Hey channel insiders, I'm your host Katie Bavoso and welcome to this episode of partner POV brought to you by Rafé Systems. Platform teams face mounting challenges managing data heavy workloads across complex cloud environments. RAF simplifies this with a platform that delivers consistency, governance, and cost efficiency at scale. And through its deep partnership with AWS, Rafé has become a leading choice for enterprises accelerating cloud adoption.
Here to explain why is Mohan Atraa, chief product officer at Rafé Systems. Welcome Moan. >> Hey, thank you Katie. Uh really a pleasure to be here today. >> So great to have you and thank you so much for joining me. I think the best place for us to get started is to address those who are just learning about Rafé for the first time. Why don't you give them a brief overview of what you do and what kinds of cloud environments you serve? >> Oh, sure. Absolutely.
Maybe a easy way to think about Rafi is let's let's actually look at this from AWS's lens, right? Because many of the customers who are familiar with AWS, I mean it's an amazing solution, right? Like especially with managed services like Bedrock, SageMaker, which a lot of people love and use for building Genai applications with leading foundation models. Now the issue that many customers face is they're also doing things on premises and they sometimes do that because of data residency requirements.
They have regulatory issues that they had to comply with or simply they have cost issues. Now organizations find themselves in this situation and they are kind of operating in a hybrid mode which is you know many enterprises or many of them are living in multicloud environments right like AWS Azure and GCP and maybe even some on-prem stuff and maybe just to add on a little bit of u a spice to it maybe they even have an edge deployment or if you are a large you know classified operations you may have air gap setups so when you have this kind of complex heterogeneous environment.
How do you unify everything across this diverse infrastructures and and this is kind of where Rafa plays. So at its core we are nothing more than an infrastructure orchestration and workflow automation platform. We are kind of helping enterprises and service providers transform this heterogeneous compute. Bring it all together and transform that into a selfservice consumption engine that users can use. >> Very well put and very simple especially with that last explanation.
Thank you so much for that. So how does Rafé's platform differ from not only native tools, native cloud tools but competing platforms as well? And what makes your platform more effective? So maybe a way to think about this is if if you are an organization that's 100% AWS, you absolutely should use the native tools because it's it's optimized for the particular cloud. The way to think about this is of course is very cloud specific. So the tools that are designed for AWS are very AWS specific.
Now what we talked about are organizations that live across multiple environments. So the tooling there does not port over to the uh other environment that they have and there are many organizations where they have to stay on premises even though they use a cloud for certain data residency requirements they have to also have on premises or you know it's actually getting uh kind of complicated now in a in a complex geopolitical environment where it's become more acute now where people are you know more interested in keeping their data u in in their environments in their countries.
So we help abstract this complexity across this environment and these are ideal use cases for Rafé. See if you're an organization that finds yourself in this kind of a situation Raf is a great fit compared to something like a native native cloud tools. It's not just me saying it. If you look at industry analysts like Giga Ohm, we've been consistently ranked an outperformer. We even have been called out by organizations like Accenture which are pervasive with enterprises and the large organizations like Nvidia where they're particularly called us out for AI based solutions for efficient self-service operations for end users.
So what do we do for these people? See if I am an enterprise maybe a a easy way to think about this is if you use a solution like Rafé your outcome is significantly accelerated. So like faster deployments a better total cost of ownership because you know the hybrid otherwise can be very complicated. You otherwise will land up having like a team one for AWS a team two for onrem and and now you have like two governance domains that you have to uh deal with.
So we eliminate this complexity. So this is where we work extensially extensively with organizations like AWS where they know that organizations are multicloud. They're hybrid and we work in the field with them because in the end you want to make sure the customer is happy and that's the most important thing. >> Thank you so much. A follow-up question to that. How quickly can a new enterprise get up and running with Rafé compared to building maybe a do-it-yourself Kubernetes stack in-house from scratch themselves? >> So maybe if you want to break it down into into maybe two types of of organizations, there might be some organizations that maybe started with the native tooling and they already have let's call it brownfield. they have a bunch of assets already and then let's say they are you know moving into a second cloud or moving into on premises.
So that's scenario one and scenario two is green field where the customer says hey I'm just starting from scratch I got nothing I'm you know starting from zero help me out here so in both scenarios we have kind of purpose-built our platform to to ensure that for both scenarios the onboarding is frictionless now I don't want to hold back the suspense is typically we're talking hours right organizations have gone from nothing to a production grade environment in hours and we usually tell people start small and then build on it and expand.
I mean nobody likes a big bang because there's a learning curve with anything. Uh it's like getting a new car. It takes some time to get used to it. So even for complex hybrid setups like spanning AWS and maybe an on-prem environment, you know, managing large fleets of infrastructure with complex enduser workflows. I mean, you can be up and running in in less than a week even for those kind of scenarios. >> Wow. Well, with that in mind, I'd love to hear a real life success story.
Can you share a real world example of how a Rafé customer reduced costs or accelerated time to market with your platform? >> Maybe a good good example to maybe take is is actually one of my favorite customers and to work closely with them. They are in the biotech space and as you can imagine biotech is highly regulated and this is an organization that's global. So they are not only they not only have to be compliant with the US laws but also European laws and other you know laws in other countries.
It's a complex um operating environment for them. But as scientists uh we all human beings pretty similar all over the world just live in different countries and and they are they are in what I would call as therapeutics for for cancer uh cures right so if they learn about some issues as scientists in a certain country and if they can bring that solution over to another country well that's helping people right but then these laws and regulations should not get in the way u uh in doing the job So they live in both AWS and on premises and on- premises is where they store the data because data resiliency is a big big worry for them.
So it's a hybrid environment and uh we have kind of helped them deploy and operate this at scale. I mean they operate at immense scale. The amount of data they move around uh helping their scientists find cures faster is actually pretty insane. You know, if you talk about impact for them, um, they went from setup times that pre- raffle, I would say they're in months, uh, with with experts and they were able to shrink that down into a highly repeatable process with a smaller team and now they are in hours of time and that's the benefit that a platform like Rafé brings abstracting away the complexity of the cloud and on-prem.
The hybrid's a complex beast and we simplify that dramatically for this customer. >> I love to hear that. I love a story where you can show how it really touches everyday people and the lives and the journeys that they're on. So incredible story there and thank you for sharing that. Well, we haven't talked about AI yet, which of course is some sort of record because everyone is talking about it lately. So why don't you tell me moan how is Rafé evolving to meet the fastchanging needs of enterprises adopting AI and containerized workloads >> just like everybody else in the market we got pulled into this about 2 years ago >> and uh organizations that were doing just infrastructure automation before their needs evolved into AI infrastructure automation but there's a big difference it's not you know one could say hey what's the big deal it's just AI infrastructure is still infrastructure.
The problem is the AI infrastructure is incredibly expensive, not available in all places and because it's so expensive, it results in all kinds of complexity. So, one of the common problems we see with people is say, "Hey, look u you know, we just bought this expensive $5 million uh on premises GPU infrastructure, but my remaining app lives in the cloud. My data is living on prem. My app is living in the cloud. We evolve the app very quickly in the cloud.
Now, how am I going to do that on premises? This is a $5 million investment. Uh I can't have that idling. It's like having an expensive Ferrari in your in your uh driveway, right? I need my on-prem expensive environment to work as effectively as a cloud because cloud moves with light speed, right? But how do we do that with onrem? So these are some of the problems and and the other thing they land up saying is look I don't have power in my data center anymore beyond a certain level and my usage is gone through the roof.
How do I push to the cloud? I'm running at a capacity on prem. Can I just seamlessly move to the cloud uh so that my users can do their job. So these are some of the kind of use cases that we land up doing in for these customers. Maybe another useful example maybe I'll take a real life customer example here. This is a large hedge fund. Of course they use AWS for their mission critical applications, customerf facing applications, but for training their machine learning models, they do everything on premises with around 5000 GPUs and they have data scientists in New York, another team in Tokyo, another team in London.
They only have X number of GPUs on prem to do training. How do I share across these three teams? How do I make sure that these expensive data scientists are not twiddling thumbs because they don't have access to GPUs? Well, you know, we help them kind of manage the allocation of these limited GPU resources, AI infrastructure to these data scientists. And coincidentally, I mean, if you think about it, Tokyo, London, and and New York, they're at slightly different time zones.
So, they have different working hours. So we can do time based allocation like you it's like sharing a car if you're not driving it at the same time or how do I allocate quotas and make sure that if I'm indeed accessing the infrastructure at the same time as someone else how do I schedule it so that it's fair and equitable so no one's twiddling thumbs again. So these kind of use cases are where we really shine. And finally, if I have like a mission critical rollout happening and it's going to be like millions of dollars of loss for this hedge fund if if they don't let that data scientists, you know, have access to AI infrastructure, guess what?
They will burst to the cloud if needed. And we help enable that too. So in the end I think these organizations are trying to align and make do with whatever constraints are imposed on them and infrastructure whether it's onrem or you know a cloud like AWS you know for them it's just infrastructure they just need access to stuff to do their job and we help enable that >> we've obviously been talking about AWS throughout this entire interview but I'd like to dig more into your strategic partnership how is AWS and the partnership that they provide you a differentiator for both you Rafé and your customers. >> We worked with AWS for I think 7 years now.
Uh in fact ever since the company was was founded and uh of course the reason for that our early customers were on AWS. So we kind of were you know pulled in and and uh we've kind of done a lot of unique work around AWS because obviously our key value prop for our customers is how can I partner effectively with AWS so that I can maximize value for the customer. So hopefully like um you know 1 plus 1 equal to three kind of a situation. So what we help these organizations do is take raw infrastructure from AWS help transform that into a fully operational production ready platform.
What does that mean? And a lot of people may not realize this. There is actually a very large body of work that happens around AWS infrastructure before an organization especially a large enterprise would deem that as production grade. Uh a lot of that work uh tends to be very manual uh very cumbersome errorprone. How do I streamline that? So now why this really really is effective for customers is they get to move fast. Uh they have less errors.
They don't need like an army of people to do things that are considered routine. That's number one. The AWS team really likes working with us because they care about customers being successful on Rafé on on AWS. I'm sorry. So they they want to make sure that their customers find value in in AWS infrastructure and we are a solution completer in many ways. We are a catalyst for these business transformation ideas that people are embarking on and uh that's why AWS also looks at us as a strategic partner.
We're also in the marketplace the AWS marketplace that really really helps enterprises. Why is that? they usually have large what AWS calls an EDP spend, right? So these are uh enterprise discount programs where you allocate you commit to a certain amount of buying and then now you can consume offerings like Rafé through the marketplace and this retires the the committed spend. This is really really valuable for enterprises because they get significantly discounted pricing and a very simple purchasing process >> for companies already standardized on AWS elastic kubernetes service or EKS for short.
Why would they add rafé on top? >> So think of EKS like a brand new house that I got. I mean there's a bunch of work we have to do before I can live in that house, right? So what do organizations have to do before they can use this amazing new EKS cluster or most people don't stop with one they have hundreds right large enterprises so I have hundreds of these clusters what do I have to do I have to standardize them organizations especially IT love standards otherwise it's too hard for them to manage things so they look at things as a fleet right and they kind of want to make sure that everything in the fleet looks consistent so if there's a security problem or did I update that at the right time on this cluster?
If I did not, well, maybe I'm not compliant anymore. Now I have a big headache in my company. Maybe I had to report that to uh I don't know the SEC or someone else. Nobody wants those headaches. They want to do their job effectively and make it business as usual. So standardization is a very big problem. Now the next thing is you have a you have let's say an EKS environment. There may be 20 application teams that are deploying apps on it. And these 20 application teams may have five developers each.
So it's 100 developers. Now I have 100 users that need access to only what they need. And these are operating behind a firewall inside AWS. So how do I give them access to it? How do I know who to give access to? So secure access is a problem. Kota management uh is a big deal. Finally, the world has moved on from infrastructure people provisioning and managing EKS clusters and all of that. The world has moved on dramatically. This was the way five 6 years ago people used to do what people have moved on to now what leading companies leading enterprises doing is what is called as selfservice.
So me as a user I don't know anything about AWS infrastructure because I've not been trained on it. I'm a developer. I should be able to go look at a menu of options, click a few things, get access to it, do my job. Why should it be any harder, right? But of course, I'm not going to get the wild west. I'm going to get an IT standardized environment via self-service, right? And it may have policies like, well, Moan, you can have it for 2 days after which we'll tear it down because it's too expensive.
So organizations are using Rafé to not only standardize these environments but also empower self-service because in the end it's all about productivity for these users. If I'm a developer and there's friction, everything slows down. If I get self-service, I do my job and the organization has policy enforcement. developer is productive, company is productive, you deliver share shareholder value, everyone's happy. >> For those who are watching and who are really interested, what's one thing customers or prospective customers can do today to help streamline their onboarding with Rafé systems? >> We do offer free trials.
So, if you go to rafé.co, there's a free start or we also in the marketplace. So if you're the kind of user who is extremely familiar with the AWS marketplace, click right there and and start with a free trial there. The entire deployment itself, you know, it can be done end to end in in about 30 minutes or so. And what we've done is we've kind of built out various scenarios and say that you know here are four or five scenarios that we see repeatedly uh being used by customers.
So we basically say pick your scenario and walk down that chain that process and then experience it for yourself. I think most users in the market today they want to learn by doing. They want to try and then form their own opinion. They don't want to be sold to. They want to experience it and form their own opinion. And these are savvy users. So how do we help them in a self-service manner? So that's kind of what we have optimized for. So come on over either to rafrey.co and there's a free trial or go to AWS marketplace and then follow the very simple steps to try this out on your own and take it for a spin. >> Moan, thank you so much for your time today.
It's been a pleasure getting to speak with you and learn more about Rafé Systems. I wish you the best of luck through the rest of the year and beyond. >> Thank you >> and thanks to you at home for joining us. For more episodes of partner POV, check out channelinsider.com. Once again, I'm Katie Bavoso and I'll see you next time.
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