Narrator: Live from London, England, it's theCUBE covering AWS Summit London, 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hello, and welcome to the AWS Summit, here in London's ExCeL center. This is theCUBE. Here's my co-host Dave Vellante, and also now we're joined by Prashanth Chandrasekar, who is the senior vice-president and general manager at Rackspace. Now Prashanth, you're here to talk about really the next generation of cloud services. What are they? And what are you communicating to your partners here at the conference? Absolutely. Thank you Susannah and Dave for having me back on the show, big fan of theCUBE. Really, I think Rackspace, next generation cloud services are absolutely foundational to what we do for our customers, and so ultimately what we're trying to deliver is a very utility-based model of services, very similar to how Amazon thinks about the cloud and what they've effectively lead over the vast many years. So, I think the world, we believe the world of traditional IT services, of large monolithic contracts where you've got traditional SIs that are going and working with companies to say, let us transform you with digital transformation and kind of outsource services, I think those days are effectively gone and they're dead. From our perspective, customers are on this journey from one platform to another. They're moving from traditional IT workloads to the public cloud. There's that hybrid journey that's under way and we've talked about how Amazon has really acknowledged that through its work in Outposts etc, but the idea is for us to say, listen, customers are on a very bespoke journey, everyone's on a different journey, individual journey. Let's meet them exactly where they are in that journey, where they're at right now moving traditional IT workloads to the public cloud. So, let's go and architect and deploy them and migrate them based on best practices that we've gained from thousands of these engagements. Or, if they're further along and actually they need to manage and operate these in a very container-centric or Kubernetes-centric world, we can help them there too. Or, if they're already several years in and they see their costs getting hard to control because they've got sprawl within the organization, we could help then with cost-optimization and governance, and all this is enabled through what we called a service blocks model at Rackspace, which really stitches together various of these piece parts, if you will, of services across the infrastructure, security, applications, across the full stack. So, that's the idea. So, how would you categorize first off, the Rackspace strategy? People remember you guys catalyzed and incubated the open stack movement, which was kind of a Hail Mary against AWS. And then others chimed in. And then, you realize, "Wow, we're gonna step away". It was great open-source project, amazing. And now, you partnering with Amazon. What's the strategy, how would you describe that? If we've learned anything over the past 10, 20 years and Rackspace has been around for now, 21 years, that it's an extremely dynamic market and it's driven by customers, ultimately and their pace of change and so on. So when we started as a company, 20 years ago, we started a managed hosting business and services is the foundation element of what we do, and support and expertise for customers, enabled by technology. And so, that really helped us take us through that first 10 years of our journey. And then the cloud movement, enabled a lot by Amazon, really took off and where it was really a mainstream consideration, or an early consideration, I should say, it's more mainstream now, obviously. But, back then, so we could beat it with the open-stack public cloud business. And then, very soon, we realized our customers were all also operating in Amazon, and so, that really said, "Listen", we've always historically said, "Let's go where our customers wanna go." And we've always been a services technology services company at heart. So it doesn't make a lot of sense for us to move away from that DNA and that ethos. So, it's no different from customers saying at a high level, Windows or Linux, we can't have a very dogmatic view about one or the other, we just have to say, "Listen, what do customers want to work on?" based on what their various factors that they take into consideration. So, no different here. Platforms are just platforms. They're choices that customers have, and so we started with saying if customers want help on Amazon, they're still asking us for it. Let's go and partner with Amazon to do exactly that. So that's exactly what we did in 2015 to partner up. So, where do you fit in that value chain? How do you help customers and where does Rackspace add unique value? I think ultimately, there's various elements of value along the way and I've described the service blocks model as the way in which we really bring it together. So customers are either looking for help to get to the cloud and they're asking us "What is the best way "for me to get there given my current state?" and so there's a deep assessment that's done from a... We have a lot of expertise at Rackspace, over a thousand AWS-certified experts and certifications. So, we bring those experts to the customer, talk about where they're trying to go. Hey, you're trying to really reduce your mean time to recovery, you're trying to increase your release cycles at a certain rate that's very aggressive, operate with a DevOps principle and mindset. All those things are the objectives the customers have, and then we then enable them to go and say "Okay, given all that, here are the workloads "we would enable you to move or to build from scratch." Bring our entire set of services, with their infrastructure, security, or application services. Start with a value-added set of workloads, and then build from there, effectively prove the case and then move on. Do you think the very fact that Amazon Web Services' growth has been so rapid, and that there are so many new services coming online, every month, that's actually helping you, because people need help to navigate? Indeed, that's a phenomenal point. Ultimately, part of the reason why customers in our install base were reaching out to us and saying, "Hey, Rackspace, you've done a phenomenal job "helping us in our first evolution of our journey. "Can you help us now on this new world, "where it's actually quite complicated?" These 16-hundred features on average, or 14-hundred features on average, are being launched by Amazon on a yearly basis. And that's just, despite what we hear in the headlines, where cloud-first companies and us, the startups of today, are absolutely leveraging Lambda out of the gate, or containers out of the gate. But there's a whole host of companies that are going through this massive digital disruption, trying to compete with these startups, that need a lot of help to re-skill their workforce, to change the way they think about process within their organizations, between their business, development and technology and operations teams. And then, ultimately, how do they actually build out a much more agile way of responding to customers. So, that work requires a company like Rackspace to come and help them navigate through that really, really large set of features. I suppose there is a space that you certainly didn't forsee 10 years ago? Prashanth: Oh, absolutely, no. That's what's so dynamic about this space, right? I think that nobody would have predicted, even today, we're seeing tons of momentum with concepts that were very nascent not only a few years ago. So, Kubernetes, as a concept, almost every one of our AWS customers at Rackspace are what we call fanatical AWS, is absolutely looking for help on Kubernetes. And so, when we think about Docker a few years ago, and Docker Enterprise, and we think about Kubernetes, and there was that battle. Today, the battle has been won. Kubernetes is pretty much the de-facto orchestration engine. So, nobody could have predicted that a couple of years ago-- And tomorrow it'll be something else! Exactly, so it's fascinating, and that's why customers need help navigating all those choices. And you guys are the experts. You carry people through the journey. You've mentioned Hybrid before, customers want choice. Even though Amazon wants everybody to put their data in their cloud, customers sometimes have multi-clouds. Absolutely, so Hybrid and multi, I think is becoming a lot more, even Amazon, is very much acknowledging that the big opportunity is in Hybrid Cloud, because if you think about where we are in the technology adoption curve, and the trillion dollars of spend that ultimately gonna move there's no doubt that it's a cloud-first world or destination is the cloud. But the vast majority of the workloads exist in traditional IT. So, how do we take that Hybrid moment, and Outposts is a great acknowledgement of that, and so they're very aggressively investing, we're investing with them and helping our customers along their journey, effectively. Prashanth Chandrasekar, thank you very much for talking to us, Prashanth there from Rackspace. And my co-host Dave Vellante has been helping us navigate what's happening here at the AWS web summit. I'm Susannah Streeter, and thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat techno music)