John Furrier and Stu Miniman continued their quest to present theCUBE viewers as many tech athletes as possible with the introduction of Marten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus Systems. Live from AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, theCUBE co-hosts sat down with their guest to discuss private vs public cloud and data portability.

Marten didn’t come empty handed for his interview. He showcased to the viewers a functioning private cloud – “an AWS compatible private cloud in a backpack.”

“Twelve core power, 20GB of storage, battery power for 10 hours. When we talk about private cloud, this is what you can do today,” boasted Mickos. “Mobile and cloud are the big new trends, so we combined them,” said Mickos with a very large smile.

Excited by the premiere on theCUBE, Furrier asked his guest to talk in depth about the product.

“When you build private clouds it’s very important that they are easy to use and easy to operate. And we show that, by building them into a backpack, you can operate the cloud without any sysadmin, and without any extra labor. You have everything in here; it’s very compact and very easy to use,” explained Mickos.

Private vs. public cloud : dynamic market wars

Mentioning Andy Jassy’s keynote presentation, Miniman asked Mickos to give his take on the entire private versus public cloud dynamic.

“Every economic system has shown that over time you have a division between owning and renting. We don’t know yet whether the percentages will fall, but we do know that there will always be on-premise computing and public computing. What we make sure is that we have the same API on-premise as you have on public cloud – that’s why we are AWS compatible,” said Mickos.

Amazon’s prediction is that in the future only 10 percent of the data is going to remain on-premise. “How do you help customers decide what goes on-prem and off-prem?” asked Miniman.

“You start using AWS and Eucalyptus and you grow them to the degree it makes sense. You don’t have to know the answer upfront, because it’s impossible to know,” clarified Marten. “You have reasons for going to the public cloud and for staying on-prem: data gravity, control, compliance, performance, cost, margins, etc. If you think you know ahead of time, then you’re probably wrong,” stated Mickos.

Building a business on AWS

Furrier then asked Mickos to talk more about his company and the business model. “We’ve always had the same positioning for this company: we believe that public cloud is innovating a new way of computing, and AWS is the big player there. We are enabling the same power on-premise, inside your firewall, on your own servers. That’s why we’re building an open source, AWS compatible, cloud platform.”

Many people are apprehensive about lock-in, so John asked Marten’s opinion on that issue. “I think we provide the ultimate relief from lock-in, because we’re using the industry standard API, that anybody can use, we deliver all our software as open source code, so anybody can use it without being our customers. I don’t know how you can go further on the road of reducing lock-in,” said Mickos.

“I think open source is going into the right direction and has shown that it’s a superior way of developing and deploying software,” Mickos went on. Ten years ago when I ran MySQL, it was all about source code. Now it’s more about APIs. The source code better be open but it’s also about the APIs so that you can combine different parts of the software stack.”

Eucalyptus Systems also helps customers move from VMware to other platforms. “We allow people to have the flexibility to decide exactly how much VMware environment they have and how much and how much they have open source non-locking the environment,” Mickos concluded.