(upbeat music) >> From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of SUSECON Digital. Brought to you by SUSE. >> Welcome back. I'm Stuart Miniman coming to you from our Boston area studio and this is theCUBE coverage of SUSECON Digital 20. Happy to welcome to the program two of the keynote present presenters. First of all, we have Dr. Thomas Giacomo. He is the President of Engineering and innovation and joining him his co presenter from Makino state, Daniel Nelson, who is the Vice President of Product Solutions, both of you with SUSE. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> All right. So, Dr. T, Let's start out, innovation, open source, give us a little bit of the message for our audience that you and Daniel were talking about on stage. We've been watching for decades, the growth in the proliferation of open source communities, so give us the update there. >> Yeah. And then it's not stopping, it's actually growing even more and more and more and more innovations coming from open source. The way we look at it is that our customers there, they have their business problems, they have their business reality. And so we, we have to curate, and prepare and filter all the open source innovation that they can benefit from, because that takes time to understand how that can match your needs and fix problems. So at SUSE, we've always done that, since 27 plus years. So, working in the open source projects, innovating there but with customers in mind, and what is pretty clear in 2020 is that large enterprises, more startups, everybody's doing software, everybody's is doing IT and they all have the same type of needs in a way they need to simplify their landscape, because they've been accumulating investments all the way or infrastructure or software, different solutions, different platforms from different vendors. They need to simplify that. They need to modernize, and they need to accelerate their business stay relevant and competitive in their own industries. And that's what we are focusing on. >> Yeah, it's interesting, I completely agree when you say simplify thing, you know, Daniel, I go back in the opportunities about 20 years. And in those days, we were talking about the operating Linux was helping to go past the proprietary Unix platform, Microsoft, the big enemy. And you were talking about operating system, server storage, the application that on, it was a relatively simple environment in there compared to today's multi cloud, AI, container based architecture, applications going through this radical Information broke, though, gives a little bit of insight as to the impact this is having on ecosystems and, of course SUSE now has a broad portfolio that at all? >> It's a great question and I totally get where you're coming from, like, if you look 20 years ago, the landscape is completely different, the technologies we're using are completely different, the problems we're trying to solve with technology are more and more sophisticated. At the same time, though, there's kind of nothing new under the sun. Every company, every technology, every modality goes through this expansion of capabilities and the collapse around simplification as the capabilities become more and more complex and more manageable. So there's this continuous tension between capabilities, ease of use consume ability. What we see with open source is that, that kind of dynamic still exists, but it's more online of like developers want, easy to use technologies, but they want the cutting edge. They want the latest things. They want those things within their packages. And then if you look at operations groups or people that are trying to consume that technology, they want that technology to be consumable simple, works well with others be able to pick and choose and have one pane of glass to be able to operate within that. And that's where we see this dynamic. And that's kind of what the SUSE portfolio was built upon. It's like, how do we take the thousands and thousands of developers that are working on these really critical projects, whether it's Linux like you mentioned, or Kubernetes, or or Cloud Foundry? And how do we make that then more consumable to the thousands of companies that are trying to do it, who may even be new to open source or may not contribute directly, but when you have all the benefits that are coming to it, and that's where SUSE fits and where SUSE has fits historically, and where we see us continuing to fit long term is taken all those Legos, put into together for companies that want that, and then allow them a lot of autonomy and choice and how those technologies are consumed. >> Right, one of the themes that I heard you both talk about, in the keynote, it was simplifying, modernize, celebrate, really reminded me of the imperatives of the CIO. There's always run the business, they need to help grow the business, and if they have the opportunity, they want to transform the business. I think you said, run improve in scale. Scale absolutely a critical thing that we talk about these days, when I think back to the Cloud Foundry summit, in the keynote stage, it was the old way if I could do faster, better, cheaper, you could do them today. We know Faster, faster, faster is what you want. So give us a little bit of insight as to, you talked about Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes, application, modernization, what are the imperatives that you're hearing from customers and how are we, with all of these tools out there helping, IT, not just be responsive to the business but actually be a driver for that transformation of the business? >> It's a great question. And so when I talk to customers, and Dr. T, feel free to chime in, you talk to as many or more customers than I do. They do have these what are historically competing imperatives. But what we see with the adoption of some of these technologies is that faster is cheaper, faster is safer, creating more opportunities to grow and to innovate betters the business. It's not risk injection, when we change something, it's actually risk mitigation, when we get good at changing. And so it's kind of that modality of moving from, a simplified model or a very kind of like a manufacturing model of software to a much more organic, much more permissimuch more being able to learn within ecosystems model. And so that's how we see companies start to change the way they're adopting this technology. What's interesting about them is that same level of adoption. That same thought of adoption, It's also how open sources is developed. Open Source has developed organically, it's developed with many eyes make shallow bugs, it's developed by like, let me try this and see what happens, right? And be able to do that in smaller and smaller increments just like we look at Red Green deployments or being able to do micro services, or Canary or any of those things. It's like, let's not, do one greatly for what we're used to and waterfall is that's actually really risky. Let's do many, many, many steps forward and be able to transform it iteratively and be able to go faster iteratively and make that just part of what the business is good at. And so you're exactly right. Like those are the three imperatives of the CIO. What I see with customers is the more that they are aligning those three imperatives together and not making them separate, but we have to be better at being faster and being transformative. Those are the companies that are really using IT as a competitive advantage within their reach. >> Yeah, because most of the time they have different starting points. They have a history. They have different business strategy and things they've done in the past. So you need to be able to accommodate all of that and the faster microservice, native development posture for the new apps, but they're also coming from somewhere, and if you don't take care of that together, you can just accelerate if you simplify your existing because otherwise you spend your time making sure that your existing is running. So you have to combine all of that together, and the two, you mentioned Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes and I love those topics because, I mean, everybody knows about Kubernetes. Now it's picking up in terms of adoption, in terms of innovation technology, uilding AI ML framework on top of it. Now, what's very interesting as well is that, Cloud Foundry was designed for fast software development, and cloud native from the beginning that by the factor apps, and several like four or five years ago, right? What we see now is we can extract the value that Cloud Foundry brings to speed up and accelerate our software development cycles, and we can combine that very nicely and very smoothly simple in a simple way, with all the benefits you get from Kubernetes, and not from one Kubernetes. From your Kubernetes running in your public clouds because you have workloads there, you have services that you want to consume from one public clouds. We have a great SUSECON fireside chat with open shot from Microsoft. Asia, we're actually discussing those topics. Or you might have also Kubernetes clusters at the edge that you want to run in your factory or close to your data and workloads in the field. So those things and Daniel mentioned that as well taking care of the IT ops, like simplify, modernize and accelerate for the IT ops and also accelerate for the developers themselves, we benefiting from a combination of open source technologies. And today, there's not one open source technology that can do that. You need to bundle combine them together and best make sure that they are integrated, hat they are certified together, that they are stable together, that the security aspects, all the technology around them are deeply integrated into services as well. >> Well, I'm really glad you brought up some of those Kubernetes that are out there. We've been saying for a couple years on theCUBE, Kubernetes is getting baked in everywhere. SUSE's got partnership with all the cloud providers and you're not fighting them over whether to use a solution that you have versus theirs. I worry a little bit about, how do I manage all those environments? Do I end up with Kubernetes sprawl just like we have with every other technology out there? Help us understand what differentiates SUSE's offerings in this space? And how do you fit in with the rest of that very dynamic and diverse. >> So, let me start with the aspect of combining things together. And Daniel, maybe you can take the management piece. So, first of all, we are making sure at SUSE that we don't force our customers into a SUSE stack. Of course we have a SUSE stack, and we're very happy people use it. But the reality is that the customer knows that they have some investments, they have different needs, they use different technologies from the past, or they want to try different technologies. So you have to make sure that for Kubernetes like for any other part of the stack, the IT stack or the developer stack, your pieces are our modular that you can accommodate different different elements. So typically, at SUSE, we support different types of hypervisors We're not like focused on one but we can support KVM, Xen, Hyper-V, vSphere, all of the nutanix hypervisor, NetApp hypervisors and everything. Same thing with the OS, there's not only one Linux that people are running, and that's exactly the same with kubernetes. There's no one probably that I've seen in our customer base that will just need one vendor for Kubernetes because they have a hybrid cloud needs and strategy and they will benefit from the native Kubernetes they found on AKA, CKA, SDK, Alibaba clouds, you name them and we have cloud vendors in Europe as well doing that. So for us, it's very important that what we bring as SUSE to our customers can be combined with what they have, what they want, even if it's from the so called competition. And so the SUSE Cloud Foundry is running on. I guess, you can find it on the marketplace of public clouds. It could run on any Kubernetes. It doesn't have to be SUSE Kubernetes. But then you end up with a lot of cells, right? So how do we deal with that then? >> So it's a great question. And I'll actually even broaden that out because it's not like we're only running Kubernetes. Yes, we've got lots of clusters, we've got lots of containers, we've got lots of applications that are moving there. But it's not like all the VMs disappeared. It's not like all the beige boxes, like in the data center, like suddenly don't exist. We all bring all the sins and decisions of the past board with us wherever we go. So for us, it's not just that lens of how do we manage the most modern, the most cutting edge? That's definitely a part of it. But how do you do that within the context of all the other things you have to do within your business? How do I manage virtual machines? How do I manage bare metal? How do I manage all those. And so for us, it's about creating a presentation layer. On top of that, where you can look at your clusters, look at your VMs, look at all your deployments, and be able to understand what's actually happening within your environment. We don't take a prescriptive approach. We don't say you have to use one technology or have to use that technology. What we want to do is to be adaptive to the customer's needs. And say you've got these things. Here's some of our offerings. You've got some legacy offerings too. Let's show you how to bring those together. Let's show you how you modernize your viewpoints, how you simplify your operational framework and how you end up accelerating what you can do with the stuff that you've got in place. >> Yeah, I'm just on the management piece. Is there any recommendations from your team? Last year at Microsoft Ignite, there was a launch of Azure Arc, and, we're starting to see a lot of solutions come out there. Our concern is that any of us that live through the multi vendor management days, don't have good memories from those. It is a different discussion if we're just talking about kind of managing multiple Kubernetes. But, how do we learn from the past? And, what, what are you recommending for people in this multi cloud era? >> So my suggestion to customers is you always start with what are your needs, what is strategic problems you're trying to solve. And then choose a vendor that is going to help you solve those strategic problems. So isn't going to take a product centric view. Isn't going to tell you, use this technology and this technology and this technology, but it's going to take the view of like, this is the problem you're going to solve. Let me be your advisor within that and choose people that you're going to trust within that. That being said, you want to have relationships with customers that have been there for a while that have done this that have a breadth of experience in solving enterprise problems. Coz, I mean, everything that we're talking about, is mostly around the new things. But keep in mind that there are nuances about the enterprise, there are things that are that are intrinsically found within the enterprise, that it takes a vendor with a lot of experience to be able to meet customers where they are. I think you've seen that in some of the real growth opportunities within the hyper scalars. They've kind of moved into being more enterprise, view of things, kind of moving away from just an individual bill perspective to enterprise problems. You're seeing that more and more. I think vendors and customers need to choose companies that meet them where they are, that enable their decisions, not prescribe their decision. >> Okay. Oh-- >> Let me just add to that. >> Please go ahead. >> Yeah, sorry. Yeah. I also wanted to add that I would recommend people to look at open source based solutions because that will prevent them to be in a difficult situation potentially, in a few years from now. So there are open source solutions that can do that. And look at viable, sustainable, healthy open source solutions that are not just one vendor, but multi vendor as well, because that leaves doors options open for you in the future as well. So if you need to move for another vendor, or if you need to complement with an additional technology, or you've made a new investment or you go to a new public cloud, if you base your choices on open source, you have a better chance but from a data. >> I think that's a great point, Dr. T, and I would glom on to that by saying, customers need to bring a new perspective on how they adjudicate these solutions. Like it's really important to look at the health of the open source community. Just because it's open source doesn't mean that there's a secret army of gnomes that you know, in the middle of the night go and fix box, like there needs to be a healthy community around that. And that is not just individual contributors. That is also what are the companies that are invested in this? Where are they dedicating resources? Like that's another level of sophistication that a lot of customers need to bring into their own vendor selection process. >> Excellent. Speaking about communities and open ports, want to make sure you have time to tell us a little bit about the AI platform discussed. >> Yeah, it's it's very, very interesting and something I'm super excited about it SUSE. And it's kind of this, we're starting to see AI done and it's really interesting problems to solve. And like, I'll just give you one example, is that we're working with a Formula One team around using AI to help them actually manage in car mechanics and actually manage some of the things that they're doing to get super high performance out of their vehicles. And that is such an interesting problem to solve. And it's such a natural artificial intelligence problem that even then you're talking about cars instead of servers or you're talking about racing stack instead of data centers, you still got a lot of the same problems. And so you need an easy to use AI stack, you need it to be high performance, you need it to be real time, you need to be able to get decisions made really quickly. These are the same kinds of problems. But we're starting to see them in all these really interesting real world scenarios, which is one of the coolest things that I've seen in my career, especially as it turns of IT, is that IT is really everywhere. It's not just grab your sweater and go to the data centre, because it's 43 degrees in there, it's also get on the racetrack, it's also go to the airfield, it's also go to the grocery store and look at some of the problems being addressed and solved there. And that is super fascinating. One of the things that I'm super excited about in our industry in total. >> All right, well, really good discussion here. Daniel, Dr. T, thank you so much for sharing everything from your keynote and been a pleasure watching. >> Thank you. >> All right back with lots more covered from SUSECON Digital 20 I'm Stuart Miniman and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley. HOLLOWAY ALTO, California It is a cube conversation. >> Hi, Welcome to the Cube Studios. From the Cube conversation, we go in depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry. I'm today's host. Beauty burst. One of the biggest challenges at every enterprise faces, especially those that are considering a serious move to the cloud, goes way beyond any questions about compute. Wait beyond any questions about storage. Perhaps the most important question will be, What do I do with my network? How does my network transform? How does my security profile transform in response to a movement to the cloud? Now there are a lot of reasons why, but one of the chief wants the cod really isn't a strategy for centralising your I t and your applications in your data, it's better thought of his cloud from more broadly distributing that function, getting it close to the action. Where is going to generate the most value? Big challenge for enterprise is in tow. Have that conversation. We've got Matt Carter, who's the CEO of Ari, aka >> not welcome to the Cube. >> Thanks for having me >> so before we get into this important question. Give us the update on Hari, aka >> So recently we were got investment. Goldman Sachs, Siri's F $50,000,000 that capital is going to really be deployed towards helping us to expand our global footprint, put money into marketing more sales. People build out processes internally as a company. So we're well capitalized and a really great position to take advantage of the enormous growth that we see in this space. >> So I mentioned upfront this notion that the cloud is a strategy for distributing your work and with controls and with certainty and with greater security, perhaps even more so than it should be thought of as a way of centralizing things that's puts enormous pressure on networks. What are you hearing from your customers as they think about some of these challenges? >> Well, one of the big challenges for a lot of our customers is complexity. Many of them have worked with a number of different providers to be able to stitch together a reliable, secure network. What makes Hari Aku is so differentiated is that we're able to manage that as one single source provider. We have a global network. We have a secure network, and so we make it easy. We take out the complexity for our customers and even more importantly, what we also do. We help out customers to accelerate their digital transformation. Many of them are going through various stages of digital transformation, able to do that by work with one single provide, like Harry, AKA who could help accelerate that in state for them much faster than others in the marketplace today. >> So you're trying to remove the network from the transformational or from the from the side of uncertainty when we start talking about digital transformation. But what is the Ariake, the Ariake Network? This this notion that you have a full stack from the actual network all the way up to the software to find services? What's the How does that manifest itself as different apologies or different approaches to your customers? >> Yes, so think of it this way, Peter. So for a customer to put together a holistic network, they're different component pot. So one component part is to say, last smile. So being able to get that circuitry broadband circuitry someplace around the world, they have to deal with a number of different vendors around that we were able to be the single source provided provided for the customers. Secondly, they have to then figure how to connect to the cloud. And they're working with a number of different telco providers to help them to stitch together that piece again. We have our own global pops around the world were able to provide the local the last mile, plus that sort of middle stage there for the customer as one single source provider. So again, complexity is the thing that's actually driving a lot of the challenges for our customers. Way able to sort of do that as one single source provided for our customers. >> But it sounds like you're also in a position to say we can reduce complexity, but we can also increase the flexibility that the network has. So I was talking with large customer large client earlier this week on one of the things that they observed is they're trying to reduce the amount of traffic disassociate with back haul back to the corporate network before close to some sass provider. How our customers ultimately starting to rethink how they direct traffic because a good, solid foundation like Ari AKA should allow you greater flexibility and how you target traffic to different circuits at different times based on location, application, data and identity. >> Yeah, so part of the thing that what customers are also to build upon that face with this is that what type of traffic works works best on what network, right? And so if you're dealing with a variety of different networks, it creates a lot of monitoring. Ah, lot of flexibility and lack of reliability for the customer. So with us again, we're able to provide them insight to application performance and use a state performance because it's all one single network, and we've become, quite frankly, an early detector. If there are problems with particular types of applications, were able to inform the customer of that and make the appropriate changes to allow for much more seamless, reliable application experience for our customers. >> So let's talk about specifically how you're helping customers. Today was one of the offers that you have and some of the approach that you have to engage in them. So one of the challenges within any large organization is to get the groupings of individuals to agree on what the problem is in the direction to take, the more shared the resources, the Mohr people participating in the conversation. Let's be honest. Is nothing more shared in an organization today than a network? How are you seeing your customers succeed? And sometimes, you know, fall victim to the challenges of tryingto build that unity around how to move forward? >> Yeah, that's a really great question. So what we have found this that it's not a single decision maker any longer in eh? In a minute with the customer. There are the lists, a willing dealing with the CTO to CEO. He or she has a constituency who have a say around the types of applications or networking that we're using to deploy that those applications. So what we have found that Ari, aka that the approach we have to take is that we have to be really good, if you will. Diplomats knowing how to go into a customer really working partner with the various constituencies, getting them in a room, making sure that they understand and help them to sort of see the end state vision and a lot of ways part of what we're trying to do with the CEO of CTO is how do we become a really good partner for them to help them help their constituents season? So what we call it our reactors no innovate grow. The no part of what we dio is actually one of the most important component parts of how we go to market. What is the problem? How does his problem impact? You know, the various constituencies inside that customer and their and their customers. So getting dimensional, dimensional izing that problem makes you were bringing the right people to the table is a really putting competency that we have, you know, manifested overtime to help that organization become successful. The thing that's important for us, we've us houses an enabler, and so you just don't see you know you enable you. You have to really work with the customer and really understand the problem that they're faced with. How do we enable the customer to really understand Dimensional is the problem and figure out how our solution helps that customer solve that problem or take advantage of that opportunity. So we call in no innovate crowd that no pa, it's really important that innovates not just invention It's really about making sure we're able to position and Taylor our solution set to the needs of the customer and grow the grow pot is really all about our customers. Success. Did we help them to become successful? Whatever that objective is. Opening up offices in China and getting their sales team productive up and running quickly. Tow, monetize, opportunity, stare. Whatever those growth objectives are, how do we help them to become successful? So everything we do is a line to the customs success, so no innovate grow. It's a real part of how we go to market. To serve the customer is comprehensive. Um, it's time consuming, but we feel is differentiating because we're not just selling you a, um you know, sort of a solution, so to speak. What was really selling you is is a a way to solve a problem or take advantage of that opportunity is a different sort of the mention of how we go to market with the others. >> So talk we'll talk a bit about how that is translating into customer success directly. You got a good product. Sounds could get a good love to go to market strategy. Really love the emphasis on on innovate. Which will you look at is how do you get your customers to successfully adopt time to value reduced uncertainty, Deeper integration? Mohr Embedded nous How is that translating success toes a little bit about how you're seeing? Are his customers be able to do things differently as a result >> so that the two pasta de so the first pot is the existing customers? So let's start with the fact that most of the existing customers who came to us came to us because they had a particular problem someplace around the world. So let us say we way. We've been able to get sort of a few sort of site locations with them. They like what they see when they come back to says, Hey, you know, you solve this problem here. Can you help us solve this problem over here? And then over time we may be able to expand, increase share. I'm with the existing customers. The second thing that we've done is that I've always said to the team, since I've been in the company with the best kept secret out there, that people don't realize that we offer this sort of into end man its service. And our customers know our customs have been good evangelist and helping us to bring in more customers. But as biggest, the market opportunity is not enough people know who we are. So part of what we're doing now, Peter is really elevating brand present. You know, if you're gonna be a company that's moving up the stack and if you're a CEO who's gonna outsource this decision, that's your connectivity. To accompany Ari aka you need to know that the person sitting across the table from you understands me gets me has thie empathy, right, sensitivities of the problems that we're dealing with, So great deal of what we're now doing is, you know, I brought in a new team. Folks have been near done that folks who've sold to these folks over the years who understand those customers problems, so elevating out brand, bringing the right level of competency into the organization and really send them make out brand muchmore wear around how we help our customers solve these problems. So a little bit of this marketing, you know, in sales. But the main thing >> is, it's just that >> we're now in a position where we need to really hone in on getting up brand much more elevated. So people understand how we solve their >> problems, engagement across entire life cycle, it's and service to success. So where is s so we could kind of see you are a good, fast growth company on the market. That's, I think, is going to become increasingly hot as people start to realize the role that network transformations going to play in this whole thing. Um, how do you see Orry, aka being a force say, in 23 years, I c e o you got to be thinking about >> well, you know, constant thinking about that. So for us, it's really, um, continue to add more innovation to our platform and a big part of that innovation. You nose around security as you're starting to, its more things going to the cloud. People want to know that isjust a secure platform. We have a very secure platform today, but we'll continue to innovate and add more layers to that. So that's one piece. The second piece is is too, you know, continue to invents, elevate our brand out into the marketplace. So we got a show about the places that give people. It's that this is a company that's going to be around for a while. That has sustainability, etcetera, so elevated and really, you know, we have a guy on our team, Ash Watt, who really is a pioneer in this space around the technology and where it's going having more thought, leadership, showing up at the right sort of conferences, making sure that we are framing and helping toe lead the thoughts around, you know, S T win and how it plays a role in the marketplace >> making that no consumable >> making that no consumable. That's exactly that's exactly right. So I think for us it's really the continuation of maturing and growing as a company. You know, we've been a Silicon Valley start up company. We've operated as a Silicon Valley start up company, but now where we are and given the complexities of managing a network right is that we have to now come across to our customers that where a company that is here for the long haul that that we have taken into account off the precautions all the necessary building blocks. Tobe able to deploy, secure global network today. We do that. Not enough people know about that. We need to continue to enhance that message healthy. >> Well, every company has its challenges, and every company has its go forward. But I could tell you, certainly our clients speak well of Ariake. So, Matt Carter, Thanks very much for being on the Cube. >> Thank you, >> Andi. Once again, we've been >> talking about Carter, CEO of Ari, aka >> Thanks for joining us for another cube conversation on Universe. See you next time.