A lot of companies these days want to snap their fingers and make their data centers go poof. But depending on their size and economics, they may not be able to swing the cost of the all-in, public-cloud high life. For them, on-premises private cloud options that pair public-cloud-like scale and composability with iPhone-easy operation can be the next best thing.

At his previous company, Najaf Husain (pictured, left), chief executive officer of Cloudistics Inc., experienced both the high and the crash of public cloud. The software development company was tired of managing infrastructure. “So we went to Amazon,” he said. “We spent three months or so developing code to implement QA.”

It was all gravy having hardware out of the way. And then they actually implemented it. After month one, the bill was $100,000; after month two, it was $150,000, and after month three, the company was accreting $200,000 a month in fees to run Amazon. “As a company of 500, we had to figure out what to do next,” Husain said.

Husain and Rod Lappin (pictured, right), senior vice president of global sales and marketing at Lenovo Group Ltd, spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Lenovo Transform 2.0 event in NYC. (* Disclosure below.)

Plug-and-play cloud with Lenovo OEM deal

What Husain’s previous company did was bring infrastructure back on-prem, and learned lessons that would form the basis of Cloudistics. “What we did is we took a page out of how the public cloud operated,” Husain said. “And the way the public cloud operates is, they have composable resources, so you can scale resources independently. So I can scale network separate from compute separate storage.”

A private cloud platform with these features recreates much of public cloud’s value proposition on-prem for much less money, he added.

Cloudistics has struck up an original equipment manufacturer deal with Lenovo that fuses its platform with Lenovo’s ThinkAgile integrated appliance. “So think of it like your iPhone. When you buy your iPhone, it’s hardware, software beautifully integrated,” Husain said. “You can run containers, you can run Docker, you can run windows, SQL — all those apps are available for you to run with a click.”

“They only need two plugs … they need a plug for the network, and a plug for power, and, basically, it’s ready to go,” Lappin concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Lenovo Transform 2.0 event.  (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Lenovo Transform 2.0. Neither Lenovo Group Ltd, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE