, so that that's the life.
29:46
That's the life we.
29:47
Deliver. So are you an addon then to, I mean,
29:49
are you re not a replacement for public cloud, but are you more or less? Uh,
29:54
but you are, but you're not, I'm trying to.
29:57
No, we are AB we're an alternative.
30:00
We're an alternative to VMware, to Nutanix, to public cloud.
30:05
We are absolutely an alternative to those things.
30:07
Yeah. Cause it's funny. We all get raised on, uh,
30:10
any cloud or we get raised on, you know, hybrid it. Um,
30:14
and then we kind of like our flavor, right? It's you know, you like, it's like,
30:19
like border Chevy, like you're not picking wrong. You're just, you, you,
30:23
you're in a blank in one brand versus another,
30:25
but this almost like takes all that away where you like nothing, like not,
30:30
not saying you don't like nothing, but you know what I mean? It's like,
30:33
you let me do, let me run my business and don't let me,
30:35
don't let that get in the way.
30:37
Yeah. We, I, I, I, this sounds a little extreme,
30:39
but we think of ourselves like the Tesla, you know,
30:42
how many mechanics you need to, to touch your car over a seven year period?
30:47
Um, more than one, I don't need any to touch my Tesla. Yeah. I mean, there's,
30:52
there's nothing there. I put fluid in it and that's it.
30:55
I don't even go to the darn gas station. I just plug it in when I get home. And,
30:59
and there's like, I don't know, 42 parts versus 1200.
31:02
It takes 80 hours to make an electric car like Tesla versus 700. I mean,
31:07
it's just, it's just, it's a, it's a paradigm shift. And guess what?
31:12
I get up software upgrades every 60, 90 days,
31:14
I bring a whole bunch of cool new features to it. And guess what?
31:16
I don't have to do anything. It just happens. My wife Beamer,
31:20
they call her up say, Hey, you gotta bring your car in.
31:22
We gotta do a software upgrade. She sits in the waiting room for three hours.
31:25
Like, what's up with that? I don't have any.
31:27
Of that. Did you ever think in your lifetime,
31:29
there'd be an auto company that made that as much of a stink as Tesla has?
31:32
Like yeah. I thought it was literally,
31:35
I thought it would be impossible to like have a new car starter. No,
31:39
cause this get, get in the market and actually have a name.
31:42
Yes. Well, Bob, I know this is gonna sound really crazy, but I,
31:47
you know, people tell me this, Jan,
31:49
you're going against V you're going against AWS, Google, Azure. Um,
31:54
all these multi-billion dollar global companies that have way more capital than
31:57
you do. And I feel not, not that, not that I deserve this association,
32:02
but I feel a little like Elon Musk can Tesla, 15 years ago, he's a startup,
32:05
you know, with mm-hmm and he's,
32:07
he's got drawings for an electric car and he's got maybe one car made and he
32:12
sold a couple hundred of them. I remember seeing him in Hawaii in, in oh six,
32:15
you know, and, and um, and everybody thought he was crazy,
32:20
cuz he was about to take on all these behemoth that all in the world.
32:23
And now he's worth more than the top, you know, three combined. Yeah. I mean,
32:26
yeah. And, and basically he made it simpler.
32:30
You're not gonna go to space on me. Are you?
32:33
Uh, I may already be there. I don't know. It's.
32:35
there's whiteboards in space. No, I'm kidding. Um,
32:40
so what I mean what's uh,
32:43
I don't wanna say what defines success because that's such an arbitrary stupid
32:47
question, but I mean, you know, do you wanna be looked upon in, in, in two,
32:50
three years, is, is, you know, one of the flavors like who are we picking right.
32:55
When we're going to market, you know, cause right now it's, it's really,
32:58
it's really for, if you look at it, I don't wanna call Oracle,
33:01
you know what I mean? IBM that's a little bit, yeah. Yeah.
33:03
It's more on the enterprise side, but right now there's, you know,
33:07
two flavors with a third maybe with goo, you know, Google in there,
33:10
but you know, yeah.
33:12
Well, I, you know, I don't, I don't, I, I think,
33:15
I think we are designed for something different. So, you know, they,
33:20
they're, they're, they're very,
33:21
very successful companies doing a lot of great things and there's a ton of
33:24
workloads that are going there and gonna go there. And, and, and so, but,
33:27
but there are, there's a whole batch of computing that's coming down the pike,
33:32
that it's gonna be very difficult for those both business models and technical
33:36
architectures. And those are two different problems that, that,
33:39
that those hyperscalers have actually that,
33:41
that are gonna re require a whole new thing.
33:44
And the advantage we have is we have, um,
33:47
technology that is an architectural advantage over what they have.
33:51
And it's mature. I'm not a startup with the, the, with the,
33:54
with the technology and the product. We're not a startup,
33:56
but the company's early stage. And second of all,
33:59
my business model is not designed around trying to entrap you and
34:04
keep you and make you so that you have. So I've,
34:09
you have so many tentacles built into me. You can't leave to me.
34:12
Tho their business models are like ransomware.
34:17
Once you move your application to me and AWS knows this better than we all do.
34:22
Once you move your application to me and build your tentacles to me,
34:25
you can't leave without paying me a ton of money or somebody, a ton of money,
34:30
cuz you gotta rewrite everything. That's the definition of ran somewhere.
34:35
The only difference is I didn't have to pay to encrypt your money and I made
34:37
money doing it.
34:38
You're not wrong, you're not wrong. Right?
34:41
And so that's ransomware. And, and I feel like,
34:45
you know, you gotta like democratize and put,
34:49
put the owner of the data back in control of their asset.
34:52
And if you didn't keep it complicated, you could do that.
34:55
So my vision ultimate dream here is to deliver that value to the world.
35:01
And it's funny, you look at the stacks now, even on the data and analytics side,
35:06
you have everything from, you know, Kafka, data and motion.
35:09
You got your containers, you have your privileged data management. Now your,
35:13
you have your DUP now for data. Um, and then you have your, your,
35:18
your dashboarding and your BI at the end of it. And you know,
35:21
then you have analytics tools all in between it. And it's like,
35:24
you've just created again, another complex thing,
35:27
which didn't really need to be that complex.
35:29
We're talking about a piece of data and how does it translate to the business?
35:33
And now we, we have to architect this massive. Um,
35:36
I don't wanna call it bloated, but it's, you know,
35:38
cause that's what I do for a living, but it's, it's bloated. Yeah. It's bloated.
35:42
Yeah.
35:42
It's bloated. And, and we used to say this at online tech and Ottava,
35:47
and I apologize to all the service providers out there,
35:49
but the reality is the complexity. It's almost a self-fulfilling prophecy.
35:54
If you're a service provider,
35:56
complexity is a good thing because your job is
36:01
to simplify it to the enterprise. So that's your value add?
36:03
There's not a lot of innovation there. There's just sort of, you know,
36:07
orchestration. I have the experts, I've got the capital to buy and,
36:11
and build the data centers and put all the equipment in place. And so, and so,
36:15
so you don't really benefit from, from,
36:17
from making things simpler for the very end user, because the, to me,
36:23
the only thing that is justifiably complex in a business
36:28
or in any entity is figuring out exactly what your customer wants.
36:33
Mm-hmm, , that's complex and everything else should be simple.
36:37
Sure. Accounting, accounting today is complicated,
36:41
but we have gap. So at the end of the day,
36:43
there's a lot of software that can do almost every small business can do
36:48
their own accounting. It's funny.
36:50
Almost no small business can do their own cloud computing. Not.
36:53
Exactly, exactly funny yesterday. I, um,
36:56
went to the lines game with family and I had my 22 year old cousin who just got
36:59
his first sales job and he wants to, he gets right in my face,
37:02
wants to pick my brain and I go, you gotta sell two things, man,
37:05
simplicity or price, and you don't wanna sell on price.
37:08
Cause then you're just commodity. Yes.
37:09
And make it easier to do business with you or make it the product that you're
37:12
simpler and that, you know, everything you're saying, that's funny. It's how,
37:15
how much it rings. True. Um, break. Yeah. Get rid of too bad.
37:19
We had to go see the lions. But other than that, you know, so what keeps you,
37:23
what keeps you, I'm gonna, I'll kind of end on this,
37:25
but what keeps you in Detroit? Is this, you know, is this home, do you think,
37:28
uh, you'd get more eyeballs if you're out in Frisco or what's uh,
37:31
I guess it doesn't matter these days. Eh.
37:34
Good question. Um, I would get, honestly,
37:37
we there's some things that would be a lot easier out in San Francisco, um,
37:41
cost of living would not be one of them. Yeah. um,
37:44
we do hire people. Look, my, my senior vice president of sales,
37:47
Chris Lehman's outta San Francisco cuz you know, Silicon valley and Boston,
37:52
Miami area, they, they have, they have the best of the best.
37:55
That's one thing Michigan really struggles with is go to market expertise.
37:59
We've gotta solve that.
38:00
We do not have that here very much with all due respect to the really good sales
38:04
and marketing people here in the area. We don't have enough of you. Um,
38:07
but what keeps me here is, um, actually I'm I'm I'm in Ann Arbor. Uh,
38:12
although I'm a fan of Detroit, I love the great likes. I mean I spend,
38:16
I spend my nasty winter months down in Sarasota at our house,
38:20
but um, you know, it's, it's not that expensive.
38:24
We've got a lot of fresh water. The weather's unbelievable in the summers,
38:28
at least in Ann Arbor, the schools are fantastic. I mean they're really good.
38:33
And, and so, uh,
38:36
it's a great place to be and um, so,
38:41
uh, I'm not going anywhere.
38:43
Well, we're like we, we're glad to have you here. And uh,
38:46
like what look forward to, uh, we gotta get together soon. It's long overdo.
38:49
I know we just caught up not too long ago, but uh,
38:51
we gotta get little face to face now that we can again.
38:54
Yes. Love to do it. Bob, let me know.
38:56
When, so we can find you on LinkedIn, uh,
38:58
Y with a Y and uh, verge.io, if you wanna read more,
39:03
but uh, sincerely appreciate the insight and uh, love telling the story and,
39:07
and, and, uh, you know, look forward to seeing what's next with you guys.
39:10
Thanks so much, Bob. Let me know if I ever can.
39:12
Help you. Absolutely. Thanks. Thanks Cindy. So thanks.
39:15
We're gonna wrap things up for episode 4 45 on behalf of Bob and Randy,
39:19
do us all a favor, drink up your drinks, get your phone numbers.
39:21
You don't gotta go home. You just gotta get the hell outta here.
39:23
See you next week. Drive careful beat it. Bye. Every.