theCUBEd Awards | KAOPS by Nethopper by nethopper.io (Most Innovative Product for Platform Engineering Teams)

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Chris Munford

Founder & CEO

Nethopper.io

How platform engineering solutions are simplifying cloud-native operations

As organizations embrace cloud-native applications, the demand for efficient platform engineering solutions grows, helping teams manage tools, ensure security and maintain operational efficiency. The growing complexity of multicloud and Kubernetes environments has created a need for streamlined solutions that simplify deployment and observability, according to Chris Munford, founder and chief executive officer of Nethopper LLC. The company, a leader in platform engineering, is addressing this challenge with its innovative Kubernetes AI Operations solution.“[With] innovation in platform engineering, there’s a lot of it happening,” Munford said

play_circle_outline Approach to innovation in platform engineering and adding open source projects

play_circle_outline Unlocking Success with KAOPS: The Power of Deploying Apps and Private AI for Enterprise Security

play_circle_outline Extending platform capabilities with GitOps for customization and flexibility

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KAOPS by Nethopper by nethopper.io (Most Innovative Product for Platform Engineering Teams)

Chris Munford

Founder & CEO Nethopper.io

Join us for an insightful session with Chris Munford, founder and CEO of Nethopper.io, as he shares his expertise in platform engineering. In a discussion led by Christophe Bertrand, principal analyst at theCUBE Research, Munford discusses the innovative approaches that led Nethopper to success at theCUBEd Awards. Learn how Nethopper.io excels in providing solutions for platform engineering teams, with a special focus on their award-winning product, KAOPS.

This video delves into the strategies that set Nethopper.io apart, such as the implementation o... Read more

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What is the process for adding open source projects to a platform for innovation in platform engineering? add

What is the function and purpose of the KAOPS platform in relation to modern app teams and third-party applications, specifically in the context of deploying AI and data initiatives for enterprises? add

What concept has the platform KAOPS been extended with? add

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KAOPS by Nethopper by nethopper.io (Most Innovative Product for Platform Engineering Teams)

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Christophe Bertrand

>> Hello everyone. My name is Christophe Bertrand, Principal Analyst at theCUBE. Research, and welcome to the CUBE's Tech Innovation CUBE Awards where we are celebrating the winners of our inaugural program. The competition was fierce and we received an exceptional number of high caliber entries that showcased incredible innovation happening across the tech landscape. Today we're joined by Chris Munford, who is the founder and CEO of Nethopper.io. Welcome, Chris.

Chris Munford

>> Thank you. Thank you for having me, Christophe.

Christophe Bertrand

>> It's great to have you. Nethopper.io won in the entry focused on product for platform engineering teams, so first in that category. So let's talk about that. Congratulations, first of all, Chris. Let's talk about that. Let's dive in. I'd like to know more about how you approach innovation. Obviously it's central to these awards. And could you share a specific example of how you or your company approached a challenge in an innovative fashion and the type of impact that it had?

Chris Munford

>> Sure. Well, again, thanks for having me, and we're excited to win this award from theCUBE. And so innovation in platform engineering, there's a lot of it happening. The outward way that you see this is often through the addition of new open source projects and platform engineers need to juggle dozens, if not more, open source projects to innovate in their job and help deliver modern apps to the cloud or data center of their choice. So we're faced with this often where someone will come to us and say, "As part of our platform, we have this chosen tool. It's really great. It helps us innovate in security or observability," or one of the other dimensions that they have to get really right. And so we have the opportunity to increase, innovate in our product and add these open source tools to it. And we have a formula to do this. We often use the word blueprint, so we have the ability to add blueprints to our platform very easily, which makes it very then much more repeatable for somebody else to add this innovation to their platform as well.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, that's great. And actually, I'd like to understand a little bit more about what happens when people acquire your platform. Tell me about how do you roll it out? Is there before, during, and after? Do you have any type of services or training you provide? And how do you get that feedback from the users?

Chris Munford

>> We do. The deployment mechanisms vary wildly, so we need to be very flexible in our approach. Some customers want to do this on prem with one suite of tools. Other customers want to do it in their virtual private clouds through public cloud providers with other suites of tools. So we support both the SaaS method where you use our backend to consume the service, but also a self-hosted model where, especially for security, privacy conscious customers, they don't have to go to the internet. They can have a completely air gap solution. And likewise, we almost always run in Kubernetes environments and some people have their chosen, not only cloud provider, but their way of doing Kubernetes. So we have a bring your own Kubernetes cluster, bring your own cluster, BYOC, approach where you don't have to use us for everything. You can just use us for the software deployment and operations piece of the solution. So we try to stay flexible for customers to meet them how they want to deploy.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, let's talk about your customers a little bit. Tell me more about what type of typical customer do you have? Are there some specific verticals or specific geos that you focus on?

Chris Munford

>> The verticals vary. Kubernetes is not a vertical and containerized workloads is not a vertical specific thing. So whether you're in insurance, retail, manufacturing, they all have they all have modern apps that they want to deploy as containers in Kubernetes. And so we support all the verticals. We tend to go to market through managed service providers. HP is a big partner of ours, so if you consume HP services, it keeps our sales force and operations smaller than it would otherwise need to be. And so we often go through our managed services partners to engage all of these verticals.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Right. And your product, KAOPS, has been recognized for its approach with the award here. So could you walk us through a specific example of how customers are using your solution to solve problems that were not possible or practical to address before?

Chris Munford

>> Okay. So yes, good question. Many of our customers are enterprises that have built one, a dozen, a thousand applications and they need to deploy them. In order to control those deployments, make sure that once they're deployed, the apps are staying up and healthy, there's generally a suite, a large suite of tools and other things they need to do to ensure the security, availability and scale of those applications. And typically all these tools come with their own dashboards, expertise and deployment mechanisms themselves. So many DevOps teams, platform engineering teams, find themselves in the scenario of managing many different tools and many different dashboards. This is often described as tool sprawl. We have a single command and control. KAOPS is a single command and control mechanism and dashboard with one UI that can combine the dashboards and administration of all of the tools necessary to roll out all of these apps for an enterprise. So it's not necessarily something that couldn't be done before, but it's something that is very complex, involves a lot of people and a lot of different finger pointing when things potentially go wrong. But by centralizing it into a single DevOps platform, it significantly simplifies and reduces the complexity of the solution.

Christophe Bertrand

>> And that's operational efficiency, that's time to market for applications or time to process. So this is all very critical. So let's double click on the product a little bit and look, every successful company has its own secret sauce, right? So what would you say is the most distinctive aspect of your approach that has enabled you to push the boundaries of the solution?

Chris Munford

>> I have one in mind. So as we talked about, KAOPS helps modern app teams deploy the applications they wrote. And we discovered along our journey that that wasn't quite good enough. We also need to deploy the tools that those modern app teams need to deploy. And also, we learned along the journey that we need to deploy the third-party applications that they might want to include in their operations. And one of those third-party applications that has become really popular recently is GenAI and other LLMs and other models. So it turns out our platform is very useful for deploying what we're calling private AI and allowing people to take control, observability and secure the data involved in their AI initiatives. So our secret sauce is not only being a single platform that helps you deploy multiple apps, but also morphing over into the AI and data side of companies where it can also help control the AI future for enterprises.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, absolutely. And AI is a perfect example that demonstrates that technology. It's constantly evolving. So how do you and your team stay ahead of industry trends and, really, how do you ensure that you can keep creating those meaningful solutions based on operational efficiency, based on the ability to have a single point of control for everything that gets deployed? And how do you do that without necessarily following the latest hype?

Chris Munford

>> Yep, good question. So we have long recognized that we can't put everything in our platform that every customer would ever want to use. So we've extended our platform with the concept of GitOps. So you can actually make our platform, KAOPS, do things that we had never even intended, through declarations or these blueprints that you would create in your own Git. So for example, if you want to roll out AI with your specific model in your specific cloud or data center with your specific GPU, we as a platform provider could not possibly handle all the different permutations of that. But by taking our direction from the desired state that you would like your AI to run in or your applications to run in from your Git repositories, we can extend our platform to handle all of these different variances across apps and AI and customers.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Right. So you are CEO and co-founder of Nethopper. So the question I have for you is, as you step back and think about what you've done so far and where you're going and, again, definitely great recognition here with this award, how does your company foster this culture of innovation?

Chris Munford

>> I would say by listening to customers. We just keep listening, keep improving the product the way they want to improve it, recognize that what's good for them is better for us than what we think is good for us. So keep on listening to the customer and making the product more useful for them.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, Chris, these are words of wisdom, absolutely. As a next product guy can only agree. So look, Chris, congratulations again and thank you so much for joining us today.

Chris Munford

>> Thank you for having us, Christophe. Thank you very much.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well thank you everybody for watching. My name is Christophe Bertrand. I'm a principal analyst here at theCUBE Research. And again, first edition of the CUBEd Awards 2025. Thank you for joining us.