>> Narrator: Live from Santa Clara in the heart of Silicon Valley. It's the Cube. Covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2017. Brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation and Pivotal. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman joined by my cohost, John Troyer. There's nothing we love more when we're at the User Conference is to actually be able to dig in and talk with the users. I want to welcome to the program Opal Perry who is a divisional CIO at Allstate. Did the keynote this morning. A really good community here. I know they were excited to hear your story and thank you so much for joining us. >> Thanks, it's great to be here with you. >> So Opal, we hear this term the digital transformation. Some people think it's just a buzz word but you talked in your keynote about the transformation that's going on in your world. Why don't you give us a quick overview of your role and what this transformation has been. >> Sure, so I've been with Allstate almost six years and I'm one of the vice presidents on the technology leadership team so we both work together as a whole team on initiatives that affect the entire enterprise. And then my particular day-to-day focus is Divisional CIO of Claims. We're a large insurer. The number publicly held insurer in the U.S. We support claims for auto, property, Allstate business insurance. It's a outstanding time to be in the business because there's just so much going on in technology. There's so many immersion areas and particularly when we are able to knit them together to serve our customers from insurance protection, restoration standpoint. It's really powerful. We do say and hear transformation so much that it feels sometimes like an overused term but I haven't found a better word for it yet because I think things really are transformative. We've been used to, for many years in the industry, change. Right, continuous improvement. We're always trying to change and get better. But what's happening now with this conversions of forces is truly transformative. We're not just replacing one way of doing things with a slightly improved way. We're changing the way people interact and serve the customer. >> And Opal, what was the driver for the change? Was there a pain point or competitive pressure? What drove this change? >> At Allstate, it's all about the customer opportunity. As I mentioned this morning, we've got 16 million customer households and that's just a tremendous responsibility and also a tremendous opportunity. To us, it was thinking about how do we bring the forces of this great 86-year-old company to bear and use the digital and technology changes emerging and really do that in support of giving our customer a better and better experience. How do we protect them? How do we restore them? >> As you are making this transformation to... We're here at the Cloud Foundry Summit, so interested in the Cloud Foundry story, how some of that decision process, obviously the tech is really cool, A. So was this coming out of the developers first, the technologists first or was it more of a needs analysis from the top-down that like a platform instead of technologies like Cloud Foundry? It could be what we need. >> It really came from a number of quarters but the tipping force was from our infrastructure area. As we looked like a lot of large companies do at what's the future of infrastructure, both in the data center, themes that have been emerging for many years in Cloud. There were a number of us that are leaders at Allstate that came from a banking background so we had seen previous era changes. Prior to Cloud Foundry been instantiated, I'd worked more in home-grown paths and seen that opportunity both from the developer but also from the infrastructure and so when Andy Zitney had joined us, he's with McKesson now, but he had joined and was our CTO for a period of time and had background from Chase and PayPal and various areas. He came in and build our platform team and really looked through their selection process, determined Cloud Foundry was a great option for us and something that we could grow with over time to start meeting the needs. But it was really an interest of saying hey, let's let infrastructure get out of the way, provide the foundation for the developers, and let the developers innovate great software for the business. But let's let the platform take care of things. He brought early awareness to a lot of those factors. >> Yeah, I think the joke is that nobody should be righting their own cryptographic software anymore (Stu chuckles). Nobody should be writing a distributed key-value ParaStore anymore. The Cloud Foundry people will tell you nobody should be writing their own platform anymore. That's hard enough, let somebody else take care of it. >> Yeah, maybe if you're a PhD student (interviewers chuckling) or researching the next great idea but in terms of being within an enterprise, whose primary role is to serve customers in a different way. Again, it just takes care of a lot of the lifting. That took a while when we introduced it for some people to understand. People would say to me why are you adding another layer? Getting them to understand the power of the abstraction and that's what we're really doing. We're lifting up above so we don't have to be worried so much about the exact infrastructure we're sitting on. >> That upscaling process that you're talking about, that training process. Both from the developer side and the operational side, there's a learning curve. Some people embrace it and some maybe not so much. Can you talk a little about how people have gotten trained up on the new skills, how you're helping people do that? >> Yes, in our platform team, it really started with Matt Curry who joined us a few years ago. He's a awesome engineer but also a great leader. He really set the tone culturally for the platform team to be learning environment and for people to share a lot. So a lot's really happened where he's led the hiring and training and seating of the platform team. From a developer perspective, when we looked across the enterprise and realized we've got a couple thousand developers that have worked for us for decades across different areas, we needed to do something more to reach scale more quickly. Initially, we were pairing with Pivotal and that was effective in getting some good results but we thought in order to make that scale and scale more quickly, we wanted to take a different approach. We partnered with Galvanize and brought in-house a 12-week bootcamp-style approach. >> Opal, one of the things that really resonated in your keynote, you talked about painting a picture as to how this technology really impacted your customers. There was a tree, there was a sun, there was your lab's environment and roots. Maybe if you could tease that out a little bit for us and explain how this technology really impacts your users. >> Yes, well, one I think in using that metaphor, it kind of acknowledges the environment is somewhat organic, right? The platform is still growing a lot, the ecosystem we're in, we have the chance to both contribute to the community and to take from it as it develops. To me, that's a really strong notion. The notion that particularly in leadership, we're kind of we're gardeners in a way, right? We're fostering the growth and so I thought that it's a really good example of thinking about as a tree or any plant really grows. It needs a variety of factors so I said our customers are like the sun to us, they're the reason for existing, and that's what we're all orbiting around. But the air represents all the business opportunity. The winds of change have been blowing mightily for years. The soil in which the tree is planted is like all the great Cloud Foundry instances. It's the training, it's the new role definition, it's the holistic program that really defines how we work as a digital product team. We put all that together and we need constant leadership support on a number of grounds to really make sure we take and cement the change. >> What about the developers? Where do they fit in this natural, organic analogy. >> They're the growing, thriving, strong plant itself. I think both. We aim for each individual product team and each individual, whether it's developer, product manager or designer to be continuously growing and using their creativity, discipline, strength, to bring us great business results. And then when you kind of back out and look at our network or product teams, that's a really important thing to me. An enterprise of our scale is very few breakthroughs will occur, I believe, because of a single digital product innovation. It's really in the ability to knit together different products to provide an end-to-end service or experience to the customer. >> How do you look at the public cloud? You know, Cloud Foundry allows? We were talking about BOSH, a multi-cloud environment. Where does your applications and deployments live today and how do you look at the public cloud? >> You know, we're still exploring some of the possibilities. Matt and his team have been very active looking. We started with on-premise installation for Cloud Foundry. And for myself, leading a development team, it's great as the platform is a look to kind of burst out into a multi-cloud environment. It'll be transparent to my team as long as we're operating to run on our Cloud Foundry instance, they can take us wherever we need to go. They've been doing a lot of work with our security team and other areas of the company to determine what's the right way to forge the path forward. I had a meeting with them Friday and they've got some great design things in the works. I think the next six moths to a year, are going to be looking at some real strong expansion of our cloud strategy. >> How does security fit into this whole picture? Obviously, a major concern for every CIO these days. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, to us, we've taken a real security-first approach. We're been our CISO team has been working really closely with Matt and the Cloud engineers and they're just defining how do we want to segregate parts of our environment? How do we follow the principle of trust no one and build security in from the get-go? Again, it's a little bit like the platform itself. I'm confident when they get a solution in place, they'll minimize the burden on my developers and we can just have a security-first mindset but have a lot of the hygiene taken care of by the platform implementation. >> Again, something you don't want to differentiate on. You want to be built into the foundation, or the roots, maybe of our metaphor here. >> Opal: Yes. I heard ya. >> Opal, can you talk a little bit about the apps? Obviously, we've already used words like scale here today. Allstate's a big company. You've got lots of apps. Legacy apps, many different kinds of stacks, generations of technology. How are you choosing what ends up being is this greenfield or things that are being moved? How are you all looking at different applications inside the company? Where they live on which cloud and how they get modernized? >> We're lighting the business needs and strategy, really drive how we prioritize. It really is a matter of a lot, at this point, triage and prioritization. We've got a rich set of opportunities. When we're building new apps in-house, we're certainly looking to take a cloud-first approach. Again, a lot of that's within our own walls today but we know that with the Foundry, it offers us the option to burst out at a later date and leaves us some optionality. The Allstate Corporation, the Allstate brand of insurance is what's best known but in Claims, I also support we have a brand called Encompass Insurance so we're looking to provide support for multiple companies and build technology that can serve everyone. There are a lot of cases too, in an ecosystem like ours, where we're working with third party vendors and they're increasingly offering cloud-based solutions. Again, we do a lot of work with them from the security and compliance perspective to make sure that their strategy is consistent with ours. To make sure we take appropriate care of our customer data. And then I personally get really excited by the refactoring opportunities. I'm really fortunate in Claims that our core claims system was implemented just about 10 years ago. I call it legacy now, but it's not, (John chuckles) as far back to the dark ages as some of the other systems that you'll find within the walls of enterprises. It was build as our last big monolithic implementation and we've been doing decoupling there. So whenever we know we're going to do a decoupling, we look for what opportunity to implement new cloud native microservices and again just stand that up in our environment with the platform team. >> I wanted to ask also about culture and technology adoption. We're sitting here in the middle of Silicon Valley. This cloud phenomenon driven a lot from Silicon Valley. Sometimes people think this cloud native stuff, it's for startups, it's for the kids, it's for whatever. You're based in the Midwest and I also, I'm an Illinois boy myself. You get sometimes, kind of a inferiority complex about the coast, both coasts. But this does not seem to be a coastal phenomenon. This does not seem to be something that only a startup can learn. This is Allstate, a mature company and with a Midwestern base, can you kind of talk a little about was there anything about that in terms of people saying we can't do that here or that sort of thing? >> No, no, I mean, in fact, I think it's a global phenomenon. I was living for almost two years in Belfast, Northern Ireland. We have a division there, Allstate Northern Ireland and we saw a lot of Foundry activity among different companies there. Of course, there's a European summit every year, as well, so I think it's just good common sense. A lot of us, again, before Cloud Foundry came through were working with the different predecessor technologies and Spring and Vmware, you know various aspects and kind of knitting together which felt like reinventing the wheel. So it's just good business sense, good common sense when there's a solution that you can leverage. I think it's just like you were commenting earlier, right? If it's there and you can use it and you can allow the focus to be on what really differentiates you as a business to your customers. That's the way to go. >> Opal, the last question I have for you is there either commentary on any of the announcements that were made this week or are there any things that you're hoping really, for either Pivotal, the fFundation in general, your ecosystem that would make your life easier that's kind of on your to-do list from the vendor side? >> There's so much to take in. I think it's probably still going to take me a week to absorb all the implications. It's great to watch the dynamics going on. I think Microsoft joining the Foundation, that's a very good move 'cause we have so many different technologies within our enterprise so to understand how different vendors are working and playing together in some way is really good. I think Abbey and the Foundation, they've been fantastic about always soliciting input from members like us and members of the community about what we want to see. For me, it's always a big eye-to-word scale. Again, we're a huge enterprise. There are even larger enterprises here that have started running and when this really becomes the we all achieve the aspirational goals and it becomes the day-to-day backbone. It's just making sure this is really hardened to run at true enterprise weight. I think that the enterprise scale of the future is going to be even bigger than what it has been historically because with all these new products, we're driving an appetite towards greater and greater customer interaction. I saw that in banking ten years ago and I think we're going to see it in insurance more and more so we just want to know that we're all working together to get that strength and that power that the customer needs. >> Opal Perry, really appreciate you sharing Allstate's digital transformation with us and our audience, for John and myself. We'll be back with more coverage here from the Cloud Foundry Summit. Thanks for watching the Cube. >> Opal: Thank you. (gentle lively music)

>> (upbeat music) [Narrator] From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AnsibleFest 2020, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hello welcome back to theCUBE virtual coverage of AnsibleFest 2020 Virtual. We're not face to face this year. I'm John Furrier, your host. We're bringing it together remotely. We're in the Palo Alto Studios with theCUBE and we're going remote for our guests this year. And I hope you can come together online enjoy the content. Of course, go check out the events site on Demand Live. And certainly I have a lot of great content. I've got a great guest Skyla Loomis Vice president, for the Z Application Platform at IBM. Also known as IBM Z talking Mainframe. Skyla, thanks for coming on theCUBE Appreciate it. >> Thank you for having me. So, you know, I've talked many conversations about the Mainframe of being relevant and valuable in context to cloud and cloud native because if it's got a workload you've got containers and all this good stuff, you can still run anything on anything these days. By integrating it in with all this great glue layer, lack of a better word or oversimplifying it, you know, things going on. So it's really kind of cool. Plus Walter Bentley in my previous interview was talking about the success of Ansible, and IBM working together on a really killer implementation. So I want to get into that, but before that let's get into IBM Z. How did you start working with IBM Z? What's your role there? >> Yeah, so I actually just got started with Z about four years ago. I spent most of my career actually on the distributed platform, largely with data and analytics, the analytics area databases and both On-premise and Public Cloud. But I always considered myself a friend to Z. So in many of the areas that I'd worked on, we'd, I had offerings where we'd enabled it to work with COS or Linux on Z. And then I had this opportunity come up where I was able to take on the role of leading some of our really core runtimes and databases on the Z platform, IMS and z/TPF. And then recently just expanded my scope to take on CICS and a number of our other offerings related to those kind of in this whole application platform space. And I was really excited because just of how important these runtimes and this platform is to the world,really. You know, our power is two thirds of our fortune 100 clients across banking and insurance. And it's you know, some of the most powerful transaction platforms in the world. You know doing hundreds of billions of transactions a day. And you know, just something that's really exciting to be a part of and everything that it does for us. >> It's funny how distributed systems and distributed computing really enable more longevity of everything. And now with cloud, you've got new capabilities. So it's super excited. We're seeing that a big theme at AnsibleFest this idea of connecting, making things easier you know, talk about distributed computing. The cloud is one big distribute computer. So everything's kind of playing together. You have a panel discussion at AnsibleFest Virtual. Could you talk about what your topic is and share, what was some of the content in there? Content being, content as in your presentation? Not content. (laughs) >> Absolutely. Yeah, so I had the opportunity to co-host a panel with a couple of our clients. So we had Phil Allison from Black Knight and Pat Lane from Allstate and they were really joining us and talking about their experience now starting to use Ansible to manage to z/OS. So we just actually launched some content collections and helping to enable and accelerate, client's use of using Ansible to manage to z/OS back in March of this year. And we've just seen tremendous client uptake in this. And these are a couple of clients who've been working with us and, you know, getting started on the journey of now using Ansible with Z they're both you know, have it in the enterprise already working with Ansible on other platforms. And, you know, we got to talk with them about how they're bringing it into Z. What use cases they're looking at, the type of culture change, that it drives for their teams as they embark on this journey and you know where they see it going for them in the future. >> You know, this is one of the hot items this year. I know that events virtual so has a lot of content flowing around and sessions, but collections is the top story. A lot of people talking collections, collections collections, you know, integration and partnering. It hits so many things but specifically, I like this use case because you're talking about real business value. And I want to ask you specifically when you were in that use case with Ansible and Z. People are excited, it seems like it's working well. Can you talk about what problems that it solves? I mean, what was some of the drivers behind it? What were some of the results? Could you give some insight into, you know, was it a pain point? Was it an enabler? Can you just share why that was getting people are getting excited about this? >> Yeah well, certainly automation on Z, is not new, you know there's decades worth of, of automation on the platform but it's all often proprietary, you know, or bundled up like individual teams or individual people on teams have specific assets, right. That they've built and it's not shared. And it's certainly not consistent with the rest of the enterprise. And, you know, more and more, you're kind of talking about hybrid cloud. You know, we're seeing that, you know an application is not isolated to a single platform anymore right. It really expands. And so being able to leverage this common open platform to be able to manage Z in the same way that you manage the entire rest of your enterprise, whether that's Linux or Windows or network or storage or anything right. You know you can now actually bring this all together into a common automation plane in control plane to be able to manage to all of this. It's also really great from a skills perspective. So, it enables us to really be able to leverage. You know Python on the platform and that's whole ecosystem of Ansible skills that are out there and be able to now use that to work with Z. >> So it's essentially a modern abstraction layer of agility and people to work on it. (laughs) >> Yeah >> You know it's not the joke, Hey, where's that COBOL programmer. I mean, this is a serious skill gap issues though. This is what we're talking about here. You don't have to replace the, kill the old to bring in the new, this is an example of integration where it's classic abstraction layer and evolution. Is that, am I getting that right? >> Absolutely. I mean I think that Ansible's power as an orchestrator is part of why, you know, it's been so successful here because it's not trying to rip and replace and tell you that you have to rewrite anything that you already have. You know, it is that glue sort of like you used that term earlier right? It's that glue that can span you know, whether you've got rec whether you've got ACL, whether you're using z/OSMF you know, or any other kind of custom automation on the platform, you know, it works with everything and it can start to provide that transparency into it as well, and move to that, like infrastructure as code type of culture. So you can bring it into source control. You can have visibility to it as part of the Ansible automation platform and tower and those capabilities. And so you, it really becomes a part of the whole enterprise and enables you to codify a lot of that knowledge. That, you know, exists again in pockets or in individuals and make it much more accessible to anybody new who's coming to the platform. >> That's a great point, great insight.& It's worth calling out. I'm going to make a note of that and make a highlight from that insight. That was awesome. I got to ask about this notion of client uptake. You know, when you have z/OS and Ansible kind of come in together, what are the clients area? When do they get excited? When do they know that they've got to do? And what are some of the client reactions? Are they're like, wake up one day and say, "Hey, yeah I actually put Ansible and z/OS together". You know peanut butter and chocolate is (mumbles) >> Honestly >> You know, it was just one of those things where it's not obvious, right? Or is it? >> Actually I have been surprised myself at how like resoundingly positive and immediate the reactions have been, you know we have something, one of our general managers runs a general managers advisory council and at some of our top clients on the platform and you know we meet with them regularly to talk about, you know, the future direction that we're going. And we first brought this idea of Ansible managing to Z there. And literally unanimously everybody was like yes, give it to us now. (laughs) It was pretty incredible, you know? And so it's you know, we've really just seen amazing uptake. We've had over 5,000 downloads of our core collection on galaxy. And again that's just since mid to late March when we first launched. So we're really seeing tremendous excitement with it. >> You know, I want to want to talk about some of the new announcements, but you brought that up. I wanted to kind of tie into it. It is addictive when you think modernization, people success is addictive. This is another theme coming out of AnsibleFest this year is that when the sharing, the new content you know, coders content is the theme. I got to ask you because you mentioned earlier about the business value and how the clients are kind of gravitating towards it. They want it.It is addictive, contagious. In the ivory towers in the big, you know, front office, the business. It's like, we've got to make everything as a service. Right. You know, you hear that right. You know, and say, okay, okay, boss You know, Skyla, just go do it. Okay. Okay. It's so easy. You can just do it tomorrow, but to make everything as a service, you got to have the automation, right. So, you know, to bridge that gap has everything is a service whether it's mainframe. I mean okay. Mainframe is no problem. If you want to talk about observability and microservices and DevOps, eventually everything's going to be a service. You got to have the automation. Could you share your, commentary on how you view that? Because again, it's a business objective everything is a service, then you got to make it technical then you got to make it work and so on. So what's your thoughts on that? >> Absolutely. I mean, agility is a huge theme that we've been focusing on. We've been delivering a lot of capabilities around a cloud native development experience for folks working on COBOL, right. Because absolutely you know, there's a lot of languages coming to the platform. Java is incredibly powerful and it actually runs better on Z than it runs on any other platform out there. And so, you know, we're seeing a lot of clients you know, starting to, modernize and continue to evolve their applications because the platform itself is incredibly modern, right? I mean we come out with new releases, we're leading the industry in a number of areas around resiliency, in our security and all of our, you know, the face of encryption and number of things that come out with, but, you know the applications themselves are what you know, has not always kept pace with the rate of change in the industry. And so, you know, we're really trying to help enable our clients to make that leap and continue to evolve their applications in an important way, and the automation and the tools that go around it become very important. So, you know, one of the things that we're enabling is the self service, provisioning experience, right. So clients can, you know, from Open + Shift, be able to you know, say, "Hey, give me an IMS and z/OS connect stack or a kicks into DB2 stack." And that is all under the covers is going to be powered by Ansible automation. So that really, you know, you can get your system programmers and your talent out of having to do these manual tasks, right. Enable the development community. So they can use things like VS Code and Jenkins and GET Lab, and you'll have this automated CICB pipeline. And again, Ansible under the covers can be there helping to provision those test environments. You know, move the data, you know, along with the application, changes through the pipeline and really just help to support that so that, our clients can do what they need to do. >> You guys got the collections in the hub there, so automation hub, I got to ask you where do you see the future of the automating within z/OS going forward? >> Yeah, so I think, you know one of the areas that we'd like to see go is head more towards this declarative state so that you can you know, have this declarative configuration defined for your Z environment and then have Ansible really with the data and potency right. Be able to, go out and ensure that the environment is always there, and meeting those requirements. You know that's partly a culture change as well which goes along with it, but that's a key area. And then also just, you know, along with that becoming more proactive overall part of, you know, AI ops right. That's happening. And I think Ansible on the automation that we support can become you know, an integral piece of supporting that more intelligent and proactive operational direction that, you know, we're all going. >> Awesome Skyla. Great to talk to you. And so insightful, appreciate it. One final question. I want to ask you a personal question because I've been doing a lot of interviews around skill gaps and cybersecurity, and there's a lot of jobs, more job openings and there are a lot of people. And people are with COVID working at home. People are looking to get new skilled up positions, new opportunities. Again cybersecurity and spaces and event we did and want to, and for us its huge, huge openings. But for people watching who are, you know, resetting getting through this COVID want to come out on the other side there's a lot of online learning tools out there. What skill sets do you think? Cause you brought up this point about modernization and bringing new people and people as a big part of this event and the role of the people in community. What areas do you think people could really double down on? If I wanted to learn a skill. Or an area of coding and business policy or integration services, solution architects, there's a lot of different personas, but what skills can I learn? What's your advice to people out there? >> Yeah sure. I mean on the Z platform overall and skills related to Z, COBOL, right. There's, you know, like two billion lines of COBOL out there in the world. And it's certainly not going away and there's a huge need for skills. And you know, if you've got experience from other platforms, I think bringing that in, right. And really being able to kind of then bridge the two things together right. For the folks that you're working for and the enterprise we're working with you know, we actually have a bunch of education out there. You got to master the mainframe program and even a competition that goes on that's happening now, for folks who are interested in getting started at any stage, whether you're a student or later in your career, but you know learning, you know, learn a lot of those platforms you're going to be able to then have a career for life. >> Yeah. And the scale on the data, this is so much going on. It's super exciting. Thanks for sharing that. Appreciate it. Want to get that plug in there. And of course, IBM, if you learn COBOL you'll have a job forever. I mean, the mainframe's not going away. >> Absolutely. >> Skyla, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE Vice President, for the Z Application Platform and IBM, thanks for coming. Appreciate it. >> Thanks for having me. >> I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE here for AnsibleFest 2020 Virtual. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2018 brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation. >> I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of Cloud Foundry Summit 2018 here in Boston, Massachusetts, happy to welcome back to the program Abby Kearns who's the executive director and goddess of the Cloud Foundry Foundation. Abby. >> Yes. >> Thanks so much for being here, good morning, good evening. >> Good afternoon. >> You've been running, doing so many sessions here, so, we're really glad that we get to have you on to help us wrap up our coverage. >> My pleasure, what better way to wrap up another amazing day at Cloud Foundry Summit than hanging out with you, Stu? >> Thanks, Abby, it's a pleasure. Look, really, I've said it a few times, but I mean it. One of the reasons I wanted to come here is, I get to talk to a bunch of users and they have great stories, so, it's always cool to talk to the startup doing something neat and different, but another thing, too, when you talk to the US Air Force and they talk about how they're doing drastic change, talk to T-Mobile, you talk to some of these bigger, older companies, and gosh, that's a bad word in the industry, right? But making some big changes, so, take a breath and tell us what your experience has been at the show so far. >> Well, I mean, you hit on my favorite part of the whole show, is getting to spend time with the community, but also the end users. What's so unique about Cloud Foundry Summit is half the attendees are end users. And it's so great to see them all come here and really be willing to put it all out there and get up on stage and talk about what they've done, how they got there, or hear them all fight about who's the more agile hundred-year-old company, which has been a funny conversation today. Allstate was chiming in that they were the young one in the group at 85 years old, so it's... But honestly, we get really caught up in the tech but hearing how people are using it and what they're doing and how it's changing their company is really I think the interesting story. If I'm a journalist, that's what I want to cover, because that's the interesting stuff. >> We had a media dinner and we're not supposed to share the details of them, but I love this discussion. This stuff isn't easy. We actually have the customers sharing the rewards, the challenges, the problems, well, working at a big company, change is definitely not easy. Working with some of this tech, it's not the simplest thing out there. We're working, there's lots of projects, there's lots of different interfaces there, but, still getting measurable great value out of what they're doing. To use an old term, moving the needle on what they're doing, so, it's exciting to see that. You've been in so many sessions, give us some highlights from, say, if you've got a couple of examples or things that, any customer story that you'd want to share. >> I mean, today, I heard a lot about Boeing. Boeing and the journey that they're on has been amazing to hear them talk about how they're changing their company, and even, in fact, they ask, all right, we're going to talk about this at Summit, but I don't want to talk about the tech. I don't want to talk about how we're using CICD, I don't want to talk about any of that. I want to talk about the culture change and having user after user say, I'm actually, want to get onstage and talk, but I don't want to talk about the tech, and that, I think, really shows the excitement and enthusiasm around the transformation process and what that means for them, and for me, as someone watching this outside, you're like, oh my god, this is amazing, and this is such a powerful story to really reflect the role technology has played in enabling that, but also the hard work that has to come into that. >> We often say that the technology is the easy part, it's the people and process stuff that'll be hard. The Foundation and this ecosystem and all the users that are involved, there's a lot of technical challenges, though, that are people working through, so, I wonder, do they underplay some of the technology things that they have to, I mean, learning new technologies, learning new skills, some of that is cultural, but, there is kind of that full spectrum that they have to get engaged with. >> Yeah, well, I just think that Cloud Foundry makes it easy (laughing) from the technology standpoint, because it really pulls a lot of things in together, but, collectively and particularly in open source, the opportunity exists for us to all move forward together. One of my big things I'm pushing for this year is interoperability, and continuing to let the technology evolve and taking advantage of new and innovative technologies, either alongside the platform or inside the platform, but really that's going to be a big focus and it was so great to hear from a lot of these end users, but that's important to them, too. >> Yeah, interoperability, you know, there are some that would look at this and they'd say, oh, they know Cloud Foundry because that thing that came out of VMware and there's this company, Pivotal, filed an S-1, they're going to go public, but, maybe talk a little bit about the ecosystem. There are so many solutions out there which don't yet have the Cloud Foundry branding on it but leverage the technologies in there. >> Yeah, it was really great to announce our eight certified distributions for 2018. We've had two new ones join SUSE Cloud Application Platform and, the most surprising one is Cloud.gov is now a certified distribution. Cloud.gov has done so much to bring digital transformation to the government, and so for them, and AT and F in particular, being able to offer up a platform like Cloud Foundry and the digital transformation initiatives around that, to federal agencies, is such a powerful story. They are literally changing our government, and hearing more and more stories like that have been really exciting, so to see that they now have a certified distribution, so regardless of what industry you're in, or what geo you're in, you have access to a certified distribution, the ability to run it on any cloud, for example, AliCloud is now, it's Cloud Foundry CPI is now available for AliCloud. You can run it on any cloud in the world and that is really showcasing that Cloud Foundry is not only leading the industry in terms of driving this change in these companies and with the technology but the ecosystem around it is continuing to grow and build. >> Maybe share a little bit, the tracks got kind of redone and there's some interesting tracks to kind of highlight, some of those focus areas that you had at the show this year. >> Yeah, for the first time ever, we had a government track. We had so many government use cases. You mentioned the Air Force earlier, AT and F. We have governments around the world that are running Cloud Foundry, so we added a government track. We had also a containers and serverless track. We actually added, last year we added an enterprise track, which is essentially users getting up on stage and talking about what they do. We added a whole track because we had so many submissions for that, and so it's really, again, an interesting opportunity to talk about the core technology and the platform, what's happening around that, but also more importantly how it's being used, and really being able to capture that is important for us. >> All right, the other kind of metric, if you look at the growth, is, when you talk about the ecosystem, there's, I believe it's the Foundry, which is the online marketplace. Speak a little bit to how that's been growing. >> Right, so we launched the Foundry last year in October at our summit in Basel. We launched in initially with 600 services. In short, it's an online marketplace for end users to find services, capabilities, and support, so it lists certified distributions, training partners, as well as technologies that are available that they could run on or alongside the platform and since October, we had now announced this week that we actually have over 4900 services in there now, so it's continuing to grow, but also, one thing I hadn't mentioned is it is our most highly trafficked page in our website, so it's continuing to drive the most traffic because end users care about it, but it's also really an area where we can showcase the breadth of the Cloud Foundry ecosystem. >> Yeah, I talked a little bit with Chip about this, but, there's not just one project, there's so many things getting involved. Maybe give us a little bit of the philosophy from the Foundation. What's the most important thing and how do you keep growing without sprawling? (laughing) >> Well, I think Cloud Foundry has always had really strong opinions about where we go and one of the things that we work, collectively work together on, is keeping a core shared vision, so there is a common core where the innovation continues to grow and happen, but allowing space and room for everyone to be able to differentiate from either different commercial go-to-market, or extensibility or extensions. For example, if you look at just our distributions alone, we've got one that focuses on federal government, we've got Pivotal Cloud Foundry, but we've got also an SAP cloud platform and really it's focusing on changing not only SAP customers, but also the way SAP thinks about software, and so seeing these different variations of the same core technology, is also a big driver of the inspiration, it's like, so many different perspectives around the table that really can drive and push the technology to do new and innovative things. >> All right, Abby, want to give the the final word. People that haven't been to the show, there's so much online. Any special things you'd want to call out, or final thoughts? >> Well, one, if you haven't been to the show, you should definitely come. We have another one coming up in October 11th and 12th in Basel, Switzerland, so if you've never been to Basel, it's a great way to come experience Summit for the first time. All the videos from all the sessions and key notes will be made available on YouTube usually within about a week, so anything that you missed if you were here, you can catch up there, and we're going to just keep talking about what we're doing and continuing to promote it and we'd love for more people to join us on the process. >> All right, well, Abby Kearns, always a pleasure to catch up with you. Thanks to the Foundation again for helping us bring this coverage, all of our content, of course, is always out there. It will be on theCUBE.net. Talking to many of the people in the Cloud Foundry ecosystem at many shows throughout the year, so, thanks, Abby, and the whole Foundation. A great lineup of customers, partners, and thought leaders in this space. Thanks to Brian and Alex for helping us do this coverage and be sure to check out all of our coverage on theCUBE.net. I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching theCUBE.

(bouncy electronic music) [Narrator] Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE. Covering InterConnect 2017 brought to you by IBM. >> Hey welcome back everyone, we are live in Las Vegas for IBM InterConnect 2017. This is the CUBE's coverage of IBM's Cloud and data show. I'm John Furrier, with my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Abby Kearns, Executive Director of Cloud Foundry Foundation. Welcome to the CUBE! >> Welcome, thank you! >> Thanks for joining us, so Cloud Foundry, you're new as the executive role, Sam had moved on to Microsoft? >> Abby: Google. >> Google, I'm sorry, Google, he was formerly at Microsoft, former Microsoft employee, but Google, Google Cloud Next was a recent show. >> Yeah. >> So, you're new. >> I'm new. >> John: To the reins but you're not new, new to the community. >> I've been a part of the community for several years prior to joining the foundation a year ago I was at Pivotal for a couple of years so I've been part of the Cloud Foundry community for several years and it's a technology that's near and dear to my heart and it's a community that I am very passionate about. >> And the emergence of Cloud Foundry if you think about it has really kind of changed the game it's really lifted all the boats, if you will, rising tide floats all boats. IBM uses it, you've got a lot of customers. Just go down the list of the notable folks working with Cloud Foundry. >> Well, look no further than those that are on our board and those that represent the strategic vision around the Cloud Foundry, so IBM, Pivotal, but, Dell EMC, and Cisco and SAP and VMware and Allianz and Swisscom. And of course, Pivotal. I think all of them really bring such a broad perspective to the table. But then broadening beyond that community, our community has grown so much. A lot of people don't realize that Cloud Foundry has only been an open-source project for just a little over two years, so January 2015 marked when it became an official open-source project. Prior to that it was part of Pivotal. And in that little-over-two years, we've grown to nearly 70 members in our community and are just excited to continue to grow and bring more perspectives to the table. >> So what has been the differences, a lot of people have been taking a different approach on for Bluemix, for instance, they have a good core at Cloud Foundry. Is it going the way you guys had thought as a community, that this was the plan all along? Because you see people really kind of making some good stuff out of the Cloud Foundry. Was that part of the plan, this open direction? >> Well I think part of the plan was really coalescing around the single vision of that abstraction And what's the whole vision of Cloud Foundry, it's to allow developers to create code faster. And whatever realm that takes. Our industry is evolving and it's evolving so quickly and exciting, all of these enterprise organizations that are becoming software companies. I mean how exciting is that? As we think about the abstraction that Cloud Foundry can provide for them and the automation it can provide, it allows them to focus on one thing and one thing only, creating code that changes their business. We're really focused myopically on ensuring that developers have the ability to quickly and easily create code and innovate quickly as an organization. >> So on the development side, sometimes standards can go fall down by forcing syntax or forcing certain things. You guys had a different approach, looking back now, what were the key things that were critical for Cloud Foundry to maintain its momentum? >> I think a couple of things. It's a complex distributed system but it is put together amazingly well. Quality was first and foremost, part of its origins. And it's continued to adhere to that quality and that control around the development process and around the release process. So Cloud Foundry as an open-source project is very much a governance by contribution. So we look for those in the organizations and different communities to be part of it and contribute. So we have the full-time committers that are basically doing this all day, every day, and then we have the contributors that are also part of the community providing feedback and value. >> And there was a big testimonial with American Airlines on stage, that's a big win. >> Abby: Yes, it is a big win. >> Give us some color on that deal. >> I can't give you any details on the deal that IBM has-- >> But that's a Cloud Foundry, IBM-- >> But it is Cloud Foundry, yes. >> You guys were part of the Bluemix thing? >> Yes. And American Airlines is a company that I have a lot of history with, They were a customer of mine for many years in the early 2000s, so I'm thrilled to see them innovating and taking advantage of a platform. >> So, help us unpack this conversation that's going on around PaaS, right? >> Some people say, "oh, PaaS is pase," but it's development tools and it's programming and it's a platform that you've created, so what do you make of that conversation? What implications does it have to your strategy and your ecosystem strategy? >> Well, I for one don't like the term PaaS anyway, so I'm happy to say PaaS is pase. Because I do think it's evolved, so when I talk about Cloud Foundry, I talk about it as a Cloud application platform. Because at the end of the day, our goal is to help organizations create code faster. The high degrees of automation, the abstraction that the platform brings to the table, it isn't just a platform, it is an enabler for that development. So we think about what that means, it's, can I create applications faster and do I have a proliferation of services to your ecosystem point that enable applications to grow and to scale and to change the way that organization works. Because it's a technology-enabled business transformation for many of these organizations. >> John: It's app-driven, too, that's the key to success. >> It's app-driven, which is why we talk so much about developers, is because that's the key, if I'm going to become a software company, what does that mean? I am writing code, and that code is changing the way I think about my business and my consumers. >> And the app landscape has certainly changed with UX creativity, but now you've got IoT, there's a real functional integration going on with the analog world going digital, it's like, "Whoa, "I've got all this stuff that's now instrumented "connected to the internet!" IoT, Internet of Things. That's going to be interesting, Cloud has to power that. >> I think it does, because what is IoT reliant on? Applications that take advantage of that data. That's what you're looking to gain, you're looking to have small applications streaming large amounts of data from sensors, be it from cars, or be it from a manufacturing plant, if you're thinking industrial IoT, so Cloud Foundry provides the platform for many of these applications to be developed, created, and scaled at the level that companies like GE, and Siemens, and others are looking to build out and tackle that IoT space. >> It's open, I mean we can all agree that Cloud Foundry's the most open platform to develop applications on, but developers have choices. You're seeing infrastructure as a service, plus you're seeing SAS kind of minus emerge. How should we be thinking about the evolution, you said earlier it evolved, where is it evolving to? Obviously you bet on open, good bet. Other more propriet... I don't even know what open is anymore sometimes (Abby laughs) >> But we can agree that Cloud Foundry's open. But how should we be thinking about the evolution going forward? >> Well that's the beauty of open, right? What is open-source, open-source brings together a diverse set of perspective and background to innovate faster. And that's where we are, we're seeing a lot of technology evolve. I mean, just think about all of the things that evolved the last two years. Where we've had technologies come up, some go down, but there's so much happening right now, because the time is now. For these companies that are trying to develop more applications, or trying to figure out ways to not only develop these applications, but develop them at scale and really grow those out and build those and IoT, and you're getting more data, and we're capturing those data and operationalizing that data and it comes back to one thing. Applications that can take advantage of that. And so I think there's the potential, as we build out and innovate both the ecosystem but the platform will naturally evolve and take advantage of those winds from these organizations that are driving this to scale. >> So scale is the linchpin. >> Abby: Yeah. >> If you think about traditional paths, environments, if I can use that term, they're limited in scale, and obviously simplicity. Is that another way to think about it? >> I think about it this way, the platform enables you to run fast. You're not running fast with scissors. You want to be able to run fast safely. And so it provides that abstraction and those guardrails so you can quickly iterate and develop and deploy code. If I look at what... HCSE as a company. They went from developing an application, it took them 35 people and nine months to create an app, right? And now with Cloud Foundry, they're able to do it with four people and six weeks. It changes the way you work as an organization. Just imagine as you scale that out, what that means. Imagine the changes that can bring in your organization when you're software-centric and you're customer-first and you're bringing that feedback loop in. >> And you guys do a lot of heavy lifting on behalf of the customer, but you're not hardening it to the point where they can't mold it and shape it to what they want is kind of what I'm-- >> No, we want to abstract away and automate as much as possible, the things you care about. Resiliency, auto-scaling, the ability to do security and compliance, because those are things you care about as an enterprise. Let's make that happen for you, but then give the control to the developer to self provision, to scale, to quickly deploy and iterate, do continuous delivery. All of those things that allow you to go from developing an app once a year to developing an app and iterating on that app constantly, all the time. >> So I've been wanting to ask you to kind of take a step back, and look at the community trends right now. PC Open Stack has a trajectory, it's becoming more of an infrastructure, as a service, kind of settling in there. That's gone through a lot of changes. Seeing a lot of growth in IoT, which we talked about. You're starting to see some movement in the open-source community. CNCF has got traction, The Linux Foundation, Cloud Native, you've got the Kubernetes, I call it the Cold War for orchestration going on right now so it's a really interesting time, microservices are booming. This is the holy grail for developers for the next gen. It's going to be awesome, like machine learning, everyone's getting intoxicated on that these days, so super cool things coming down the pike. >> For sure, I think we're in the coolest time. >> What's going on in the communities, is there any movement, is there trends, is there a sentiment among the developer communities that you see that you could... Any patterns developing around what people are gravitating to? >> I think developers want the freedom to create. They want the ability to create applications and see those come to fruition. I think a lot of things that were new and innovative a couple of years ago and even now, are becoming table stakes. For example, five years ago, having a mobile app as a bank was new and interesting and kind of fun. Now, it's table stakes. Are you going to go bank with a bank that doesn't have one? Are you going to bank with a bank that doesn't have it? It becomes table stakes or, who doesn't, if you don't have fraud detection which is basically event driven responses, right? And so you think about what table stakes are and what, as we think about the abstraction moving up, that's really where it's going to get interesting. >> But open-source community, is it going to move to these new ground, what I'm trying to get at is to see what's happening, what's the trend in the developer community. What's hot, what's fashionable. Is there new projects popping up that you could share that you think is cool and interesting? >> Well they're all cool and interesting. >> John: You'd rather not comment. (laughs) >> I think they're all cool and interesting, I think, you know, CNCF is a sister organization underneath The Linux Foundation. >> John: They kind of inherited that from Kub Con though. Kubernetes Con. >> Yeah, I think they're doing interesting things. I think any organizations that's promoting Cloud Native application architecture and the value of that, we all deserve to be part of the same conversation because to your point earlier, a rising tide lifts all boats. And if every organizations is doing Cloud Native application architectures and Cloud Native solutions, it's going to be super interesting. >> We just had STRAD at Duke, we ran our own event last week called Big Data SV, and it's very clear to us that the big data world industry and Cloud are coming together and the forcing function is machine learning, IoT, and then AI is the appeal, that's the big trend that's kind of, puts a mental model around but IoT is driving this data and the Cloud horsepower is forcing this to move faster. It seems to be very accelerated. >> But, it also enables so much, I mean if you can operationalize this data that you're aggregating and turn it into actionable apps that do things for your business, save money, improve logistics, reach your users better and faster, you start to see the change and the shift that that can bring. You have the data married with the apps, married with the in point sensors and all of a sudden this gets to be a really interesting evolution of technology. >> So what's your hundred day plan, well you're in the hundred day plan already. So what's your plan for this year as new Executive Director for Cloud Foundry, what's on the agenda, what's your top three things you're going to chip away at this year for objectives? >> Developers, developers, developers, does that count as top three? >> More, more, more? Increase the developer count? (laughs) >> Just really, reaching out to the developers and ensuring that they're able to be successful in Cloud Foundry. So I think you'll hear more from us in the next couple of weeks about that. But, ensuring-- >> John: The proof points, basically? >> The proof points, but just ensuring they can be successful and ensuring that scale is affable for them, and then really, our summits are even changing. We've actually added developer tracks to our summit, to make them a place not only where you can learn about Cloud Foundry, but also where you can work with other developers and learn from them and learn about specific languages, but also, how to enable those into Cloud Native application architectures and I think our goal this year is to really enrich that development community and build that pipeline and help fill those gaps. >> And celebrate the wins like the American Airlines of the world, and as IBM and others are successful, then it gets to be less... You don't want to have cognitive dissonance as a developer, that's the worst thing, developers want to make sure they're on a good bus with good people. >> You've obviously got some technology titans behind you, IBM the most prominent, I would say, but obviously guys like VMware, and Cisco, and others, but you've also got [Interference] organizations, guys like Allianz, VW, Allstate I think was early-on in the program. >> JPMC, Citibank. >> Yeah, I shouldn't have started, 'cause I know I'd leave some out, but you're the Executive Director, so you have to fill in the gaps. That's somewhat unique, in a consortium like this. Somewhat, but that many is somewhat unique. Is there more traction there? What's their motivation? >> Abby: As a user? >> Yeah. >> Well, to your earlier point, we're an open-source, right? And what's the value, if I'm an enterprise and I'm looking to take advantage of a platform, but also an open-source platform, open-source allows me to be part of that conversation. I can be a contributor, I can be part of the direction, I can influence where it's going and I think that is a powerful sentiment, for many of these organizations that are looking to evolve and become more software-centric, and this is a good way for them to give back and be part of that momentum. >> And Cloud's exploding, more open-source is needed, it's just a great mission. Congratulations on the new job, and good luck this year. We'll keep in touch, and certainly see you at the Cloud Foundry Summit, that's in San Fransisco again this year? >> Santa Clara, June 13th through 15th. >> John: So every year, you guys always have the fire code problem. (laughs) >> Well I think I'm going to go on record now and officially say this, this will be our last year there, which I think everyone's excited about, 'cause I think we're all over Santa Clara right now. (laughs) >> Alright, well, we'll see you there. Abby Kearns, Executive Director of Cloud Foundry Foundation, here inside the CUBE, powering the Cloud, this is the CUBE's coverage of IBM InterConnect 2017. Stay with us, more coverage after this short break. (bouncy electronic music)

[lively music] >> Man: Live from Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCube, covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2017. Brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation and Pivotal. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman with my cohost, John Troyer. Happy to welcome back to the program, actually a former colleague of mine, Cornelia Davis, Senior Director of Technology at Pivotal. Cornelia, it's great to see you. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> All right, so why don't you fill in our audience a little bit about your role at Pivotal, you've been involved since before the foundation in early days of everything happening. >> Yeah, and in fact I have been working with Cloud Foundry for longer than the Pivotal Company's existed. As you know, Stu, you and I used to work together at EMC in the corporate CTO office. >> Yeah, I remember a company named EMC. [Laughing] >> Yep. And I worked in the architecture group and we did architecture in emerging tech. And about five years ago, my boss, who you know, Tom McGuire, said, "You know, this platform as a service thing, I think is going to be pretty disruptive, and I want you to start looking at it. And so naturally we were EMC, VMware was incubating Cloud Foundry already, so I started playing with Cloud Foundry. So that was way back in the days of Cloud Foundry version 1.0. I'm one of those people who got to raise my hand and say, "Yes, I've been to every single Cloud Foundry Summit." [Stu Laughing] But fast forward then we had the Pivotal spin-off, and since the Pivotal spin-off, I joined the Cloud Foundry team proper, and I've been in a role working the product organization, working with James Waters, who I know you spoke to earlier today, and helping our customers kind of get their arms wrapped around what this...this isn't just the next application platform. How really, it's radically different, and how the applications, it enables a completely different style of application. And so really helping customers grok the differences about that. >> Yeah, Cornelia, I want you to help us dig into this a little bit, because when we look at any of these massive changes, a lot of times we say, you know, the technology is the easy part. It's really the change in mindset, the change in the structure, new skillsets. What are you seeing, what's different now than it was, say, three or five years ago, and what are those customer discussions that you're having? >> Yeah, and that's a great question, and I will say, and thanks for the opportunity to say this, is that the technology isn't always the easy part. [Stu laughs] So let me give you an example. So just earlier today I was on a call where somebody was talking about some user interviews that they had done with some programmers, and what they concluded at the end of that was that programmers really weren't comfortable with the "asynch" model for this particular API, and that they really wanted to just deal with the synchronous stuff. And the answer there is not that we say, "Oh, okay, we'll let you keep doing synchronous." The answer is that yes, there's a technology thing here that's hard, which is starting to think asynchronously and changing the way that we design our applications. So the technology's not always easy, but we have to go there, because in the cloud, where things are so extraordinarily distributed in a way, and the cloud is constantly changing in ways that it never did before, we have to adopt new technology models. So that's the first thing I'll say, is that we definitely, the technology parts are sometimes hard. That said, certainly over the course of the last four years, as I've worked with those customers, in the beginning, I spent a lot of time, as you know, I'm a technologist, so I spent a lot of time at the whiteboard, and sketching out architectures and talking about changes in the architecture of the platform or changes in the architecture of the application, but then I very quickly found myself talking to customers about the other things that are going to need to change around the edges. So if, for example, you want to start deploying software multiple times a day, you're going to have to change your processes, because you can't have the security office have to do a full audit of every change before it goes into production if it's going to happen three or four times a day. And if you do that, then does that imply organizational changes? So I spend a great deal of my time really talking about the whole DevOps and the people and process side of the equation as well. So last week, I was just - I'm part of the programming committee of the DevOps Enterprise Summit, and we just held that last week in London. And there we spent a lot of time talking about those elements as well. >> I spoke with somebody who was at that conference, and they said it was a little bit sobering, because there are people who have adopted a lot of these practices, and then there are people who are trying and then probably people who have not started yet. >> Cornelia: Yeah. >> As Coté calls them "the donkeys without the unicorn horns yet. >> Cornelia: Ah. >> But as you go out to the customer base, obviously part of what Pivotal is doing is really this huge Pivotal Apps push about showing people the culture. I mean, do you feel like it's a push or a pull, does the technology come first, and then the culture, does the CIO yell, or do the developers say, "We want this"? >> So we definitely get a little bit of both. I would say that I have had the great opportunity to work with a great number of these customers, so Allstate, for example, we've seen Allstate here at CF Summit year after year, and Opal spoke about Andy Zitney talking about this three or four years ago. Well, that was IT saying, "Hey," and that was more from the operations side saying, "Hey, we're going to build you a new platform," and then will they come? Now, they of course had to couple that together with, "Okay, we're not just going to build the platform, we have to put things in place to enable people to use it properly. So there's certainly- and that came a little bit more from Andy Zitney's vision. So it was a little bit more from the top, "Hey, we understand there's a better way, we're going to start making this available to you, and we'll teach you along the way." We absolutely see the opposite as well, though. Where we see the groundswell, which sometimes comes from a bunch of really smart people starting to play with the open source things. And saying, "Hey, there's got to be a better way," or the shadow IT. They're frustrated with the three-month cycles, and those things. So it isn't one answer, it's really both. It comes from both sides. >> All right. So Cornelia, you're good at understanding some of those next generation things. One of the terms that we've been talking about for the last couple of years is "cloud-native." Could you help us really kind of tease apart what that means in your customer base, and the way you approach and explain that? >> Yeah. So the term "cloud-native" is brilliant from the perspective of having a term for it that has really taken ahold. Because I would say that three years ago, I used to say to people, "Hey, cloud is not about where you're computing, it's about how you're computing." But in fact, that's not exactly accurate. And so, now that cloud-native is a term that's taken hold, I have modified my statement. And the statement that I like to make now is that, cloud, in fact, is where you compute. It could be a public cloud, it could be a private cloud, but it is more of a location. Cloud-native is the how. So I like to also characterize the cloud and cloud-native, really cloud-native applications, as two fundamental things. One is that cloud-native has reached levels of distribution that we have not seen before. We've been dealing with distributed systems and heck, in universities, there have been courses on distributed systems for 40 years. But even when I started my career 30 years ago, I started my career in aerospace doing embedded systems, and I remember working on a system where we had three processors. You know, that was as distributed as we got. And we actually mapped out on a whiteboard, okay, we're going to run this on this process and parallel with this on this process, and the point there is it was distributed, but we knew exactly what we had, and we could count on that being there. Now, it's reached a completely different, many many orders of magnitude more, in terms of the number of distributed components, as we go to microservices and those types of things. So that's one of the things that I characterize cloud and cloud-native, is highly distributed like we've never seen before. Couple that together with the other thing I just talked about with the embedded systems, that's very different from that, is constantly changing. Always changing. And whether that change is happening because of some catastrophe or that change is happening because we are doing an upgrade, a planned upgrade, it's constantly in flux. And so we have to do things differently for that. And so that, I think really, is what cloud-native is about, is the how, and like I said, highly distributed, constantly changing. >> All right. And what about the role of data, when we talk about that? Distributed architectures, storage is really tough in that kind of environment. >> Cornelia: Yep. >> And therefore, how does data play into it? >> Cornelia: Yeah, so cloud-native apps were really, as an industry starting, and here at CF Summit, people are really kind of grokking what that means. Highly distributed, small, loosely coupled components that we've put together, we'll talk about that collective in just a moment. But they're generally stateless and so on. So we understand cloud-native apps, but cloud-native involves data as well, as you said, now most of our customers that have, as you said, some of them are a little bit further along whether it's DevOps or it's cloud-native architectures, they're a little further along. And those that are quite far along, have a lot of microservices, and so you look at them, and if you look just at the microservices, you think, "Ah, beautiful. Loosely coupled, independent teams, and so on," and then you pull back the curtain, and you realize that those microservices are all tied to a shared database. There's this monolithic Oracle database or SQL server, something at the back end, that they're all tied to. And so in fact, when a team wants to make a rev on a microservice, they might still have to go through some of that planning and lockstep with lots of other teams, because, "Hey, I want to change something in the data." So the data, remember we just talked about highly distributed? Well, on the data side, it's not so highly distributed. Yes, we've got multi data centers, but we have, again, a predictable number of nodes. We know what we've got deployed. We have very rigid architectures and configurations and so on. So when we start to apply cloud-native to data, we look at the same goals we had with cloud-native applications, which is autonomy, so being able to have the different cloud-native components evolve independently, resilience, so that we have bulkheads and air gaps between them, all of those same goals, let's start to apply those to data. >> And you feel that that's not happening today yet. We're earlier in the process yet? >> It hasn't been happening. That's right. We're far far far earlier in the process. And so what we want to start to do is take that monolith that's sitting behind the curtain and we want to start breaking it apart. Now, the industry has definitely gotten to the point where they're starting to tackle this. And that was, I kind of had an epiphany about a year ago, I was working with a customer, talking to them about DevOps, talking about all these cloud-native patterns and practices, and the punch line was it was the data team of this organization. So they didn't understand the solutions, but they were understanding that they had pain points that were very reminiscent of the pain points that their colleagues in the application server teams had had, had been tackling for three or four years. So the types of technologies that we're starting to see emerge and the types of patterns we're starting to see emerge are things like unified logs, like applying Kafka to that problem of having a unified log and that be the source of record. And event-driven systems and those types of things. Every microservice gets its own database, which, yeah, we'll get some of that, but that's a kind of purist and not pragmatic way of looking at things. Caching plays a pretty big role in that, so caching in the past has been all about performance, but now when we start to look at patterns, how can we use caches to help us create those bulkheads and those air gaps so we get additional resilience in our microservices architecture? If we can put caches and there are companies like Netflix, like Twitter, who have done that, who have embedded caching deeply through their entire architecture. >> Well, do you think these technologies will come from the database or, well, let's call it the database projects and vendors themselves, or is that something, those patterns can get built into a platform, say, like Cloud Foundry? >> I think it's going to probably come more from the platform community, which is not to say that database vendors aren't thinking about that, but again, they are keeping the lights on with their existing product, so they have those quintessential business school constraints that are holding them back. >> A quick question on nomenclature. So a few years back as cloud-native was being coined, you also heard about 12-Factor apps, and that was one particular manifesto, and certainly the ops folks, I would call it at the time, said, "Well, wait a minute, that's great for your front end, but where are you storing your state?" >> Cornelia: Exactly. And so I love this conversation about >> Yep. cloud-native data. So that is what we're talking about here? >> That's exactly what we're talking about, is doing that. And so it allows us, it's interesting, because as soon as we take a model where we say, "Okay, every microservice gets its own microdatabase," then of course everybody in any large enterprise says, "Wait a minute, what about my data compliance, my data governance, how do I keep a customer that's stored in this database over here from diverging from the customer record that's stored in this other database?" I mean, we've spent decades talking about the 360 view of customers, because we've already been somewhat more fragmented than we wanted, and our knee-jerk reaction over the last several decades was, let's consolidate everything into one database. But with that comes slowness. It's the proverbial large, large ship that's hard to turn and hard to move. But what's different now is that we're starting to come up with some different patterns of doing that, what we call master data management in the past, we're applying completely different patterns now, where those individual microservice databases are really just seen as a materialized view of some source of record, and that source of record is just a time series of events, and you can always rebuild. You know, it's very interesting, because databases have had a log as a part of their architecture forever. For a very, very long time. And in fact, the log, arguably, is more important than any of the database tables that are stored on disk, because you can always recreate the database tables from the log. Now take that concept and distribute it. That's what cloud-native data is all about. To take what has been a single fabric, and now create a highly distributed, constantly changing fabric for data. And figuring out what those patterns are. >> Cornelia, I want to give you the final word. You've been to all the Cloud Foundry Summits. Either the customers or the event itself, what are some of the things that are kind of new and changing, that people that aren't at the show should know about? >> You know, I was walking down the hallway this afternoon, one thing I'll note that has changed, like I said, I was walking down the hallway with a colleague of mine, and he said, "I have 12 people from a single one of my customers here. 12 people." I spoke with somebody else who said, "Yep, another customer - not a vendor, but a customer - sent 30 people here." So we have- Cloud Foundry Summit in the beginning was a whole bunch of people who were the hobbyists, if you will. So I think we've reached that inflection point where we have the users, not just the hobbyists, but the true users that are going to leverage the platform. That's one thing that's changed. Some of the things- the other interesting thing I think that is really brilliant is the touch that the Cloud Foundry Foundation has. So I'll tell you, I submitted several papers here three years ago, when it was still the Pivotal Show. I could talk about whatever I wanted. I don't always get my papers accepted here now. And that is a good thing. That's a really good thing, so we have really democratized the community, so it truly is a community event. I think that's another thing that's happened, is kind of the democratization of Cloud Foundry, and I love that. >> Cornelia Davis, it's a pleasure to catch up with you, thank you so much for joining us. And John and I will be back with a couple of customers, actually, here at the Cloud Foundry Summit. So stay tuned and thanks for watching theCube. [lively music]

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vega, it's theCUBE. Covering InterConnect 2017. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back everyone. We are live in Las Vegas where IBM InterConnect 2017. It's theCUBE's coverage of IBM's Cloud Show, Cloud and Data Show. I'm John Furrier, and my Co-Host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Abby Kearns, Executive Director of Cloud Foundry Foundation. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Welcome, thank you. >> Thanks for joining us. So, Cloud Foundry, you're new as the executive role. Sam had moved on to Microsoft. >> Abby: Google. >> Google, I'm sorry, Google. He was formerly at Microsoft. Former Microsoft employee. But at Google, Google Cloud Next was a recent show. So you're new. >> I'm new. >> John: To the reins, but you're not new in the community. >> I've been a part of the community for several years. Prior to joining the Foundation a year ago, I was at Pivotal for a couple of years. So I've been part of the Cloud Foundry community for several years and it's a technology that's near and dear to my heart. And it's a community that I am very passionate about. >> And the emergence of Cloud Foundry, I think about it, it's really kind of changed the game. It's really lifted all the boats, if you will, rising tide floats all boats. IBM uses it, you've got a lot of customers. Just go down the list of the notable folks working with Cloud Foundry. >> Well, I look no further than those that are on our Board and those that represent the strategic vision around the Cloud Foundry, so IBM, Pivotal, but DellEMC and Cisco and SAP and VMware and Allianz and Swisscom and, you know, of course Pivotal. And I think all of them really bring such a broad perspective to the table. But, then broadening beyond that community, our community has grown so much since. So, a lot of people don't realize that Cloud Foundry has only been an open source project for just a little over two years. So, January 2015 marked when it become an official open source project. Prior to that it was part of Pivotal. And in that a little over two years, we've grown to nearly 70 members in our community. And our disk x high continued to grow, and bring more perspectives to the table. >> So, what has been the differences. A lot of people have taken a different approach, on. For Bluemix, for instance, they have good core at Cloud Foundry. Is it going the way you guys had thought, as a community that this was the plan all along? Because you see people really kind of making some good stuff out of the Cloud Foundry. Was that part of the plan? This open direction? >> Well, I think part of the plan was really coalescing around a single vision of that abstraction. And what's the whole vision of Cloud Foundry? It's to make, allow developers to create code faster. In whatever realm that takes. And our industry is evolving and it's evolving so quickly, and exciting, all of these organizations. These enterprise organizations that are becoming software companies. And how, I mean, how exciting is that? As we think about the abstraction that Cloud Foundry can provide for them, and the automation it can provide and allows them to focus on one thing, and one thing only, creating code that changes their business. So, we're really focused myopically on ensuring the developers have the ability to quickly and easily create code and innovate quickly as an organization. >> So, on the development side. I mean sometimes standards can go, fall down by forcing syntax or, you know, forcing certain things. You guys had a different approach. Looking back now, what were the key things that were critical for Cloud Foundry to maintain its momentum? >> I think a couple of things. You know, obviously, it's a complex distributed system, but it's put together amazingly well. Quality was first and foremost, part of its origins. And it's continued to adhere to that quality and that control around the development process, and around the release process. So, Cloud Foundry as an open source project is very much a governance by contribution. So we look for those in the organizations and different communities to be part of it, and contribute and so we have the full time committers. That are basically doing this all day, every day. And we have the contributors that are also part of the community providing feedback and value. >> And there was a big testimonial of American Air Lines on stage. That's a big win. >> Abby: Yes, it is a big win. >> John: Give some color on that deal. >> I can't give you any details on the deal that IBM has. >> But that's a Cloud Foundry, IBM. >> But it is Cloud Foundry, yes. >> You guys were part of the Bluemix thing. >> Yes. >> Okay. >> And American Airlines is a company that I have a lot of history with. They were a customer of mine for many years in the early 2000s, so I'm thrilled to see them innovating, and taking advantage of a platform. >> So, help us unpack this conversation that's going on around PaaS, right. Some people say, oh PaaS is passe. But, it's development tools and it's programming. And it's a platform that you've created. So, what do you make of that conversation? What is it, what implications does it have to your strategy and your ecosystem strategy? >> Well, I for one don't like the term Paas anyways. So, I'm happy to say, PaaS is passe. Because I do think it's evolved. So, when I talk about Cloud Foundry, I talk about it as a cloud application platform. Because at the end of the day, our goal is to help organizations create code faster. You know, the high degrees of automation, the abstraction that the platform brings to the table, isn't just a platform, it is an enabler for that development. So we think about what that means. It's can I create applications faster? Do I have proliferation of services, to your ecosystem point, that enable those applications to be, to grow and to scale, and to change the way that organization works? Because it's a technology enabled business transformation for many of these organizations. >> John: It's app driven too, that's the key to success. >> It's app driven, which is why we talk so much about developers, is because that's the key. If I'm going to become a software company, what does that mean? I am writing code, and that code is changing the way I think about my business, and my consumers. >> And the app landscape has certainly changed with UX creativity, but now you've got IoT, there's a real functional integration going on with the analog world going digital. It's like whoa, I've gotten all this stuff that's now instrumented connected to the internet. IoT, Internet of Things. That's going to be interesting. Cloud has to power that. >> I think it does, because what is IoT reliant on? Applications that take advantage of that data. I mean that's what you're looking to gain. You're looking to have small applications streaming large amounts of data from sensors, be it from cars or be it from a manufacturing plant, if you're thinking industrial IoT. So Cloud Foundry provides the platform for many of these applications to be developed, created, and scaled. At the level that companies like GE and Siemens and others are looking to build out and tackle that IoT space. >> It's open. I mean we can all agree that Cloud Foundry's the most open platform to develop applications on. But, you're. Developers have choices. >> Yeah. >> You're seeing, you know, infrastructure as a service, plus, and you're seeing, SaaS kind of minus emerge. How should we be thinking about the evolution. You said earlier it evolved. Where is it evolving to? Obviously you've bet on open. Good bet, all right. Other, more proprietary. I don't even know what open is anymore, sometimes. (laughter) But, we can agree that Cloud Foundry is open. >> We're open. >> But how should we be thinking about the evolution going forward? >> Well, that's the beauty of open, right. Like, what is open source? Open source brings together a diverse set of perspectives, and background to innovate faster. And that's where we are. We're seeing a lot of technology evolve. I mean, just think about all the things that have evolved in the last two years. Where we've had technologies come up, some go down, but there is so much happening right now, because the time is now. For these companies that are trying to develop more applications and are trying to figure out ways not only to develop these applications, but develop them as scale, and really grow those out and build those, and IoT, and you're getting more data. We're having, capturing those data, and operationalizing that data. And it comes back to one thing. Applications that can take advantage of that. And so I think there is the potential as we build out and innovate both the ecosystem, but the platform will naturally evolved and take advantage of those wins from these organizations that are driving this to scale. >> So scale is the lynch pin, right? And if you think about traditional PaaS environments, if I can use that term, they're limited in scale and obviously simplicity. Is that another way to think about it? >> Well, I think the platform. I think about it this way. The platform enables you to run fast. You know, you're not running fast with scissors. You want to be able to run fast safely. So, it provides that abstraction and those guardrails so you can quickly iterate and develop and deploy code. If I look at what let's do HCSC is a company. They went from developing an application. It took them 35 people and nine months to create an app, right? Now, with Cloud Foundry, they're able to do it with four people in six weeks. It changes the way you work as an organization. Now, just imagine as you scale that out, what that means. And imagine the changes that can bring in your organization. When you're software centric, and you're customer first, and you're bringing that feedback loop in. >> Now, you guys do a lot of heavy lifting on behalf of the customer, but you're not hardening it. Hardening to the point where they can't mold it and shape it to what they want. That's kind of what I'm. >> No, we want to give. We want to abstract away and automate as much as possible for things you care about. Resiliency, auto-scaling, the ability to do security and compliance, 'cause those are things you care about as an enterprise. But, let's get that, let's make that happen for you, but then give the control to the developer to self-provision, to scale, to completely deploy and iterate. Do continuous delivery. All of those things that allow you to go from developing an app once a year to developing an app and iterating on that app constantly all the time. >> So Abby, I want to ask you, kind of take a step back. And look at the community trends right now. You see Open Stack has trajectory, it's becoming more an infrastructure as a service. Settling in there. That's gone through a lot of changes. Seeing a lot of growth in IoT which we talked about. You starting to see some movement in the open source community, CNCF has got traction, the Linux Foundation, Cloud native you've got Kubernetes. I call it the Cold War for orchestration, you know, going on right now, and it's. So it's really interesting time. Microservices are booming. This is the Holy Grail for developers for the next gen. It's going to be awesome. Machine learning. Everyone's getting intoxicated on that these days. So, super cool things coming down the pike. >> For sure, I think we're in the coolest time. >> What's going on in the communities? Is there any movement, is there trends, and is there a sentiment among the developer communities that you see that you could. Any patterns developing around what people are gravitating to? >> I think developers want the freedom to create. They want the ability to create applications and see those come to fruition. And I think. I think a lot of things that were new and innovative a couple of years ago, and even now, are becoming table stakes. For example, five years ago, having a mobile app as a bank was new and interesting and kind of fun. Now, it's table stakes. Are you going to go bank with a bank that doesn't have one? Are you going to bank with a bank that doesn't have it? It becomes table stakes. Or who doesn't, if you don't have fraud detection, which is basically event driven responses, right. So, you think about what table stakes are, and what, as we think about the abstraction moving up, that's really where it's going to get interesting. >> Yeah, but open source communities are going to move to these new ground. What I'm trying to get at is to see what's happening, what's the trend in the developer community? What's hot, what's fashionable? Is there new projects popping up that you could share that you think is cool and interesting? >> Well, they're all cool and interesting. >> John: You'd rather not comment. >> (laugh) I think they're all cool and interesting. I think you know, CNCF is a sister organization underneath the Linux Foundation. I, you know. >> John: They kind of inherit that from KubeCon, Kubernetes Con. >> Yeah, I think they're doing interesting things. I think any organization that's promoting cloud native application architecture and the value of that, you know, we all deserve to be part of the same conversation, because to your point earlier, a rising tide lifts all boats. And if every organization is doing cloud native application architectures, and cloud native solutions, it's going to be super interesting. >> I mean we certainly were just at Strata Hadoop, we ran our own event last week called Big Data SV, and it's very clear to us that the big data world and industry and cloud are coming together, and the forcing function is machine learning, IoT and then AI is the, you know, appeal. That's the big trend that kind of puts a mental model around it. But, IoT is driving this data and the cloud horsepower is forcing this to move faster. It seems to be very accelerated. >> But, it also enables so much. I mean, if you can operationalize this data that you're aggregating and turn it into actionable apps that do things for your business, save money, improve logistics, reach your users better and faster, you start to see the change and the shift that that can bring. You have the data married with the apps married with the endpoint sensors, and all of the sudden, this gets to be a really interesting evolution of technology. >> All right, so what's your 100 day plan. Well, you're already in a 100 day plan already. So what's your plan for this year? As new Executive Director for Cloud Foundry, what's on the agenda, what's your top three thing you're going to chip away at this year for objectives? >> Developers, developers, developers. Does that count as top three? >> More, more, more. (laughter) Increase of developer count. >> Just really, reaching out to developers and ensuring that they're able to be successful in Cloud Foundry. So I think you'll hear more from us in the next couple of weeks about that. But, >> John: So proof points basically. >> The proof points, but just ensuring they can be successful. Ensuring that scale is affable for them. And then really our summits are even changing. We have actually added developer tracks to our summits to make them a place not only where you can learn about Cloud Foundry, but also where you can work with other developers and learn from them, and learn about specific languages. But also, how to enable those into cloud native application architecture. And I think our goal this year was to really enrich that development community, and build that pipeline and help fill those gaps. >> And celebrate the wins like American Airlines of the world, and as IBM and others are successful, then it gets to be less. You don't want to have cognitive dissonance as a developer, that's the worst thing that developers want to make sure they're on a good bus. To you know, with good people. >> Well, you've got, you've obviously got some technology titans behind you. IBM, you know, the most prominent, I would say. But obviously, guys like VMware and Cisco and others, but you're also got a number of practitioner organization. Guys like Allianz. >> Abby: Allianz, yeah. >> VW, Allstate I think was early on in the program. >> JPMC, City Bank. >> Yeah, I don't want to. I shouldn't have started, 'cause I know I'd leave some out. (laughter) You're the Executive Director, so you have to fill in the gaps. But so, that's somewhat unique in a consortium like this. Somewhat, but that many is somewhat unique. Is there more traction there? What's their motivation in your. >> Abby: As a user? >> Yeah. >> Well, to your other point. We're an open source, right. What's the value? Me, if I'm an enterprise, and I'm looking to take advantage of a platform, but also an open source platform. Open source allows me to be part of that conversation. I could be a contributor, I could be part of the direction. I can influence where it's going. And I think that is a powerful sentiment for many of these organizations that are looking to evolve and become more software-centric, and this is a good way for them to give back and be part of that momentum. >> Yeah, and cloud's exploding. More open source is needed. It's just a great, great mission. Congratulations on the new job, and good luck this year. We'll keep in touch. >> Thank you. >> John: And certainly see you at the Cloud Foundry Summit. That's in San Francisco again this year? >> Santa Clara. June 13th through 15th. >> So every year you guys always have the fire code problem. (laughter) >> Well, I think, and I'm going to go on record now, and officially say this, this will be our last year there. Which I think everyone's excited about, because I think we're all over Santa Clara right now. (laughter) >> All right, well we'll see you there. Abby Kearns, Executive Director of Cloud Foundry Foundation. Here inside theCUBE, power in the cloud. This is theCUBE's coverage of IBM InterConnect 2017. Stay with us, more coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)