>> Announcer: 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. >> Oh my Bosh! One of the fun t-shirts here at the Cloud Foundry Summit. I'm Stu Miniman joined by my co-host John Troyer. We've had a day of some really good interviews, really liked geeking out, digging into this hybrid, multi-cloud world, John. Something that feels to be coming into focus a little bit more. I had a bunch of questions coming in, and many of them, at least, I have some answers as to where they're going. What's your take on the Cloud Foundry Summit? >> Yeah, my first Cloud Foundry Summit I thought was super interesting. We got to talk to a couple users, which is always really interesting, and also some folks from the foundation. It was insightful, actually. I talked to a few vendors here, and they said, well how's the crowd? I said, not big, but the people who are here are big. Right? In terms of, there weren't 20,000 people here, there were 1,700, but the companies that are involved are serious about Cloud Foundry, they're all in, they're building apps and they're not building one or two apps, they're building thousands of apps on Cloud Foundry and moving their whole enterprise over. So, that was kind of super enlightening to me. >> Yeah, I mean, John, we know the story here. We've talked at a number of events about this. When you've got big financial companies, insurance companies, people in healthcare, if they don't become more agile, they will be Uberized. We have to have a different term, right? Uber's in the news for all the bad reasons now, so Netflix was the old term, but that digital disruption by start-ups. So, when you hear companies, oh, we're a 75-year-old company, we're a 100-year-old company, we're becoming a software company, and therefore, we're going to take our thousands of apps, and somewhere writing, we always have the new things we're writing, and then we'll move some along. So, that application really spectrum of the new stuff, and then pulling along the old one with a platform like Cloud Foundry, being that bridge to the future if you will. >> Right. Right. And, we aren't talking about a small team chatting on slack. We're talking about, in one organization, thousands of developers, coordinating on this platform. >> Yeah, absolutely. We to talked Express Scripts, I think they said they're hiring about a thousand engineers in a little more than a year. So, big companies, a lot of things to move when we're talking, Liberty Mutual is like, oh we want 75% of our IT staff to be writing code, and today they're less than 50%. So, if you're sitting in that other 50%, the writing is on the wall that you need to move in that direction, or maybe we're not the right organization for you. I'm curious, your take about that retraining of staff, we know we have a shortage of skill sets. How do they learn? How do they get, is it certifications? Is it training? What have you seen? >> Well they did just announce the Cloud Foundry certification program here today. So, I think that was an interesting component that's needed for support for this. But, really the Cloud Foundry supports all sorts of technologies and I think you see it in both the contributors here and in the technology. So, it's polyglot world, I see a lot of people, the crowd, used to, known assistments are indeed doing more programming, doing more automation, and so I think it's all of a course. I think, look it's clear, in five or 10 years the profile of people in IT is going to look a lot different. And, this is one of the leading edges of it. >> Yeah. Coming to the show and we talked about it on the intro that drumbeat of Kubernetes really gaining the hearts and minds of developers, I feel like it's been diffused a little bit. I don't know whether Kubo is the answer, but it is an answer. We've talked to some people in the ecosystem, that have other options that they're doing. As well as, of course, companies like Google, which Kubernetes came out of and Microsoft who's embracing Kubernetes, they like choice, they want people to use their platform. Keeping a more open approach for Cloud Foundry to work with other pieces of open source in the ecosystem. It's goodness? Time will tell whether this one solution makes sense. What's your take on that? >> Sure, I think Cloud Foundry has always been known as the opinionated platform. But, I think now the subtleties have come out that, yes there are certain opinions in the way things are glued together, but as James Waters pointed out, they've always had different kinds of abstractions of things running on or in the platform, in terms of whole apps or server list, we didn't really talk about today. But, so Kubernetes is sitting beside there for people who want more knobs, who already have an app, that expects that kind of scalability and management, makes sense for the Cloud Foundry. I think, they seem pretty open to embracing whatever works, and in some ways it's an analogy to what going on in the clouds like Azure and Google Cloud Platform, and that it's like, look bring us your work loads, we will run them. So, I think that's kind of an opening of at least a publicly stance of an opening. >> Yeah. I like this as Steve O'Grady said in the conversation we had with him, there's a lot of choices out there and therefore customers really, they want that. Of course there's the paradox situation. How do I keep up on all the latest and greatest? I mean, three years ago, the last time I came to the show, was like 08 Docker, totally going to disrupt this. Now it's Kubernetes, we only brought up functions as a service or as a server less, like once, and it did not seem to fit into where this plays today. But, there's options out there. Customers that are here, like what they're doing. It is moving them forward, it is enabling them to be that faster, faster, faster. More agile, meet the needs of the business and stay competitive. >> Yeah. Steve's term was different tools for different jobs or something like that right? >> We always said at Wikibon, a torse is for courses. >> Yeah. I mean a polyglot is one way that Coops' Clouds Foundry world used to talk about it. But, I think different tools is a great way. There is, we're in a technical time of great diversity. Which is awesome right? There's no monoculture here, which is super interesting, I think. >> Yeah absolutely, also the move from Cloud Foundry really started out as a predominantly, a non premises deployment and Public Cloud is seeping into it. We talked to a couple of customers that are starting to use Public Cloud, and most of them who weren't using it today were understanding where it fits. Sorting that piece out and look at solutions like Cloud Foundry as one of those pieces that are going to give them flexibility moving forward. >> Yeah. I mean I think that this is something that's going to have to develop over time. Right? It's one thing to say, I'm a layer on top of another cloud, but Amazon really wants you to use its databases, and Google Cloud really wants you to use it's services. And so, you can only stay completely independent for so long without taking advantage of those things, as you evolve these platforms. So, there is that tension there, that will play out, but it's played out over and over again at the many levels in tact. So, we'll see some standard stuff there. If Cloud Foundry has enough value, people will use it as their deployment platform on MultiCloud. Well let's talk about MultiCloud. What you think Stu? But sometimes MultiCloud is more of an ideal than a practicality for many organizations. >> Yeah. What about Pivitol? So if we look at Pivitol, number they're doing in Cloud Foundry, was, last year was about 275 million, so that number had been shared in one of the earnings calls. Seems like a very well position for the Fortune 1000. I'm always trying to figure out. What is the tam that they can go after? Who does it work for, and who doesn't it? At OpenStack we talked about, well great, the Telco NFV market looks great, but is that 20 or 50 companies. For something like Cloud Foundry, there's lots of big revenue that they can get by knocking down many of these Fortune 1,000's. But, it does seem to be that enterprise grade, therefore there's dollars attached to that. It is something that they, Pivitol, has done a solid job of converting that need, using open source into actual software revenues. Yes, their services and labs are a critical, critical, critical piece of what they do, but it is the subscription of software that they built. Many of their clients were on, I know , a three year subscription and lots of those renewals have started coming now. Expectation is that we could see an IPO by them by 2018. It's been reported I'm sure Michael Dell would love to have another influx of cash that he can help fund all of the the things that he's doing. What's your take on Pivitol coming out of this? >> I mean, from here it looks like Pivotal is very comfortable with it's place and who it's customers are. I didn't see a lot of hedging about, we're going after a different market, or we're going for the individual developer, or we think this can be used by almost anybody. These are big companies we're talking about. In the key note this morning for the foundation, talked about enterprise grade. Talking about security, talking about scale, talking about developer experience. They're not shy about it. They're serious when they say they are an enterprise grade platform. So, which I think is great right? You should know yourself and I really feel like both the foundation and Pivitol, a big part of the foundation, does know itself and knows who's it's customers are. >> Yeah. I guess the only thing that I look at is, so many conferences that I go to, is this a platform that SAS companies are building on? As we look at what the future of companies, and especially in the technology space, are going to look like, yes we have some of these big companies that are using it, but you know there's not the, oh okay, work day and sales force, and all these companies, I haven't seen these companies that are already just software companies using it. It's the industry, older companies that are trying to get more into software and therefore this helps with their digital transformation. The companies that are born in the cloud, I haven't seen that in there, and that's fine. There's definitely a diversity of the marketplace. >> Yeah. If you look at a spectrum, we're saying that all SAS companies are software companies, well those SAS companies may be even more software company than a manufacturer or a finance company. So, I think that's okay. One thing they have to watch with the ecosystem and the customer base is the speed of evolution, the speed of the ecosystem, new entrants coming in. Can they keep the velocity of innovation up? I'm sure that's one thing they're looking at. >> Yeah. It is interesting right? Will the millennials be using Cloud Foundry caring about it? Or is this more the boomer, the older generation that have used it? >> Hey, it's not a job versus Steve McGrady, it's not a job versus Dotnet or Microsoft World anymore, but they're still a lot of job developers and new ones coming in. I think hey, there's still COBOL programmers. >> Alright. Want to give you final takeaways. For me some good quality users talking about their stories. There's reality here as you said, there wasn't any big shift is to what Cloud Foundry or the foundation or what they are doing. There's not some big pivot that they need to do. No pun on Pivotal. But, sometimes you go and you're like, are they tone deaf? Are they drinking their own Kool Aid? I think this group understands where they fit. They're focused on delivering it, definitely a changing ecosystem from previous years and how they fit into that whole cloud environment. I'll give you the final word. >> Sure. That goes with some of what you said. The people seem very productive. They seem happy. They seems super engaged. The show floor when the sessions were in session, there was nobody here on the show floor. People are here to learn. Which means that they're here to get stuff done. It's kind of a no nonsense crowd. So, I really enjoyed the day. >> Alright well, John always a pleasure to catch up with you. Appreciate you sitting in for the day and talking about all of this. You brought some great expertise to the discussion. Big thanks to the team here. We actually had four shows this week from the Cube, so as we get towards almost July 4th, which means that we get a deep breath before the fall tour comes. So, I want to thank everybody for watching. As always, check out thecube.net for all the videos from this show and all the other shows. If you see a show that we're going to be at and you want to be on, get in touch with us. If you have a show that we're not at, please feel free to reach out to us. We're really easy to get in touch with. For my co host John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Once again as always, thank you for watching the Cube and we will see you at the next show.

>> Announcer: 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 joined by my host, John Troyer. Really excited to welcome to the program one of the keynote speakers from this morning, Mojgan Lefebvre who is the SVP and chief information officer. We always love CIOs, from Liberty Mutual Insurance Global Specialty. Thank you for your keynote this morning and thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> So you went through a lot of data and a lot of information in your keynote. Liberty Mutual, you say spent a billion dollars in tech yearly. There's certain technology companies that spend that much. As the CIO, what are some of the biggest things on your plate and we'll get in the discussion of Cloud Foundry and cloud and everything as we go from there. >> Sure so I'd say probably the priorities differ by the business unit you're in. The specialty business has generally been a bit more manual and we have over 200 or so insurance products. So really automating it is very different from automating consumer insurance which is really focused on home and auto. So really right now, our focus is increasing the productivity and the risk assessment for a lot of our underwriters. And then I say probably analytics, pricing. Making sure that we're assessing risks correctly is definitely another point of focus for us. >> Okay with so many products, we understand the rate of change must be difficult. In your keynote you spoke about embracing cloud and agile methodology. Maybe take us back to what some of the pain points were and led to yourself and management to embrace this big change. >> Yeah, absolutely so several things are going on. One is that we see a lot of new players entering the world of insurance, and it both about new capital coming into the world of insurance. Just 'cause there's not enough investments that capital can be put towards so insurance is one place to come to and the other is technology players that are coming into our world. Companies like Metromile, Lemonade, the list goes on and on and so really our world is changing. Technology is driving a lot of that change and so we know that we've got to be a big player in that area as well. And as I said really, we've got to become one of those software companies that can actually sell insurance as opposed to the other way around. I'd say some of the other things that are happening is the fact that our employees. Our consumers now have all these other software companies that they have experience with and so their expectations are very different. They've got one experience when they're at home and then they come into the workplace and it looks like they've gone back 100 years. So that paradigm needs to change. So those are some of the things that have really made us think we have no choice but to truly change the way that deliver software. We've got to get out of this mode where everything takes multiple years and multiple millions of dollars and really at the end of the day. The people that you started the work with are no longer even there to appreciate what you've delivered to them. And usually it's not what they ask for anyway. >> As you adopted the Cloud Foundry platform. One of the things about Cloud Foundry, even very early in it's life cycle was that it was associated with digital transformation, and cloud native. And especially once it was joined up with Pivotal Labs. So how much of, as you all embark on this journey. The great thing about here at Summit, there is a lot of talk about visual transformation. A lot of talk about agile. That's what we were just talking about. Some shows you go to it's a lot about features and a lot about speeds and feeds. And a lot about the latest, greatest. So how much apart of it as you all were adopting this platform? Was that culture of digital transformation surrounding the actual tech. How important was that? >> I think that was very important because again, as I said we know that, that's what the consumers expect. They no longer want things to be manual. They want things to be at the tips of their fingers and so really transforming us from being a company that's very paper intensive to really being more and more digital was critical to us. The very first application that we actually put in the cloud which was in my business unit was for document management in our Al Fresco. And actually what we named it was we're going paperless. As something that we started about three years ago, and today I can say that yep, we are paperless and so the great thing about Al Fresco was that it was indeed cloud native, and that was very important to us. We started out looking at some of the other solutions that are out there. I won't necessarily name them but they did not lend themselves to the cloud. And so really going with a cloud native solution that would enable us to become much more digital and paperless was very critical to us. >> You talked a lot about developer adoption now in your journey. Was that a tough sell at the very beginning or did developers go wait a minute, This is going to save me a lot of time. I'm on board. >> So you mean with Cloud Foundry in general? >> John: With Cloud Foundry, in general. >> So if anything I'd it was probably the developer community that really sorted this out and so by the time that the leadership and management started to pay attention. There were pockets of developers who were just very, very bought into it, and so I would say that went a long way. And then made it easier to sell it to other developers. I say they're much more listening to what their peers are saying than what we have to say. And then really meeting with the Pivotal Labs guys. I'd say those folks have truly a magical way of selling their story and they've truly helped us. Not only sell it to our developers but also sell the story to our business. I'd say that the mindset shift from thinking I'm going to have everything in one go versus no, I'm going to get it in iterations and I'm actually going to trust the fact that the next releases are going to come is a big mind shift and Pivotal was instrumental in helping sell that to us. >> One of the benefits of Cloud Foundry is to give you flexibility as to where your applications and data live. That being said, a majority of customers that have deployed Cloud Foundry are doing it on premises. How do you manage what goes, stays in your own environment. What handles the public cloud. My understanding you're doing quite a bit of AWS today. What's your viewpoint for you and management on public cloud? >> We certainly see public cloud as the future. I know Chip mentioned something about, well it's not going to be cheaper. We're actually counting on that in the end from a total cost of ownership perspective. That it will be cheaper and we truly mean it when we say we want 75% of the people writing code. And by that I mean the staff within the IT group of course. And we don't want them to have to worry about the infrastructure and so while we've started with AWS, we absolutely have a relationship with Microsoft as well. We definitely want to be independent on this cloud and I would say something like Cloud Foundry definitely allows you to do that. >> When you're looking at that total. That full TCO, you don't have fully burden, I have gear and I have people managing that gear and all the operations there. If you can shift that piece of it. You're not differentiated on the infrastructure or at those needs. You want to focus on those thousands of products that you have and your people coding to create those next opportunities. >> Exactly. We want to focus on the value add. That's where we want our people to really be focusing and we want to let the cloud players who do it extremely well to be doing that for us. >> You put forth in your keynotes some pretty audacious metrics. I think it was 60% of the work load public cloud. More than 50% of apps to release code on daily basis and you wanted 75% of the IT staff to write code. How did you come up with those numbers. How are doing against those? >> About a year ago, once we decided that the imperative for change was so critical. The IT leadership team got together. We spent a couple of days off site and we said let's come up with what we're calling today our IT manifesto. And so we said we just have to change and there are multiple things that we're going to change. And we said we're going to put some, what we call bold, audacious moves or BAMS as they've come to be known together. And so those were just some, we knew they were out of right to some extent, but we said if we don't really put some goals that are really hard to reach, we're never going to get there. >> What are some of the head winds there? What have slowed you from meeting those and any lessons learned that you share to your peers on what you've learned going through this. >> Certainly deciding on what goes to the clouds first is one of those areas that we're learning as we're doing. We know that it's easy when you're working in a greenfield and it's something new. So yeah, you can very easily say I'll build in the cloud. When you're looking at what you're existing environment is and what you move to the cloud. One of the questions as well, if we move all of our development environment. How's that going to interact with the production environment. If you have them in different clouds. Other things are how it interacts with active directory and held app and some of those things. And I say finally would be kind of the global applications always make it much more difficult as you think. How do you replicate among different clouds in different geographies. Those are some of the blockers that we've got to tackle and make sure that we get around. >> One of the interesting parts of any management strategy in any company is skills, up skilling. So how have you been approaching that in terms of this new cloud native world. Both for the devs, is this year at Cloud Foundry Summit. Are people here learning? There's new certifications. >> I say it's a multi prong approach. We definitely have partnered with several companies to put some training together to make sure that we're training our staff. We started a program that we call go for code and so we've asked volunteers. For people who are not coding today and who want to get there that actually they go to these coding schools and they're going to spend the next two to three months actually learning how to code. It's very rigorous. >> So they might have been technical in an infrastructure way before and they want to learn how to code? >> Yeah, it may be that or they may have just been business analysts who are just doing requirements gathering or project management, and they want to learn how to code. So we've tried to be as transparent as possible because when you say I want 75% of my IT staff to be coding. Like you've got 50% who are not coding today. There's a message in that and so of course it's up to us to make sure that we're providing the tools and what's needed for that to happen. Our goal is to get anyone on our staff who really wants to get there and is willing to put the sweat in to be able to do it. 'Cause we also know it's not like software engineers are just lying out there on the streets. There is a shortage of software engineers and that's going to become more and more of a problem. So really getting our own employees that we value greatly to be able to do that transformation, I think is critical for us. >> Another great one line, you had your keynote was out with the annual, in with the weekly. I think you said it was 16 releases in five months. The counter to that and I'm curious how you deal with it and talk to your peers is how do people keep up with just all the changes that are happening? I talk to the companies that create code on just regular occasions and they can't keep up. And how do you make sure your staff doesn't get burned out? >> So great, great question again. We're at the very beginnings of our transformation. The one thing I will say is looking at the team that did this and did the 16 releases in five months versus teams that are working on annual releases. The energy, the enthusiasm, the excitement and hopefully some of it came through in the video that you saw is just phenomenal. So I'd say, I'm much less worried about them burning out than hey can we keep the others as excited. I will tell you automation and things like Cloud Foundry that actually help you automate your pipeline are critical. You can not do multiple releases or daily releases if you don't have those tools. If you truly get to the point where you do have the automated pipeline. I think a lot of that is done for you so that's what we're gearing towards and driving towards. >> One of the things that people always love to pontificate is in the future, what is the role of the CIO? We'd love to see you embracing things like cloud because it was like well, when I had gear, and I had capital budget I understood it. But I'm changing the role. I'm doing that. What have you been seeing as the changing role? Anything down the line you see and how that changes? >> You're right, so a lot of people say, well there is no need for a CIO in the future. I'd say there's probably more and more need for very business oriented, strategic CIOs who also understands technology really well and they're the epitome of someone who understands technology and is the head of engineering so to speak. But also making sure that they can work very well with the business and understands the impact of technology on the business. I'll be waiting for the day where the need for someone like that goes away. I don't see it coming too soon. >> Final question I have for you is what brings you to an event like this? Spend the time, give the keynote. What do you get out of it personally and for your company? >> One is really learning 'cause again, if you're a doctor in medicine. If you want to keep up with what's going on around you you've got to educate yourself. So certainly that aspect of go out there, see what's going on. Making sure that you're keeping up with new technology that's one thing. The other was my experience with Pivotal has been phenomenal, and so I thought it was critical to actually take the opportunity to share that. Hopefully others will learn. A lot of the tweets that I saw was well, if a big 100 year old insurance company can do this. Then nobody has an excuse and I'll say yeah of course. So it's really both to give back and to continue to learn and then to reconnect with colleagues. Cornelia and I actually worked together over 10 years ago. So just coming to here and being able to have dinner with her tonight is going to be very enjoyable. >> Absolutely a tight knit community. Really appreciate you coming on the program. We welcome you to theCUBE alumni list now, our community, >> Thank you. Of the thousands that we had on the program. From John and myself, we'll be back with lots more coverage here from the Cloud Foundry Summit. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (uptempo techno music)

>> 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)

[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]

>> 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. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to Silicon Angle Media's production of The Cube, worldwide leader in live tech coverage, here at the Cloud Foundry Summit. We're in Santa Clara, California. Happy to have my cohost for a day of coverage, John Troyer. John, great to see ya. >> Glad to be here, Stu. >> So, we were reflecting back. The Cloud Foundry Summit has been going on for a few years. Last time I went to it in person, was I believe three years ago in San Francisco. It was actually the same year as the first DockerCon but reflecting back even further, Cloud Foundry was founded in 2009 at a little company called VMware, which you and I have some familiarity with. Back in 2009, I happened to be working for EMC which was the major majority-owner of VMware and where were you, John? Where were you in 2009? >> I was at VMware, doing that thing, preaching about virtualization. And Paul Baritz was there, there was a growing trend there in the company to be pulling out developer tools and I think this was one of the really bright ideas that came out of that time at VMware. >> Yeah, Derek Collison, who's a Cubalon we've had on many times there, was really the creator there. Back when we were talking about, when we talked about Cloud it was like oh, yeah it's about infrastructure today but in the future it's going to be as platform as a service. Fast forward, I mean boy the ebbs and the flows of Cloud Foundry got spun out into what became Pivotal. Cloud Foundry itself created a whole foundation. Paas, is kind of in the past now. We've said Paas is passe. Abby Kearns, who we're going to have on the program, with the Cloud Foundry foundation, said that it's not about Paas anymore. Seems to be, I hear multicloud, I hear, you know we're really about enabling developers in agility. What's your take on some of this journey that we've seen, John? >> Well, I think at this point in the journey, people are agreeing on the messaging and the needs and the things they want to be talking about. In fact, a lot of the messaging of Cloud Foundry, take my code, run it anywhere, I don't care how. The Cloud Foundry haiku is very similar to what you might hear from Cervalis, right? It's the same idea. Different level of abstraction, different kinds of apps, but the idea that developer productivity is enhanced by not worrying about the things underneath them, is a clear recognition across the industry today. >> Yeah. Absolutely, and it really goes back, a term that used to be thrown around a bunch of years ago is application modernization. And what does that mean? Number one is companies are becoming software companies so when you hear companies like GE, we're going to have Liberty Mutual on today and Liberty Mutual says we want to be a software company that happens to deliver insurance. So we've seen, car companies are going to become software companies that happen to have vehicles in some kind of manner. So it's this transformation, the software's eating the world meme, and right, that differentiation, I want my company to be able to focus on my applications and where that lives and what's underneath it doesn't matter enough. So right, whether it's Cervalis, Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, OpenShift are all options to allow me to allow my people that write code to work on that stuff and make sure we get the operators and the infrastructure people involved. >> Right. And I want to consider Cloud Foundry and Cloud Foundry Summit in and of itself. I think it is interesting and people will compare it to things like DockerCon and we were both at DockerCon. I'm struck again by some of similar messaging about developer experience and agile. I think here though, the message is much more enterprise-ready, the scalability, the management, the business digital transformation was much more the conversation that's going on this week. The Docker experience, the container experience, is a lot more bottom-up, developer-up, one developer engaging in a different deployment and development pipeline. This is more about what does your business need to do to move faster. >> Absolutely. And this is a foundation show so what is the state of the ecosystem. Pivotal is the big player here. Pivotal's also our sponsor that allowed us to bring the program there. Really appreciate Pivotal's support to bring us here but three years ago, when I went to the show, it was IBM and HP, which is now HPE, very heavily involved, Cisco had a decent presence. Now, who's some of the headline companies here? Well big announcement with Microsoft. Google Cloud is on stage. How does that changing of who's involved, who's contributing, how many of users are actually part of the foundation and doing things are changing and as you brought up, very enterprise focused. One of the dynamics I've seen is Pivotal's done a really good job of getting to the C level decision makers and help them say, you want to do that whole digital transformation and become a software company? We can help. We have the labs group that will help you along that journey and then they pull the developers in and say hey okay, here's the tooling you've got. Let's go write this stuff and then they get on board and then they drive that change. >> You can't look at this stuff in isolation just for the foundation or the project or just Pivotal. The other companies have their own journeys. Some of the big ones, like HPE and Cisco have recently shifted a lot of their focus and their emphasis on open-source and pulled back from other things like OpenStack and so, I don't think you can put that solely on the success or failure of Cloud Foundry. I think you're also seeing another dynamic which is the cloud platforms, Google and Microsoft Azure, they want to be the best cloud platform for everything. They don't want to silo anything. They are welcoming. And so that's an example of them coming in and welcoming Cloud Foundry as one of the services that run great on their platform. >> Yeah. Yesterday, SAP and their Keynote put up this slide with all of these boxes and kind of made a joke, okay I'm going to walk you through how we built our stack and it actually, the entire audience cracked up. Chip Childers, this morning, said I've redone my Keynote, I'm just going to walk you through the stack and everybody laughed but it comes to a point that, what we discussed at OpenStack John, this is not a simple shrink-wrapped software. There are pieces of the proponent. How it all goes together. Kooboo is something we're going to dig into, which is, we take Bosch is the multicloud solution for Cloud Foundry and then it says, okay I've got my Cloud Foundry and I've got my Kubernetes and I can have them live side by side. Different from okay, we're going to take OpenStack and put Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes on top of it. Can I put Kubernetes on top of it? I was talking to some people from Google leading up to the show and they said well, yes you can put it on top, you can put it on the side, how deeply do you integrate it. It is still very early days for Kubernetes even though we've seen this real ground-swell especially in the developers' world. You mentioned we were at DockerCon. We're also going to have The Cube at CubeCon later this year so lots of shows. The maturity level, the adoption, who makes money, so many different angles to get in. I'm excited we're going to have some users on. What are you looking to take out of today's event, John? Some of our speakers or beyond. >> Well, we're here talking to people. So I'm looking at energy and I'm looking at people who, their vision of the future, what they actually have accomplished, the businesses and the business outcomes that they've achieved, I'm really looking forward to the customers. And also the ecosystem, right? Cloud Foundry Foundation is part of the Linux Foundation. How are the different open-source components working together because we are discovering in 2017 and beyond that all these open-source stacks do need to inter-operate and do need to talk with each other. And so that's something I'm very interested in as well. >> Yeah, absolutely. Our first guest, Chip Childers, is going to be able to go into a lot of them. As I mentioned, we've got a couple of guests from Pivotal. We've got a couple of Vend users. We've got people from the Foundation. Got a guest analyst, Stephen O'Grady's going to come on from RedMonk. So got a full day of coverage, in addition to some of the things you mentioned, right, that kind of multicloud, how do we differentiate, you know? Why Microsoft wants to be very open. Amazon seemed to actually get like denigrated a little bit by some of the comments of some of the speakers. Not by the Foundation or anything like that but Liberty Mutual, one of the guests we have on, they run on Amazon. Pivotal started Cloud Foundry on Amazon and Amazon of course is the juggernaut in the cloud world. We've actually got, one of our teams are out at the Amazon Public Sector show, digging into that ecosystem. So Amazon is always the elephant in the room if you will when we're talking about cloud. So how do all these pieces fit together? So I'm excited to dig in. Really glad we could bring The Cube to this event. Very much a t-shirt crowd that we've got the show for behind us. Everybody getting excited about some of those things. >> I think we're the only ones with jackets here. Maybe one or two. >> There are. There's the press and the analysts are here but absolutely. If we did this two days, we'd pick our favorite t-shirt and throw it on under the blazer. That's kind of the Valley way, as you know. Alright. So John, really appreciate you joining me. Please stay with us for the full day of coverage. As always check out siliconangle.tv for this and all the events. We're going to be back and we will be right back with our first guest here at the Cloud Foundry Summit. Thanks for watching The Cube.

>> Announcer: 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, joined by my cohost John Troyer. Happy to welcome back to the program, friend of theCUBE, James Watters SVP of Product at Pivotal. James, great to see you, and thanks for helping to get theCUBE to Cloud Foundry Summit. >> Yeah, I was just saying, this is the first time theCUBE is at CF Summit, so we're official now. We're all grown up. We're out in the daylight and you know you made it when theCUBE shows up, so excited to have you here. >> Absolutely. So a lot of things going on. We had Chip on talking about some of the big announcements. >> James: Yeah. >> From Pivotal's standpoint, what's some of the important milestones in releases happening. >> Yeah, I think in the simplest terms, the big new thing came out of our collaboration with Google is called Kubo, which is Kubernetes on BOSH. And I think that was a big move that got a lot of applause in the keynote when it was announced yesterday. And I think it shows two things. One is that Cloud Foundry really is going to embrace multiple ways of deploying artifacts and managing things, and that we're really the cloud native platform and willing to embrace container abstractions, app abstractions, data abstractions pretty uniquely, which is, there hasn't been another platform out there that embraces those with specialized ways of doing them. And I'm really excited about the customer response to that approach. >> Yeah, James, help us unpack that a little bit. So we look at the term seems this year, everybody, it's multi-cloud, we're all talking back-- >> James: Yeah. >> I think back to the days when we talked about platform as a service. One of the pieces was, oh, well, I should be able to have my application and move lots of places. That's what I heard when I talked about Cloud Foundry. When Docker came out everybody was like, oh PAS's dead, Docker's going to do this. When Kubernetes came out, oh wait, this takes the core value of what platform as a service has done. And today you're saying Kubo, Cloud Foundry, and Kubernetes with some BOSH, pulling it all together. Walk us through, 'cause it's nuanced. And there's pieces of that. So help us understand. >> Yeah, I like to say that even though sometimes you have open source communities have their own sense of identity, there's really not a god abstraction in cloud programming. Like there's not one abstraction that does it all. The simplest way you can see that is that people are interested in function as a service today. They're also interested in container as a service. Well, those two are not, they're not compatible. Right, like you don't deploy your whole Docker image to Amazon Lambda, but people are interested in both of those. And then, at the same time, there's this hyper growth of Spring Boot, which is, I think, the most efficient way of doing Java programming in the cloud, which is really at the core of our app abstraction. And so we see people, there's hyper growth, and function as a service, app as a service, especially with Spring Boot, and then also container. And I think the approach that we've had is beause there's not one god abstraction, that our platform needs to embrace all of those. And that actually, it's pretty intuitive, once you start using them, and you get beyond the slides and the buzz words. When to use one versus the other. And I think that's what users have been really excited about, is that Pivotal and Cloud Foundry communities embraced kind of that breadth, in terms of, different approaches to cloud native. Does that make sense to you, John? >> Yeah it's starting to, right? A lot of people like to do all or nothing about everything, right? >> James: Yeah. >> It's all going to be, we're going to be serverless by next year. And that doesn't make any sense at all. >> James: That's right. >> And so you have multiple programming models, like you said, multiple different kinds of abstractions, so when would somebody want to use, say containers, as a service, or container orchestration, versus some of the other application models. >> Yeah, it's a really, really great question. And I just had a really productive customer meeting this morning, where we went through that. They had some no-JS developers, that they said, look, these developers just want to get their code to production. They don't want to think about systems, they don't want to think about operating systems, they don't want to think about clusters. They're just like, here's my app, run it for me. And that's the core trick that Cloud Foundry's done the best of any platform in the world, which is CF Push, and so, for a no-JS developer, here's my app, run it for me, load balance it, health management, log aggregate it, give me quotas on my memory usage, everything. That's a good example of that. Then, they also had a team that was deploying Elasticsearch and some packaged applications. And they needed the level of control that Kubernetes in terms of pods, co-location, full control of a system image, the ability to do networking in certain ways, the ability to control storage. And you don't just take Elasticsearch and say here's my Elasticsearch tarball, run it for me. You actually start to set up a system, and that's where Kubernetes container as a service is perfect. Then the other question is how do you stitch those together, and you've seen the Kubernetes community adopt the Service broker API, the open Service Broker API out of Cloud Foundry, as a common way of saying, oh, I have an Elasticsearch over here, but I want to bind it to an application. Well, they use the CF services API. I think it's early days, but there's actually a coherent fabric forming across these different approaches, and it's also immediately intuitive. Like we didn't know, when we first conceived of adding Kubo to the mix, we didn't know what the educational level of education we have to provide, but it's been intuitive to every client I've talked so far, so that's fun for me to watch you say a few words like, oh, we get it. Yeah, we use that for this and this for this. >> All right, James, I have to up-level it a little bit, there. >> James: Little deep? >> You travel way more than I do. We kind of watch on social media. Prove me wrong, but i can't imagine when you're talking in the C-suite of a Fortune 100, pick your financial, or insurance company, that they are immersed in the languages and platform discussions that the hoodie crowd is. So where are you having those discussions? >> James: Yeah. >> One of the things, I come into the show and say Pivotal and Cloud Foundry are helping customers with that whole digital transformation. >> James: We are. >> And making that reality. So help us with that disconnect of, I'm down in the weeds trying to build this very complex stack, and the C-suite says, I want to be faster. >> I'll tell you what the C-suite has to solve. They've got to solve two things. One is they've got to deliver faster and more efficiently than ever before. That's their language, and our core app abstraction has been killer for digital transformation. Deliver apps faster, find your value line, and approach problems that way. They get that. That's why we've been succeeding economically, that's been a bit hit. But they also have another problem is, they want to retain talent, and when they're trying to retain talent some of those times, those folks are saying, well, we want little bit more control. We want to be able to use a container if we want, or think about something like Spring Cloud Data Flow to do high-end pipelines. And so they do care about having a partner in Pivotal and in Cloud Foundry, they can embrace those new trends. Because they've got to be able to not be completely top down in how they're enabling their organizations, while also encouraging efficiency. And so that's where the message of multiple abstractions really hits home for them, because they don't always want to referee some of the emerging trends and tech, and telling their team what they have to use. So by providing function, app, container, and data service, we can be the one partner that doesn't force that a priori in the discussion. Does that make sense? >> Is there friction ever, when saying, okay here, we've got this platform that actually is rather opinionated versus, hey, go choose everything open source and do whatever you want. I think that there's political boundaries between different parts of organization, this is a lot of what DevOps, I think, as a movement has been so important. Which is saying actually, you need to blur the political boundaries in the organization to get to faster end-to-end throughput and collaboration. So I think that's definitely a reality. At the same time, the ability that we've had to embrace these different approaches allows the level of empowerment that I think is appropriate. Like I think what we've been trying to do is not necessarily cater to a free-for-all, we've been saying, what are the right tools in the tool chest that people need to get their job done. So I think that's been very warmly received. So I guess I'd say that hasn't been a big problem for us. >> I want to ask you about the ecosystem. I think back when the ecosystem started, IBM, HPE, Cisco were big players. I come in this week, and it's Google Cloud, Microsoft Cloud, and Pivotal still is, last time I checked it was what, 70% of the code base created by Pivotal. >> James: I think it's 60 or 55 now. >> The change in the ecosystem what that means, and what that means to kind of open source, open core. >> Yeah, so I think in addition to the Kubo work that we've done, the other big news this week is that Microsoft joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation. So, essentially the largest software company in the world-- >> Wait, wait, Microsoft loves open source, I hear. Did you hear that one? >> They do. >> I know, it's still shocking for a lot of us that have known Microsoft for a long time, don't you think? And I'm not trying to be facetious, they totally are involved, I've talked to lots of Microsoft people. Kudos to them, they're doing a really good job. Even if I look at the big cloud guys and throw in VMware in there, Microsoft is one of the leaders in participating and embracing open source. >> They are and I think Corey Sanders, who got on stage, announced this, he leads the Azure virtual machine service, and a lot of the other Azure services for them, I think that their strategy is they want to run every workload. Like if you talk to Corey about it, he's like, you got workload, we want to be your partner. And I think that's been the change at Microsoft, is once you go into cloud, it's sort of like Pivotal embracing multiple program abstractions, right, once you have a platform you want as much critical mass on it as you can. And I think that's really helped Microsoft embrace the open source community in a very pragmatic way. Because they are a business, a company, right? And I think open source is required to do business in software these days, right, like in a way that it wasn't 10 years ago. As you look at your customer set and multi-cloud, right? From the very beginning multi-cloud was baked into the concept of Cloud Foundry. Like you said, just push, right? >> James: Yeah. >> So what do you see as common patterns? We've talked to folks already who, on-prem. Obviously, you all are running your CF service in partnership, your main one, your partnership with Google, You work with Amazon, what do you see in customer base, right? >> Yeah, so, let me just share a little bit from a good customer. This is a prospect conversation more, like someone who's starting the journey. They were currently running on-prem, on an OpenStack environment, which had some cost of maintenance for them. They were considering also using their vServer environment, to maybe not have to do as much customization of OpenStack. But there were certain geographies that they wanted to get into. They didn't want to build data centers. And what they were confronting was, they'd have to go learn networking and app management on a couple different clouds they wanted to use. And what they liked about our CF Fabric, across that, was that they said, oh, this is one operating model for any of those clouds. And that's the pattern that we see is that companies want to have one cloud operating model while there's five major cloud players today. So like how do those two forces in the market combine? And I think that's where multi-cloud becomes powerful. It's not necessarily multi-cloud for it's own sake, but it is the idea that you can engage and use multiple resources from these different data center providers without having to completely change your whole organization around it. Because taking on, how you run vServer versus OpenStack is different, as you know, right? >> Right, right, and talking about change, right? You and I were together at VMware when you launched this thing. >> James: Yeah. >> And there was a profound kind of conceptual chasm to leap for the VMware operators to figure out what was going on here. >> James: Yeah. >> So in this new world of services operation in multi-cloud, how are you seeing people, how's the adoption going, you just launched, or the foundation's launched its new certification stuff, can you talk a little bit about the new skill set needed, or how you're seeing people, the people formerly known as sys admins are now actually doing cloud operations. >> Well, I'm not sure if you saw Pat Gelsinger's announcement at Dell World, Dell EMC World, about developer-ready infrastructure. And I think this is a critical evolution that our partnership with VMware is more important than ever. Which is they're now saying all of these people that have been doing traditional system administration, you need to now offer developer-ready infrastructure. And this is an infrastructure that all the networking and network micro segmentation rules need to be there, all of the great things that the VMware admins have provided before needs to be there, but it needs to be turnkey for a developer. That developer shouldn't just get what we had and 2009, when you and I were working there together, which is like, here's a virtual machine, go build the rest of the environment. It should look more like, here's my application, run it for me. Here's my container, run it for me. And so what we're seeing is a lot of people upping their game now. To say, oh, the new thing is providing these services for developers 'cause that ties into digital transformation, ties into what the business is doing, ties into productivity. So I'm seeing a Renaissance of sys admins having a whole new set of tools. So that makes me excited. And one of the cool things we're seeing, I'd love to get your opinion on this is, this cool operating ratio of, we've had our clients present. Their administers of Cloud Foundry instances are able to run tens of thousands of apps in containers with two to four to five people. And so now they've got this super power, which is like, hey bring as many of the applications as the business needs to me. I can go run 10,000 app containers with a small team of people with a good lifestyle. To me, that's actually kind of incredible to see that leverage. >> Yeah, I think it's a huge shift, right? 'Cause you aren't setting up the VLANs and the micro segmentation and the rest of the stuff. >> Yeah, it's not all by hand, and so now the idea with our NSX partnership, is I'm really excited about, fun to talk to you about it. We used to work in Building E and have lunch out there, is that when you provision a CF app, we're working with the NSX team that all the segmentation will align with the app permissions. And this is a big deal, because it used to be that the network team and the app team didn't really have a good conduit of communication. So now it's like, okay I'm going to bind my app to this data service. I want NSX to make sure that permission is followed. To me, that's going to be a revolution of getting the app, and the DevOps teams and the networking teams to work together, clearly. So I'm pumped about that. >> Running low on time. A couple of quick questions about Pivotal. Number one is, now that you're doing Kubo, could we expect to see Pivotal join the CNCF? So EMC is is joining the CNCF. We have friendly relations with the CNCF, I don't think that's at all out of the cards. I just know current, I don't have any news on that today. But we've been very friendly with them, and we started working with Google on that, so no immediate plans there, but we'd be open to that, I believe. >> Okay, and secondly, my understanding, the last announcement on revenue, you can't speak to the IPO or anything, James, above your pay grade, but $275 million in billing on PCF, did I get that right? What do you see is kind of the mix of how you're revenued, are you a software company, a services company? The big data versus the cloud piece. How do we look at Pivotal going forward? >> Yeah, what'd I say is I primarily oversee the Cloud Foundry portion of what we do. And services are an incredibly important part of our mix, Pivotal labs. When you think about this developer-ready infrastructure tend, like a lot of the way you organize your developers can change too. So we talked about how the sys admins jobs change. They gets this platform scale, well the developer's job has changed now, too. They have to learn how to do CICD, they've got to learn how to potentially turn around agile requirements from the business on a weekly basis versus every six months. So Pivotal labs has certainly been critical to that mix for us. But PCF in and of itself, has been a very successful software business. And I think, I believe can grow into the billions of dollars a year in software, and that's what kind of keeps me excited about every day. >> All right, James, I want to give you the final word. You speak to so many customers. >> James: A few. >> The whole digital transformation thing, what are you seeing? How do we help customers along that moving faster. >> That's a, it's a big topic. And the thing that's really interesting about what PCF does is, that it helps people change their organizations, not just their technology. And this has certainly happened in the vServer environment, right? Like it would change your organization, but we're even going higher, which is like, how are your developers organized? How operating teams organize. How you think about security. How you think about patching. Like the reason why I agree that it's transformative, is that it's not just a change of technology, it's these new technologies allow you to rebuild your organization end-to-end, of how it delivers business results. And that makes it both a humbling and an exciting time to be in the industry, because I personally, don't have all the answers every time. People ask about organizations and what to do there. Those are complex issues, but I think we've tried to partner with them to go on that journey together. >> Unfortunately, James, we're going to have to leave it there. We will definitely catch up with you at many more events later this year. And we'll be back with more coverage here from the Cloud Foundry Summit 2017. You're watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Narrator: 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. >> Hi this is Stu Miniman, joined with my cohost, John Troyer. Happy to welcome to the program a first-time guest, Chip Childers, who's the CTO of the Cloud Foundry Foundation. Chip, fresh off the keynote stage, >> Yep. >> how's everything going? >> It's going great. We're really happy with the turnout of the conference. We are really happy with the number of large enterprises that are here to share their story. The really active vendor ecosystem around the project. It's great. It's a wonderful event so far. >> Yeah, I was looking back, I think the last time I came to the Cloud Foundry Show, it was before the Foundation existed, We were in the Hilton in San Francisco, it was obviously a way smaller group. Tell us kind of the goals of the Foundation, doing the event, bringing the community in. >> Yeah, you can think about our goals as being of course, we're the stewards of the intellectual property, the actual software that the vendors distribute. We see our role in the ecosystem as being really two key things. One: we're focused on supporting the users, the customers, and the direct uses of the Open Source software. That's first and foremost. Second though, we want to make sure there is a really robust market ecosystem that is wrapped around this project, right. Both in terms of the distribution, the regional providers that offer Cloud Foundry based services, but also large system integrators that are helping those customers go through digital transformation. Re-platform applications, you know really figure out their way through this process. So, it's all about supporting the users and then supporting the market around it. >> Yeah, as we go to a lot of these events, you know, there are certain themes that emerge. There were two big ones that both of them showed up in what you did in the Keynote. Number one is Multicloud, number two is you got all of these various open sourced pieces, >> Chip: Yep. you know, what fits together, what interlocks together, you know which ones sit side by side. Why don't we start with kind of the open source piece first? Because you're heavily involved in a lot of those. Cloud Foundry, you know, what are the new pieces that are bolting on, or sitting on top, or digging into it, and what's going on there? >> You know, I think first I want to start with a basic philosophy of our upstream community. There are billions of dollars that rely on this platform today. And that continues to grow. Right, because we're showing up in Fortune 500, Global 2000, as well as lots of small start-ups, that are using Cloud Foundry to get code shipped faster. So our community that builds the UpStream software, spends a lot of time being very thoughtful about their technical decisions. So what we release and that what gets productized by the down streams is a complete system. From operating system all the way up to including the various programming languages and frameworks and everything in between. And because we release a complete platform, at a really high velocity, so many people rely on it's quality, we're very thoughtful about when is the right time to build our own, when should we adopt and embrace and continue to support another OpenSource project, so we spend a lot of time really thinking about that. And the areas today that I highlight around specific collaborations include the Open Service Broker API which we actually spun out of being just a Club Foundry implementation. And we embrace other communities, and found a way to share the governance of that. So we move forward as a big industry together. >> Stu: Yeah and speaking on that a little bit more. Very interesting to see. I saw Red Hat for instance speaking with Open Shift, Kubernetes is there. So, how should customers think about this? Are the path wars over? Now you can choose all the pieces that you want? Or, it's probably oversimplifying it. >> I think it's over simplifying it, it depends. You can go try to build your own platform if you want, through a number of serious components, or you can just use something like Cloud Foundry, that has solve for that. But the important thing is that we have specifically designed Cloud Foundry to allow for the backing services to come from anywhere. And so, it's both a differentiator for the various distributions of Cloud Foundry, but also an opportunity for Cloud providers, and even more importantly, it's an opportunity for the enterprise users that live in complex worlds, right? They're going to have multiple platforms, they're going be multiple levels of abstraction from Bms to containers, you know, to the path abstraction even event driven frameworks. We want that all to work really well together. Regardless of the choices you make, because that's what's most valuable to the customers. >> Okay, the other piece, networking you talked about. Why don't you share. >> Yeah, yeah so, besides the Service Broker API, we've added support for what's called Container to Container Networking. I don't necessarily need to dig into the details there, but let's just say that when you're building microservices that the application that the user is experiencing is actually a combination of a lot of different applications. That all talk to each other and rely on each other. So we want to make sure there's a policy-based framework for describing how the webs here is going to talk to the authentication service or is going to talk to the booking service, or the inventory service. They all need to have rules about how they communicate with each other. And we want to do that in the most efficient way possible. So we've adopted the Containing Networking interface as the standard plugin that is now at CNCF, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. We think it's the right abstraction, we think it's great. It gives us access to all the fascinating work that is going on around software networking, overlay networking, industry standard API plugin to our policy-driven framework. >> Along the same theme, Kubo, a big new news project also kind of integration of some Cloud Foundry concepts with a broader ecosystem, in this case another CNCF project, Kubernetes. Could you speak a little bit to that? >> The Kubernetes community is doing a great job creating great container driven experience. You know that abstraction is all about the container. It's not about, you know, the code. So it's different than Cloud Foundry. There are workloads that make sense to run in one or the other. And we want to make sure that they run really well. Right, so the problem that we're solving with the Kuber project is what deploys Kubernetes? What supports Kubernetes if there is an infrastructure adage and a node goes offline? Right, because it does a great job of restarting containers, but if you have ten nodes in a cluster, and then now you're down to nine, that's a problem. So what Bosh does, is it takes care of solving the node outage level problem. You can also do rolling upgrades that are seamless, no downtime for the Kubernetes cluster. It brings a level of operational maturity to the Kubernetes users that they may not have had otherwise. >> Chip, can you bring us inside a little bit the creation of Kubo, is that something that the market and customers drove towards you? I talked to a couple other Cloud Foundry ecosystem members that were doing some other ways of integrating in Kubernetes. So what lead to this way of deploying it with Bosh? >> Yeah, absolutely so, it came out of a direct collaboration between Pivotal and Google. And it was driven based on Pivotal customer demand. It also, if you speak with people from Google that are involved in the project, they also see it as a need, for the Kubernetes ecosystem. So it's driven based on real-world large financial services companies that wanted to have the multiple abstractions available, they wanted to do it with a common operational platform that is proven mature that they've already adopted. And then as that collaboration board, the fruit of the project, and it was announced by Pivotal and Google several months back, they realized that they needed to move it to the vendor neutral locations so that we can continue to expand the community that can work on it, that can build up the story. >> The other topic I raised at the beginning of the interview, was the Multicloud. So in a panel, Microsoft, Google, MTC for Amazon was there. All of the Cloud guys are going to tell you we have the best platform and can do the best things for you. >> Of course they do. >> How do you balance the "We want to live in a multicultural Cloud world" and be able to go there versus "Oh I'm going to take standard plus and get in a little bit deeper to make sure that we're stickier with the customers there." What role does Cloud Foundry play? What have you seen in the marketplace for that? >> Well the public lab providers are, if you look at the services that they offer, you can roughly categorize them with two things. One, are the infrastructure building blocks. Two, are the higher level services, like their database capabilities, their analytics capabilities, log aggregation, you know, and they all have a portfolio that varies, some have specific things that are very similar. So when we talk about MultiCloud we talk about Cloud Foundry as a way to make use of those common capabilities, now they're going to differentiate based on speeds and feeds, availability, whatever they choose to, but you can then as a user have choice. And then secondarily, that Open Service Broker initiative is what's really about saying "great, there's also all these really valuable additional capabilities, that, as a user, I may choose to integrate with a Google machine learning-service, or I may choose to integrate with a wonderful Microsoft capability, or an Amazon capability." And we just want to make that easy for a developer to make that choice. >> Chip, Cloud Founder was very early in terms of a concept of a platform of services, let's not call it platform as a service right now. But you know, this platform that going to make developers lives easier, multi-target, MultiCloud we call it now, on from your laptop to anywhere. And it's been a really interesting discussion over the last couple years as this parallel container thread can come up with Kubernetes and Mesosphere and all the orchestration tools, and the focus has been on orchestration tools. And I've always thought Cloud Foundry was kind of way ahead of the game in saying "wait a minute, there's a set of services that you're going to have for full life-cycles, day two operation, at scale that you all are going to have to pull together from components." As we're doing this interview here, and this year at Cloud Foundry Summit are there anything that you think people don't kind of realize that over and over again people who are using Cloud Foundry go, "Wow I'm really glad "I had logging or identity management," or what are some of the frameworks that people sometimes don't realize is in there that actually is a huge time-savor. >> Yeah, there are a lot of operational capabilities in the Cloud Foundry platform. When you include both our Bosh layer, as well as the elastic runtime which is in the developer centers experience-- >> John: Anything that people don't often realize is in there? >> Well, I think that the right way to think of it is, it's all the things you need in one application, right? So we've been doing this for years as developers. In the applications operators team, we've been doing it. We've just been doing it via bunch of tickets, we've been doing it via bunch of scripts. What Cloud Foundry does is it takes all of those capabilities you need to really trust a platform to operate something on your behalf, and give you the right view into it, right? The appropriate telemetry, log aggregation, and know that there's going to be help monitoring there. It makes it really easy. Right, so we were talking earlier about the haiku, that Onsi Fakhouri from Pivotal had authored, it's appropriate. It's a promise that a platform makes. And platforms designed to let a user trust that the declarative nature of asking a platform to do X, Y, or Z, will be delivered. >> Chip, we've been hearing Pivotal talks a lot about Spring, when Cloud Foundry's involved. Is it so much so that the Foundation needs to be behind that, or support that? How does that interact and work? >> Well, we're super supportive of all the languages in the framework communities that are out there. You know, even if you pick a particular vendor, Pivotal in this case has a very strong investment in the Spring, Spring Cloud, Spring Boot, they're doing really amazing things. But that's also, it's our software, you know, they steward that community, so all the other vendors actually get the advantage of that. Let's take Dot Net and Microsoft. Microsoft open sourced Dot Net. So now you can run Dot Net applications on Linux. They're embrace of the container details and the APIs and their operating system is making it so that now it can also run on Windows. So the whole Microsoft technology stack, languages and frameworks, they matter quite a bit to the enterprise as well. So we see ourselves as supportive of all of these communities, right? Even ones like the Ruby community. When there's an enterprise developer that chooses to use something like Ruby, with the Ruby on Rails framework, if they use Cloud Foundry, they're getting the latest and greatest version of that language, framework, they know that it's secure, they know that it's going to be patched for them. So it's actually a great experience for that developer, that's working with the language. So, we like to support all of them, we're big fans of any that work really well with the platform and maybe integrate deeper. But it's a polyglot platform. >> We want to give you the final word. People take away from Cloud Foundry Summit 2017, what would you want them to take away? >> Yeah the simple takeaway that I can give you is that this is an absolutely enterprise grade open source ecosystem. And you don't hear that often, right? Because normally we talk about products, being enterprise great. >> Did somebody say in the keynote enterprise great mean that there's a huge salesforce that's going to try sell you stuff? (Chip laughs) Well that's coming from the buying side of the market for years. And you know, it was a bit of a joke. What is "enterprise great?" Well, it means that there's a piece of paper that says, this product will cost x dollars and the salesperson is offering it to you. So of course it's going to be enterprise great. But really, we see it as four key things, right? It's about security, it's about being well-integrated, it's about being able to scale to the needs of even the largest enterprises, and it's also about that great developer experience. So, Cloud Foundry is an ecosystem and all of our downstream distributions get the advantage of this really robust and mature technical community that is producing this software. >> Chip, really appreciate you sharing all the updates with us, and appreciate the foundation's support to bring theCUBE here. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from The Cloud Foundry Summit 2017, you're watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Announcer: 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. Happy to welcome to the program a first-time guest but a company we've had on the program before. Brian Gregory is the director of Cloud Strategy and Engineering at Express Trips, I'm sorry, Express Scripts, and Express Scripts booth is actually right behind us on the stage. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, you were giving us a little bit of background about, I believe it's been about three years you've been with the company. Why don't you share with our audience Express Scripts company that many of us have probably used, less likely that everybody knows who you are and your role there. >> Yeah, so my role today, again, is a Cloud Strategy Engineering director, but it's really focused on building out the next-gen platform, making infrastructure irrelevant, if you will, and making our developers go faster and making everything as streamless as possible. >> And Brian, just for our audience that doesn't know Express Scripts, give us, what's the brain of the company and what are you known for. >> We serve 85 million patients today, 3,000 contractor. We have, if you go look at what we do as a business, the pharmacy benefit management side, our goal is to basically make prescriptions safer, more affordable, for all of our patients. So if you think about what we're doing, that's really what we're doing, and we like to say pharmacy smarter. And for us, that's our major goal in everything we do. So my team, anybody's team, doesn't matter what you're doing in technology, that's your end goal, to deliver value to those patients and your clients and so that's what we focus on. >> Well, Brian, it's a good thing. IT's changing all the time, at least health care, nothing's been changing radically, changing all the time. So, bring us inside what you did when you came inside the company. Your role, as you said, infrastructure. Wanted to worry about that less, that's something we hear a lot. >> Right, and one thing I should clarify is that Express Scripts has always been a technology company. If you look at their grass roots and what they were built upon, in 30 years they grew to 100 billion dollar business, really by utilizing technology at the end of the day. When I came in, I was managing some infrastructure teams and database organizations and we decided that this was, the whole digital transformation, or cloud strategy, was a real thing, so my leadership asked me to take this on as an initiative, that was my background, that's where I came from, my grass roots, if you will, from Savs and Centurylink and that became a full-time role. It came to one point where you can't do both, this is taking off and it's being a real thing. Our main goal was to say, how are we going to step outside the box? We still have to run a 100 billion dollar organization. But we got to figure out what the new is, right, you're going to invent that next light bulb, and we've got to maintain the current one. And so, for us, we wanted a full-fledged platform. It wasn't about just spitting out BM's and delivering those, I think we'd had that covered. It was really about figuring out how we're going to figure out cloud, cloud in general. And then what about multi-cloud and how do we get a platform that could seamlessly integrate with all of those. >> And Brian, what was the underlying driver there in the business? Is it you needed to develop more software, you needed to move faster, what's the why, was it cost savings and things getting out of hand? >> Yeah, all of the above. I think specifically it's about delivering value, delivering value to patients as fast and seamless as possible. And so we wanted to figure that out. The old ways, if we all go back in our years of, there were days that I would get hardware and physically, I'm going to figure out how to put the drive so that they're getting more IO or whatever. Those projects have been solved, right, and if you look at companies 10 years ago, they were like, virtualization is scary, I can't do that, I have production workload. So the trend in the market is to keep moving up the stack, and so ultimately, that's where you end up focusing on. Where do we deliver value as an IT organization? That's not for us to go build a homebrewed system that does any of those things. You can go buy those things, integrate them and figure out how they can drive value in your business. So that's what we wanted to do, get a platform. The first goal we had was actually a really interesting story. We wanted to build a new mobile application that would allow consumers to go on and make a user experience much better than it had previously been. If you wanted to order prescriptions, you could go onto this app and say, not just, can I order that, but I can also see what the prices are at different places local to you, the distance to those, and then what would it take if you did a 90-day fill for our home-delivery program and you could sign up via that method. And that was really what we were going after, that end user experience to say, how do we change the experience for our consumers. Not necessarily the back-end stuff, the day-to-day batch processing that they don't really care about how that's done as long as it's done within the time threshold that that's supposed to be done. >> Brian, can you talk a little bit about the process of getting to where we are in terms of, you talked about trying to figure out cloud, and part of that is figuring out which platform to go with and then part of it is finding the people with the skills to, once you've decided on a direction, to help you figure it out. Can you talk just a little bit about maybe that learning journey for you, for Express Scripts? >> Sure, sure. Yeah, it's really interesting, 'cause when I talk, I feel like this was five years that I've been doing this specifically at Express Scripts, when really, it's 18 months that we've really stood up our internal hybrid cloud and got our platform installed. So, yeah, it's learning by doing but the nice thing about everything we're doing, and you hear this all the time, is that we can iterate, you can make changes. It's not like you have to wait three months and then you can't shift or can't course-correct. Learning, the team's been amazing, so I grabbed some people within, they got re-trained on this is the new stack. I also brought in some people that had previously worked with me that had some of the skill sets. Really, it's people that are curious in nature and want to learn. But then you go, that's a neat story, we can stand up a cloud or use an external one, you can stand up your pads. But at the end of the day, what do you do next, how do you start to engage developers? 'Cause when we opened the doors for business, it wasn't like we had everybody standing there waiting to get in. You had to convince them of, these are the features, not convince them, show them the features and the functionality and why it mattered to them. Why does it matter now, and then you go, okay, that's great, and you start to, I would say my team focuses probably 80% of their time on teaching people how to fish, hoping that the developers get better and the consuming of the platform, they help each other and we see a lot of that happening in our slack channels and hipchat and different things, communication tools where they're helping each other, so we're not even having to answer all the questions. But then you get the whole problem of, all right, well, now we've got release management we're going to start working with and that opens a whole new can and they're transforming as well and they're definitely changing their processes. But it gets hairy when you start looking at, well, we've got to keep the tourniquet over here 'cause we can't afford any disruption or outages for our patients. But these new guys, if they check all these boxes, they should be able to deploy whenever they feel like in the middle of the day and we should feel comfortable doing that because it's now micro-service, it's not some monolith thing that they don't understand. >> Brian, can you give us a little insight on the state of your application, so I think most people understand something like cloud foundry, oh, I wanted to build that new app, that's a great use case. How many applications have you moved over, do you have a percentage you measure? I heard the Liberty Mutual keynote was like, what percentage of workloads they have there, what percentage of people code, how fast they release code on this thing, what metrics do you use? >> Yeah, so I had this conversation last night. We don't have, I can tell you that we have over 1100 applications that have moved in 18 months, so I would tell you that, when it started out, we had specific goals of migrating existing lift and shift and refactoring and things like that. What we found was that there's all this net new coming in, not just what we're doing is blowing up within the company, but they're also doing that on the developer's side and they're doing a lot of new things so those new projects clearly migrate over or come in the door starting out with cloud-first strategy. Then you start to lift and shift, and you really have to start cherry-picking what makes sense. Some things you go, there's not really the value, there's no user experience behind this, it's literally just a monetary thing, maybe or maybe not. But you start taking the dollars that you're going to put towards migrating this, and then you're like, well, it's not really a win-win. So what we found was that allnet news coming this direction on the cloud foundry platform, and the workload that makes sense, and then we started cherry-picking things that we re-wrote in spring and they're slowly migrating. But today we're at 1100, we just hit 1100 apps, which is pretty good for 18 months. >> That's really impressive in 18 months. Any lessons learned there as to things you could do to move faster or mistakes that were made that you could tell your peers, hey, watch out for this? >> Yeah, I definitely have a lot of those but, at the same time, I feel like lessons learned are the best thing, the best thing we do is fail, literally, because then you learn something from it and you move forward. I think the one advice, some advice I would give to people is, don't get hung up on trying to be perfect. If there's a lift and shift opportunity and you only get 60 to 70% of the goodness of moving this thing, then just go ahead and do it, don't say, well, but it's not perfect, and we want to make this app completely different, 'cause that's where people get stuck on. I think once they realize they just try some things and then you can get over there and change it and make it perfect down the road. But some people are like, why would I move one to one, I should refactor this app and maybe have it multiple per one and those are great conversations but I think it keeps people, the old analysis paralysis conversation, and it's like, just try it, just go. I would say another good story we had is, we have an outcomes conference that we host, Express Scripts. We had, they were trying to come up with a new way to do basically a content management solution show a digital benefit guide, and they came in and they wanted to try one technology. Didn't work out, two weeks later they came back and were like, well, it doesn't deliver that, so we tried something else. And we tried four different things for this person and they got to where they wanted to be but the important part was that we could change on the fly. In the old days, it was like, you ordered hardware or you ordered BM's, you were stuck because he had dates to deliver and we basically, we can change things. If it doesn't work we'll try something else and you can move around and do things at scale where you couldn't before. >> It sounds like a set of outcomes that the business side, the executive side, leadership, can actually point to and recognize as helping transform the business. You're here at the conference, a sponsor of the conference, participating at the conference. And you're a pharmacy benefits company, so, that's an interesting position to be in. But it sounds like the business and management supports you and recognizes that this is helping move with velocity. >> Yes, so from the top down, we are a technology company at heart. This is what we do and the company has come a long way with, when I got there, the fact that we're here sponsoring it means a great deal to me because this is, after all, an open-source tech conference, which is amazing. It's nice to talk about, get some branding out there and talk about what we're doing so people know that, hey, there's a lot of really cool things happening. Maybe we recruit some people at the end of the day as a result, you never know. But yeah, it's really about just branding and then supporting the community and getting out the word of what we're doing and why it matters. >> Last question I have for you, Brian, is, a lot of discussion about multi-cloud and things like Kubernetes enable that. Can you share what public cloud or public cloud you use, how you look at that dynamic? >> Yeah, so we've got a few things in the works. So there's a few POC's happening, I would tell you that our internal cloud is where we have everything hosted today. We've built an internal hybrid cloud. >> So you have the data centers? >> Yeah, we have multiple data centers and we have our internal hybrid clouds built out. We are evaluating some external capabilities, we're also doing some partnerships, you can actually go read about. Our CIO just released a story about that. We're definitely looking for that, where's our burst-able capacity. With our data and with what we have going on, going external is a much different conversation than where my previous company, we're talking about Hippa compliance and a lot of different data issues that we've got to make sure we're protecting and our most important thing to do is protect that data from our patients. So there's no reason for us to go, we have to get out external at this point, but we do see that as an important part of our key going forward to say, this is part of our strategy, to say, we've got to get an external solution as well. >> Brian Gregory, always love the stories of how digital transformation are helping to impact everyone who uses prescriptions. I mean, no better way of helping people, so we'll be back with lots more coverage here of Cloud Foundry Summit 2017. Thanks for watching The Cube. (techno music) >> I remember when I had such a fantastic batting practice, I walked by a couple of sports writers in that era.

(upbeat techno music) >> Announcer: From Boston, Massachusetts, it's the Cube, covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2018, brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation. >> Welcome back to the Cube, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is Cloud Foundry Summit 2018, in Boston. Talking a lot about digital transformation, and love when we get to talk to the users here, at the show. One of the great stories told on the keynote stage this morning was from T-Mobile. So, while Rob wasn't on the stage, he's involved in the activity. This is Rob Hansen, Director of Operations at T-Mobile. Thank you for joining me. >> Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you for having me. >> So, Rob, we were talking before and the twitters, there's lots of stuff that goes on, but everybody, there was a great story talking about 17 hundred developers and only 10 operators, underneath, making those work. So, maybe before we get into it, tell us a little bit about your role, your background, what you do at T-mobile. >> Sure, my role is, I lead a team on the operations side. So, we operate the software and when we look over the last 10 years or so, that software's been predominately large monoliths. Look at, use TIBCO as an example. We've been a heavy user of TIBCO BW for many many years and my environment supporting TIBCO BW accounts for about 2,000 physical servers across multiple data centers, and that carries a high operational cost. We're doing all our changes in the middle of the night. Things break, seeming randomly at times, causing customer impact, just a lot of paint and patching. One of my favorite topics is patching. >> (laughs) Oh, boy. Tuesday's your favorite day of the week, right? It's taco Tuesday and patch Tuesday. >> Oh, my god. Yes. Exactly Every quarter I get the list of servers, here's the list of servers that needs to be patched, and it's just a nightmare, right. >> So, Rob, can we talk a little bit about the developer and operator interaction at your company? I interviewed Solomon Hykes last year at DockerCon, and he said, "Believe it or not, "I created Docker mostly for the operators." That's his background in there, >> Oh, yeah. >> But everybody, they're, "This show, "it's developers, developers, developers." So, what's that dynamic inside T-Mobile? >> Historically, before we got into kind of the cloud-native space, it was really an us versus them, right. There's the mentality of, oh, it's an ops problem now. There's a great meme out there. It's one of my favorites, the little girl standing in front of the burning house, and it says, "Worked in dev, it's an ops problem now." (Stu laughs) So, as we've gone through this cloud-native journey, and we've moved into using like Pivotal, within our environment, we've seen that community within our organization come together, and really start working closer and closer together. Right now, we're going through a migration into the TIBCO Container Edition project, or application, and as we've been doing that, we literally have our ops base folks and the development base folks sitting in a room together, day and night, just working together. Historically, developers have a point of view, operators have a different point of view. It's really brought them together into a singular point of view and ownership of the software, and just providing business capabilities. >> Rob, could you give us a little bit of picture, kind of your application portfolio, how much have you been kind of moving onto the platforms, how much do you build new on the platform, those kind of things? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, I mentioned earlier, legacy, we were about 2,000 physical servers. Right now, I'm trying to remember the actual application count, but I've taken, or we've taken one of our historical job applications, moved it completely into PCF, running a complete spring boot now. We're doing that with our TIBCO environment. We have a number of other applications that we've spun up, running in spring and whatnot. What we've been able to do is just explode the amount of stuff we're deploying, and just new functionality. We're able to develop it much faster. So, when we look at the developers, more people are coming on board, because you can just get the code out there so much faster, and really in smaller increments. So, a lot of times, when we've developed things and we've delivered functionality for the business, because you're dealing with large monoliths, you have to change, you know, one of the applications I mentioned, you've got 200 services, about 600 operations, bundled into the same ball of code. Now, we've separated that out into a bunch of microservices, so now, we can just implement this one thing, with very little to no impact to the business. I think one of the big fundamental shifts that we've seen, we have historically done the large Saturday night deployments, right. You show up Saturday night at 7:00 p.m. and you hope you get to go home Sunday. We've really shifted that model, so in Q1, in my space, we did 86 and a half percent of our changes in production, during the day, right in the middle of the business day. >> Stu: Is it scary? >> It was at first, in all honesty, because my biggest fear is having to explain things to leadership, you know why did it go wrong, the root cause, and all that kind of stuff. But because we're able to move so fast now, we're able to get the code out there. We're able to see, okay, is this working? Roll it back really quickly, leveraging blue-green. Scale is another thing. Every year, iPhone. iPhone is a scary time I think, for pretty much any wireless operator. And historically, we've had to go out and buy more physical servers. So, you're buying these servers, you're building em. It takes months to build em, stand em up, and you're doing that for a two-day event, a year. You end up carrying the costs of that hardware. Well, this last iPhone in September, you know the iPhone 8 and the iPhone X, because we were predominately running in our cloud-native environment, and our cloud foundry environment, spun up the containers. >> Does that live in a public cloud? >> That lives in a private cloud, On-Prem. >> Stu: Okay. So we just spun up the containers, got through the event, spun em down. >> Okay, you had enough infrastructure capacity, you just didn't need it to be kind of-- >> Yeah. Well, and we're able to target the specific services, right. In our TIBCO landscape, we operate, in the old BW environment we operated about 200 years, comes out to about 14 hundred services. So, when you're scaling up, you're having to do it, more or less, for everything, but running in the Pivotal environment, we're able to just target, okay this, you know, like a get customer info. It's like a basic call when you log into MyT-Mo. You're able to just take that, double it, triple it, whatever you need to do. Maybe this other call over here, you know, we don't have to touch that. So you're just being way more efficient with your resources. >> So, Rob, if you can do these updates all the time, do you still love patching as much as you used to? >> The patching is the devil. I actually, the 10 to 15 people that Chuck was talking about on stage today, those are the guys that actually operate the physical hardware, you know, the Diego cells and whatnot. I meet with them on a weekly basis, and we kind of go through the state of things, and planning, and all that kind of stuff. Almost every time, I end that meeting with, "I just don't want to patch anything, anymore." So, the more we get onto this environment, the easier it is for me As we're trying to do this dev/ops transformation at T-Mobile, we're getting there, and we're doing it. You know, one of the things we ask ourselves is, should a dev/ops team have to care about patching? Why is a developer going to say, "Oh, my OS is a version behind, "I need to take care of that." That's not useful to the business, right? That takes away time that that developer can be creating new things and adding value. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you think about, you know in a public cloud environment, I don't think about that, you know, what version of ah-jur-ware you're running isn't something that people ask. Private cloud, if it's going to live up to what we want it to, it should have a similar type of dynamic. >> Exactly, and our platform team is amazing. I mean, they take care of that stuff for us. I'm a heavy user. So I think Chuck talked about this a little. He didn't really talk about the volume, but we started on our Pivotal journey a couple years ago. I think first started dabbling 2015, but we really didn't start converting our large monolithic middleware until the beginning of 2017. So, right now, we are doing 250 million transactions a day, on our Pivotal platform, just with two, or, I'm sorry, three of my platforms running in there. >> Last thing I want to ask you, Rob. What key learnings have you had, going through this transformation? What do you say to your peers, that they could do better or look out for or plan, to help them? >> I think the main learning that we've had is just how important it is to partner together, with the hardware people, the developers, and the operations people. Coming together, it's a cultural shift in many respects. Like they say in dev/ops, a lot of people talk about it, they don't realize how hard it is to do, but hardware has to be a part of that. Coming together, luckily, we had a couple stumblings, in the beginning, but we were quickly able to huddle together between kind of these three core groups and really work together and overcome those challenges. I think the second thing that's really important is just to be open and honest with each other. Everybody makes mistakes. I think a lot of times, there's cases of, oh this is platform problem, oh it's a software problem. You know, there's a little finger-pointing here and there, from time to time, but getting through that, being open, honest, communicative with each other, it just makes the world so much easier and better for us. >> Well, Rob, my entire IT career, you know we've wanted everybody to hold hands (Rob laughs) and get in the circle together, bust through those silos, so, you know, making progress though. Thank you so much for sharing the story of T-Mobile. Watch more coverage here from the Cloud Foundry Summit, here in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm Stu Miniman. You're watching the Cube.

>> Announcer: From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2018. Brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation. >> I'm Stu Minamin and this is theCUBE's coverage of Cloud Foundry Summit 2018. Here in beautiful Boston, Massachusetts. Happy to welcome back to the program Chip Childers, who is the CTO of the Cloud Foundry Foundation. Chip, you started off this morning saying the runners this morning got a taste of the Boston Marathon. >> They did, they did! >> It's raining, it's cold, it's miserable. >> Yesterday was beautiful. >> At least there was less wind. >> Yesterday was absolutely beautiful. So we kicked off the summit, beautiful sun, but then we had our Fun Run this morning. >> As a local, I do apologize for the weather. Normally April's a great time. We want more tech coverage here in the area. More tech shows. We're in the center of a great tech hub, here in the Boston Seaport. We've talked to a couple of Boston startups, you know, here at the show. And, you know, great ecosystem if you go there. Thank you for bringing your show here. >> Absolutely, happy to be here. >> All right, so, last time we caught up was year ago at the show. And I think it was, what, 213 working days or something? I think Molly said >> Something like that Something like that yeah. >> The good thing is in our industry, nothings changing, we can talk about the same stuff as last year. >> Leisurely pace >> No concern, let's just sit back and you know, talk about our favorite pop culture references. Chip what's hot on your plate? And what are you hearing from the users in the community? >> Sure. So this year the theme Our events team came up with a very fun pun, which is Running at Scale. It means two things. One, the Boston Marathon was on Monday, but two it really does represent the stories that we're getting from our users, the customers, and the distributions, those that use the open source directly. So not only are we seeing a broadening of adoption across new organizations, but they're getting really deep into using it. We filled a survey, user survey, just did our second run of it. In fact we didn't have this data back in Santa Clara last year. So it's been less than a year since the 2017 one. And what we found was that there was a 21 point swing in those companies that were using Cloud Foundry with more than 50 developers, alright. So 50 developers and higher When you really talk to the interesting, large scale Fortune 500 companies, they're talking thousands of developers, that are working on the platform, being productive, and that truly is kind of what this event is about for us. >> I grew up around the infrastructure stuff, and scale means a lot of things to a lot of people, but had a great discussion with Dr. Nick, just before talking about how if you were to build your kind of utopian environment You look at some of the hyper-scale companies, the Facebooks and Googles of the world, and thing is they're such a scale that if they don't have good automation, and don't have you know really the distributive architectures that we're all talking about and things like that, there's no way that they could run their businesses. >> Yeah and the reality is a lot of the businesses that aren't Google, aren't Facebook, they have to be able to think about that level of scale. To me it really boils down to three basic principles, and to me this is the best definition of what Cloud native means. Whether you're talking about a platform, whether you're talking about how you design your applications, it's simple patterns, highly automated, which can be scaled with ease, right? And through that you can do really amazing things with software, but it has to be easily scaled, it has be easily managed, and you do that through the simplicity of the patterns that you apply. >> Yeah, and being simple is difficult. >> Yes >> How much we have arguments in the industry it's like well, let's throw an abstraction layer in there, do an overlay or underlay, but you know really building kind of distributed systems, is a little bit different. >> It is a little bit different. So one of the things that the Cloud Foundry ecosystem has, is a rich history of iterating towards a better and better developer experience. At its heart, the Cloud Foundry ecosystem of distribution, and tools, and the different products we have, they're all about helping the developer be a better developer in the context of their organization. So we've been iterating on that experience and just doing incremental constant improvement and change and we're very proud of that productivity, right? And that's really what drive these organizations to say look, this is a platform that is operated very easily with small teams. I think you've spoken with a couple companies, and if you ever ask them hot many operators do you have to handle thousands of engineers, tens of thousands of applications, they say, well, maybe ten. >> The T-Mobile example is >> Great example >> Ten to fifteen operators with 17000 developers so >> Chip: Yep, yep >> It's funny cause I remember we used to talk about you know in the enterprise how many servers can a single admin handle and then if you go to the hyper-scale ones it was three orders magnitude different. But in the hyper-scale ones they didn't really have server people, they had people that brought in servers, and people threw them in the wood chipper when they were done >> Chip: Absolutely >> And they didn't manage them. It was the old cattle versus pets analogy that we talked about in the other room, It's just totally different mindsets is how we think about this. I love, For me, it was in the enterprise you know, we harden the hardware, we think about this, and in the software world it's you know, No no, I built it in the application layer, because One of my favorite lines I use is you know, Hardware will eventually fail, and software will eventually work right? >> Absolutely. I think that's the difference between, So application centric thinking leads you to Necessarily, you have to have infrastructure to run it right? My favorite thing is this whole server-less term is absolutely ridiculous if anybody understands it, but there's a little bit behind it, which is, in fact I'd argue Cloud Foundry's fundamentally server-less because when you push code into it, you don't care what operating system's underneath it, right? All you care about is the fact that you've written some code in Java or in Nojass or in Ruby, you're handing it to a platform it deals with all of the details of building a container image, scaling it, managing it, pulling independencies, you don't care what underlying operating systems there, and then that ten person platform operations team, in the Cloud Foundry world, they have the benefit of upstream projects actually producing the operating system image that they can consume, within hours of major vulnerabilities being announced. >> I love actually, at this show you've got a containers and server-less track >> We do >> And I'm an infrastructure guy by background and when we went to virtualization we went little bit up the stack, I don't think about servers I'm trying to get closer to that application. Love you to comment on is Cloud Foundry helps gives some stability and control at that infrastructure level, but it still involved with infrastructure, from in my own data center, >> Chip: Yep >> or hosted data center or I know what could I'm on. When I start going up to like server-less, I'm a little bit higher up the stack, and that's why they can live together, >> Yeah, yeah >> And its closer tied to the application than it is to the infrastructure, so maybe you can tease that out for us a little. >> Yeah, so I think one of the main things that we've heard from the user community and this is actually coming from users of a number of the different distributions. They're saying, look there are roughly, today, roughly two different modes that we care about, cloud native application workloads. And this might expand to include functions and service but predominantly there's two. There's the custom software that we write, which the past experience is great for, and then there's the ISV delivered software, which today increasingly the medium of software delivery is becoming the container image, whether it's an OCI container, whether it's a Docker image, ISV ships software as container images, and you need a great place to land that, so those two abstractions, that paths, just hand the system your code, or the container service just hand it a container image, both of them work really well together, and part of what we're trying to do as a community, a technical community, is we're evolving those integrations so that we can work really well with the Kubernetes ecosystem. There are different options for how these things might be stacked, depending on the vendor that you're talking to, I think mostly that's immaterial to the customers, I think mostly the customers care about having those two experiences be unified from their developer or app owner prospective. >> When you come to this show, there's more than just Cloud Foundry. There's a lot of other projects >> Chip: For sure >> That are coming on to the space Gives us a little viewpoint as to how the foundation looks at this. What's the charter which it fits under Linux foundation There's so many different pieces, Some kind of bleed into what the CNCF is doing, and just try to help map out >> Chip: Yeah how some of these pieces and it's this great toolbox that we've talked about in open source. I love like the zip car guy got up and he's like, I use all the peripheral stuff, and none of the core stuff >> Right >> And that's okay >> Absolutely, that's the fun of open source. So there's a couple ways to look at this. So first, the open source communities collectively. There's a lot of innovations going on in this space, obviously What the Cloud Foundry ecosystem generally does, historically has done, and will continue to do, is that we are focused on the user needs, first and foremost. And what our technical project teams do is they look at what's available in the broader open source ecosystem. They adopt and integrate what makes sense, where we have to build something ourselves, simply because there isn't an equivalent, or it's necessary for technical reasons. We'll build that software. But our architecture has changed many times. In fact, since 2015, right. It hasn't been that many years, as you said, we move slow in this industry (Stu laughs) We've changed this architecture constantly. The upstream projects releasing at minimum of twice a month. That's a pretty high velocity. And it's a big coordinated release. So we're going to continue to evolve the architecture, to bring in new components, this is where CNCF relates. We've integrated Envoy, which is a CNCF project. We're now bringing in Kubernetes, in a couple of different ways. We're working closely with Istio, which is not a CNCF project, yet. But it looks like it might head that way. Service mesh capabilities, We were an early adopter of the container networking interface. Another Linux foundation effort was the open container initiative, right. Seeded from some code from Docker, again one of the earliest platforms to adopt that, outside of Docker. So we really look at the entire spectrum of open source software as a rich market of componentry that can be brought together. And we bring it together so that all these great users that you're talking to, can go along this journey, and think of it almost as a rationalization of the innovative chaos that's occurring. So we rationalize that. Our job is to rationalize our distributions, use that rationalization, and then all of the users get to take advantage of new things that come up. But also we take what gets integrated very seriously, because it has to reach a point of maturity. T-Mobile again, running their whole business on Cloud Foundry. Comcast, running their whole business on Cloud Foundry. US Air Force, fundamentally running their air traffic control, right, how do they get fuel to the jets, on Cloud Foundry. So we take that seriously. And so it's this combination of, harvesting innovation from where we can harvest it, bring it all together, be very thoughtful about how we bring it together, and then the distributions get the advantage of saying, here's a stable core that's going to evolve and take us into the future. >> Chip I've loved the discussion with real customers, doing digital transformation. What that means for them. How they're moving their business forward. Want to give you the final word, for those that couldn't come to the show, I know a lot of the stuffs online, there's a lot of information out there, anything particular do you want to call out, or say hey this is cool, interesting, or exciting you that you'd want to point to. >> Yeah, I actually. There are a lot of things but the one thing that I'll point to is as a US citizen, I'm particularly proud of some of the work that's happening in the US Government. Through 18F, with cloud.gov as an example, but if I step back even further, Cloud Foundry is serving as a vehicle for collaboration across multiple nations right now. We're seeing Australia, we're seeing the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Canada, South Korea, all of these national governments, are trying to figure out how to change citizen engagement to follow the lead of the startups, which are the internet companies, at the same time that these large Fortune 500 companies, are also trying to digitally transform. Governments are trying to do the same thing. So we had a, we're almost done for the day here, but there was almost a full day track of governments talking about their use of the tech, talking about that same digital transformation journey. So to me that's actually really inspiring to see that happen >> Alright well Chip Childers. He was a dancing stick figure >> Chip: I was in the keynote this morning, but here with us on theCUBE. Thank you so much for joining once again, and thank you to the foundation for helping us bring this program to our audience. >> Chip: We're happy to have you here. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE. Thanks for watching (bright popping music)

>> Announcer: From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. >> 2010 was the first year we brought theCUBE to VMworld. At that time, VMware was a $2.5 billion company with former Microsoft exec Paul Maritz at the helm. Two years earlier, in a stunning development, VMware fired co-founder and CEO Diane Greene, which sent the company's stock tumbling almost 25%. Under pressure from investors, Joe Tucci, the chairman of EMC, made the move after a rocky four-year relationship with Ms. Greene. EMC purchased VMware in 2004 for $635 million. The Maritz years were marked by a strategy to move the company beyond the hypervisor into new areas of growth, including desktop virtualization and applications, which were met with mixed market responses. To Maritz's credit, however, the company continued to expand its presence in the data center, and under his leadership remained highly competitive with Microsoft, who was seen at the time as VMware's main rival. In 2012, the company named long-time Intel and then recently EMC exec, Pat Gelsinger as its CEO. Gelsinger inherited a roughly $4.5 billion company, staring into the teeth of the oncoming cloud megatrend. Gelsinger quickly embarked on a strategy to refocus on the core business, buoyed by a restructuring of many of the VMware assets that EMC and VMware folded into a new company called Pivotal. Gelsinger made several attempts to maintain and expand VMware's total available market with a public cloud play called vCloud Air, which ultimately failed. On the plus side of the ledger, however, Gelsinger led VMware's software-defined data center strategy grabbing pieces of its value chain that were historically left for the ecosystem. Of course, the most notable being NSX, the company's software-defined networking product, and vSan, a software storage play. Fast forward to 2017, and add to these developments the momentum of VMware's cloud management and orchestration offerings, its security and other multi-cloud services, and you now have a nearly $8 billion revenue company growing at 10% per anum, with a $40 billion market cap, and a new owner, namely, Michael Dell and company. Hello, everyone. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stu Miniman, and this is our VMworld 2017 preview. Stu, thanks for joining me. >> Dave, can't believe it's bene eight years we've been doing theCUBE at VMworld. >> Right, and we have been tracking this, Stu, and now, as we were saying, we see new owners, Michael Dell, Dell buying EMC, and of course VMware maintaining the vast majority of the ownership. Stu, what has changed since Michael Dell purchased VMware? What's changed in terms of Dell, its ownership, and also in the past year? >> Yeah, so it's been one of the top questions. Last year, John Furrier and I interviewed Michael Dell, and there were still everybody trying to say after the acquisition happened, "Aren't you going to just sell of VMware because VMware "needs to be independent, "they need to be able to partner with everyone?" And Michael was basically like, just lit a fire underneath him, and he's like, "People that think I'm going to sell it "don't understand the business plan "and they don't understand math." Everybody thought, "Oh, you got to sell them off "to be able to pay down the debt," and he's like, "No. "VMware has been called the jewel of this acquisition "of EMC, the largest acquisition in tech history." And that relationship of VMware is something that's still playing out. One piece of it, you mentioned vSAN, one of the success stories, there was the failure of EVO:RAIL, which was kind of the first generation solution put together sold through a whole lot of partners. They took that whole product and marketing team and put them together with EMC and created the VxRail team, which now reports up to Chad Sakac. On the Dell/EMC side, VxRail doing quite well, vSAN doing phenomenally well. They claim to have the most number of customers for any product in the hyper-converged infrastructure space. Lots of different solutions out there. So, some of that blending of how Dell/EMC and VMware, we see a little bit of that, but still, VMware partners with everyone. VMworld, still, Dave, is probably the largest infrastructure ecosystem out there, and even if we look at cloud, it's one of the more robust ecosystems out there. The only one probably rivals it these days is Amazon. >> Stu, isn't Dell's ownership of VMware somewhat more threatening to server vendors in particular than EMCs? Especially Cisco, IBM, HPE, large volume movers of VMware licenses, how has that affected the dynamic in the ecosystem? >> Yeah, Dave, we've talked in previous years. I was at EMC back at the beginning of the VMware relationship. EMC really didn't know what it was getting when it got VMware. It was less dollars were going to go into servers because we consolidate with virtualization, and less dollars to servers should mean more dollars to storage, good for EMC. Well, Dell, number one thing that Michael Dell wants to do is sell Dell servers. So, of course, if I'm someone else in that ecosystem, if I'm selling other servers, if I'm selling storage that doesn't run on Dell gear and not part of that Dell ecosystem, absolutely it could be a threat. Micheal has maintained the they're going to keep VMware, allow them to have their independence, and I haven't heard too many rumblings from the ecosystem that they've messed up the apple cart from VMware's standpoint. >> Okay, last year the talk was that Pat Gelsinger was on his way out. >> Stu Miniman: Yeah. >> You see Pat Gelsinger doesn't appear to be on his way out. There's earnings momentum, which we'll talk about, but thoughts on management? >> Yeah, so, right, Dave. Number one thing is we thought Pat would be out. Things are doing better from a stock market. You talked about the growth, 10% per anum right now is solid VMware. We've seen a number of moves and changes, people that, there have been a lot of people that have left. There's new people that have come in. There are areas that are doing quite well, and virtualization is still a mainstay of the data center. One of the things we'll talk about, I know, is that Amazon relationship, which we expect to hear a lot about at the show. Amazon's one of the Global Diamond partners, which, a year ago if you had said that Amazon was one of the top partners up there with the likes of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, OVH took over the vCloud Air business, which is, as you said, it failed from VMware's standpoint. They still have a number of partners. Companies like Rackspace, OVH that took over that vCloud Air business, and lots of service providers are doing quite well selling VMware lots of places. And virtualization still is the foundational layer for most infrastructure. >> So VMware pre-announced earnings to the upside and future growth ahead of expectations, so the stock got a nice pop out of that. What's driving that momentum? >> The two areas you talked about first. vSAN is doing quite well. It's driving a lot of adoption and trying to get VMware to be a little bit more sticky and really kind of slowly expand as opposed to big chunks. We talked about when Pat first went in as CEO, it was, VMware had to play a similar game to what Intel did, Dave, which is how do they expand what they're doing without really ostracizing their ecosystem. And, to their credit, they've done a pretty good job of that. They baked in some backup solutions, but lots of backup solutions, you and I were at the vMon conference earlier this year. VM's still doing a very solid business inside of VMware's ecosystem. Lots of other players that play well there. NSX is really starting to hit its stride, that networking piece, but where a few years ago we were talking about it was VMware versus Cisco, well, they seem to be kind of settling into their swim lanes. Cisco still has their core networking business. Cisco's trying to become more of a software company. Cisco actually recently bought Springpath, which was their hyper-converged product, but today that's far behind what vSAN's doing, revenue, users, and everything like that. AirWatch was another acquisition. Sanjay Poonen really helped drive that forward. So the mobility play, VMware's doing well. A lot of the emerging areas, we've been waiting to see where VMware goes with them. Things that I look at like containerization, server lists, open stack VMware had some plays there. They are really kind of nascent at this point and haven't really exploded. I always look at this show, are we seeing many developers there? Lots of the shows we go to have a big developer group. We'll have a little bit of developers, but it's really still a small piece of the overall picture. There's still lots of virtualization admins, people looking at where VMware fits into cloud, and that's kind of where it sits today. >> Let's talk about the competitive dynamic, which is totally different. I mean, back when we first started covering VMworld with theCUBE, 2010, it was really Citrix, Microsoft, Citrix with VDI. You mentioned AirWatch, which kind of flipped the dynamic a little bit. Quite a bit, actually. But Microsoft was the key virtualization competitor. Now it's like competitors, partners, you've got Google Cloud, now, of course, Diane Greene running Google Cloud, which is kind of ironic. We can talk about that. Microsoft with Azure, AWS, which is, we expect to hear a lot from VMware at VMworld 2017 about the AWS relationship. Certainly, IBM with its cloud. Nutanix, which launched at VMworld several years ago, is now more competitive. You mentioned Cisco. They're clearly more competitive with NSX. How do you describe the competitive landscape? What should we be watching at this year's show? >> Yeah, Dave, first of all, you talked about how VMware grew from kind of the $2.5 billion to more like an $8 billion, so of course they're bumping into, kind of going over some of their swim lanes a little bit, and the market has matured. Absolutely, hyper convergence for the last few years has been one of the hot spots, not only for VMware, first when they launched vSAN, it actually was the tide that rose for a lot of their competitors out there. Nutanix, SimpliVity, many of these companies said that they actually stopped a lot of their outbound marketing for about a year because all the people that called up looking at vSAN went to those solutions. Now vSAN's hitting its stride. It's doing really well. I highlighted how VxRail is doing great revenue on the Dell/EMC side, and there's still lots of partners that VMware has. So hyper converge, absolutely something that we'll see there. Cloud, big piece. I mentioned Rackspace, OVH, all the service providers. The vCloud Air network is still kind of there. So how VMware is getting into the service providers, how they're getting into the cloud, I know we'll talk a little bit more about the cloud piece. Last year it was the Cloud Foundation suite, which takes vSAN, and NSX, and vSphere, puts it all together with a management, and that's something that VMware wants to be able to put on prem in a service provider or in AWS. So really, wherever you go, VMware is going to be there and stretch that, but it's like a four-node star configuration. It doesn't natively go into Amazon. That's been a lot of the lift that's been happening over the last year to try to get that VMware on AWS working, and I hear it's not 100% baked yet by the time we get to the show, but working out a lot of those details. But cloud, hyper-converged, some of the new ones. VDI will still come up too, I'm sure. >> How about Docker? Where do they fit in the competitive landscape? >> Yeah, it's interest, remember, I remember the last year we had the show in San Francisco we had Ben Golub, a CEO at Docker, on the program there. Ben's no longer the CEO. They switched CEO's. We had theCUBE at DockerCon this year. Containers, absolutely very important. VMware has something called VMware Integrated Containers. I hear a little bit about it, but most people, if they're saying, "I'm doing virtualization," they're probably doing it on Linux. So Red Hat Summit this year, heard a lot about containers. We're going to have theCUBE at Kubecon, which is the Kubernetes show, later this year. So we know VMware plays a little bit with Docker. I'd love to see VMware saying how they fit into the Kubernetes piece a little bit more. We heard of the Cloud Foundry Summit earlier this year, how Pivotal kind of fits into that environment and they've got a way to be able to spread across multiple environments there. But VMware tends to play in a little bit more traditional applications. And, Dave, when you talk about a competitive standpoint, that's what I look at for VMware. The biggest threat to them is they don't own the application, so Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and all those cloud-native apps that are getting put in the public cloud, like Google, and Amazon, and Microsoft, does that leave VMware behind? Does VMware, I heard it many times last year, become the new Legacy? >> Well, and, but they're clearly positioned as an infrastructure player, so let's talk about that. I mean, cloud has become the new, infrastructure and service, become the new big competitive threat to on-prem infrastructure. Wikibon has done some research on the true private cloud. Interestingly, I mean, true private cloud essentially is a moniker representation of public cloud-like attributes on prem, bringing cloud, cloud models, to the data, for example, and Wikibon has forecast that as the largest market. I think I've got some data here. It shows that true private cloud over time will be a $230 billion market, whereas infrastructures and service in the public cloud will be about 150 billion. So you expect that true private cloud is going to overtake that. It's growing faster. The CAG here is 33% versus public IAS at 15%, but the big thing is staff. >> Yeah. >> Staffing, getting taken out essentially, getting out of non-differentiated heavy lifting, but what is VMware's cloud strategy generally, but specifically with regard to bringing the cloud model to the data on prem? >> Yeah, so when we created the true private cloud definition, we said,"Vvirtualization alone is not cloud, "and therefore, what do we need? "We really need to have that automation, "that orchestration." And VMware had done a number of acquisitions, they're putting the suite of solutions together, and it's more than just saying, "Oh, I have six different software products; "here's a bundle." How do we fully integrate that? And that's what the Cloud Foundation suite's what VMware put together so that I can have it in a virtual private cloud in Amazon. And it's something basically VMware manages it, but it's Amazon's data center, and that's plugged into the public clouds. I can do the similar sort of thing in the service providers and that's why, with our forecast, Dave, we show in about five years, true private cloud should have more revenue than public cloud. Big reason is because there's a whole lot of Legacy out there and moving from all of my, most companies hundreds if not thousands of applications, getting all of them to the public cloud is tough. Having them in a virtualized environment and being able to slide them over to this kind of environment makes a lot of sense. I can do that. And the shift of my workloads and my applications going to microservices really starting to break apart some of the the pieces is something that a lot of times that's going to take five to 10 years. So, in the meantime, we're going to shift kind of Legacy to private cloud while we're picking off the things that we can with the public cloud. And VMware with their Cloud Foundation suite and their solutions that they're putting together, networking as, really, the inter fabric with NSX, vSAN making it easy to make those applications a little bit more portable between different types of infrastructure, but that's really, VMware is they put their cloud play, and they have a very large set of partners that they're working with in this space. >> So, Stu, how should we look at the VMware AWS deal? Is it AWS's attempt to get a piece of the true private cloud action on prem? Is it VMware's initiative to try to actually get a cloud strategy that has teeth, and works, and has longevity? How should we think about that? >> Yeah, it's, of course, a little bit of both. At its core, I think it's Amazon looks at 500,000 VMware customers that have data center deployments and they're going to stick a straw into that environment and say, "Come try out the first taste of our services," and once you get on the Amazon services which, by the way, they're launching, what, three new features every week, I think. I was at the Amazon Summit in New York City recently and it was like, "Oh, it's a regional summit," there were like three main announcements. No, I got the email. There were like 12 announcements and each one of them were kind of cool and things like that. So it absolutely is how do I get customers comfortable with moving to this new model. I think one of the things that Microsoft did really well is when they pushed everybody to Office 365, they said, "SaaS is the way you should always think "about buying your applications going forward, not, "I'm going to deploy a server for my Outlook, "I'm going to deploy infrastructure for my SharePoint." It's, "I'm going to buy Office 365 and that's just "the way it's done." So they made it the okay. Now VMware, it's really dangerous, in a way, saying, working with Amazon, now we're saying, "Hey, playing on Amazon's safe. "The water's nice." And once they get in that water and you have access to all of those cool things that Amazon keeps putting out, which, by the way, Dave, the week after they announced the partnership of VMware and AWS, what Amazon announced was, "There's a really easy "migration service that, if you have "a VMware Ware environment, "you just kind of click this button." And I'm pretty sure it's for free. "You can now be completely on AWS "and you don't have to pay for VMware licensing anymore. "Wouldn't that be nice?" >> So, okay, so the way you've phrased it or framed it, is it sounds like that VMware, with its half a million customers, has more to lose than AWS in this deal. Is that the right way to think about it or is this not a zero-sum game? >> I don't think it's a zero-sum game when, you brought up the true private cloud. The data center still, there's room for some growth with VMware, even if people are 90% virtualized now, there's some room for growth there. Public cloud, though, has a strong growth engine, so now VMware has a play there. Rather than saying, "It's the book seller, don't go there," they want to have a play. Michael Dell, Dave, I'm sure we're going to ask him, say, "Hey, what do you think the world's going to look like "in five years? "You've got your Azure Stack partnership "that you're lining up with your server division "and with EMC, you've got Amazon that VMware's playing with, "you've got your data center; "how does that go?" And, of course, Michael being the smart businessman that he is, is going to say, "Uh, yeah, you're going to buy Dell "no matter what solution you go with, "and I'm going to have a strong position "in all of them." but it definitely is, we're in a bit of a transitional phase as to how this is going to look. We've, for years, been arguing how big does public cloud get, what applications go where. I do think that this has the potential to accelerate a little bit from VMware's standpoint. VMware customers getting in this environment, trying out some of the new things. I know lots of people that were in the virtualization community that are now playing in the public cloud, getting certified, doing the same things that they did a decade ago to get on public cloud. So, as those armies of certified people kind of move over in the skillset, we have a generational shift going on and lots of people are going to be like, "Hey, I don't want to spend 12 to 18 months "building a temple for my data anymore. "I can just spin this up really fast and move." It's interesting, Dave, Cycle Computing, one of the earliest customers that we interviewed at Amazon, was just acquired by one of the other cloud guys, not Amazon. So companies that know, that was an HPC company that was, rather than spend 18 months and $10 million, we can do the same thing in, like, a few weeks and $10,000. >> They're super computing in the cloud. All right, let's wrap with what to expect at VMworld 2017. Obviously it's going to be a lot of people there. They're your peeps. A lot of partying going on. It's like, it used to be Labor Day kicked off the fall selling season, and for years it's been VMworld. What should we look for this year? >> Yeah, so, I'm excited, Dave. It's always, this community, they spend like the whole summer getting ready for it. I'm actually going to be sitting on a panel at Opening Acts, which is, the VMunderground group does on Sunday. So the event really, it doesn't start Monday, Dave, it actually, a lot of people are already flying in by the time this video goes up. They're doing things Saturday. On Sunday there's three panels. I'm sitting on one on buzz words in IT, so to things like cloud and server lists. Are those meaningful or are those a total waste of our time? So that kind of gets us started. You mentioned lot of good parties at the show always. There's the vExpert community. I was a vExpert for a number of years back when it was, you know, hundred, couple hundred people. I think there's now 1,500 vExperts worldwide. We've got a bunch of hosts coming in to help us, including John Troyer who created the vExpert program, Keith Townsend, Justin Warren, excited to have them. Lisa Martin's going to be co-hosting, along with you, me, John Furrier and Peter Burris. So we've got a big team. We've got two sets. We've got a great lineup at theCUBE. Two sets, three days in the VMvillage, which this year is on the first floor right outside of the Expo Hall. So it's one of those things I don't expect to sleep a lot. I expect to see a lot of people, bump into 'em on the show floor, stop by theCUBE, see the parties, and definitely see 'em in the after parties. >> Great. Well, as Stu says, we have two sets going on, so please stop by and see us. Stu, thanks very much for helping me with this VMworld preview. We'll see you in Vegas next week. Thanks for watching, everybody. See you in Las Vegas. This is theCUBE. (electronic music)

(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)

>> Narrator: Live from Washington, DC, It's The Cube, covering .NEXT Conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, everybody. This is day 2 of the Nutanix .NEXT Conference, #NEXTConf. This is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage and my name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, Stu Miniman. As I said, this is day 2 and today, the keynotes were in the morning. Yesterday, they were in the afternoon. So, when we left you yesterday we went right in the keynotes with CEO Dheeraj Pandey, who gave a very, as he always does, Stu, a very philosophical deep discussion, a lot of commentary from thought leaders and some customers. Somewhat long, although shorter than last year, but that's Nutanix likes to do things. They want you to bake and savor what's going on in their community and their ecosystem. Today, it was all about product. Sunil Potti got up and he basically took us through the products, the new innovations, the strategies, and that's what we're going to unpack this morning in the next couple of minutes and then go deeper throughout the day. So, Stu, it's all about cloud. Two years ago, at the first, the inaugural .NEXT Conference, Nutanix laid out a strategy of moving beyond hyper-converged infrastructure. This is at a time when everybody was pivoting to hyper-converged from the traditional converged, or the legacy infrastructure. And they laid this long term, little bit fuzzy vision about supporting cloud and multi-cloud. At the time, it was really focused on migrating off of VMware onto other platforms, but they sort of teased us with a vision of cloud. Today, we saw that vision come into a little bit more clarity, but there's still a lot of questions. Give me your summary on the keynote today and specifically, this Nutanix strategy of being the cloud operating system. >> And Dave, I think vision is the right term because unlike previous announcements by Nutanix, a lot of what they laid out here are things that in development. The two big announcements that they talked about yesterday and went through a little bit more today, Calm, which was an acquisition that they had made last year really, to be able to help them try to be that management across multi-clouds. That's in process I believe, if I remember right, it's the second half of this year, it will be shipping. I got a note from a friend of mine, and they're like, okay this is the 687th product in the industry that's trying to solve this problem because everybody is trying to solve this problem. Microsoft wants to be the player here. Companies like CA want to be in the lead here. Of course, Amazon would like to manage everything because just put it on Amazon. So, why is Nutanix position to be the control playing layer of a multi-cloud world. Nutanix is a small player. They've got some good pieces. They're starting to touch some of the environment, but I'm not sure. In the second one, the zee or jee cloud services, that's not- >> Zee, Si, jee (laughs) ... >> It's spelled X-I and we've heard multiple pronunciations. We'll get Sunil on this and get him- >> X-I is, as you told me this morning, the last two letters of Nutanix flipped. >> Yeah, so, it's a DR service that they're going to deploy. It's in development right now. I don't think we know anything about pricing yet. It's not going to ship until the first half of next year, is the target for that. But really lays out, as to, I think we really want to get to the Google relationship and beyond. How does Nutanix get to be more than just an on premises infrastructure layer. They've already sold to service providers. I've talked to companies that not only build their infrastructure, but sell services based on using Nutanix as an infrastructure, but they're going to take that full Nutanix stack and make it available in Google data centers around the world, and we expect them to expand those partnerships and what Sunil was hitting on at the end of his keynote is, the terminology they used is your cloud native, your mode one applications, a lot of times those start in the public cloud, and sometimes those come back to an infrastructure like in Nutanix, where I can run it in a similar operational model. And then, do we take our mode two applications, the big legacy, the thousands of applications that we have, do we try to shove those in to the public cloud? And the challenge there is if it's not the same stack on both ends, it's not the same operating model, there's challenges and I know we wanted to use that out a little bit. >> So, Stu, I had a conversation with Paul Moritz in 2009, where he said to me, "The advantage that Amazon and Google and Facebook have is that they have homogeneity in their data centers." And he said, "For us to succeed in cloud, we have to have homogeneity in both on prim and in the cloud." And so he, at that point, indicated that the VMware strategy was going to be putting, essentially, VMware in these clouds and the cloud service providers, as we all know, that manifested itself in vCloud Air. We've heard the story before. How is this different? >> First of all, vCloud Air, most people would agree, a failed strategy. >> Who would not agree with that? (laughs) >> Right. The biggest challenges we saw on vCloud Air when I talked to the community is VMware said, "Wait, we're going to build it ourselves and run it," and customers were like well, I've got lots of partners, and they're like, well, we'll partner with Savvis. And Savvis made no margin on this. Couldn't do anything else. They tried to go to lots of other service providers, and they were, I don't know how I add services, I don't know how I add value. >> So, how is this different? >> You look at this and say okay, well, Nutanix is going to start with building it themselves because they want to understand it. I've talked to service providers here that say, "Hey Nutanix, we have experience and we know how to do this. We could advise you on this." Of course, Nutanix, they didn't come out and say this is the future, everybody run every service on this. They say, hey, we're working on a DR solution, we're a little bit measured. This is where we're going. I think there's time for it to mature, time for Nutanix to work with their partner Ecosystems. The Google announcement gives Nutanix credibility, but a lot of it is pressure leased slideware, if you will. You say, "Okay, great, I'm going to take Z and run it on GCP." Well, this is a product next year that, maybe, will probably run somewhere with Google. Where's the details? >> Okay, talk about lift and shifts, too. >> Thanks Dave. We talked yesterday to one of the doers, one of the practitioners of Nutanix, and they said, "Hey, I'm looking at containers." And we said, "Hey, are you looking at Nutanix for this?" They say, "Well, now that I hear they're working with Google, who's obviously a thought leader in driving that, that will drive them closer to us." So, question is, the Z cloud service is based on AHV. So, if I bought in, there are some customers who say "I want a virtualized environment that I can mirror," but most of us look at it and say virtualization is kind of heavy for taking something to more the public cloud. If I containerized, then I can use kubernetes, and I can move applications a little more. Debate we're having internally, Dave, often is how much of the stack do I have to have to complete hardware all the way through on both ends? Do I have something like kubernetes, which allows me to take containerized applications and move them, because lift and shift, I was at the Cloud Foundry Summit, and it said let me build my new applications on the platform, and then I'll start migrating some over so I have that shared management platform to hold the environment. But, it's challenging. The same thing we've had discussions. Amazon, there's certain applications we build there, Amazon would love you to take all of your applications, but it's not trivial. Porting something over is not easy, is one of the points that Nutanix was making, and we've heard from the community that Amazon really doesn't want you just to trying to lift the whole thing and shift it. You should be doing some refactoring, or start pulling apart your application- >> They want you to pull change the operating model. So, Stu, is this a blind spot for Nutanix? Let me back up. We asked Pat Gelsinger, when Docker and Core OS came on the scene, what does that mean for you? He said, "Hey, we've got the best container in the world. It's VMware." And we all kind of went, mm, I don't know. Is this a similar head wind potentially? Is this a threat that Nutanix is so VM focused versus containerize? Or can they just embrace containers? >> Great question. Something I want to pose to the Nutanix executives, Dave, because there's multiple paths forward. When we asked Amazon a similar question, they said to get from your legacy data centers to public cloud, here are the eight R's, as to refactor, re-platform, redo this, things like that. There's more than one solution. As we know, customers have lots of applications. There's some that you're going to leave them sitting on. That old hardware in the back corner and run it until that thing burns into the ground. >> Running on CMS. >> Absolutely, Dave. Many of those things got moved into VM environments and are going to stay there for awhile. So, unfortunately, everything in IT tends to be additive, and we've got all of the debt of ... >> Don Tapscott. God created the world in six days, but he didn't have an install base. The technical debt. >> Technical debt. >> All right, Stu, we got to wrap. This is day two of Nutanix. We're going all day long. Today, heavy executive, partner and customer day. We have Sunil coming on. We're going to go deep on products. Chad Sakac coming on from Dell-EMC. We got Dheeraj, of course, the CEO. Stay tuned, everybody. Stu Minima, Dave Vellante. We'll be right back after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from Washington DC it's The Cube. Covering .NEXT Conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Good morning everybody. In 2009, infrastructure professionals, and the vendors who supplied products to them, started to realize that the cloud was real. They began to try to replicate that cloud on site. The first instantiation was what we call converged infrastructure. Converged infrastructure was essentially the combination of storage, server, and networking kind of bolted on together but prepackaged, pretested, and engineered to be installed and delivered in a more seamless fashion to minimize the amount of labor that had to go into the management of infrastructure. That was around 2009 and in that same year, Nutanix was born with a slightly different vision, to actually develop a solution that was truly cloud-like for on prem. Welcome everybody to Nutanix .NEXT 2017. This is The Cube, the leader, in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stu Miniman from SiliconANGLE Wikibon, who is an expert on Nutanix, on hyper-converged infrastructure, which was the next instantiation of converged infrastructure. And now, Stu, we see this going into the cloud era. Nutanix is a company that's probably going to do close to a billion dollars this year, if not a billion. They got a two and a half billion dollar market cap. They got a gross margin model in the high fifties. They're growing at 65, 66% per year. The stock, when they did their IPO, was a meteoric rise, sort of flattened out since. It's up today, on some news that was broken by CNBC. They're doing a deal with Google. This is our, let's see, fourth? Third or fourth .NEXT >> Third year of the US show, The fourth >> Fourth overall. >> Nutanix conference overall >> we did some in Europe. >> Stu, great to be working with you. We've been together a lot this month at a number of shows. This is sort of the capstone of what we call true private cloud and a great instantiation and example of it. What are your thoughts, early thoughts, on what to hear. >> Steve, great to be with you as always, and excited to be here at this show. One of the things I love in our role as analysts is when you see something in some of the early stages. So, I first got introduced to Nutanix when they were about 20 people. Little bit smaller than say, when I first met VMware, when they were about 100 people. And to watch this company and this wave grow I remember John Furrier and I interviewed Dheeraj, CEO of Nutanix, back at VMworld 2012. And, right, infrastructure and converged infrastructure, I mean, I worked on some of the original Vblock architectures when I worked at EMC, and we're saying "Take my storage, take my network, "take my compute, put 'em together, "package 'em, integrate 'em, try to make it simpler." But when we talked to Dheeraj, it wasn't about the infrastructure, he really posited that the challenge of our day is building distributed systems, and it's really a software challenge, and that is at the core of what Nutanix's IP, what their engineering mentality is, and they've kept that going forward. We always talk about, oh, okay, in our infrastructure silos, Nutanix's vision from day one was to go beyond that, we talk about hybrid cloud or multicloud, today, that's what Nutanix is starting to deliver in their vision. When they first launched themselves as an enterprise cloud, as their marketing, everybody was like "What are you talking about? They're an HCI player, what's their cloud mission?" Making an announcement with Google shows that they are going to have some partnerships there to live in that hybrid or multicloud world. And Dave, I want to clarify, when I You know, we throw around these terms, hybrid and multi for me these days, I look at it as, hybrid is a lot of what I know you used to call federated, so how do I have a model that really looks the same whether that's just the application layer or even going down to the infrastructure layer, spreading between environments, typically my private cloud and my public cloud service writers can be in the mix there, multicloud means I've got data and I've got applications that are going to live in multiple public clouds in multiple data centers, of course we've got SaaS, so that differentiates a little differently. Things like Kubernetes are really helping that explosion and that discussion of multicloud, kind of replacing what we used to talk, with PAS, the platform as the service, where I could really be independent of the cloud, so there's a lot of nuance and detail which I'm looking forward to digging into. >> It's nuance >> Over the next two days >> But it's important nuance, because basically you're saying it's not just a bunch of hybrid, it's not just a bunch of clouds, >> Stu: Yeah. >> It's some kind of federated >> Stu: Yeah, we had >> It's a data plane and a control plane that spans multiple physical locations, essentially. >> Yeah, I worry about things like identity, I worry about things as to how to security SPAN these environments, governance of course plays in a lot, but I'm sure we'll hear things about consumption model because one of the things cloud consumption model used to be like, oh well some business guy just swipes a credit card and goes and does it, well shouldn't all infrastructure be as easy to buy as we did, I mean, you remember a decade ago we always talked about the consumerization of IT, now it's really that cloudification of IT with companies like Amazon really driving forth the model that everyone wants to copy. >> So since we've started researching Nutanix and talking to some of it's customers two years ago at the initial .NEXT conference, at the Fontainebleau in Miami. Really talked to a number of customers and you could see the enthusiasm for simplicity, you could see the desire to reduce their reliance of VMware and the vTax that was hanging over their heads, and at that time, a couple years ago Nutanix introduced Acropolis, which is essentially a hypervisor inside of what they call now the cloud operating system. But that is a strategic move by a company that's basically saying, "hey, we're not just hyper converged, "cause everybody's now pivoting "to hyper converged, we're cloud," so it's a message to the financial world, to the industry analysts, and to customers that, we have a vision and to the financial world, we have a large TAM. Financial guys are more worried about, they're always worried about TAM expansion, that's their TAM expansion plane. Now, bringing it back to some of their financials, just briefly, Nutanix essentially loses 37 cents from an operating basis, on every dollar of revenue it makes. Okay, that's I guess in vogue these days, but it's funny accounting, because they don't recognize the full value of their OEM deals, like the Dell deal, again some nuance, and there are some accounting changes that are occurring which should be a tailwind for this company from just from the optics of the income statement. So you're going to see, and I think the street's finally starting to understand this, again, stocks up today on the Google news, there's no press release yet, but CNBC broke that news, what do we know about that? >> Yeah, so first of all, right. The accounting changes coming this summer, if I remember right, I believe it's August, >> Dave: Yep. >> So that means that rather than taking the three year subscription and only taking a small piece of that today and pushing most of it out into the future, there will be a restatement of all of Nutanix's number, which, right, will be a tailwind as you said and push all that in. Google, number one, is you look at one of the most interesting dynamics of Nutanix is, been the relationship with VMware. I did an interview with Dheeraj right after the IPO, I was at the headquarters, sitting with him in this beautiful library that they have there, and he turns to me and he's like, you know, on camera, he says, "Stu, if VMware hadn't been so negative on us, and not allowing us to OEM or ship their product, I don't know if we would have launched our own hypervisor." It was not an initial plan. It was something that he's talked to the analyst community and said, this is something that was not simple, it was not something that was done lightly, it was something that, their hand was really forced because customers say, "I want the simplicity, "I want to be able to just stand it up, "I need that to come pre installed," and there was additional value that Nutanix felt they could bring. The DNA that they had, as they said, from companies like Facebook, from Google, and the like, where they understand the underlying code that they need to build to be able to build this distributor architecture. So, building off of KVM, they built the Acropolis hypervisor. One of the next big shifts coming is containerization, and this is where Google fits in. They should be able to accelerate that move, which is the thing I worried about with hyper converged, is we took our virtualized SAN environment and we just put them in slightly different form factor. It's simpler, yes, it's great, it's going to be, hopefully, a better economic environment, but how do we move the company forward faster? Two years ago, the customers were really excited cause they said, "I got my weekends back." What you want from an IT department is not to say, "hey, I'm no longer just overworked," but "I'm driving the business forward." But Dave, you've always said the role of the CIO is not just to maintain the business, but to transform and grow the business. So that's where we need things like containerization to help companies be more agile and move faster, and to have IT turn into a force that can help code, create new business lines, leverage our data more. The thing that we've heard at every storage show we've been at recently, Dave, is, NetApp actually say that "storing is boring" and that is something that we hear, is "I need to leverage our data, "we need to get it out there" and that's what I'm looking for this week, is to hear more of that cloud native piece. I was at the Cloud Foundry Summit a couple weeks ago, I can sit that on top of Nutanix. So how does partnerships like Google and some of these environments help with application modernization, analytics where I can get new, you know, take my data and create new business value, cause that's where we're going to really transform and grow companies into new revenue streams, and Nutanix is a platform to help deliver on that. >> So, Stu, since the spring when we released our latest true private cloud report, the Wikibon team, there's been a lot of talk about that report, it's implications, we had, there was a blog post today from Yaron Haviv at Iguazio saying, "you guys needs to rethink your definition of true private cloud, because the on prem guys have no chance against the cloud guys," we don't agree with that, by the way. But the notion of true private cloud, is this this on prem infrastructure that substantially mimics the public cloud, and as I said before, has a control plane that spans multiple physical locations. That's a concept that we've kind of put forth, and started to quantify, because there was so much cloud washing going on. And it really is, frankly, the savior of the existing infrastructure guys, or could be. Because their legacy business is not growing, in fact it's declining, and this is a very high growth market opportunity for these folks. So, my question to you is, can Nutanix participate in that high growth market? You know, there seems to be an aspiration, maybe I'm overstating this, but to be the next VMware, of sorts. >> Stu: Yeah, no, no. >> Can they do it? >> Exactly, and Dave you're not overstating it, I've heard people from Nutanix say that was their target. Their target wasn't to replace a flexpod, their overall vision was right, to be the next VMware. They want to be a platform to be able to grow on that. And the thing I've been looking at, at every show when we go to infrastructures, how do you live in that multicloud world? Because, you can't put blinders on and say, "Right, well, Amazon's in a corner." No, we know Amazon customers are using them. Right, as you said, Dave, I want that operational model in my own environment to build what we called a true private cloud, absolutely Nutanix is a player there. There's still work to be done for all of these infrastructure players, but what are they doing? How does their control plane span beyond that? And why should Nutanix be more than just a piece of the infrastructure? Because, there are lots and lots of players, not only the infrastructure players, lots of software companies, and the cloud companies themselves, that are going to say "I'm going to own that piece." I mean, Microsoft, identity is one of their greatest strengths. Google and Amazon, have been going after that, I mean, Amazon's eating everything, Dave. So, why should Nutanix not just eat some of the old guys, but be a player that lasts into the new world? Is looking forward to the announcements later tonight, we've got a lot of their partners and customers on here to be able to deliver proof points. And Nutanix is still growing, still doing real well, and you know, exciting stuff. >> Yeah, so we're going to be covering this, wall to wall coverage of two days. We've got some great outside guests coming in, we got Diane Greene's speaking at this event, Bill McDurmott's speaking at the event, and word is Peter McKay from Veeam is going to make another appearance, he's like The Cube, he's everywhere. (Stu chuckles) And then some really interesting outside speakers. Malhotra is here again, so really excellent line up that we have for you guys this week, two days, wall to wall coverage, this is The Cube, we'll be back from the district, live in Washington, D.C., this is Nutanix .NEXT. Be right back. (relaxed futuristic music) >> Announcer: Robert Herjavec