>> From Orlando, Florida It's theCUBE. Covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to theCUBE. I am Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. And we are in Orlando at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. We're at the NetApp booth and we are now talking with Gerald Pfeiffer V SUSE, VP of Products and Technology Programs. Gerald, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> So thank you for bringing the SUSE Chameleon here So let's talk about open-source. What is an open-source company? What are the key hallmarks that define an open-source company? >> So when you think of open-source technically it's about the license. It's about the open-source license that the software is under. But if you want to be a real open source company there is actually, it goes beyond that. And that's where many we see many of the classic companies fail as in you take a piece of software that you've written in house you open-source it which means you put an open-source license on it. And then you throw it over the fence. You put it on an FTP server or a NetApp Server or github or somewhere and say this is an open-source project. Technically true but what open-source really is about also is how you develop the software. It's a development model. It's about the community or communities you have. And so as an open-opensource company or a true open-source company what that means is you need to change how you develop the software. And how you go about it and it involves, you need to, You need to, let go. You need to, you need to lose. Lose in a way you lose control and you need to help, if it's something that you initiated you need to make this attractive for others and easy to contribute. And so the development model the transparency collaboration, communications all that is really important for a successful open-source project. But I would argue also for a successful open-source company. >> So let's talk about the community for a little bit when it comes to open-source and especially with SUSE. SUSE's one the most successful open source companies in the world. However, your key product, SUSE Enterprise Linux you guys don't control the kernel you have to work with a community of organizations and personalities and conflicting agendas. How does SUSE organize their self that over a 25 year period you guys have consistently grown become more prominent in the industry. How have you had that when you don't even own you don't, rather, control the key technology, the kernel to your product. >> Ya, so, there is actually a trick behind it and the short answer is you cannot control but you can influence. And so how do you influence? And it's really about becoming part of the community or I usually actually when we get new employees that come from a proprietary background one of the first things I teach them is there is no such thing as the open-source community. It's actually open-source communities. There is actually many of them and even your example, the kernel there is the Linux kernel community, but inside, everyone, the group of everyone who contributes there're actually subgroups. People focusing on different aspects. And so if you want to influence that the easiest way and the hard way is you start contributing. And so you start building up rapport, you start building up credibility and that's usually not something you do overnight It's not like you can come and say Oh, I've been doing operating systems for 30 years. I'm a distinguished engineer and now I'm telling you this is how you need to do it. You start by contributing code. You start by being part of the conversations. By critiquing, constructively hopefully, other people's contributions. usually in a certain area. And then people start getting to know your name. And they start trusting you. And I've, I'm not a kernel engineer but there're a couple of open-source projects I've contributed since writing my PHD thesis And I'm still doing that usually on my weekends or evenings when I have a little time. And so there're people I've been working together for 15 years or more, who I've never met in person. And some I've met and then I realized Wait a minute, I know he's going to be at the conference and I don't know how old he is. He wrote about his children so that gives a certain or his young baby children so that may give an, an idea. But I don't know how old he is. I don't know what color of hair. What color of skin. But then you meet and because you have this relationship you actually, you know, you get together. And there is trust and once you have this trust on a personal level but also, at least as importantly or I would break both the same on a technical side. I trust your, your judgment. Then you start influencing. >> Is that what makes SUSE an open open-source company? >> Ya that's definitely one of the aspects where, when we want to we want to drive something. And I'll give you an example that's actually especially in SAP context this is really relevant is something we call live kernel patching. So you know you have this HANA system so it's lots of memories and you have all those security issues that keep popping up, now and then. And so one of the challenges is you want to apply the security update if you're an IT person but, when you do so, you need to, and it's a kernel thing, then you need to restart the server. Because other sub-systems like a web server you just restart the web server and you're down for one millisecond and nobody really notices unless you're CNN.com or whatever. But if you restart the kernel the whole machine reboots. And then you know you scan the memory and you have a HANA machine with 12 terabyte of memory or 16. So the start up takes and then why is HANA so fast? Because all it did is in memory. Now, doing that isn't, isn't fast. >> So that's really interesting as you look through, I love the integration between SAP and SUSE the in-memory, the continuous kernel, patching, the ability to integrate the two solutions. It's interesting, you guys have a partnership you have outside of SAP with these companies that not necessarily, from a licensing perspective the application is close-sourced. So there is a myth I think, in the industry that close-sourced software versus open-sourced software one is more secure, the other one's more stable Random religious arguments. What are we seeing in the... Wow, what are... How are customers embracing the SUSE relationship along with the SAP relationship. >> You know in a way (laughs) and that's a, nhat's a tricky statement to make but in a way at first approximations customers don't care whether it's open-sourced or proprietary? As a customer, I care that it works. And if I'm a SAP customer my (mumbles) workload needs to stay up. And so what I'm looking for is performance is security, is scalability, is availability, high availability. And so whatever platform gives that to me is the platform that I choose or in the case of HANA for, actually, SAP choose. So if you look at HANA, it's an interesting sample the only operating system it's available on the only platform it's available on is Linux. So SAP actually has done their research and they looked into it and said okay, we need certain characteristics what's... Where do we get the best solution? And it turns out Linux offered that. And so I don't see, when it comes to applications in particular our workloads I don't see it as much as being open-sourced or proprietary It's really what's the best technical solution and then there obviously is the question behind the question is how do you actually get to the best solution? And that's where the open-source model where it's not just one company doing that we have lots of engineers contributing to the kernel and other parts. But it's only one part. Many of our partners contribute Our competitors contribute And so in this open-source arena Things move. Just to improve, for example, the linux kernel and you get a better outcome than any proprietary vendor would actually be been able to deliver with a classic Unix system for example. >> You talked about, you know, customers not caring about the technology. It just needs to work. And it's kinda the same thing I think of when you look at a technology like ERP software that's largely invisible. Right? So is SUSE. And SAP wants to be one of the top ten most valuable global brands. And this morning during the keynote Bill McDermott said that they're now number 17. So they're getting up there to the big brands Like Apple, Coca Cola, Google who all have products that we can kinda see and touch. So when you're in a partnership with SAP how do you articulate the value of what you guys can deliver to help the customer not care about what's under the hood here but also ensure that they're actually able to deliver what they need to to their customers. What are some of those unique maybe customer examples that you have where customers with SAP on SUSE are transforming their businesses or their industries. >> Yeah so, much... Much of this transformation really comes from the SAP stack. What we contribute is really the stability of the platform. And so, Obviously, obviously at the technical level people do care do care actually about open-source because the one thing open-source provides you is the transparency. You can see an SAP engineer actually developing HANA for example. But also other things we do together They have been looking at the source code trying to understand what's going on and then optimize HANA. So when I said customers don't care that's in a first approximation because it needs to work. If it doesn't work, everything else doesn't matter. But if, so there are people who care about the technical more details. Often these days or usually when When it's like at the CLO level or an IT director level what they care more about is things like high-availability scenarios or blueprints. So it's not just one bit of technology or even how HANA runs on SUSE but they know a server is going to fail at one point. How do you-- >> When I ran a SAP environment one of the things that we did, we did a bake-off of Linux distributions for our appliances and these are appliances! In theory you get an appliance you turn it on and you install your SAP app and life goes on, no one should care about the underlying appliance but for us it was about the OS and the availability. You know, we were coming from a non-stop XP, HP, titanium shop and we were very happy with the non-stop capability but going to X86 there's a lot of thought that goes into making that non-stop Can you talk to the relationship between NetApp, SAP and, and SUSE from a community perspective because this is related to the conversation around open-source and making that happen and to your point, how do you care why would an IT director care about SUSE verses some other distribution. >> So, you know, if you look at the conversations I'm having often it's then looking at it at the solutions level So if you can point out that you have the blueprints or reference architectures or whatever you want to call it. You have customer success stories etc. Where you can say, look this is, in a scenario like this in your, in your market or in your in your vertical this is what you can do and this is how it'll be supported. So that your guys don't have to start from zero but it's actually really easy to go high availability or in fact we have a dedicated team that sits in the... That sits in the Linux lab with all the other partners you named and many more where SAP, and that's actually a really clever thing they did, creating this Linux lab and they also have a partner board where talking about communities, they have created this level of community where different vendors come together you know and you have hallway conversations and you want to do something say okay, how do you do this with the SUSE side how do you do this on the NetApp side and then at an engineering level and at a solution level you build something that actually works technically and then obviously the support relationship is really important. So that's, that's one of the challenges open-source had in the beginning compared to proprietary because if you look at some of the old full stack companies or established ones. They used to deliver hardware and then the operating system and then middleware or database and application top. So you had one phone number to call when there's a problem. And originally with open-source you know, you got this piece here and then you got the storage from from NetApp say and .. And who do you call? And then the finger pointing starts. So what's made open-source also successful is the establishment of, of really, processes, agreements and just practical workflows so that our companies work together and the customer, they can pick up the phone in fact, if you look at, let's say SAP applications what we have set up in this SAP environment is you can call SAP and that's the only phone number you ever need to call. And everything behind that happens fully transparently. So all the vendors get together. >> So, to sum up it sounds like what you're talking about that's really key for SUSE is openness, transparency, trust, collaboration. >> Yes, and at the open-source level at Linux kernel, compiler and the individual pro checks but essentially the same. Exactly what you explained. Also at the business level, what we do with partners and what we do with customers. >> And we hear that in the keynote this morning Bill McDermott really kinda was talking about trust as the new currency. So Gerald you're right in line with that. Thank you so much for joining Keith and me today. >> Thank you for having me. >> We wanna thank you for watching theCUBE I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend from SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018 Thanks for watching.