The Exchanges

Q If you got a few months out of it, that's pretty damn good, actually, right?

A Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. A few months of my phone calls, everyone's happy. And then I come back from Iceland, and my voice mail's filled up, my inbox is filled up, and people are threatening to see me, because this thing's not working, and they really need it. And that's when I sat down and thought, hang on, what's going on here? And that's when I realized that a cloud is simply the maturation of technology. The way you made technology work before was you had smart people to make it just work. That Ubuntu server wasn't going to stay working unless it's someone to keep it working. Now you buy it from Google for eight cents an hour. Now the problem is not making it work, but picking the right one. And that's a supply chain problem. And that's what we do. We see it, we're ERP for people with a supply chain of raw materials of cloud. It's filled very early days. So a lot of it's like with SCP in the early days, it's just reporting on what you're buying. But the more advanced users are using, not just to Making choices, but getting down to a billion materials for each individual customer, not an average, but an actual.

AI assessment note: “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. A few months of my phone calls, everyone's happy.”

Q Okay, is it, so, I mean, walk me through that, right? A complicated pricing model can be a good thing or a bad thing. It can mean you're not leaving any money on the table, but it can also be really hard to explain. How do you deal with that?

A Well, there are two modes for cloud cost management. First mode is reporting. So I'm reporting we charge you a percentage of the spending and that works because generally you're growing your cloud and deployment and we're helping you make sure you're not wasting any money. But in the second mode, you're optimizing it. So you've kind of moved to the cloud, you've got the hang of it, and now every day you want to take advantage of Moore's law, which means moving aggressively between the different parts. Well, in that mode, we're adding value. We're not just doing reporting. We're actually reducing your bill typically by 20 to 30% a year on a unit cost. Our bill personally at cloudability in February was the same as it was in April, 2015, for a business of 11 times bigger. So in that mode, we have to charge you a bit more like regular software. And it's based on the kind of modules.

AI assessment note: “Well, there are two modes for cloud cost management. First mode is reporting.”

Q is, you could argue, you could plot the volume of kind of cloud spend over time and make an argument for the size of your market over time. Um, what do you want to do with the company over the, over, over, you know, many, many years? Is it something you take public, you stay private, you just keep getting more spend, you launch new products. What do you do?

A Many years ago, I started video games. And about 20 years later, I saw a visual effect in a game on a playstation with my kids. There was something I invented in the mid-eighties. Very simple effect. You just close the screen like this. And it gave me tremendous satisfaction. It's something I built in the eighties and still being used 20 years later. Um, the people who join Cloud Ability are about improving the way that cloud affects technology and technology affects the world. Um, we, we are thinking about a capital structure that takes us through the next recession. We think that optimization is going to become mandatory, like virtualization did in the O two, O three, O four recession, and we're looking forward to what will we continue to make compute more efficient. Um, with all that data we collect, we have got a mountain of data. Uh, we think that there, uh, once it becomes clear, the way the cloud is done, is it serverless, is it containers, what makes it, of, of, of infrastructure to containers, to power some things that happens. We think there's an opportunity to roll up the business. And become like a broader compute platform. But if you're trying to do all things to all people today, you're going to lose in every vertical. You've got to win in one vertical and then combine the winning vertical, the winning solutions. And that happens when the industry matures. So some…

AI assessment note: “sometime in the next five years or mature, we will probably be an IPO.”

Q That's interesting. Um, and nothing in between. You're either smart, you're either smart or you're cool, right?

A Well, there's a lot of people who are early on cloud, and for them, a simple reporting tool is pretty straightforward, and also a tool that might be oriented towards a more DevOps way of thinking, where a human is picking from a list of a million options just for instances alone. Yeah, a human might have a religion that this particular one is good, we let the data do it. And that's the background we've got in our think set team. We're all like big data, some of us are ad tech, we just let the data do the talking, and so we have to be very accurate. We processed two exabytes of data last year. And to get these very accurate, we call it the true cost platform, because we automate our recommendations. Our competitors put a human in between. And if you're kind of still dealing with treating your service like pets, instead of like cattle, you kind of give them names and put them down their neck, then that's good enough.

AI assessment note: “Well, there's a lot of people who are early on cloud”