>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with coverage of Susic on digital brought to you by Susan. >>Right? Hi. I'm Stew Minuteman. And welcome to the Cube's coverage of Susic on Digital 20. Rather than gathering together in Dublin, we have a larger audience online watching everything digitally, really helping a happy to have on the program. Back to the program. One of our cube alumni. She is fresh off the keynote stage. Melissa DiDonato. She is the CEO of Tuesday. Melissa. So good to see you. Wish it could all be in person. But, you know, thanks for having the Cube in. Ah, >>thank you very much for joining us as well. My third time on the show. I'm really, really pleased to be an important part of our digital experience with Susie. Conditional. So still what? Nice to see you. >>All right. So last time you were on the program, you spoke to Dave. Dave a lot today about how you know you're keeping your employees safe and keeping them productive. The note I heard clearly from you in your keynote presentation is really a sense of optimism. So, like, if you could bring us a little bit inside. You know, I'm sure you're talking to a lot of your customers. What is it even then in these unprecedented Well, I'm giving you that sense of optimism. >>Yeah, there's no denying where we are in the world with Kobe. 19. We have a whole different way of looking at the world. Every business in every industry has been impacted, and not just the working life but our family life. The way we communicate, the way we run our homes, our environments at work is it's been very much integrated now. It's a very different way of adding a whole different level of stress that we didn't have in our business life just a couple of months ago. And I think, as I told Dave, the most important thing for me is number one to make sure that our employees remain self safe and healthy. That's number one, And I think that as we experience negativity across the world of news and social media, etcetera, that my hope is that the community and the Susan family remain optimistic and you know, why do we have the ability to remain optimistic when everyone else is experiencing a lot of doom and gloom. One White House, because you rightly so said, Let me talk about Sousa and how we wouldn't in our community. Our thesis is the power of many. This power of many in a virtual community really drives innovation. We're not like proprietary software and many other tech companies where you have to resign the building to make sure that we maintain and evangelize innovation that you live and deliver to your customers. For us, it's very different. Our community is the basis for innovation. It's the pillar of our community, of our company, our ethos in our value. So it's Susa. This spirit of collaboration and integration is live today more than ever before, with 99% of our employees working from home being engaged a very different way than maybe they're used to. But not so unlike engaging the innovation that we get out of our community. I think you mentioned something else do that's really important. That's productivity. We've moved away as of the first of March and measuring productivity in exchange for measuring the way that we integrate and elaborate and engage with our place. So instead of productivity, we're measuring engagement. Our employees are becoming much more engaged with each other with our customers and our communities. And of course, our partners they're giving back to their community. They're measuring the engagement they're successful means of delivering or how much they can give back to their communities. So we've seen a huge rise and are employees giving back to their communities around them. For example, I met an employee who is donating a very big part of his bonus percentage to a hospital to pay for lunches for frontline health workers near his his home, our nerve of Germany office. They're giving their lunch vouchers and donating that to all of the homeless people around their community. And then we've got employees around Italy, one in particular that's created a virtual classroom for a son school and the community around him. So you know, everyone's really pitching in, I think finally, from a community perspective, we're also sponsoring a numerous amount of hackathons. For example, in Germany, the government has recently held a hackathon for community based solutions to combat code. In 19 our employees participated in engaged with their one day off. We give every employee one day off a year to engage for charitable cause and the results of this hackathon is a better understanding of the data per states about code in 19 across the country. So I think all in all, everything that we're doing is really trying to, you know, utilize the community as we always have, is open source. Open source is developed in a community that often times does not sit together. And now we're trying to really engage with that community as much as possible to keep innovation alive, to keep collaboration alive and not just for the purpose of innovation, but for the purpose of combating the virus and giving hope and first gratitude to this community and across all of our population across the world. I really do believe that in challenging times like today, it's the best way to realize the innovation that we can put together, triggering innovation for good. But also bringing out the best in humanity is it's amazing to see what you know. Thousands and thousands of people in the open source world are giving and delivering and collaborating in which to solve the worlds Problems Cove in 19 but also innovation problems for today and tomorrow >>Yeah, Melissa said some great stories that you have there, you know, we, of course, are huge supporters of communities in general. I've had a great pleasure not only recently but over the last 20 years, watching Linux communities on what's happening in open source. One of the key constituencies, obviously, to your audience, our developers. There are quite a few announcements that I talked about on the keynote stage was wondering if you could help walk through Ah, for our audience. You know, the primary announcements and especially, you know, the impact that it will have on the developer developer community. >>Yeah, that's right. So the developers are entranced, obviously, as part of Susa, where deep open source roots and they're ingrained in our culture. So we just recently focused on a new developer community with content specifically targeted to developer use cases for application platform offering. So over the next couple of months, we're gonna roll out content analytics, open source, Dev >>ops. All >>these things that you are sure loves to micro services, containers, kubernetes edge and and the like. So a lot of innovative technologies as our content. Now what we are offering in the developer community is the SuSE Cloud application platform developer sandbox. We wanted to make it easy for these developers who just spoke of to benefit from the best practices that evolved from the cloud native application delivery that we offer every day. Of course, the customers and now for free to our developers, we want them to be able to easier, easily apply their skills to create applications that can run anywhere, anywhere from on Prem Private Public Cloud and the access is and the developers to get access and hands on experience. That SuSE cloud application platform without having to spend all of their own environment is it is a big test or commitment to the developer community that can explore tests and develop without having any hardware services themselves. It's a really I've signed up myself. Hopefully, you will, too, and join the community and give some feedback and engage in this open source community. For developers, it's really important for everybody. You can find it at developer dot cisco dot com, in addition to the sandbox is I just mentioned you'll also find there are developer forums. It's got getting started guides and other useful examples of how to accelerate the adoption of the cloud application platform and all of the demo tools you can use. It's I can't express the importance enough that we put in place in our developers. Our developer community is a really important part to reach the innovation that we so hoped and live for every day. So we need to provide them the tools to be successful. So I think when you're gonna see Studio is a lot more engagement with our developer community and a lot more integration with them, a collaboration with them. As time goes on, it's a big part of our focus coming in now to 2020 and, of course, the second half of the year. >>So, Melissa, one of the other point that you made in your keynote is that Souza is now, you know, fully independent. It's always been an open source company, a long history there. But what does this one year of independence mean for your customers and that partner ecosystem? >>Yeah, it's a big deal for us, so it's a really big deal. We swung away from micro focus a year ago and mark so just now, Pastor, one year we're now in control of our destiny and the future is very, very bright. I think going forward in the next year, what you can expect from Susan is continued focus and support our customers, of course, the digital transformation efforts that we need to put into helping them go through this transformation. I saw a cartoon, You know, the other day everyone probably saw who's leading your digital transformation. Experts efforts your CEO, your see Iot or Corona virus. And I think we all agree that Corona viruses, but a new effort and focus on the digital transformation of our companies and our customers need to go through. So I think we need to be sure that with this new independence that we focus on that digital transformation effort. Couple that with our open source innovation and no matter where our customers are on their journey, that we give them the enabling tools to get there. We start with simplifying, modernizing and accelerating our customers journey, and you're gonna hear a lot about that in the keynote that I just did, um, simplifying first. So simplifying and optimizing our customer's applications and the data to exist in I T Environment. That's going to help them go on the journey to modernize, modernizing everything about the I T infrastructure as well as their legacy applications, to utilize modernizing, modernized technologies like containers or edge or cloud, or for the like. By simplifying and modernizing, our customers can then begin to accelerate. They can accelerate innovation. They can accelerate growth. They can accelerate delivery of whatever services and applications they want to deliver, for example, capabilities around AI and edge. And they can scale their companies to bring markets product to market faster and even at a lower cost. So I think when you think about Susan our independence, I want our customers to know and understand that our focus will always be to simplify, modernize and accelerate, but also to remain nimble, how our customers, our partners, our community, innovate faster based on customer business requirements and to solve problems of today and tomorrow, not just what we knew before. So we're much more connected with our customers and ever before, and we want to be able to offer them the flexibility that they heard that learned to love it. Enjoy from Susa more some now than ever our customers agenda. Su is our only agenda in a world where everyone wants to be the best at everything. The only thing we want to be number one with is customer satisfaction. We will say number one in the market because we love servicing our customers. We love being maniacally focused on our customers, needs their business problems and creating solutions that are tailored with services that make them more successful. I think you can expect Souza to enter new markets like powering, for example, autonomous vehicles with safety certified legs and other really innovative technologies that were developed every single day in our community with our developers to solve customer business problems. I say to the teams every day, you know, we're big enough for scale, and we're small enough to be nimble and to be flexible to service our customers first. So expecting that from Susa in our independence, but always, of course. >>Yeah, Melissa, you talk about things like ai and Ed and innovation, and you just brought up autonomous vehicles. So, you know, not only is a cool area, but really highlights uh, you know, a lot of these waves coming together. You announced up onstage. Really cool looking company. Electro bit. I noticed there, Green almost matched. Your companies do So. Tell us about this. This is a partnership. Why? It's important. And you know what? What others can learn about it. >>Yeah, sure. So Electra bit. We just partnered with that. Made the announcement today in the keynote there, the leading Internet global international provider of embedded software solutions for automotive. So it's a whole new area for US safety certified Linux is the first for Susan in this industry. I recently met virtually with Alexander coaching the CEO Electra bit to learn more about his company innovation, that we're gonna drive together. We've got a whole session at Susan Con Digital in the platform to talk about what we're doing with safety certified Lennox and what we're doing with Elektra bit. I can't wait to tell you more about, and I've got a 1 to 1 fireside chat with Alex, and I think you're gonna love to learn more about, you know, maybe something else. Wei mentioned in the keynote they may want to know about. And that's the artificial intelligence solution that I specifically talked about launching next quarter. This is I'm super excited about as well. I mean, it's really easy to be excited here, Susan, when you have constant rolling innovation in our community and delivering that to our customers. But this is also an exciting space. The solution that we're launching next quarter is going to benefit both data scientists and I t operations teams by simplifying the integration of key AI building blocks that are going to be required to develop quickly test and then deploy the next generation of intelligence solutions. So keep your eyes open for that to we're gonna have some game changing solutions for Susan and all of our customer promise ai solution next quarter. So two big announcements for us here exclusively. It's music on digital. I can't wait to share all the details Next order with AI, but also with Alex in the fireside chat I had with him during the week. >>Alright, So great, Melissa, A couple of big announcements that you talked about give >>us a >>little bit of a look forward. So, you know, you talked about what? One year of it, and it means what should people be looking at? What goals do you have for the community and the company actually look through the rest of 2020 >>as we look to the rest of 2020. I think, um, it's been a hard year already, and I couldn't have predicted when I took over a CEO of this great company nearly 10 months ago that we'd be having the hard times that we currently have. I can honestly say that there's no place I'd rather be. The fact that we are in the best company in the best industry, with open source at our roots at our heart that will never change but you can expect from us is consistent and constant innovation. You could look for us to be nimble, dependable. You can look for us for growth and there ever were a recession proof company that delivers the best solutions to our customers. I think Susie's in fact, I know it is. We're going to double in size and three years, so we're going to go from just under 1/2 a 1,000,000,000 to a 1,000,000,000 in revenue and what in three years time and we've got the constant trajectory and the means of which to do it. We're really looking from a strategic perspective. The rest of this year. How can we simplify, modernize, accelerate the solutions delivered to our customers to ensure we constantly focus on innovative technologies, keeping open source of value's and ethos to our core? And then also consider how do we ensure a safe, stable quality environment that's building on tools such as optimizing and automating their environment to get the best out of their technology stack? And that's when you should expect to see from some of the rest of this year as we go obviously into 2021. You're gonna want to watch the space to stay tuned for the look at Susa. We're growing like a rocket ship, and we have still intention of going through the crisis and, of course, going into the back half of 2020. But we're accelerating with pace going into 2021. >>Alright, well, Melissa, I'm definitely looking forward to talking to some of your customers, some of your partners in some of your team. So thanks again for joining us, definitely looking forward to catching up with you further down the line. >>I look forward to it. Thank you so much for the time today, and obviously the focus on, Susan. We're super excited to share where we're going, where we've come from and what the journey looks like Ahead. So thanks for the excitement that you're sharing with us throughout this week. Really appreciate you. Thank you. >>Alright. And be sure to stay with us. We've got wall to wall coverage Susic on digital money. Even if we're not at a physical event, we get to do them all remotely digitally. That global digital experience. I'm stew Minimum. And thank you for watching the Cube. >>Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with coverage of Susic on digital brought to you by Susan. Right? >>Welcome back. I'm Stew Minuteman. And this is the Cube's coverage of Silicon Digital 20. Really excited to be digging into some of the cloud discussions. I've got two guests joining me now, one from across the pond and one from across the country. So joining me is Billy Baldwin. She is the senior director of Global CSP Alliance sales with Lisa. Coming from across the pond and coming from California is Mikhail Fradkov, who is a principal business development at Amazon Web services. Thank you both for joining us. >>Thank you to really, really exciting. >>All right, So, Julie, obviously, you know, we know we're limit Been proliferating the cloud something that almost I think really understand. You know, cloud, you know, big piece of the overall soussa discussion. Um, bring us inside a little bit, You know your role. And of course, the long partnership that business ad with AWS. >>Yeah. So? So my role is working with, you know, the major hyper scale is in the public cloud providers in offering solutions that's driving digital transformation. And this modernization even more so in today's current climate. We're seeing, you know, modernization transformation is being driven out of necessity. The necessity now due to the yeah, the code 19 impact. So I really want to draw on. You know, we've been working with AWS for the last 10 years. We've serviced, you know, thousands of customers between us who are looking at how they innovate on D drive, you know, flexibility and agility into into their, you know, the right and then there accounts. So it's really important that, you know, we look at how we support our customers from a, uh, and integrated support perspective and how we can we can move them forward in the in the digital transformation journey. >>Awesome. So Mikhail and I want to hear what Julie talked about. I think about when I when I look at AWS, you talk about builders when you go to the conference that Amazon told, you know, innovation is absolutely something there. So talk to us a little bit about how you know the Linux community in general, and to save costs more specifically are engaged. And you know a piece of what AWS is doing. >>Sure, So in general, it's a bless. I'm responsible for making sure that our customers are successful as they go through there. Well, its information Jordan you or business transformation. Jordan is so those those are all involved transformations. And, um, it's It's actually an interesting position to be in because you see it first hand on the ground for all the challenges and all the all the interesting problems that customers get the soul and then it's a sexual incredibly exciting that we're having this conversation in the framework of silicon because open source is incredibly important for a glass and stable beta last week understand how important open source is for customer success, and therefore we've been involved in contributing to the projects from from very early on, that justly mix and a VM and Java and kubernetes. So we see we see a lot of a lot of proliferation in the space and then another. Another interest in I guess below that, I would say, is if you think about the open source notion, which is largely around community, so there is this sort of like a juxtaposition off the cathedral and the bazaar, right, and then so the bazaar is the vibrant community off people, commentaries with ideas, and they're they're pursuing them and they innovate. And so something similar we see in the um yes, it the blast community with several 1,000,000 customers day today. They're sold in challenges and bring in lots of lots of requests for innovation, and I >>want to call it puts >>pressure on Amazon to innovate. But it's a lot of inspiration, right? And then, therefore it's It's interesting to see right that because of all the innovation and all those requests, customers get access on Amazon toe. All the features such as same was open source, Right? So you capitalize on this on this innovation, and you're there is well, customers can request, let's say, in financial service industry and then so you get a lot of security features. All the only controls would say, like I saw saw some combines and then some of the most stringent compliance already, like product guys that say the blessed, that stuff. That's one of the examples. >>Yeah, I e starts are Julie. That customer flywheel that you talked about is what we really want. They're so Julie, you want wanted to comment on what he was saying. >>I was just kind of just to kind of reinforce, you know, that whole community in that whole innovation based as well because from an open source perspective, you know that that sense of community is really driving those changes on with the AWS platform. It's got a very rich functionality behind it. You know, it's one of the, you know, the first time platform. So it does have that degree of innovation, you know, from from Day One. And that's just being driven by the by, the by, our customers who are pushing the envelope family in everyone more on. That's where you know the relationship between, you know, Souza on AWS is really, really started to excel. Looking at how we we move into that container space now as well, and help the customers, you know, modernize not only their, you know, the the cloud native that's going straight to cloud. But how do they modernize modernize their legacy applications as well? Um, and how today, you know, take, you know, take their on premise environments on, make them more effective and more efficient, and by using public cloud to be able to do that. >>Yeah. Julia, I'm glad you brought that up, because absolutely, there's opportunity. But there's challenges there. Customers really have. You know, it's either hybrid or multi cloud deployment. You know, container ization. Kubernetes are absolutely enable is there? But I wonder if you could bring us inside. What Susie doing? You have any customer examples of you know how they're really making this change? We know that it's still the majority of applications have not been modernized. They've not going cloud native. They're not ready for these environments. So how are customers working through this ultimate journey? >>Yeah, I mean, it's really, really complex. And I did a presentation on our sales summit talking about, you know, Gardner's five. Ours about you know, what applications can move to the cloud, how easy it is to do that. And I think there is some research done last year with for like, one, um, where the previous year there was a lot of customers said, Yeah, we're moving to fired and it's easy. And then this year, when they rerun the survey, it was No, it's really hard. We need partners. We need to look at how we how we do this. And so you know, every application is going to be able to be moved hours, and it's really Orton that they know the customers have a strategy and look at what they're doing on prem it and then start to identify what is you know, what is cloud friendly? What do they need to do to kind of go forward? You know, Do they need to be, you know, rewrite an application? Do they need to re factor it kind of just be a lift and shift. And so what we're doing with with AWS is, you know, we've been working with partners like both, for example, who built out to retail application platform to be able to migrate those customers quickly into a more cost effective and efficient way of delivering businesses because they will say, you know, even more so in the current scenario there, you know margins are being squeezed. They need to be looked at being ableto deliver higher, you know, return on investment and to share with any of their, you know, in with their spend. So, you know, that's that's one area that we are kind of like, Look, you know, looking at as well. We've had great success with it. Um, we've also got a quick start programs with with AWS that allows, you know, customers you need to migrate quickly and easily. To be able todo to take those applications on their environments on DNA, move them on to the public cloud. So that so that those are two key areas that we're really looking at, you know, driving. Yeah, they're driving forward because it's critical because it is complex. Um, you need to have a Roma. You need to have a strategy about how you do, and you need to identify and include the stakeholders when they move. You know, when you're changing your environment to make sure that you haven't missed anything, >>something that would love to hear your viewpoint on this to you know, when you look at the Amazon ecosystem, you've got a huge AWS marketplace. Obviously, the integrators help customers work through their various environments and how to modernize them. How to move there, you know, what are you seeing in the customer base, for example, you can help share as to how they're moving along. >>Sure. One of the way we have to understand right, a little bit off the context. So all this all this talk about, let's say, cloud migration and innovation, it's not. It's not an abstract sort of exercise, an absolute discipline. It happens for its right if we look. If you look at the innovative companies at a fast moving companies, effectively, they they see on average time to value metrics about 420 times faster. Then let's say what people slow companies, right? And then So that's That was a lot of pressure on companies to actually embrace, embrace this innovation and the digital transformation and engage with customers in the way that they have never done before, such as just technology enable so many things, so many protect right and then this. With any opportunity it comes, Here comes a challenge on then, as Julie pointed out, it's a it's a difficult exercise. Let's let's not mince words here. So and therefore we have to make sure that everybody is a line. Let's say customer goes through this exercise right that that they're trying to change their processes. The leadership sets new goals. The leadership says new objectives. They have to change the culture they have to train people. So that is that it's not just the challenge of the patient right there within the hour, then outside of the company, you want to make sure that effectively, everybody, everybody comes to the table is there's a lot of value and very much alive, and that just that this is where we see, I guess a lot of, um, a lot of opportunity because as as you go through this process, um, you have to, right, you have to have the right stakeholders who have you have to have trained people, right? And then if you look at another statistics that just 86 companies or so they have a first step and the other 86 infrastructure spend this to on premise And the reason for that is companies cannot not hire and train and train faster, right? So therefore, on AWS side, we we invest a lot in training programs and certification programs as well as we have the vibrant community off partners who can step in and help us with challenges such as we have a system off JIA size and the size, so we have with both hands off the size M s P s, whatever we have providers. And then effectively back to what results here is that you have the synergy. Not not only the change going from from the inside company. >>They >>also have the support structure. As Joe talked about Big Start, we have training and then we have programmatic support, right cattle, how to navigate passengers for that. And then as the switch swollen, you mentioned their new processes. This is this is where the power of the cloud comes in and part of the community. So all those challenges they have been sold. So you can take some of the blueprints and apply them as is. And >>you can you can >>pick and choose what? What? Your bias. So, for example, you can go with cloud native tools with Amazon Web services at the very same time you can. You can also pick products. For example, SuSE Cloud application platform, which provides you with this. I wouldn't call it, um it's slightly more opinionated approach how to how to implement your develops practices and agile practices. And then it's still making Iran's on top of Amazon elastic container service. So yeah, and then, as as Jules mentioned. We program, for example, in the work of success with it >>and just touching on that point because, you know, we talk about we're not islands, you know, we have to engage with the partners. You know, we want to make sure the customer success is at the heart of everything that we do. Um, and we have to bring in the right skill sets at the right time, you know, to to make make that journey as easy as possible and as quickly as possible on. So that's the you know that that's the beauty of community. That's the beauty of partners on benders coming together with the customer at the heart off of everything that they do on. You know, I know that's a very strong message that you're going to get from, you know, from Susie Con. But it's from message that we showed with Aws as well, about how do we do the right thing for the customer and how do we, you know, and how do we enable that success? But then to be successful, which will drive Ultimate six, you know, successes as partners as well? >>Excellent, Julie. One of the big things we're themes we heard in the keynote was talking about the developer community's obviously to say in AWS A lot of developers, anything specific for the developers out there That that either. The highlight >>s so obviously we've got the cloud application platform on. We've got the quick starts as well. So for May is you know, you've got a proven a proven platform with real aws that, you know, the infrastructure available there, the ease of which, you know, cloud application platform can sit on top of that of the eks elastic. The services is really, really critical. And, you know, for me, it would be just, you know, just try it, um, on and give us your feedback as well. I think that's really important, because the way that you know, we drive innovation is through that, you know, the cut, the feedback from our customers and people actually using that, you know, the services. I think McHale pointed to the earlier as well. You know, the innovation that they've seen has been driven by, you know, customers actually saying we want this feature. We want this put pressure on from a from a dev ops community is you know there are alternatives out there and you know, you should, you know, to try. You should try. Look at you know, if that suit your needs better. I look at how you can use a trusted partner like AWS and and Susie Teoh to actually meet some of those new needs they're coming aboard. >>And it's also to Julius Point right? Way cannot overemphasize the importance off builders off people who own on this innovation within the company. And be because the biggest thing that companies can do for their success is to enable builders and as as we mentioned before, right? So the process is this challenging the other multiple parties involved, but the very same time to empower people to drive this change, it's almost like instead of directing them like, Oh, um, the space is pretty pretty interesting analogy. So instead of if you want people to know how to build the ship so you do not you do not tell them. Oh, go gather wood and then, like, this is how you hammer things together. You just you just make sure that they yearn for the C. And then ultimately this is This is what drives the innovation. And here we have essentially with with, for example, Susak Capital radical enable people and they they practice the develops, they can practice, schedule and essentially align. This was this fast time to value practices, right? So that that is the tooling. And then you take weeks starts and then you put literally innovation into into those people's hands, for example, it So that's one big start allows you to bring up the whole environment and pretty much like minutes. Well, let's say if you want to go to innovate on the sisters again, you take big start and then well, is that the takes takes a little bit more involved. So maybe, Like like in an hour and 1/2 you have a safe environment, and then you have essentially start innovating there and >>excellent. Well, Mikhail and Julie thank you so much for the updates. You know, love hearing about innovation companies. Absolutely. Building is what differentiates us is the companies that are ready for today's modern era. So thank you so much for joining us. >>Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. >>Thank you, Julia. >>Alright. We'll be back with lots more coverage from SuSE icon Digital 20. I'm stew minimum. And thank you for watching the Cube. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of SUSECON Digital brought to you by SUSE. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of SUSECON Digital '20. I'm Stu Miniman and happy to welcome to the program one of SUSE's partners, we have Marc O'Regan, he is the CTO of EMEA for Dell Technologies. Marc, it is great to see you, we all wish, I know when I talked to Melissa Di Donato and the team, everybody was really looking forward to coming to Ireland, but at least we're talking to you in Ireland so thanks so much for joining us. >> Stu, thanks very much for having me. I'm delighted to be here. You know, really looking forward to getting you guys here, unfortunately it wasn't a beaver, once we're all safe and well, great to talk. >> Yeah, absolutely, that's the important thing. Everybody is safe, we've had theCUBE a couple of times in Dublin. I'd actually, you know, circled this one on my calendar 'cause I wanted to get back the Emerald Isle but, Marc, let's talk first, you know, the Dell and SUSE relationship you know, disclaimer, you know, I've got a little bit of background on this. You know, I was the product manager for Linux at a company known as EMC back before Dell bought them, many moons ago, so I know that, you know, Dell and the Dell EMC relationship with SUSE go back a couple of decades, but, you know, bring us into, you know, what your teams are working together and we'll go from there. >> Yeah, sure, Stu, so, quite correct, nearly a two decade long relationship with SUSE and one that we hold very dear to our heart. I think what both organizations have in common is their thirst and will to innovate and we've been doing that with SUSE for 16, 17 years, right back to, you know, SUSE Enterprise Linux sitting on, you know, PowerEdge architecture way, way back in the day into you know, some of the developments and collaborations that we, that we worked through with the SUSE teams. I remember back 2013, 2014 doing a pretty cool program with our then Fluid Cache technology. So, when you look at, you know, OLTP kind of environments, what you want to kind of get away from is the, you know, the read-write, commits and latency that are inherent in those types of environments. So, as you start to build and get more users hitting the, hitting the ecosystem, you need to be able to respond and SUSE has been absolutely, you know, instrumental to helping us build an architecture then with our Fluid Cache technology back in the day, and the SUSE technology sitting around and under that and then of course, in more recent times, really extending that innovation aspiration, I guess, has been absolutely a pleasure to, to watch and to be involved with, see it mature so some of the cool platforms that we're developing with SUSE together it's a, it's pretty neat so I'm, you know, one of those being-- >> So, Marc, yeah, well, you know, bring us up to speed, you know, right in the early days, it was, you know, Linux on the SUSE side, it was, you know, servers and storage from the Dell side, you know, today it's, you know, microservice architectures, cloud native solutions. So, you know, bring us up to speed as to some of the important technologies and obviously, you know, both companies have matured and grown and have a much broader portfolio other than they would have years ago. >> Yeah, for sure, absolutely. So, I mean, what's exciting is when you look at some of the architectures that we are building together, we're building reference architectures. So we're taking this work that we're doing together and we're building edge architectures that are suitable for small, medium, and you know, and large environments. And the common thread that pulls those three architectures together is that they are all enterprise grade architectures. And the architectures are used as frameworks. We don't always expect our customers to use them, you know, by the letter of the law, but they are a framework and, by which they can look to roll out scalable storage solutions. For example, like the Ceph, the SUSE Enterprise Storage solution that we collaborate with and have built such a reference architecture for. So this is, you know, it's built on Ceph architecture under the hood, but, you know, both ourselves and SUSE have brought a level of innovation, you know, into an arena, where you need cost, and you need low latency, and you need those types of things that we spoke about, I guess a moment ago, and into, you know, this new cloud native ecosystem that you just spoke to a few moments ago. So on the cloud native side, we're also heavily collaborating, and near co-engineering with SUSE on their CaaS technologies. So here it's really interesting to look at organizations like SAP and what we're doing with data hub and SAP, it's all part of the intelligent enterprise for SAP. This is where SUSE and Dell Tech together really get, you know, into looking at how we can extract information out of data, different data repositories. You know, you may have Oracle you may have, you know, you may have HDFS, you may have Excel and you're trying to extract data and information from that data, from those different siloed environments and the CaaS technology brings its, you know, its micro, capability to the forum in that regard, our hardware architecture is the perfect fit to, to bring that scalar platform, cloud native platform into the ecosystem. >> So, you know, Marc, you've got the CTO hat on for the European theater there. When we, we've been talking to SUSE, when they talk about their innovation, obviously, the community and open-source is a big piece of what they're doing. You were just walking through some of the cloud native pieces, give us what you're seeing when it comes to, you know, how is Dell helping drive innovation, you know, and how does that connects with what you're doing with partners like SUSE. >> Yeah, well, you know, innovation is massively, massively important. So there's a number of different factors that, you know, make up a very good innovation framework or a good innovation program. And at Dell Tech we happen to have what we believe to be an extraordinarily good innovation framework. And we have a lot of R&D budget assigned to helping innovate and we get the chance to go out and work with SUSE and other partners as well. What SUSE and Dell Tech do really, really well together is bring other partners and other technologies into the mix. And, you know, this allows us to innovate, co-innovate together as part of that framework that I just mentioned. So on the Dell Tech framework, we'll obviously, you know, take technologies, you know, we'll take them, perhaps into the office of the CTO, look at new, you know, emerging tech and look at, you know, more traditional tech, for example, and we will blend those together. And, you know, as part of the process and the innovation process, we generally take a view on some of the partners that we actually want to get involved in that process. And SUSE is very much one of those partners, as a matter of fact, right now, we're doing a couple of things with SUSE, one in the labs in Walldorf in Germany, where we're looking at high availability solution that we're trying to develop and optimize there right now at this point in time. And another good example that I can think of at the moment is looking at how customers are migrating off, you know, older, more traditional platforms, they need to look at the cloud native world, they need look at how they can, platform for success in this cloud native world. And we're looking at how we can get smarter, I guess about migrating them from that, you know, extraordinarily stealthy world that they had been in the past but that needs to get from that stealthy world into an even stealthier scalable world that is, that is cloud native world. >> Yeah, Marc, you talk about customers going through these transformations, I wonder if you can help connect the dots for us as to how these types of solutions fit into customers overall cloud strategies. So, you know, obviously, you know, Dell has broad portfolio, a lot of different pieces that are on the cloud, you know, I know there's a long partnership between Dell and SUSE and like SAP solutions, we've been looking at how those modernize so, you know, where does cloud fit in and we'd love any of kind of the European insights that you can give on that overall cloud discussion. >> Yeah, sure, so, again, ourselves and SUSE go back on, in history, you know, on the cloud platforming side, I mean, we've collaborated on developing a cloud platform in the past as well. So we had an OpenStack platform that we both collaborated on and you know, it was very successful for both of us. Where I'm seeing a lot of the requirement in this multicloud world that we're kind of living in right now, is the ability to be able to build a performant scalable platform that is going to be able to respond in the cloud native ecosystem. And that is going to be able to traverse workloads from on-prem to off-prem and from different cloud platforms with different underlying dependencies there. And that's really the whole aspiration, I guess, of this open cloud ecosystem. How do we get workloads to traverse across, across those types of domain. And the other is bringing the kind of, you know, performance that's expected out of these new workloads that are starting to emerge in the cloud native spaces. And as we start to look to data and extract information from data, we are also looking to do so in an extraordinary, accurate and in an extraordinary performant way and having the right kind of architecture underneath that is absolutely, absolutely essential. So I mentioned, you know, SAP's data hub a little earlier on, that's a really, really good example. As is, a matter of fact, SAP's Leonardo framework so, you know, my background is HPC, right? So, I will always look to how we can possibly architect to get the compute engineering as close to the data sources as possible as we can. And that means having to, in some way get out of these monolithic stacks that we've been used to over the last, you know, for a number of decades into a more horizontally scaled out kind of architecture. That means landing the right architecture into those environments, being able to respond, you know, in a meaningful way that's going to ultimately drive value to users and for the users and for the providers of the services, who are building these type of, these type of ecosystems. Again, you know, as I said, you know, data hub, and some of the work that Dell Tech are doing with the CaaS platform is absolutely, you know, perfectly positioned to address those types of, those types of problems and those types of challenges. On the other side, as I mentioned, the, you know, the story solutions that we're doing with SUSE are really taking off as well. So I was involved in a number of years ago in the Ceph program on the Irish government network and, so these would have been very big. And one of the earliest to be honest, Ceph firm I was involved with probably around five, six years ago, perhaps. And the overlying architecture, funnily enough, was, as you probably have guessed by now was SUSE Enterprise. And here we are today building, you know, entire, entire Ceph scale out storage solutions with SUSE. So yeah, what we're seeing is an open ecosystem, a scalable ecosystem and a performant ecosystem that needs to be able to respond and that's what the partnership with SUSE is actually bringing. >> So, Marc, I guess the last thing I'd like to ask you is, you know, we're all dealing with the, the ripple effects of what are happening with the COVID-19 global pandemic. >> Sure. >> You know, I know I've seen online lots that Dell is doing, I'm wondering what is the impact that, you know, you're seeing and anything specific regarding, you know, how this impact partnerships and how, you know, tech communities come together in these challenging times? >> Yeah, that's a great question to end on, Stu. And I think it's times like we're living through at the moment when we see, you know, the real potential of, I guess of human and machine collaboration when you think of the industry we're in, when you think of some of the problems that we're trying to solve. Here we are, a global pandemic, we have a problem that's distributed by its very nature, and I'm trying to find patterns, I guess, I'm trying to model, you know, for the treatment of, you know, COVID-19 is something that's very, very close to our heart. So we're doing a lot on the technology side where we're looking to, as I said, model for treatment but also use distributed analytical architectures to collaborate with partners in order to be able to, you know, contribute to the effort of finding treatments for COVID-19. On the commercial side of things then Dell Tech are doing a huge amount so, you know, we're, for instance, we're designing a, we're designing a financial model or framework, if you will, where our customers and our partners have, you know, can take our infrastructure and our partners infrastructure and those collaborations that we spoke about today. And they can land them into their ecosystem with pretty much zero percent finance. And so it's kind of a, it's an opportunity where, you know, we're taking the technology and we're taking the capability to land that technology into these ecosystems at a very, very low cost, but also give organizations the breadth and opportunity to consume those technologies without having to worry about, you know, ultimately paying up front they can start to look at the financial model that will suit them and that will, that will, that will, hopefully, accelerate their time, their time to market, trying to solve some of these problem that we've been speaking about. >> Well, Marc, thank you so much for the updates. Definitely good to hear about the technology pieces as well as some of these impacts that will have a more global impact. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Stu, my pleasure. Thank you, take care and stay safe. >> Thanks, same to you. All right, I'm Stu Miniman, back with lots more covered from SUSECON Digital '20. Thank you, for always, for watching theCUBE. 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>> From around the globe, it's "theCUBE" with coverage of SUSECON Digital. Brought to you by SUSE. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is CUBE's coverage of SUSECON Digital '20. Happy to welcome back to the program one of our CUBE alumni, Alan Clark, he is in the CTO office of SUSE. He works on emerging technologies and open source. Sits on many of the boards for many of those open source organizations. Alan, nice to chat with you. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for the invitation. I appreciate the opportunity. It's always fun to chat with you, Stu. >> All right, so Alan, you know, open source of course, you know, had a broad impact on the industry. Lots of talk. You know, we talk about soft breeding the world, the impact of open source. Haas on software. Give us, you know, start us a little bit kind of the state of the state as to what you're seeing broadly when it comes to. >> You know, I'm just, I keep, I enjoy this industry, 'cause it's just booming. I got into open source a long time ago, before my hair was gray, and I just can't, it just continues to surprise me and amaze me at how much it's grown. And even from, not just as projects, right? Those continue to exponentially grow, but think about the adoption, right? And from SUSE's perspective, we've got critical mission infrastructure running on open source and that is just totally amazing, right? And they've got aerospace manufacturing firms, Fortune 100s, Fortune 500s, Fortune 50s, the world's largest banks, four or five of the world's largest banks are running on SUSE Linux, right? Automotive vendors, 12 of the 15 largest automotive vendors are running on open source, running on SUSE Linux, and 10 of the largest telecommunications firms are running on SUSE, and it just goes to show that open source is really growing and is being adopted and used by critical infrastructure for the world. Particularly in these troubling days, right? >> Yeah, I mean, Alan, I've always loved diggin' into the data, you know? I haven't followed it for quite as long as you, but I've been involved for comin' up on 20 years now, and you think back 15 or 20 years it was somebody in the back room contributing some code in their spare time when they have it. When I look at the state of open source today, you mentioned lots of enterprises are using it, but lots of enterprises are contributing to it, and it's not necessarily somebody in their spare time doing it, but more and more it part of my job is leveraging and contributing back, upsource to what's happening there, so how are you seeing that? How does that impact the overall governance of open source? >> So, that's a very good question, 'cause the amount of change is huge, right? So these open source foundations have grown very large and the number of people that are contributing to them, not just in code, but in ideas, in best practices and so forth has exponentially grown, and it's amazing to see that. Plus, I guess the other part of it that I really enjoy is it's gone global, right? It used to be these projects were kind of regional, and perhaps North America to Europe, but it's, they've gone global, so these larger projects'll have 170, 180 countries that are involved. That's truly amazing. And the thing that I find very interesting, particularly given the pandemic era, we're all sitting at our homes right now. As open source developers, we're very used to this environment. We're working from home. We're scattered around the globe. We're used to working in different time zones, different geographies, and we know how to communicate and work together, so having this distance and lack of an office is actually not that much of an impediment for open source. So it's actually kind of to their advantage. >> Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. I'd done lots of interviews with developer communities and remote work is just the way they do things. Contributing code is very much an asynchronous nature of what they were doing. Alan, I love you talked about the global nature. One of the things, I was looking forward to being at this event in person was we were going to go to Dublin, you know, great city. (Alan laughs) Love to travel. When we cover a European show, it's always, "Okay, what is different "about different geographies "compared to North America?" You know, you talk about cloud adoption in general tends to be a little bit higher in North America. Any data or anecdotes that you have globally as to how open source is maybe a little bit different and culturally thought of from organizations that might be based in Europe, Asia, Latin America, or the like? >> Yeah, that's to me one of the strengths of these communities now is the difference in perspectives that you get from the different geographies, right? From Europe to Asia and so forth, and it sometimes surprises you, right? You get so used to a few vendors maybe dominating a certain area, and what you find out is they may be strong in a certain geography, but they're not globally. And as other developers and community members and users come in and start talking about their needs and their use cases, you find that their perspective is different than yours and it's kind of that "Ah ha" moment of "Oh, we need to make sure "the software works for everybody "and fits their need." And I guess the second part of that would be, you know, with this pandemic, it's causing the whole industry dynamics to change, and businesses are finding that they've got to rapidly adapt and change, and open source is one of the ways they're able to do that, right? Our customer sentiments are changing. Their purchasing habits are obviously changed. The way we shop, the way we do business, the way we're meeting people, right? We're all doing it digitally now. That's changing the services that companies need to deliver. And one of the powers of open source is being able to provide that to them and deliver those services very rapidly to them. And another dynamic here that I'm finding is interesting is customers, or consumers of open source, the businesses that are consuming open source are realizing that with these times, you know, you've got to have multiple sources for your supply chain. We have a lot more discussion about being nationalized instead of globalized, you know, when borders shut down and you can't get your supplies from another country, where are you going to get them, right? So those kinds of discussions change your source of supplies and so forth, so you have to diversify a little bit, and that's causing new types of services that are going to be created, needed. The beauty of open source, though, is it's global, and so I can get access to it whether I'm here in Salt Lake City or I'm sitting up in Dublin, wherever I'm at. And it's awesome. It's just amazing. >> Excellent, Alan. So, you know, you talked about some of the impact of what the global pandemic happening. They can leverage remote work. Open source is something that they can get ready access to. I'm curious if there's any other things in the community, you know, rallying points that you're seeing, any good stories or anecdotes that you might be able to share. >> So, I guess the other aspect of this I find extremely encouraging is, open source is amazing for individuals, not just businesses, right, to consume it, but me as an individual to learn new ideas, new technologies, try things out. And it's a great opportunity right now, particularly for home bound to go out and learn new ideas, learn about new concepts, new technologies, learn about Kubernetes, learn about containers, learn about rapid software development, right? And SUSE's actually caught onto this. This is one of the things I find really cool is they've got a couple things that are going on. First, they've created a sandbox out there where I, as an individual, for free can go out there and give rapid application development a try. It's being at home, often I don't have the full equipment that I would have at the office, right? So getting an environment set up, having the equipment and access that I need to get an environment set up to try something out, you know, like Kubernetes or application development. I may not have that at my home. So SUSE's set up some sandboxes out there where, as a developer, I can go out and give SUSE's application platform development a try. It's easy, it's all set up for me. I can go out there and I can play. Try out new concepts, see what Kubernetes is about, see what rapid development is about. And it minimizes my, you know, the task and the equipment that I need to be able to do that. The second part of that is they've opened up a lot of their online training courses for free for developers as well and operators. So it's a great time for, we're stuck at home, it's a great time to take advantage of these resources and learn more about open source. >> Great, yeah, absolutely. Alan, I spoke to your CEO, Melissa, and we talked about the importance of the developer communities. You mentioned the sandbox there. I'm curious, anything else you've seen, kind of the changing dynamic about how developers integrate with the business. One of the constant themes we talk about is IT isn't just something that's on the side, but is a clear partner with the business and often is a driver for the business, so the developers often need some education, they need communication. What do you see and how are the development communities changing? >> Oh, so I think a great part of this, this year is all the events that are going virtual. So we've got tons of resources available within these communities and through companies like SUSE, as we just talked about, and we also have these events that are going virtual, so all this content is now becoming readily accessible. I hear often from developers saying, "Well, my company doesn't give us much "for money for traveling to these events "and conferences and so forth." Now that they're all going virtual it's given 'em great access to amazing materials, and the beauty of these events is that a lot of the material is framed around helping you understand how to develop open source, how to become a part of the community, and then also about what this technology is about, where it's heading. So you, particularly as an IT organization, I get a great insight as to where the technology's going. What's the future look like? What are the ideas that are being formed by all these individuals from around the world? What's their perspectives? And then I can turn, and tying that to the business, is I can take that and take that to my business and say, "Look, here's where the technology is heading. "Here's how we can use it to enhance our business "and deliver better services to our customer." So it's a great opportunity this year. >> Yeah, you're right, Alan. There's often that gap between the people that can attend and what content is available to everyone else, and, you know, seems to be opening up. Everything from, you know, it funny, Disney is giving away the recipes for some of the things that they're doing through the conferences, typically free to attend and on demand soon after doing. All right, Alan, you're in the emerging technologies group. So, last thing I want to ask is give us a little bit look forward. What is your group looking at or the communities that you're involved in? What are some of the things that are exciting you and your peers? >> So, SUSE expanding from the edge to the cloud, to the core, right? And so we're covering things all the way from the gamut. Lot of new exciting stuff happening out on the edge with IoT and with edge services. Pretty excited about that area. SUSE's had a lot of experience in that space, particularly if you look at manufacturing providing, helping them, those businesses, the manufacturing firms meet their SLAs. Had a lot of experience in the retail space, around point of service. That, of course, is pivoting to self-service, to frictionless shopping, that types of stuff, so it's pretty exciting in those areas. So there's a lot going on in the edge. Healthcare, SUSE's been very involved, embedded in a lot of healthcare devices. That business will continue to grow, so we're seeing a lot about, on the edge. We talked a bit about rapid development. So back at the core and the cloud we're trying to make that a seamless experience so you can push those workloads, build those workloads in a containerized, micro-service manner, and distribute those pieces where it makes sense, right? So we talk about artificial intelligence gathering the data out on the edge, doing a bit of filtering and processing, moving that up to the core and the cloud, being able to mine that data, learn intelligently, then orchestrate your services, orchestrate your core appropriately, right? To meet those demands that your customers are putting on you. There's just a lot going on. We got containers. We've got hybrid cloud. We've got multicloud. We got intelligent orchestration. Then we could go on and talk a ton, we could talk for 30 minutes just about what's happening in the data space. So there's a lot to look forward to when it comes to open source and the innovation that's happening out there. >> All right, well, Alan Clark. Great to catch up with you. Thank you so much for giving us a little bit of vision. >> Thank you, Stu. >> Where we've been, and where we're going. >> Thank you very much. >> All right, I'm Stu Miniman and stay tuned for more coverage from SUSECON Digital '20. Thank you for watching "theCUBE." (calm electronic music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of SUSECON Digital, brought to you by SUSE. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman. And this is theCUBE's coverage of SUSECON Digital '20. Really excited we get to talk to the SUSE executives, their partners and their customers. In this segment, we have one of the customers, he's in the keynote and really excited to talk to him, Günther Tschabushnig and he is the CIO of ZAMG. If you're not familiar with them, they are the Central Institute for meteorology and geodynamics, the oldest weather service in the world, based out of Austria. Günther, thank you so much for joining us. Great to see you. >> Thank you for being here, thank you. >> All right, so obviously weather something we are very interested on theCUBE. We talk how important data is. And data, is it for central to what your service is doing, providing data, the organizations, they can do lots with it. Give us a little bit, we probably don't have time to go through the 150 plus, years history of the organization, but tell us a little bit about what your organization does, and especially your role as CIO. What's involved with that? >> Oh, let me hook you in. One thing you said, we have the oldest, weather service in the world. I always tell people, we are doing big data analytics between until 1851. And actually that's true. We have actually two big data centers based in Austria. We are operating about 20 petabytes of data, 100,000 data sets per minute. What is very, very interesting for tech guys. We have one small data center additional on over 3000 meters above sea level on the observatory. It's in the middle of the glacier. Can't imagine how cool that is. When you go up, into the glacier and yeah, you have a lot of sensors, a lot of measurements and a lot of data collecting, configurations. Actually, we are also using a lot of super-computers. We do simulating, we do a lot of AI. We did big data analytics and the most important thing, we do a lot of cooperation with the people that are out there. >> Yeah, in 1851, wasn't exactly super-computers. You're gathering data from a lot of sources. Help us understand a little bit. What are some of the, asks that the business have for you? What are the kind of challenges? In 2020, that might be a little bit different than they were years ago. >> Weather comes from, but different source, actually in 1851, it was more for the King, for their wars. Nowadays it's much more peaceful, thank, God. It's more for sporting, it's more for producing things. It's a lot for logistics, but it's actually for all the human people are out there, and therefore we have to use a lot of data, a lot of processes and a lot of different customer journeys. Our most important thing is customer first. So we try to produce, our full costs, our, integrated processes, especially for the customers. Justin, quick example is, the Olympic winter games. The ZMAG is doing the forecast for the last two, winter games, because we are doing now casting and we're very good at now casting that means the forecast between the next five minutes to 15 minutes, with, what's it call a breath of 100, 150 meters, which is very, very important for, some kind of events. But we do other forecast as well. The only thing we cannot forecast but we also to, earthquakes, that means naturally earthquakes on the one side, on the other side, artificial earthquakes, which are produced through, normally bombs or nuclear bombs. And, we are working with the CTBTO, the UN organization together to analyze and to measure is illegally, nuclear tests. To make the world a little bit a better place. >> Yeah, so Günther it's interesting you mentioned in the early days it was, weather for the king. One of the things we look about in data, especially in the public sector is what data, where do you collected from? How much hearing is there? Can you talk a little bit about, how it goes kind of beyond your borders and is there, I guess, how do you work with other organizations there any of data that shared any of the models? How does that work together in your organization? >> The most important thing is the link data to link our data to other organizations and to collect other data from other organizations. It's not forecast anymore. It's forecast, integrating into processes, especially in the business processes. Weather doesn't stop at the borders. That's a good thing. So we had a lot of collaboration with our neighbors. We found a weather services from our neighbors. That's one thing. I have them, the big picture. For, our models for our simulations. But what we also do is a lot of crowd data. Because the more data we get, the more data we can assimilate into our model. The better, the higher is the resolution of our forecast, so we do a lot of integration of this crowd source weather, that could be on the one hand, a simple app that could be a weather station, in our, in your home. But that could also be a photograph. What did you do with your smartphone? Well, we do artificial intelligence algorithms. To get out the information about clouds, about damages, what we integrate again in our models, in our simulations. And give you the better forecast as a response. We have a big, cooperation, for example, with, the Austrian fire department. They get the best forecasts we can ever do. A specialist forecast for the emergencies. When does, a fire in the woods, for example, they need a special soil moisture for example, then wind directions. Do we need wind strengths? They can use this on their smartphone. They can, use the smart watch. They do pictures after emergency, send it back to us. We analyze it and do a live modeling through our super-computers. To have a better forecast on this place. >> Excellent, now you talked about a bit about communities, leveraging, a lot of different technologies, I guess that's a good way for us to help connect the dots to us talking here to at SUSECON. Obviously, open-source, the communities, the piece of what we or hearing at the show. Talk to us a little bit about SUSE , what technologies are using them, what's the role of open-source, is that, the piece of how you look at technology. >> Nothing is more boring than they get weather from yesterday. So what we need is a really fast development of our forecasts, to our customers. And SUSE helps us, there. We have special services, especially on our ship of computers. Well, we use the special SUSE ranking system. We use SUSE, on our storage systems on our software defined storage system. To have a, we can develop man, to our customers, to our cooperation partners. And, the last big thing is we use SUSE containering, that forms, and on AI platforms. So the new SUSE AI platform, we tried to do forecasts for avalanches, for snow avalanches and that's a really, really big effort at the moment, because there are people dying every year in Austria and in the Alps, because of avalanches. And maybe we can save some of them, because we do have good forecast together with SUSE. >> Excellent, you talk about moving to containerization, gives a little insight. You are a government agency. How easy it is for you to take advantage of new technologies? Any guidance you can give as to things that you've through that might be able to help? >> Innovation and new technologies, but kind of moving on the edge, because on the one hand we have 24/7, the whole year long, we have to be high availability. We have a very stable, on the other hand, we want to have new technologies, new innovations. So it's really, really working on the edge. We use two groups, two separate data centers. On one hand, we do the all the stable thing. The high availability things on the other things. On the other data center, on other group, they are doing the true new things. They do containerization, they do blockchain and they do artificial intelligent moves. And the thing is they are working together. They are connected, that means tell it this way. We have a very, very experienced, head of our one group, our stable 24/7 group, and very, very young high potential or not innovation group. To be honest, first two weeks they hated each other, because one guy wanted to have the innovation and going forward and forward and forward, and the other one said, "No stop, we have to be stable. "That's the most important thing." After four weeks with a lot of maintenance for sure, and with a lot of guidance, they started to love each other because they can learn from each other. And that's the main point. We learned about all of these things. Now we can combine, stable with technology, with new technology, with cool, new things, which can be proved in the one side and integrate that in the stable side, a little later. >> That's an excellent story to learn from, learning so important, great to hear that the more traditional, reliable group and the new innovation group work together. Of course we can't let you go talking about weather without touching on climate. So, anybody that's watched the space with his global pandemic has some interesting, I guess you'd say, positive side effects, there are parts of the world where pollution's cleaned up, major impacts, on climate that, I'd expect you have some interesting data on. What can you share, when it comes to climate change? Any advice, you'd give for business leaders, that are looking to help contribute in a positive way. >> Okay, sure actually, a data center, we are also data hub for the ESA, the European Space Agency for their sentinel data. This data is very interesting, because it hasn't direct shows and direct impact how the climate is changing. The most important thing I can tell you as a CIO, it is changing. That's the most important thing. What we are looking for is how can we combine data, to stop this climate change. How can we show other leaders, politicians, etc. How to stop it, how can we work against it, and how they can be cooperate, work against. The thing is if we only show us the weather service, our climate data, that's nice to have. You see what a curve that's going to be warmer and warmer and the parameters are changing, but that's not the goal. The goal is, how can we work together? How can we link data together? To stop pollution, to stop several kind of attributes. To stop climate change. We started to do some collaborations with big companies. One of these is SUSE. One of these is Hewlett Packard, to work together. To combine resources, to combine a compute power, to combine storage, to combine knowledge, especially data to stop climate change. >> Excellent, so Günther final question is, anything you've been seeing strange, being a CIO, a question we always have, something we heard in the keynote is the changing role of the CIO. You talked a bit about AI, talked about, you live with actual cloud, and super-computers. So what in 2020 is kind of different about the role of CIO? >> What I really learned is IT, it's the supporting accompany or the supporting department anymore. IT is, the strategic partner of each domain we have, we had all our scientists and they always told us, "We had a scientist and we need IT." From several years now, they started to work together with the IT, with Artificial Intelligence, with big data analytics, with several platforms, both integrations, how to, solve problems. So the CIO especially, is not the IT leader anymore, it's more the management part of the management board. So that means, the integration of the CIO in the whole company is much, much more then it was several years ago. Meg Whitman, I met years ago and we had a good talk, told me there is no company anymore without IT. That's not correct. There's no company anymore that is IT. Even every culture is IT, everything is IT. It's no support anymore, it's linking anymore. >> Excellent, yeah Günther, such an important point to talk about if a company, is going to thrive in the modern era. Data is such a critical piece of that gives you as a CIO, a seat at the table to work closely with them, because if the business needs to be driven by data, the CIO's role of connecting IT in the business, so important. Thank you so much for sharing your stories. Pleasure to talk with you. >> Thank you, it was a pleasure. >> All right, and we'll be back with more coverage from SUSECON Digital '20. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe it's theCUBE, with coverage of SUSECON Digital. Brought to you by SUSE. >> Stu: Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of SUSECON Digital '20. Apeda Welcome to the program Vincente Moranta, who is the Vice President of Offer Management of Enterprise Linux Workloads on Power. Vincente, pleasure to see you, thanks for joining us. >> Vincente: Hey Stu and thank you for having me. >> All right, so we know that SUSE lives on a lot of platforms. We're going to talk a bit about applications specifically, primarily SAP. Give us a little bit, Vincente, about what you're working on, and the relevance to the partnership with SUSE. >> Sure, absolutely. So, the last five years I've been responsible for offering management at IBM. Focused on solutions that live on IBM powered systems. In particular, we started with SAP HANA, and obviously SAP and SUSE, with their fantastic relationship, was a big part of that and continues to be as we have grown the platform for the last five years. >> Excellent. So, SAP of course, critical workload, we've been seeing SAP go through those transformation. So, help us understand what work needs to be done to integrate these things? Make sure that companies can run their business. >> Yeah, I think primarily as clients are making their transition from a traditional type of an ERP, CRM, and even BW type workloads, they're looking for a way to make those transitions. Really get in to the whole digital transformation and all of the spaces of being able to leverage technology in a way that creates value to the client, in almost real time. But they want to do it with technology partners that are going to enable the client to do it with minimal risk, with high flexibility and with partners who are there for them to, in some cases, do things that are not necessarily all too forwarded or ready to go yet. But really giving the customer the ability to adapt to things. And when we started with SAP HANA, as I mentioned, the customers in the market who were doing HANA on X86 platforms were limited to certain set of capabilities, certain set of support statements, and things like that. And a big part of that was bare metal implementations which still to this day remain the most popular way to deploy HANA in an X86 environment. But when we got together with SUSE and with SAP and we started the partnership around HANA, the thing that became very clear was that customers needed flexibility. They needed to be able to adapt to changing environments, very interesting challenges that they were trying to tackle with these HANA projects. But the capabilities of the servers that they were using, were not allowing them to have that flexibility. And then, even if SUSE was trying to do certain things and give some flexibility to those clients, if the infrastructure cannot handle it, or vice verse, it really just is a one-party trick and it doesn't work. So the focus with SUSE, almost from the beginning, has been on tool innovation. And we've been able to accomplish really amazing things together with them and SAP. Things that could not have been possible without that very strong collaboration. And one of them that is very recent, is shared processor pool. Right? In a world where HANA is deployed bare-metal systems, IBM Power is always doing virtualization, and together with SUSE, we were able to come up with a solution. And with SAP, obviously. That allowed customers to share source in a virtual way across many HANA instances. So completely revolutionizing the DCO and the ROI for clients working with HANA. Without trading out any of the resiliency, any of the performance, and everything else. So, that's the balance that a lot of these customers are looking for is flexibility, and better returns, especially now more than ever. Without trading out all of the things that they need for an S/4 HANA project or an ERP or a BW project. >> You talked about the flexibility and the returns that customers get on this. I wonder if you step back for a second, where is this hitting on a CIO's priority list? What has changed in today's Cloud era? Couple weeks ago, IBM Think was going on, heard a lot about customers, how they're going through their journey in the cloud. We know there's a lot of options there so. SAP solutions specifically, there's a lot of ways that we can do this. So how does a CIO figure out what the best solution for their skill-set and the technology partner that they work with. >> Yeah, I think at a high-level where the CIO's are basing nowadays, is kind of, it's a good time to be a CIO, I think, because you get a chance to have a broad range of deployment options. Without having to trade out from the features. I'm sure some CIO's will disagree and will say there's plenty of other challenges that are making their lives complicated. But if we just focus on the fact that you can deploy HANA - you can deploy it in the cloud, you can deploy it in hybrid, you can deploy it on premises. And the largest then, and especially with our capabilities, and together with SUSE, the CIO doesn't have to make a choice on trade out of things that they have to lose if they make one of the other. I think that is what helps them to feel comfortable to go in to SAP and being able to adapt. If a project becomes too large or the data transfer requirements become too complicated or too expensive, it's easy enough to bring it back and to maybe leave dev test in a cloud and move the rest of the production environment to on premise. Through a number of partnerships that we have done over the last few years, there's a number of very large MSP's and CSP's including SAP HANA Enterprise Crowd - HEC - and very soon IBM cloud as well. Who can provide all of these capabilities that SUSE and Empower allow for a HANA deployment to be done in a Cloud. So from our perspective, even though I'm a hardware guy, and some people may think I only care about on premises business, the reality is when a customer says, or a CIO as you were asking. When a CIO is trying to make a decision we don't want that CIO to be thinking they have to make a decision between IBM supporting them only if it's on premises or only if it's on Cloud. We can do both. And they don't have to do, it's not a hard trade off to decide. You can start with one, you can go to the other one. We can have capacity for them like we're doing with SAP HEC today, SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. They're using Power9 technology. The customers benefit in regardless of which deployment option they choose. Both with SUSE underneath it. I think we're trying to make it simpler for them to make those choices without infrastructure becoming the sticky point. >> Yeah, and you talked about the support that users can get, of course, from IBM. At SUSECON, a lot of the discussion about the community there. >> Absolutely. >> So, what can you tell us about, you've got thousands of customers that are running SAP HANA on Power, how do you help them rally together and be part of (muted). >> Yeah, so, you and I have known each other for a while and I think when we started working together at a prior company it was around communities practice. And the organizational network and social network. A big part of what we have done is just going to that same approach. Of just connecting people with people. Right? Connecting people from SUSE with people from IBM, with clients and trying to foster valuable interaction between those clients. Whether it's TechU, IBM TechU Conferences, SAP TechEd, SUSECON, you name it. We're always kind of looking for ways to bring people together. And I'll put in a plug for a client entity, a client council called the SAP Power Customer Council, which is a group of clients that decided on their own to get together and bring other customers who are doing SAP deployments on AIX, on Linux, obviously with SUSE and HANA, and come together once a year. We also have almost monthly interlock and workshops with them. But that is one way where the SUSE folks, IBM Power, SAP Development, all come together with a whole bunch of clients and they're giving us feedback. But also identifying things for us to work on next. From a support perspective, as you said, we have thousands of clients nowadays, and the really fantastic thing has been very few issues and the issues that we have had, SUSE, SAP and IBM, all three of us together, have been able to resolve them to the customers satisfaction. So it just kind of demonstrates that regardless of where something is invented SUSE with SLES, SAP with HANA, us with our hardware and our hypervisors, when it comes to the clients we all work very closely together for their success. >> Great. Those feedback loops are so critically important to everyone involved. I guess last thing, maybe if you've got a customer example that might highlight the partnership between IBM and SUSE? >> Yeah, there's a number of them and we have, I think it's over 60 public references together with SUSE of clients who are doing an SAP HANA with SUSE Empower. But a couple that come to mind, obviously Robert Bosch is a fantastic client for all of us. A fantastic partner. And they've been with us almost from the very beginning, together with SUSE and together with us. And they helped us to identify early on some things that they would like to be able to see supported. Some capabilities that they expected to be able to have, especially given that Bosch had a strong knowledge of IBM technology, IBM product. And they wanted to be able to apply some of the same capabilities around Live Partition Mobility and large size L-bars for HANA and things like that. And they worked very closely with SUSE and with us, and with SAP, to not just give us the requirement, but really help us to identify okay, how should this work? Right, it's not just creating the technology and adding more and more features but how do we integrate it, how do we integrate it in to Bosch, who had created a fantastic self-provisioning type of a portal for all of their clients, all of their internal entities around the world. That was really cool and it really kind of helped us to highlight how we could integrate into tools, monetary, and reporting, etc that our clients have. Another example if I can, is Richemont. Richemont International is based in Geneva. Luxury brand. And Helga Delterad who was the Director of Idea at the time, kind of came to me and gave me a challenge. He said, "Look, I love HANA Power. I love that we can do all of these things with it. But I really would like be able to share processors across multiple HANA instances. That would really reduce the bill. It would really reduce the cost. And Richemont would be able to achieve a much quicker return on investment than we had anticipated." So, he gave us a challenge. The challenge went to everybody. It went to SUSE, to us and to SAP, we all got together and again with Helga being the executive sponsor on the client side, he really kind of worked with all of us. Brought us together and it was a power of the possible type of situation that now is generally available to all clients. And it's thanks to Helga, thanks to Richemont, who brought us together and gave us that challenge. >> Excellent. Well Vincenta Morante, great to catch up with you. Thanks so much for sharing the update on IBM Power and the partnership with SUSE. >> Thanks Stu. >> All right, we'll be back with more coverage from SUSECON Digital '20. I'm Stu Miniman and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music plays)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with coverage of Susic on digital brought to you by Susan. >>Welcome back. I'm stew minimum in coming to you from our Boston area studio. And this is the Cube's coverage of Silicon Digital 20. Happy to welcome to the program. Two of the keynote president presenters. First of all, we have Dr Mr Giacomo. He is the president of engineering and innovation and joining him, his presenter on the keynote stage, Daniel Nelson, who is the Vice president of Product solutions. Both of you with Souza. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >>Thank you. Thank you for having us. >>All right, So? So, Dr T let let's start out. You know, innovation, open source. Give us a little bit of the message for our audience that Daniel are talking about on stage. You know how you know we've been watching for decades the growth in the proliferation of open source and communities. So give us the update there, >>Andi. It's not stopping. It's actually growing even more and more and more and more innovations coming from open source. The way we look at it is that our customers that they have their business problems have their business reality. Andi s So we we have to curate and prepare and filter all the open source innovation that they can benefit from because that takes time to understand that. Match your needs and fix your problems. So it's Susa. We've always done that since 27 per sales. So working in the open source projects innovating they are, but with customers in mind. And what is pretty clear in 2020 is that large enterprises, small startups. Everybody's doing software. Everybody's doing, I t. And they all have the same type of needs in a way. They need to simplify their landscape because they've been accumulating investments all the way. Our infrastructure Joseph well, different solutions, different platforms from different bundles. They need to simplify that and modernize and the need to accelerate their business, to stay relevant and competitive in their own industries. And that's what we're focusing on. >>Yeah, it's interesting. I completely agree. When you say simplify thing, you know, Daniel, I I go back in the communities about 20 years, and in those days, you know, we were talking about the operating clinic was helping to, you know, go past the proprietary UNIX platforms. Microsoft, the enemy. And you were talking about, you know, operating system server storage, the application that it was a relatively simple environment and inherited today's, you know, multi cloud ai in your based architecture, you know, applications going through this radical transformation growth, though, give us a little bit of insight as to, you know, the impact this is having on ecosystems. And of course, you know, Susie's now has a broad portfolio that at all >>it's a great question, and I totally get where you're coming from. Like if you look 20 years ago, the landscape is completely different that the technologies were using or you're completely different. The problems were trying to solve with technology are more and more sophisticated, you know, at the same time that you know, there's kind of nothing new under the sun, every company, every technology, you know, every you know, modality goes through. This expansion of capabilities and the collapse around simplification is the capabilities become more more complex, manageable. And so there's this continuous tension between capabilities, ease of use, consume ability. What we see with open source is that that that that's kind of dynamic that still exist, but it's more online of like. Developers want easy to use technologies, but they want the cutting edge. They want the latest things. They want those things within their packets. And then if you look at operations groups or or or people that are trying to consume that technology, they want that technology to be consumable simple. It works well with others. People tend to pick and choose and have one pane of glass field operate within that. And that's where we see this dynamic. And that's kind of what the Susan portfolio was built. It's like, How do we take, you know, the thousands and thousands of developers that are working on these really critical projects, whether it's Linux is like you mentioned or kubernetes or for cloud foundry? And how do we make that then more consumable to the thousands of companies that are trying to do it, who may even be new to open source or may not contribute directly but have all the benefits that are coming to it. And that's where Susan fits and worse. Susan, who's fits historically and where we see us continuing to fit long term, is taking older is Legos. Put it together for companies that want that and then allow them a lot of autonomy and choice and how these technologies are consumed. >>One of the themes that I heard you both talked about in the keynote it was simplifying modernized. Telerate really reminded me of the imperatives of the CIO. You know, there's always run the business they need to help grow the business. And if they have the opportunity, they want to transform the business. I think you know, you said run improve in scale scale. Absolutely. You know, a critical thing that we talk about these days when I think back to the Cloud Foundry summit. You know, on the keynote stage, it was in the old way. If I could do faster, better, cheaper. Ah, you could use two of them today. We know faster, faster, faster is what you want. So >>it was a >>little bit of insight as to who you know, you talked about, you know, cloud foundry and kubernetes application modernization. You know, what are the imperatives that you're hearing from customers? And how are we with all of these tools out there? Hoping, You know, I t not just be responsive to the business, but it actually be a driver for the transformation of the business. >>It's a great question. And so when I talk to customers and Dr T feel free to chime in, you talked. You know, as many or more customers than then Ideo. You know they do have these these what are historically competing imperatives. But what we see with the adoption of some of these technologies that that faster is cheaper, faster is safer, you know, creating more opportunities to grow and to innovate better is the business. It's not risk injection when we change something, it's actually risk mitigation when we get good and changing. And so it's kind of that that that modality of moving from, um, you know, a a simplify model or very kind of like a manufacturing model of software so much more organic, much more permissive, much more being able to learn with an ecosystem style. And so that's how we see companies start to change the way they're adopting the technology. What's interesting about them is that same level of adoption that seemed thought of adoption is also how open source is is developed open source is developed organically is developed with many eyes. Make shallow bots is developed by like, Let me try this and see what happens right and be able to do that in smaller and smaller recommends. Just like we look at red Green deployments or being able to do micro services or binary or any of those things. It's like let's not do one greatly or what we're used to in waterfall, cause that's actually really risk. Let's do many, many, many steps forward and be able to transform an iterative Lee and be able to go faster iterative Lee and make that just part of what the business is good at. And so you're exactly right, like those are the three imperatives of the CIO. What I see with customers is the more that they are aligning those three areas together and not making them separate. But we have to be better at being faster and being transformed. And those are the companies that are really using I t. As a competitive advantage within the rich. >>Yeah, because most of the time they're different starting points. They have a history. They have different business strategy and things they've done in the past, you need to be able to accommodate all of that and the faster micro service, that native developments for sure, for the new APS. But they're also coming from somewhere on diff. You don't take care of that. You get are you can just accelerates if you simplify your existing because otherwise you spend your time making sure that your existing it's still running. So you have to combine all of that together. And, yeah, do you mentioned about funding and communities? And that's really I love those topics because, I mean, everybody knows about humanities. Now. It's picking up in terms of adoption in terms of innovation, technology building ai ml framework on top of it now, what's very interesting as where is that cloud? Foundry was designed for fast software development until native from the beginning, that 12 factor app on several like 45 years ago. Right? What we see now is we can extract the value that cloud foundry brings to speed up and accelerate your stuff by the Romans hikers, and we can combine that very nicely on very smoothly, simple in a simple way, with all the benefits you get from kubernetes and not from one communities from your communities running in your public clouds because you have records. They are. You have services that you want to consume from one public clouds. We have a great silicon fireside chat with open shot from Microsoft Azure actually discussing those topics. You might have also communities clusters at the edge that you want to run in your factory or close to your data and workloads in the field. So those things and then you mentioned that as well, taking care of the I T ops, simplify, modernize and accelerate for the I T ops and also accelerates forward their local themselves. We're benefiting from a combination of open source technologies, and today there's not one open source technology that can do that. You need to bundle, combine them, get our best, make sure that they are. They are integrated, that they are certified to get out of their stable together, that the security aspects, all the technology around them are integrating the services as well. >>Well, I'm really glad you brought up, you know, some of those communities that are out there, you know, we've been saying for a couple of years on the Cube. You know, Kubernetes is getting baked in everywhere. You know, Cisco's got partnerships with all the cloud providers, and you're not fighting them over whether to use a solution that you have versus theirs. I worry a little bit about how do I manage all of those environments. You end up with kubernetes sprawl just like we have with every other technology out there. Help us understand what differentiates Tuesday's, you know, offerings in this space. And how do you fit in with you know, the rest of that very dynamic and defer. >>So let me start with the aspect of combining things together on and Danielle. Maybe you can take the management piece. So the way we are making sure that Sousa, that we don't also just miles into a so this time off tools we have a stack, and we're very happy if people use it. But the reality is that there are customers that they have. Some investments have different needs. They use different technologies from the past. But we want to try different technologies, so you have to make sure that's for communities. Like for any other part of the stack. The I T stock of the stack. Your pieces are model around that you can accommodate different. Different elements are typically at Susa. We support different types off hyper visors. Well, that's focused on one. But we can support KPMG's and I probably this way, all of the of the Nutanix, hyper visor, netapp, hyper visors and everything. Same thing with the OS. There's not only one, we know that people are running, and that's exactly the same. Which humanities? And there's no one, probably that I've seen in our customer base that will just need one vendor for communities because they have a hybrid needs and strategy, and they will benefit from the native communities they found on a ks e ks decay. I remember clouds, you name them Andi have vendors in Europe as well. Doing that so far for us, it's very important that we bring us Sutro. Custom. Males can be combined with what they have, what they want, even if it's from the circle competition. And so this is a cloud. Foundry is running on a case. You can find it on the marketplace of public clouds. It could run on any any any communities. He doesn't have to be sitting on it. But then you end up with a lot of sales, right? How do we deal with that? >>So it's a great question, and I'll actually even broaden that out because it's not like we're only running kubernetes. Yes, we've got lots of clusters. We've got lots of of containers. We've got lots of applications that are moving there, but it's not like all the V M's disappear. It's not like all the beige boxes, like in the data center, like suddenly don't exist. You know, we we we all bring all the sense and decisions in the past word with us wherever we go. And so for us, it's not just that lens of how do we manage the most modern, the most cutting edge? That's definitely a part of it. But how do you do that? Within the context of all the other things you have to do within your business? How do I manage virtual virtual machines? How do I manage bare metal? How do I manage all those? And so for us, it's about creating a presentation layer on top of that where you can look at your clusters. Look at your V EMS. Look at all your deployments and be able to understand what's actually happening with the fire. We don't take a prescriptive approach. We don't say you have to use one technology. You have to use that. What we want to do is to be adaptive to the customer's needs. And so you've got these things here, some of our offerings. You've got some legacy offerings to Let's show you bring those together. Let's show you how you modernize your viewpoints, how you simplify your operational framework and how you end up accelerating what you can do with the staff that you've got in place. >>Yeah, I'm just on the management piece. Is there any recommendation from your team? You know, last year at Microsoft ignite, there was the launch of Azure are on. And, you know, we're starting to see a lot of solutions come out. There are concerns. Is that any of us that live through the multi vendor management days, um, you know, don't have good memories from those. It is a different discussion if we're just talking about kind of managing multiple kubernetes. But how do we learn from the past and you know, What do you recommend for people in this, you know, multi cloud era. >>So my suggestion to customers is you always start with what are your needs? What is strategic problems you're trying to solve, and then choose a vendor that is going to help you solve those strategic problems? So is it going to take a product centric view Isn't gonna tell you use this technology and this technology and this technology, what is going to take the view of, like, this is the problem you're gonna solve? Let me be your advisor within that and choose people that you're going to trust within that, um, that being said, you wanna have relationships with customers that have been there for a while that have done this that have a breath of experience in solving enterprise problems because everything that we're talking about is mostly around the new things. But keep in mind that there are there are nuances about the enterprise. There are things that are that are intrinsically bound within the enterprise that it takes a vendor with a lot of enterprise experience to be able to meet customers where they are. I think you've seen that you know in some of the some of the real growth opportunities with them hyper scaler that they've kind of moved into being more enterprise view of things, kind of moving away from just an individual bill perspective, enterprise problems. You're seeing that more and more. I think vendors and customers need to choose companies that meet them where they are that enable their decisions. Don't prescribe there. >>Okay, go ahead. >>Yes, Sorry. Yeah. I also wanted to add that I would recommend people to look at open source based solutions because that will prevent them to be in a difficult situation, potentially in the three years from now. So there are open source solutions that can do that on book. A viable, sustainable, healthy, open source solutions that are not just one vendor but multi vendor as well, because that leaves those open options open for you in the future as well. So if you need to move for another vendor or if you need to implement with an additional technology, you've made a new investment or you go to a new public clouds. If you based Duke Tracy's on open source, you have a little chance but later left >>I think that's a great point. Dr. T and I would you know, glom onto that by saying customers need to bring a new perspective on how they adjudicate these solutions, like it's really important to look at the health of the open source community. Just because it's open source doesn't mean that there's a secret army of gnomes that, you know in the middle of the night going fixed box, like there needs to be a healthy community around that. And that is not just individual contributors. That is also what are the companies that are invested in this, where they dedicating resources like That's another level. So what level of sophistication that a lot of customers need to bring into their own vendor selection? >>Excellent. Uh, you know, speaking about communities in open source. Want to make sure you have time share a little bit about the AI platform discussed in your >>Yeah, it's very, very interesting. And something I'm super excited about it, Sousa. And it's kind of this this, uh, we're starting to see ai done in these really interesting problems to solve and like, I'll just give you one example is that we're working with um uh, Formula One team around using AI to help them actually manage in car mechanics and actually manage some of the things that they're doing to get super high performance out of their vehicles. And that is such an interesting problem to solve. And it's such a natural artificial intelligence problem that even when you're talking about cars instead of servers or you're talking about race tracks, you know instead of data centers, you still got a lot of the same problems. And so you need an easy to use AI stack. You need it to be high performance. You needed to be real time. You need to be able to decisions made really quickly, easy, the same kinds of problems. But we're starting to see them in all these really interesting wheels in areas, which is one of the coolest things that I've seen in my career. Especially is in terms of I T. Is that I t is really everywhere. It's not. Just grab your sweater and go to the data center because it's 43 degrees in there. You know, it's also getting on the racetrack. It's also go to the airfield. It's also go to the grocery store and look at some of the problems being being being addressed himself there. And that is super fascinating. One of the things that I'm super excited up in our industry in total. >>Alright, well, really good to discussion here, Daniel. Dr B. Thank you so much for sharing everything from your keynote and been a pleasure washing. >>Thank you. >>Alright, Back with lots more coverage from Susan Con Digital 20. I'm stew minimum. And as always, Thank you for watching. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's the CUBE with coverage of SUSECON Digital, brought to you by SUSE. >> Hi, and welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, and this is the CUBE's coverage of SUSECON Digital '20. Happy to welcome to the program Glenn Fitzgerald, he is the Chief Data Officer for Fujitsu Products in Europe, coming to me from across the pond. Ah, Glenn, great to see you, so thanks so much for joining us. >> Hi Stu, thanks, very glad to be here. >> All right, so, first of all, you know, Fujitsu Products Europe, Chief Data Officer, give us a little bit, your role and responsibility inside Fujitsu. >> Of course, the Fujitsu Products Europe is as the name suggests, that part of the Fujitsu Corporation that is dedicated to delivering our products out through the European geography. Fujitsu's product sets runs the full range of ITC components from... tablets to PCs to servers to big storage devices to networks, which is to integrated systems and the software stacks that sit on top of them. It's a wide profile, yeah. And my role has been to be the Chief Technology Officer for that organization for several years. Recently, we have as an organization adopted a new approach to take to the marketplace. And that has necessitated a slight change in my role to one that's more focused on enabling customers to get value out of their data and their data repositories and the correlation of that data to generate business value. A long description, Stu, but I think necessary. >> Yeah, no, super important, Glenn. One thing we've actually been saying for more than a year on the CUBE now, is when you have that discussion of digital transformation, one of the things that differentiates companies before they've gone digital and if they are truly to call themself, you know, have gone through this transformation, is they need to be data-driven, you know. Data needs to be how they're making their decisions. It was definitely a key theme that we heard from SUSE in the keynote. So maybe talk a little bit about how digital transformation and the partnership with SUSE fits into your world. >> Absolutely. So, in terms of the transformation of our business and the changes that we're trying to make to it, as a product organization, traditionally our relationships with our customers is kind of transactional. You know, we sell stuff and they buy stuff. And that relationship with customers is increasingly less viable. It's increasingly challenged. And I think it's challenged by the many things that have happened in the marketplace. It's a sign of a maturing industry. So, you have the Cloud and you have the ISVs who are providing compute power and storage capacity and network capability to our customers in a different way. They're delivering it on the click of a button on an internet browser. Now, that's suitable for some customers in some situations, it isn't suitable for others, but it's definitely here to stay and it's definitely going to change the way the marketplace works, and it has. So we've recognized inside our organization that we need to leverage some of the capabilities that exists inside the Fujitsu services organizations. Fujitsu is a large company. It also has very significant manage services capabilities, we deliver to huge customers all across Europe in terms of German government, British government, a lot of the big manufacturing industrials in Europe and a lot of the travel and insurance financial sectors. So leveraging some of that to take a more consultant-led approach to our marketplace, to our customers. So what we want to do with them is take them through the story of data transformation. And as you said, and I quite agree, the marketplace is becoming increasingly data-driven. You've only got to look at some of the well-known examples, and I'm not going to rehearse them again because everybody's heard them and knows who they are. But, every organization, however large or small, has to derive business advantage and discrimination from its data. Otherwise, they'll go the way of... I hate to say it, the High Street. You can see, in this recent pandemic, the COVID-19 stuff. I don't know what it's like in the US, but absolutely in the UK and in Europe, those retailers that have been able to provide a online presence have survived, and some of them have thrived. And those retailers that haven't been able to provide that presence aren't here anymore. And that's just, it's a current and rather violent example of this change of how to manage data and get the best value out of it. Now, in order to take that to our customers, the Fujitsu Product team needs to change some of its capabilities, it needs to introduce some of those consulting capabilities into its portfolio, which we do. It needs to work with some of our partners to deliver the capabilities either as an installation or a service and SUSE are one of our prime partners in that sense. Both in terms of delivering the computing platform standards, the SUSE Data Hub, I believe it's changed its name now. The SUSE Data Hub as I know it, is core to our offerings in this space. We have just launched in Germany, for example, a manufacturing optimization application which runs off the SUSE infrastructure and uses the SAP database and database management systems above that to deliver things like predictive maintenance and just-in-time parts delivery, and in-factory automated routine of little robots carrying the bits to the right place. And that's an example of something that was led by a consulting activity between Fujitsu and our customer, in this case, a large manufacturer. We recognized during that consultancy that some of the stuff we needed to do to deliver the solution, that would deliver the data-derived business benefit the customer needed, was not in our immediate scope. We got some of our larger partners, SUSE and SAP in this case, involved in it, and they outcome has been happy for everybody. There are some lessons in all that. The Fujitsu is still learning, if I'm frank, like how to price it. When you have consultant-led activities that are generating very great benefit for your client, it's not too great for the supplier to still be charging that just on consultant day-rate. That can lead you to not getting the value out of what you're providing to your client. So there's lessons there. There's lessons in how to interact between ourselves and some of our services partners and clients. And making sure that the optimum route to market is delivered. But that essentially, Stu, is the story. It's a change from a transactional approach to a consultant-led approach, and the generation of a large ecosystem of partners, like SUSE, like SAP, with the capabilities to build stuff with us and deliver business outcomes to clients, not a stack of tin. >> Excellent. So, Glenn, what about kind of emerging requirements, what you're hearing from your customers, you know, AI is an area that we heard quite a bit in the keynote from SUSE. Where do you see that fitting into the entire discussion? Obviously, the key, leverage of data, when you talk about AI. >> Absolutely, and to talk about that in two ways. The first way, the first issue with that is exactly the point you make, Stu, around data. So, AI, which is not artificial and not intelligent, it's just maths. It's statistical mathematics acting upon a large set of data. And if you have a large set of the right data, it can produce fantastic results for the client. But without that data, it is a relatively meaningless exercise. Once that data are assembled, we're beginning to see very significant results produced by the application of new networking, the machine learning. To technology-based, data-derived solutions for our clients, and there are many examples. I'll give you just one or two. We are working with a large financial institution in the city of London that wants to produce, basically, an artificial knowledge base that will perform the task of insurance underwriting. Don't ask me how that works, I'm not a financial guy. But apparently, insurance underwriting is a relatively mechanical task. You have a set of actuarial tables, you have a set of risks, you compare one with the other and produce a premium. We're working with them on that. There is a lot in the manufacturing space, and a surprising amount in healthcare. One of the most personally rewarding examples I've been involved with was the delivery of intelligent heart monitoring to clients with pacemakers. So, the pacemaker is made intelligent and it dumps to a Bluetooth-connected device in the patient's home, and that uploads to an AI-based knowledge system in the Cloud, and the Cloud says, "Sit down, you're going to have a heart attack." And the important element of that is that it says, "Sit down, you're going to have a heart attack" before you've had the heart attack, so you don't have one. A really fantastic example of human-centric interest. So, I think, as a separate subject, AI is largely of academic interest. But as a component of a data-driven solution for a customer, it's rapidly emerging as an important element in our armory, as indeed some other technologies. Like data annealing, and like data analytics, and to a slightly lesser extent at the moment, but I think it will come, blockchain. >> Excellent. So, Glenn, one of the things we always like talking about when we talk to a CDO is how are companies getting along with their data strategy? And I think back four or five years ago when we were first hearing about CDO as a role, it was, you know, the CDO, where do they fit compared to the CIO, what is the changing role of the CIO? So, like you were saying about some of these things, data often can be an afterthought or not necessarily connected, but just as we were saying, data needs to be a critical piece of how companies plan. You gave a great example of medical, obviously. You know, the data can really help transform lives in that environment. So, bring us inside what you're hearing from customers, how are they structuring, and are they really being, I guess, data-driven is one of the terms that I... >> That's a very good question. And the answer is yes to everything. So, one of the most difficult things to estimate, if you're going in to a customer with a client, especially if it's a client that you don't know very well, is exactly what their point of reference is going to be, what their comfort with some of these things is. As a result, we at Fujitsu invested a good deal of effort in going out to our client base and asking them the necessary questions to generate a thing we call the Data Maturity Model. Now the Data Maturity Model is not a new concept, it's a very solid and sound concept, it's been around for a long time. I think what we're trying to do is bring more rigor to that with a very large sample base of our customers. And the model is what you'd expect. There are five levels within it from at Level 1, what is data? To Level 5, where data is continually monitored, continually exploited, and continually developed as part of the business that the organization delivers. So there's a spectrum. In my experience, slightly controversially perhaps, the state of organizations on that Maturity Index varies with geography. And I think it's something to do with acceptance of risk, I think it's something to do with security concerns and liabilities. It's my observation that in the Anglophone world, in England and in the US certainly, there is a higher average awareness of the importance of data and the need to derive business benefit from it than there is, for example, in the Germanophone world, where there are more concerns around security and more regulations around security. They're quite constraining. And as a result, where organizations are a bit more traditional and a bit less aware of the value to be derived from the data. So, people, organizations hit everywhere on this scope, this plane of awareness of data and its potential. But it's definitely the case that the average is always going up. >> Yeah-. >> You only have to look at some of the public stocks, under the stuff in the public domain, to observe that that's happening all the time. >> Yeah, Glenn, I'm curious with the global pandemic happening, are you seeing any impact on that? I've heard some anecdotal data that you talk about some of the companies that are, you know, might not be interested in doing Cloud adoption because they're concerned about security, and all of a sudden realizing they need to take advantage of certain solutions. Or if you look at something like the tracking and tracing, obviously, people are rightfully concerned about personal information and having rights infringed upon. So, what will, in your opinion, are you seeing any early indications as to what this impact will be on how we think about data? >> I think there, again, there are two different dimensions. There's a Darwinian element in the attitudes towards commercial data. As we said right at the start of the conversation, in the current environment, you can see large retailers disappearing at a rate of knots because they haven't been data-aware and data-adopting. That lesson is not lost on other retailers. So, retailers are beginning to do things that in the past they wouldn't have done because of that sort of security concern, but also because of concerns about things like function and performance... and the sheer security that you have in owning your own stuff and therefore being certain of its ownership by you and your retention of the IPR involved. So there is definitely a slackening of that concern and a faster adoption of data exploitation technologies in the commercial sector. In the domestic sector, I think it's very mixed. And again, extremely geography different. In the UK, we have, if I could just talk about my own country for a second, we have this trial of a smartphone COVID-19 tracking app going on on the Isle of Wight. The British media is full to brimming with discussions of the implications of that upon individual liberty, of whether or not it's the nanny state gone mad, of whether or not we should all be not cooperating with it and catching the damn disease anyway because it's a step too far. In Germany, they just implemented it. And everybody went, "Right." (makes click sound) So there are all these different cultural adoptions of these things. But always and forever the trend is upwards. Similar debates around video surveillance technology. So you've got the pressure of security and protecting the public, against intrusion and violation of individual rights. And that debate has got to the stage now where there have been some pilots for threat detection based on video surveillance in the UK that have been stopped. Not so much in Germany. In the US, I don't know, but I guess, you're even more Libertarian than we Brits are, so it's probably more the other way. But with all of these discussions of differences, of culture and nation and area and geography, the trend is definitely upward. So, however the British people resolve that stress, you have to have a tracking app if you want to beat this disease. And that will happen in due course. >> Excellent. Well, Glenn, I'll give you the final takeaway, SUSECON '20, talk about the importance of the Fujitsu and SUSE partnership. >> I think it's a growing part of the base of an ecosystem that's required for all organizations like Fujitsu, like SUSE, that want to reach out and deliver solutions to our customers' business problems, which is after all, what we're here for and what we're all about. Because let's face it. In any sizable organization, the data landscape is unbelievably complicated. You have different formats of data, in RBDs, in unstructured file store, in whatever floats around employees' devices, on social media, for God's sake. Getting all of that out, understanding its relationship to infrastructure, understanding its relation through infrastructure, through application stacks, and service delivery, and then being able to transform that into new applications and new service paradigms that deliver the business benefits that our customers are looking for, is an incredibly complex act. And no one organization is going to be able to do it on its own. So I see the future as one of these growing ecosystems of people that work together some of the time, compete some of the time. Are in what we might call a frenemy relationship. Because we all have to work together to deliver what the customers need. Fujitsu is working with SUSE and our other partners at the forefront of that trying to build economic and commercial and technical partnerships. And I'm sure that will continue through SUSECON '20 and into the future. >> All right, well, Glenn Fitzgerald, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate the updates. >> I've enjoyed it. Thank you for having me. >> All right, much more coverage from SUSECON '20 Digital. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching the CUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of SUSECON Digital, brought to you by SUSE. >> Hi and welcome back. I'm Stuart Miniman. And this is theCUBE coverage of SUSECON Digital '20. Getting to the end of a full day wall-to-wall coverage. We've been rather than everyone getting together in Dublin where we talk to SUSE executives, their customers and their partners where they are around the globe, happy to welcome to the program. Rachel Cassidy, she is the Senior Vice President of Global Channel and Cloud. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me a pleasure to be here. >> All right, so love getting to talk a little bit about the channel, talk about the whole go to market piece, maybe you start a little bit if you would, Channel and Cloud, how do those two go together? Talk to us a little bit about what your organization does? >> Okay, sure. That's great. So I think this is something new for SUSE. So at the beginning of this calendar year, we actually saw a lot of synergy between how you're going to market with our full end to end ecosystem, and really pulling in all of the different partner type-- around with supporting our customer, digital transformation to the Cloud. So that allowed us to pull all of the alliances together that really support end to end that transformation. So under this charter, we're basically looking to fulfill and support our customers, regardless of what route they want to use to help them through this time of digital transformation, enabling them in whatever type of Cloud environment is best suited for their business, whether it's hybrid, or completely public or born in the Cloud, etc. So that's what our team is is focused to do. >> Excellent, interesting to see how those pieces are coming together. Of course, one of the big discussions is, moving more towards that cloud model we've been saying for years, you know, public Cloud really is that bar that everything gets managed to add everything from the consumption model to price and everything and the like. I know one of the pieces is that you have a new partner program, could you lay out, what's changing? How does that all work? Well, what does it mean that how SUSE is going to work with that ecosystem? >> Great. Yeah. So we're very excited about this. We're releasing or unfolding slowly our SUSE one partner program. And this is one holistic partner across all of SUSEs. I think historically, we had some different programs that address certain go to market routes or what have you. And we're pulling that all together, so we have this larger all encompassing offering. Already today, we've just soft launched a brand new partner portal, so there'll be easier look and feel and ability to use our systems, Coming soon, we'll also have an updated Learning Management System behind the scenes, so you'll have easier and more access to different types of training to support the different roles as you going to build out your panel in cloud strategy within your organization, and all of the supporting services and solutions that support that as well. The other big things that we're doing, and this is a preview of what I mean later towards the end of the summer, so this isn't released yet, but I'm giving you that precursor here. Is a different approach. So we're not going to categorize our partners by I'm an IHV or I'm an ISV, what we're going to do is focus on specialization. So how to sell Are you a seller of a solution? Are you a builder? So you're building integrated solutions that other partners in the downstream channel can sell? Are you a managed service provider or services provider or CSP? Yeah, so we'll have those different areas of specialization. But then our partners can opt into one or more and make their business more impactful to their customers and we'll support them along that journey. >> Sounds like that that move is to kind of align more with what you're seeing customers, I'm assuming. What do you expect that seems to have a ripple effect the SUSE's business? >> Yeah, I think it allows us to have more of an impact with our customers make our end and offerings more strategic, and also allows us to really leverage and create relationships across the full partner ecosystem. So it's not just the a SUSE's specific solution, but we're looking at what are the use cases that our customers are trying to solve? And how do we put the different parts and pieces of the ecosystem together to help them get to that next state of success, whatever that looks like for them, and oftentimes that's the trifecta of a multi partner solution. That then we can package bundle support, and enable our partner ecosystem to support customers on as well. >> Excellent, Rachel, how are you seeing some of the changes in that ecosystem impacting what you're doing? We talked a bit about Cloud, AI, of course, is a big discussion point for the event this week. So how are some of those larger technology trends, impacting your channel and go to market? >> Yeah, I mean, the first piece is I think the different partners are changing their businesses, there were traditional IAT, they're looking and expanding their offerings into more services or MSP type offerings. So they're looking to really engage and support their customers through that digital transformation. And that's what the partner program and how we're aligning our organization is in support (mumbles) And then maybe on the technology roadmap, we're looking to move up the stack and be more more impactful with some of those application-driven solutions. So MLN, AI, etc. And how we can be a bigger part of that and enable our partners to be successful in that as well. And then on top of that, I think the other compelling factor that we have to offer is through source initiative. I think especially now in this marketplace, we're seeing a lot of more, you know, it was already becoming mainstream, if you will, but now with COVID-19, it is a catalyst for innovation. And we are all about through open source opportunities and offerings. And that's what we're also enabling our partner ecosystem and our end customers jointly together around so that they can also be successful. >> Yeah, I've had some great conversations covering SUSECON, with your partner ecosystem, talking about the digital transformation, talking about the date. Is their framework, are there some new training that you're rolling out? Maybe you can expand a little bit on that, that digital transformation discussion, how you make sure that you've got a holistic solution for customers between SUSE and it's in an ecosystem. >> Yeah, great question. So one of the things that we're doing is, we're calling them to the one partner stack. And they're modularized, integrated solutions stack. And we're doing these basically top down and bottom up. So from a market demand perspective, where should we be playing? What are the partners that we should be interlocking with to create those end to end solutions that meet high market demand opportunities and challenges that our customers face today. And at the same time, we're also building and defining these from the ground up. So what are the assets that we're seeing from the field without any marketing support or anything just kind of proactively coming through us, help us solve this problem, and pulling those parts and pieces together, and then also making them very modularized. So that they can be almost like a LEGO Block, if you will. So you can plug and play the pieces that are relevant to your specific solutions. And in the partner world, if you have your own storage offering or whatnot, you can use that or you can use art. So it's very modular. And it also really helps to address very tailored civic solutions. We're starting these kind of a horizontal play. So looking at some of these new technologies, like you mentioned, what are we doing in AI veteran to help support that partner ecosystem and an end to end solution. But then the next wave of this is, what can we do more of that repeatable and scalable to help our healthcare providers or automotive opportunities as well. So the next iteration, our neck neck, will be to have these solutions to one partner stack, if you will, for vertical offerings as well. And then if we're sorry, you also mentioned framing. So all of this it's not just building it in the background. We're doing it in the field, with our customers, with our partners and then all of the different supporting components that you need to be successful from how to support, do it yourself marketing tips so that we can empower our partners to build this into their solutions or services are also part of this. And then enablement is a key table stakes for all of it. And not just on the the parts and pieces but the end to end offering. And also looking at that role base. Like what do I need to really help my customer understand the value of this end to end solution all the way down to the support technician or the deployment architect. >> Excellent, so Rachel is both in the keynote and the conversation that I had with Melissa, there was really a celebration of SUSE being fully independent now, for a year. I'm curious what impact that has on the ecosystem, and how does just being an independent open source company impact the relationship that you have? >> I think we've seen a nice uplift and excitement and opportunity from just that. So when people choose or go or embrace an open source option is because they want choice and we are now the largest independent open source company in the world, and we're offering advice and flexibility. And all those values that are key in the open source, culture and world are part of SUSE's culture, which I also think is really important and it resonates through our partner ecosystem, but also then extends to our customers. >> Excellent, I want to give you any final words you want to share with the ecosystem as to what they should be looking for, you give a little bit of a hint for some things coming out in the summer. But final takeaways from SUSECON. >> Yeah, our logo or tagline, if you will, is the power of many. And this isn't something that any one of us can do on our own. And I think especially in this days, environment, all the challenges that we're facing, we're really seeing people come together. And that is the definition of open source. And I've been in this environment for quite some time. I drank the Kool Aid a long, long time ago, and it's important to us. So for the partner ecosystem, like they say, the power of many and work together as one. And I think that's kind of the the message that resonates, and we want to make working with us, whether you're a customer or a partner, easier to go to market, easier to be innovative and find those solutions together. And, part of our overarching mentality is, to simplify, modernize and accelerate. So everything we do are under those three pillars, which I think is really exciting. And I'm excited to be here and be a part of this, especially at this time. >> Well, Rachel Cassidy, thank you so much for updates, I think perfect note to end things on community, obviously something that a big focus at the show, as well as something that is near and dear to the heart of theCUBE team. So it's been a pleasure for us to participate in SUSECON this year and definitely look forward to many more SUSE events in the future. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Stuart thanks for having me. Have a great day. >> All right, make sure to check out theCUBE dot net for all the interviews that we have. That, well, it shows we will be at future. I'm Stuart Miniman, and thank you for joining us for theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Speaker: From around the globe, it's theCube with coverage of SUSECON DIGITAL brought to you by SUSE. >> Welcome back, this is theCube's coverage of SUSECON DIGITAL '20. I'm Stu Miniman and really happy to welcome to the program. We have one of the keynote speakers, Alexander Kocher. He is president and managing director of Elektrobit, really excited to dig in and talk about autonomous vehicles. Alex, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu Miniman, I'm really excited that you pronounced my family name correct because this is quite difficult for you. It's a German name, thank you very much. >> Well, luckily on theCube, we do have lots of global people we have on the program. I try to do my best. My [mumbles] is all I can say really [mumbles]. >> Very difficult to pronounce it. >> Alright, so Alex, obviously autonomous vehicles is one of those use cases that talk a lot about everything from edge computing, to AI, you know, software eating the world, really one of those transformative technologies. Why don't we start with first, Elektrobit, give us a little bit as to, where Elektrobit fit in kind of the global auto landscape. >> Yeah, thank you Stu. So Elektrobit was founded in the late eighties, 1988. And since then, we are really doing embedded to be a pioneer in the embedded software and, providing solutions, software technologies, for the automotive industry. Since then we are powering more than 1 billion devices in much more than 100 million vehicles worldwide. And we are serving the automotive industry since then. So software is really becoming the single biggest enabler of innovation in the car, and software creation is our passion. So we enjoy solving challenging problems, and providing solutions that drive the mobility ecosystem of the future vehicle, where mobility causes zero fatalities, produces low emissions, and is perceived as quality time. This is also our mission and with that, we are providing services, software technologies, and tools for the automotive industry. >> Yeah, it has been fascinating to watch software in the automotive world. You know, I'm old enough to remember that, when you used to take a car in, the first thing they did was put it up and look under the hood and everything. And now pretty much, they plug a cable into the computer and, go to the diagnostic screens before they do anything else. When we talk about autonomous vehicles, I think many people would be familiar. There's really that five stage model of going from helping to fully autonomous. Give us a little bit as to what you're seeing in the trends out there, and how this market has been mature. >> Yeah, I think, the trend in the autonomous vehicles, we are at the moment at level two level two plus to where you still assisting the driver's behavior with various functions. We are starting to be, to go towards a level three hands-off. In the next, couple of, yeah, hopefully just months or single years, and then going from there to a fully autonomous vehicle, where you not only have hands-off, but also eyes off and then hand over the complete control to the car. But since then, it will still be a path. We just heard recently the announcement of all the, that, not only the functionality within the car, but also then the legal environment needs to be in place, so that you also can check that all of the various functions can be approved. I think the first step, which we will see is that we have it in a kind of a clean room environment, which means highways so the hybrid pilot, where you have to have a kind of insured environment and you can predict certain use cases. And with that we are targeting at, with the next generation of the cars, which can help in one or two years. >> Yeah its really interesting stuff, because of course, you know, it would be really simple if we had nothing, but the autobahn with nothing but autonomous vehicles. I'm sure you can have that running perfectly today, but number one, you start going on different roads and number two, you add that ever unpredictable human element when you have the cars that aren't, on the same system that can cause some issues there. I'm curious, anything from a European standpoint, you know, what's the partnership between government and industry on that, and I guess anything else that's different about Europe then maybe what we'd see in North America? >> Yeah, I think the, one of the biggest differences here is as soon as authorities approve cars, then the liability goes to the authority. And America's there is a complete different behavior in that perspective, liability is taken completely by the companies and the debt, of course. Although there are authorities to control certain environment, but the main liability issue stays with the company itself. And this per se is a complete different approach for that. I think technology-wise, we are here and there, on the same level as on the same technology level. And as you can see already in today's drive assistance functions, technology-wise, we are not far ahead. You can already try certain of those functions, for at least a couple of seconds, but in order to really accept and, calculate all the use cases, you need to start step by step. A highway is one of the perfect measures for that. But when you just go, I'm living here in the in Southern Germany, when you just go to an ancient city, city center, like we do have here Nuremberg, it can be really, really tricky that you consider all the specific use cases. So, here we need to optimize algorithms. The technology are also the horsepower in terms of processing load and of course, security of the census. So here is still for full autonomy still a path to go. >> Alright, so Alex, see, you're part of the keynote, here at SUSECON, obviously, you know, innovation, is a key topic as well as open force and community is a big topic of the show overall. Tell us a little bit about the partnership between Elektrobit and SUSE. >> Yeah, thank you very much for this question. This is really an exciting thing. So two companies like SUSE and Elekrobit, by the way, we have been founded here both, very, very in recent area, so no big area. So SUSE is a leader in delivering mission critical, Linux and container technologies in several industries and Elektrobit brings in the automotive experience. And what we aim for is to really provide the future software platform for automobiles that fulfills all the key requirements around openness, about reuse and, also about a huge pool of open source methodologies, and new modules so that we have a tremendous pool of, patents as well as a tremendous pool of innovation here. So this is the key topic. The automotive industry as such is changing, changing in a way that you continue to develop the technologies along the life cycle of the car in order to really enable our customers to download new functions and new services during the life cycle of the car. This methodology is already used in several other industries. And here we introduced with this partnership exactly the basis for that, in order to really, prepare our customers to focus on their differentiating technology and differentiating features. >> Yeah, fascinating thinking, you brought up, you know, the skill set of course is a key piece. Any industry that's going through change, we wonder who can come along and who's ready for that. It sounded like you were saying that, Linux and the other technologies in this space, there is a large pool of tech of knowledge out there, and that can help really kind of the growth next generation of the automotive industry. Am I getting that right? >> Yes, I mean, for sure the development methodology in open stores and embedded is completely different, but specifically when it comes to liability. So here, there, you need to comply to certain standards of cost, but this is one topic. The other thing is that really the innovation, who the innovation span you have in open source, as well as the modules already existing and the best practices from other industries. This is a tremendous advantage. And also one thing is in terms of changing in our industry, the automotive industry, the development methodology, excuse me, the reuse of, certain platforms is limited as soon as you have to jump to new generations of processes of software modules and so on and so forth. Here, we can with the partnership also leverage the experience we have, technologies which are also for a long period of time, backward compatible and reusable in the essential lower layers of the software, which you need to have by also complying to the relevant standards for a performance as well as a safety requirement. >> Yeah, really interesting mix of balancing that, differentiation in the marketplace while still being an upgradable path. I'm curious, you talked a little bit about the open source model. One of the key things, when you talk about going through a digital transformation is data. There's obviously a lot of data if you talk about autonomous vehicles. We see everybody about, you know, how many gigabytes per hour and all the maps and everything there. What is the role of data in this entire process? Is there sharing of data between some of the different players involved? >> So, yeah, data is I would say data is one is, first of all, data is in channel independent from industry the new currency. This is one thing, also realized in the automotive industry here. Of course we need to consider, certain privacy rules independent from, whether it's the car maker itself or its project or the driver. So we need to respect it, but independent from that, car's one of the most accurate sensors we do have, in our environment. And of course creating data, are we talking about one terabyte per day roundabout? And this is already now reused amongst, common factors amongst the industry. Just think about a certain, here as an acquisition of several players in the industry where they are sharing map data, because it doesn't make a difference, for a GM car, for a Ford car, for a BMW car, for a Daimler car. When you use the same road, the road stays, of course, the brand and the car changes, but the information about the road infrastructure is exactly the same. And this is the first topic which, has to be, or will be shared and is already shared. Second thing is traffic information where you have a mobile providers, in there, and this already is considered, and there are a lot of discussion and, or any business models undergoing or, in preparation for that. >> Yeah, well, you hope the roads don't change. I live in the Boston area, there's a times if you take six months off and all of a sudden you're like, wait, this road used to go a certain way. At least it's a lot easier to update, your software than it is for older vehicles that I'm driving. You talked a little bit about privacy. I know cybersecurity is one of the aspects that Elektrobit involved. Talk to us a little bit about the security aspect and, your company's experiences there. >> The security with transferring data into the car or outside of the car, data security is a key feature. It's just a must. So, in former times as Elektrobit as we are coming from inside the car has an embedded software provider. We protected really the devices within the car, for example, the automator from manipulation and, generated certain securities in the internal bus with our customers. But this is no longer enough. You need to go outside the car. So, when you transfer data from the cloud into the car, or vice versa and therefore cyber security, to predict the whole chain inside the car communication, they're all interfaces where you can connect devices or the backend, from where you transport the information. For them, recently Elektrobit acquired a company in Israel two years ago. But also we know that in the basic technology from the SUSE distribution, there is already a lot of technology in there, which makes data transfer really, really safe, sorry, secure, so that you can trust that the data and really keep the privacy you need to have for specific regions. >> Alright, well, this is a very fast moving industry. Give us a little bit as to what you see happening both the 24 months. What are some of the kind of major opportunities as well as challenges that are being faced? >> Yeah, I think, one of the biggest opportunities we will see in the upcoming directly next generation, is the car really becoming a part of the internet. I think with that, a lot of the business models from the common effector itself, from the suppliers need to change. So that really the common effector enables their customers to continuously update their device mobile device, namely the car. It's very similar to those devices at the moment from technology which you already have then suffocate in our pocket. Of course you cannot put the car into your pocket, but you want to have the same convenience, with new services, with new functions. And I think this is the most of, and the most exciting opportunity of the car. With that you need to have new technologies on platform. You need to have data security, you enable completely new business models. And this has changed our lives completely. Also our business compete. And I think these are the most important and the most exciting changes in the near future, as the next generation already is under preparation and will be launched really, really, really soon. And of course, second topic is the autonomous driving. It goes step by step as just as is testing the beginning. And this is the second opportunity then for many other companies making business with the time when the drivers then, have quality time and, can do something different than just hearing the car. >> Excellent, so much excitement in what is happening in industry. Definitely one we want to watch. Alex wannna give you the final word, SUSECON the partnership between Elektrobit and SUSE the final takeaways that you have for the event. >> Yeah, thanks enough. It's just exciting for us to have such a great partner like SUSECON experienced partner. It brings lots of new aspects into our industry helps us to provide the right solutions. And with that, we are sure that we can generate and we will generate the basis of the next smart cars of our customer in terms of softer platform. Thank you very much. >> Alex, thank you so much for joining us. I'm Stu Miniman, I'll have more coverage here from SUSECON DIGITAL '20. Thank you for watching theCube. (bright music)

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

>> Announcer: TheCube presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2022, theCube's continuous wall to wall coverage, Dave Vellante with John Furrier. Keith Basil is here as the General Manager for the Edge Business Unit at SUSE. Keith, welcome to theCube, man good to see you. >> Great to be here, it's my first time here and I've seen many shows and you guys are the best. >> Thanks you. >> Thank you very much. >> Big fans of SUSE you know, we've had Melissa on several times. >> Yes. >> Let's start with kind of what you guys are doing here at Discover. >> Well, we're here to support our wonderful partner HPE, as you know SUSE's products and services are now being integrated into the GreenLake offering. So that's very exciting for us. >> Yeah. Now tell us about your background. It's quite interesting you've kind of been in the mix in some really cool places. Tell us a little bit about yourself. >> Probably the most relevant was I used to work at Red Hat, I was a Product Manager working in security for OpenStack and OpenShift working with DOD customers in the intelligence community. Left Red Hat to go to Rancher, started out there as VP of Edge Solutions and then transitioned over to VP of Product for all of Rancher. And then obviously we know SUSE acquired Rancher and as of November 1st, of 2020, I think it was. >> Dave: 2020. >> Yeah, yeah time is flying. I came over, I still remained VP of Product for Rancher for Cloud Native Infrastructure. And I was working on the edge strategy for SUSE and about four months ago we internally built three business units, one for the Linux business, one for enterprise container management, basically the Rancher business, and then the newly minted business unit was the Edge business. And I was offered the role to be GM for that business unit and I happily accepted it. >> Very cool. I mean the market dynamics since the 2018 have changed dramatically, IBM bought Red Hat. A lot of customers said, "Hmm let's see what other alternatives are out there." SUSE popped its head up. You know, Melissa's been quite, you know forthcoming about that. And then you acquire Rancher in 2020, IPO in 2021. That kind of gives you another tailwind. So there's a new market when you go from 2018 to 2022, it's a completely changed dynamic. >> Yes and I'm going to answer your question from the Rancher perspective first, because as we were at Rancher, we had experimented with different flavors of the underlying OS underneath Kubernetes or Kubernetes offerings. And we had, as I said, different flavors, we weren't really operating system people for example. And so post-acquisition, you know, one of my internal roles was to bring the two halves of the house together, the philosophies together where you had a cloud native side in the form of Rancher, very progressive leading innovative products with Rancher with K3s for example. And then you had, you know, really strong enterprise roots around compliance and security, secure supply chain with the enterprise grade Linux. And what we found out was SUSE had been building a version of Linux called SLE Micro, and it was perfectly designed for Edge. And so what we've done over that time period since the acquisition is that we've brought those two things together. And now we're using Kubernetes directives and philosophies to manage all the way down to the operating system. And it is a winning strategy for our customers. And we're really excited about that. >> And what does that product look like? Is that a managed service? How are customers consuming that? >> It could be a managed service, it's something that our managed service providers could embrace and offer to their customers. But we have some customers who are very sophisticated who want to do the whole thing themselves. And so they stand up Rancher, you know at a centralized location at cloud GreenLake for example which is why this is very relevant. And then that control plane if you will, manages thousands of downstream clusters that are running K3s at these Edge locations. And so that's what the complete stack looks like. And so when you add the Linux capability to that scenario we can now roll a new operating system, new kernel, CVE updates, build that as an OCI container image registry format, right? Put that into a registry and then have that thing cascade down through all the downstream clusters and up through a rolling window upgrade of the operating system underneath Kubernetes. And it is a tremendous amount of value when you talk to customers that have this massive scale. >> What's the impact of that, just take us through what happens next. Is it faster? Is it more performant? Is it more reliable? Is it processing data at the Edge? What's the impact of the customer? >> Yes, the answer is yes to that. So let's actually talk about one customer that we we highlighted in our keynote, which is Home Depot. So as we know, Kubernetes is on fire, right? It is the technology everybody's after. So by being in demand, the skills needed, the people shortage is real and people are commanding very high, you know, salaries. And so it's hard to attract talent is the bottom line. And so using our software and our solution and our approach it allows people to scale their existing teams to preserve those precious human resources and that human capital. So that now you can take a team of seven people and manage let's say 3000 downstream stores. >> Yeah it's like the old SRE model for DevOps. >> Correct. >> It's not servers they're managing one to many. >> Yes. >> One to many clusters. >> Correct so you've got the cluster, the life cycle of the cluster. You already have the application life cycle with the classic DevOps. And now what we've built and added to the stack is going down one step further, clicking down if you will to managing the life cycle of the operating system. So you have the SUSE enterprise build chain, all the value, the goodness, compliance, security. Again, all of that comes with that build process. And now we're hooking that into a cloud native flow that ends up downstream in our customers. >> So what I'm hearing is your Edge strategy is not some kind of bespoke, "Hey, I'm going after Edge." It connects to the entire value chain. >> Yes, yeah it's a great point. We want to reuse the existing philosophies that are being used today. We don't want to create something net new, cause that's really the point in leverage that we get by having these teams, you know, do these things at scale. Another point I'm going to make here is that we've defined the Edge into three segments. One is the near Edge, which is the realm of the-- >> I was going to ask about this, great. >> The telecommunications companies. So those use cases and profiles look very different. They're almost data center lite, right? So you've had regional locations, central offices where they're standing up gear classic to you machines, right? So things you find from HPE, for example. And then once you get on the other side of the access device right? The cable modem, the router, whatever it is you get into what we call the far Edge. And this is where the majority of the use cases reside. This is where the diversity of use cases presents itself as well. >> Also security challenges. >> Security challenges. Yes and we can talk about that following in a moment. And then finally, if you look at that far Edge as a box, right? Think of it as a layer two domain, a network. Inside that location, on that network you'll have industrial IOT devices. Those devices are too small to run a full blown operating system such as Linux and Kubernetes in the stack but they do have software on them, right? So we need to be able to discover those devices and manage those devices and pull data from those devices and do it in a cloud native way. So that's what we called the tiny Edge. And I stole that name from the folks over at Microsoft. Kate and Edrick are are leading a project upstream called Akri, A-K-R-I, and we are very much heavily involved in Akri because it will discover the industrial IOT devices and plug those into a local Kubernetes cluster running at that location. >> And Home Depot would fit into the near edge is that correct? >> Yes. >> Yeah okay. >> So each Home Depot store, just to bring it home, is a far Edge location and they have over 2,600 of these locations. >> So far Edge? You would put far Edge? >> Keith: Far Edge yes. >> Far edge, okay. >> John: Near edge is like Metro. Think of Metro. >> And Teleco, communication, service providers MSOs, multi-service operators. Those guys are-- >> Near Edge. >> The near edge, yes. >> Don't you think, John's been asking all week about machine learning and AI, in that tiny Edge. We think there's going to be a lot of AI influencing. >> Keith: Oh absolutely. >> Real time. And it actually is going to need some kind of lighter weight you know, platform. How do you fit into that? >> So going on this, like this model I just described if you go back and look at the SUSECON 2022 demo keynote that I did, we actually on stage stood up that exact stack. So we had a single Intel nook running SLE Micro as we mentioned earlier, running K3s and we plugged into that device, a USB camera which was automatically detected and it loaded Akri and gave us a driver to plug it into a container. Now, to answer your question, that is the point in time where we bring in the ML and the AI, the inference and the pattern recognition, because that camera when you showed the SUSE plush doll, it actually recognized it and put a QR code up on the screen. So that's where it all comes together. So we tried to showcase that in a complete demo. >> Last week, I was here in Vegas for an event Amazon and AWS put on called re:Mars, machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. >> Okay. >> Kind of but basically for me was an industrial edge show. Cause The space is the ultimate like glam to edge is like, you're doing stuff in space that's pretty edgy so to speak, pun intended. But the industrial side of the Edge is going to, we think, accelerate with machine learning. >> Keith: Absolutely. >> And with these kinds of new portable I won't say flash compute or just like connected power sources software. The industrial is going to move really fast. We've been kind of in a snails pace at the Edge, in my opinion. What's your reaction to that? Do you think we're going to see a mass acceleration of growth at the Edge industrial, basically physical, the physical world. >> Yes, first I agree with your assessment okay, wholeheartedly, so much so that it's my strategy to go after the tiny Edge space and be a leader in the industrial IOT space from an open source perspective. So yes. So a few things to answer your question we do have K3s in space. We have a customer partner called Hypergiant where they've launched satellites with K3s running in space same model, that's a far Edge location, probably the farthest Edge location we have. >> John: Deep Edge, deep space. >> Here at HPE Discover, we have a business unit called SUSE RGS, Rancher Government Services, which focuses on the US government and DOD and IC, right? So little bit of the world that I used to work in my past career. Brandon Gulla the CTO of of that unit gave a great presentation about what we call the tactical Edge. And so the same technology that we're using on the commercial and the manufacturing side. >> Like the Jedi contract, the tactical military Edge I think. >> Yes so imagine some of these military grade industrial IOT devices in a disconnected environment. The same software stack and technology would apply to that use case as well. >> So basically the tactical Edge is life? We're humans, we're at the Edge? >> Or it's maintenance, right? So maybe it's pulling sensors from aircraft, Humvees, submarines and doing predictive analysis on the maintenance for those items, those assets. >> All these different Edges, they underscore the diversity that you were just talking Keith and we also see a new hardware architecture emerging, a lot of arm based stuff. Just take a look at what Tesla's doing at the tiny Edge. Keith Basil, thanks so much. >> Sure. >> For coming on theCube. >> John: Great to have you. >> Grateful to be here. >> Awesome story. Okay and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier. This is day three of HPE Discover 2022. You're watching theCube, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman coming to you from our Boston area studio and this is a special CUBE Conversation, we always love talking to startups around the industry, understanding how they're creating innovation, doing new things out there, and oftentimes one of the exits for those companies is they do get acquired, and happy to welcome back to the program one of our CUBE alumni, Sheng Liang, he is the cofounder and CEO of Rancher, today there was an announcement for a definitive acquisition of SUSE, who our audience will know well, we were at SUSECON, so Sheng, first of all, thank you for joining us, and congratulations to you and the team on joining SUSE here in the near future. >> Thank you, Stu, I'm glad to be here. >> All right, so Sheng, why don't you give our audience a little bit of context, so I've known Rancher since the very early days, I knew Rancher before most people had heard the word Kubernetes, it was about containerization, it was about helping customers, there was that cattles versus pets, so that Rancher analogy was, hey, we're going to be your rancher and help you deal with that sprawl and all of those pieces out there, where you don't want to know them by name and the like, so help us understand how what was announced today is meeting along the journey that you set out for with Rancher. >> Absolutely, so SUSE is the largest independent opensource software company in the world, and they're a leader in enterprise Linux. Today they announced they have signed a definitive agreement to acquire Rancher, so we started Rancher about six years ago, as Stu said, to really build the next generation enterprise compute platform. And in the beginning, we thought we're going to just base our technology based on Docker containers, but pretty soon Kubernetes was just clearly becoming an industry standard, so Rancher actually became the most widely used enterprise Kubernetes platform, so really with the combination of Rancher and SUSE going forward, we're going to be able to supply the enterprise container platform of choice for lots and lots of customers out there. >> Yeah, just for our audience that might not be as familiar with Rancher, why don't you give us your position in where we are with the Kubernetes landscape, I've talked about many times on theCUBE, a few years ago it was all about "Hey, are we going to have some distribution war?" Rancher has an option in that space, but today it's multicloud, Rancher works with all of the cloud Kubernetes versions, so what is it that Rancher does uniquely, and of course as you mentioned, opensource is a key piece of what you're doing. >> Exactly, Stu, thanks for the question. So this is really a good lead-up into describing what Rancher does, and some of the industry dynamics, and the great opportunity we see with SUSE. So many of you, I'm sure, have heard about Kubernetes, Kubernetes is this container orchestration platform that basically works everywhere, and you can deploy all kinds of applications, and run these applications through Kubernetes, it doesn't really matter, fundamentally, what infrastructure you use anymore, so the great thing about Kubernetes is whether you deploy your apps on AWS or on Azure, or on on-premise bare metal, or vSphere clusters, or out there in IoT gateways and 5G base stations and surveillance cameras, literally everywhere, Kubernetes will run, so it's, in our world I like to think about Kubernetes as the standard for compute. If you kind of make the analogy, what's the standard of networking, that's TCPIP, so networking used to be very different, decades ago, there used to be different kinds of networking and at best you had a local area network for a small number of computers to talk to each other, but today with TCPIP as a standard, we have internet, we have Cisco, we have Google, we have Amazon, so I really think as successful as cloud computing has been, and how much impact it has had to actually push digital transformation and app modernization forward, a lot of organizations are kind of stuck between their desire to take advantage of a cloud provider, one specific cloud provider, all the bells and whistles, versus any cloud provider, not a single cloud provider can actually supply infrastructure for everything that a large enterprise would need. You may be in a country, you may be in some remote locations, you may be in your own private data center, so the market really really demands a standard form of compute infrastructure, and that turned out to be Kubernetes, that is the true, Kubernetes started as a way Google internally ran their containers, but what it really hit the stride was a couple years ago, people started realizing for once, compute could be standardized, and that's where Rancher came in, Rancher is a Kubernetes management platform. We help organizations tie together all of their Kubernetes clusters, regardless where they are, and you can see this is a very natural evolution of organizations who embark on this Kubernetes journey, and by definition Rancher has to be open, because who, this is such a strategic piece of software, who would want their single point of control for all compute to be actually closed and proprietary? Rancher is 100% opensource, and not only that, Rancher works with everyone, it really doesn't matter who implements Kubernetes for you, I mean Rancher could implement Kubernetes for you, we have a Kubernetes distro as well, we actually have, we're particularly well-known for Kubernetes distro design for resource constrained deployments on the edge, called K3S, some of you might have heard about it, but really, we don't care, I mean we work with upstream Kubernetes distro, any CNCF-compliant Kubernetes distro, or one of many many other popular cloud hosted Kubernetes services like EKS, GKE, AKS, and with Rancher, enterprise can start to treat all of these Kubernetes clusters as fungible resources, as catalysts, so that is basically our vision, and they can focus on modernizing their application, running their application reliably, and that's really what Rancher's about. >> Okay, so Sheng, being acquired by SUSE, I'd love to hear a little bit, what does this mean for the product, what does it mean for your customers, what does it mean for you personally? According to Crunchbase, you'd raised 95 million dollars, as you said, over the six years. It's reported by CNBC, that the acquisition's in the ballpark of 600 to 700 million, so that would be about a 6X increment over what was invested, not sure if you can comment on the finances, and would love to hear what this means going forward for Rancher and its ecosystem. >> Yeah, actually, I know there's tons of rumors going around, but the acquisition price, SUSE's decided not to disclose the acquisition price, so I'm not going to comment on that. Rancher's been a very cash-efficient business, there's been no shortage of funding, but even amounts to 95 million dollars that we raised, we really haven't spent majority of it, we probably spent just about a third of the money we raised, in fact our last run to fundraise was just three, four month ago, it was a 40 million dollar series D, and we didn't even need that, I mean we could've just continued with the series C money that we raised a couple years ago, which we barely started spending either. So the great thing about Rancher's business is because we're such a product-driven company, with opensource software, you develop a unique product that actually solves a real problem, and then there's just no barrier to adoption, so this stuff just spreads organically, people download and install, and then they put it in mission-critical production. Then they seek us out for commercial subscription, and the main value they're getting out of commercial subscription is really the confidence that they can actually rely on the software to power their mission-critical workload, so once they really start using Rancher, they recognize that Rancher as an organization provide, so this business model's worked out really well for us. Vast majority of our deals are based on inbound leads, and that's why we've been so efficient, and that's I think one of the things that really attracted SUSE as well. It's just, these days you don't just want a business that you have to do heavy weight, heavy duty, old fashioned enterprise (indistinct), because that's really expensive, and when so much of that value is building through some kind of a bundling or locking, sooner or later customers know better, right? They want to get away. So we really wanted to provide a opensource, and open, more important than opensource is actually open, lot of people don't realize there are actually lots of opensource software even in the market that are not really quite open, that might seem like a contradiction, but you can have opensource software which you eventually package it in a way, you don't even make the source code available easily, you don't make it easy to rebuild the stuff, so Rancher is truly open and opensource, people just download opensource software, run it in the day they need it, our Enterprise subscription we will support, the day they don't need it, they will actually continue to run the same piece of software, and we'd be happy to continue to provide them with patches and security fixes, so as an organization we really have to provide that continuous value, and it worked out really well, because, this is such a important piece of software. SUSE has this model that I saw on their website, and it really appeals to us, it's called the power of many, so SUSE, turns out they not only completely understand and buy into our commitment to open and opensource, but they're completely open in terms of supporting the whole ecosystem, the software stack, that not only they produce, but their partners produce, in many cases even their competitors produce, so that kind of mentality really resonated with us. >> Yeah, so Sheng, you wrote in the article announcing the acquisition that when the deal closes, you'll be running engineering and innovation inside of SUSE, if I remember right, Thomas Di Giacomo has a similar title to that right now in SUSE, course Melissa Di Donato is the CEO of SUSE. Of course the comparison that everyone will have is you are now the OpenShift to SUSE. You're no stranger to OpenShift, Rancher competes against RedHat OpenShift out on the market. I wonder if you could share a little bit, what do you see in your customer base for people out there that says "Hey, how should I think of Rancher "compared to what RedHat's been doing with OpenShift?" >> Yeah, I mean I think RedHat did a lot of good things for opensource, for Linux, for Kubernetes, and for the community, OpenShift being primarily a Kubernetes distro and on top of that, RedHat built a number of enhanced capabilities, but at the end of the day, we don't believe OpenShift by itself actually solves the kind of problem we're seeing with customers today, and that's why as much investment has gone into OpenShift, we just see no slowdown, in fact an acceleration of demand of Rancher, so we don't, Rancher always thrived by being different, and the nice thing about SUSE being a independent company, as opposed to a part of a much larger organization like RedHat, is where we're going to be as an organization 100% focused on bringing the best experience to customers, and solve customers' business problems, as they transform their legacy application suite into cloud-native infrastructure. So I think the opportunity is so large, and there's going to be enough market there for multiple players, but we measure our success by how many people, how much adoption we're actually getting out of our software, and I said in the beginning, Rancher is the most widely used enterprise Kubernetes platform, and out of that, what real value we're delivering to our customers, and I think we solve those problems, we'll be able to build a fantastic business with SUSE. >> Excellent. Sheng, I'm wondering if we could just look back a little bit, you're no stranger to acquisitions, remember back when Cloud.com was acquired by Citrix, back when we had the stack wars between CloudStack and OpenStack and the like, I'm curious what lessons you learned having gone through that, that you took away, and prepared you for what you're doing here, and how you might do things a little bit differently, with the SUSE acquisition. >> Yeah, my experience with Cloud.com acquired by Citrix was very good, in fact, and a lot of times, you really got to figure out a way to adapt to actually make sure that Rancher as a standalone business, or back then, Cloud.com was a standalone business, how are they actually fitting to the acquirer's business as a whole? So when Cloud.com was acquired, it was pretty clear, as attractive as the CloudStack business was, really the bigger prize for Citrix was to actually modernize and cloudify their desktop business, which absolutely was like a two billion dollar business, growing to three billion dollars back then, I think it's even bigger now, with now everyone working remote. So we at Citrix, we not only continued to grow the CloudStack business, but more importantly, one of the things I'm the most proud of is we really played up a crucial role in modernizing and cloudifying the Citrix mainline business. So this time around, I think the alignment between what Rancher does and what SUSE does is even more apparent, obviously, until the deal actually closes, we're not really allowed to actually plan or execute on some of the integration synergies, but at a higher level, I don't see any difficulty for SUSE to be able to effectively market, and service their global base of customers, using the Rancher technology, so it's just the synergy between Kubernetes and Linux is just so much stronger, and in some sense, I think I've used this term before, Kubernetes is almost like the new Linux, so it just seems like a very natural place for SUSE to evolve into anyway, so I'm very very bullish about the potential synergy with the acquisition, I just can't wait to roll up my hands and get going as soon as the deal closes. >> All right, well Sheng, thank you so much for joining us, absolutely from our standpoint, we look at it, it's a natural fit of what Rancher does into SUSE, as you stated. The opensource vision, the community, and customer-focused absolutely align, so best of luck with the integration, looking forward to seeing you when you have your new role and hearing more about Rancher's journey, now part of SUSE. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you Stu, it's always great talking to you. >> All right, and be sure, we'll definitely catch up with Rancher's team at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon European show, which is of course virtual, as well as many other events down the road. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with coverage of SUSECON Digital, brought you by SUSE. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of SUSECON Digital. And really excited to welcome to the program a first time guest, and he's relatively fresh off the keynote, Alexander Kocher, who is the President and Managing Director of Elektrobit, talking about autonomous vehicles. Alex, thanks so much or joinin' us. >> Thank you, Stu, for inviting me. >> All right, so you know, definitely really interesting technologies, and a lot of talent. So many of the ways we talk about in the IT industry, to talk about cloud computing, edge impacting things, how AI fits into the world, and the balance between people and technology. Well, your company's living it. So why don't we start a little bit. Elektrobit, at least from the research I've done and from the keynote, you are a software company if I have it right. And autonomous vehicles is really what you're driving for. But give our audience a little bit of Elektrobit where you fit in the market today. >> Yeah, Elektrobit, so you can say we are software creatrs unlocking the future of mobility. We are pioneering software in the automotive industry since more than 30 years, empowering already now more than 1 billion devices, in hundreds of millions of cars, and serving since more than 30 years the automotive industry. So as software is becoming the second biggest enabler of the innovation in the car, we are driving this with our technologies. We are focusing on software infrastructure solutions, so coming from the deep, deep layers in the car, up to the HMI, up to the user interface, and providing there specific technologies for really building the basis, and able our customers to focus on their innovations. So this is car infrastructure software. This is software for autonomous driving, as you said. And this is application software mainly in the tooling to create fancy and good-looking user interfaces in modern vehicles. >> Yeah, wow, 30 years. You know most people don't think about software that long in the automotive industry. Of course anybody that owned a car understands that a lot of times it no longer, ya know, people going under the hood, but they're plugging something in and going on a computer, understand what that is. If you could, give us a little bit, what are the trends going on? We've been talking for the last couple a years, if you talk from an autonomous vehicle stand point. Probably people have seen the five stages model that's been put out there, everything from some driver-assist technologies, to a fully autonomous vehicle. But what are you seeing, your software, the companies you supply to and the users, what's happening there? >> So, I would class the trends at the moment in our industry in three blocks. There is electrification, where software is for sure playing a role, but is more used as a supporting technology. Here dominating innovation is coming from other technologies like battery, fuel cells, charging mechanisms, and so on. But then the second trend and the third trend, automated driving and connectivity, to really make the car part of the internet, these are two mega trends where software is dominating the scene, and really also dominating the value of the car as well. And I think these are the trends. We need for all of those to develop new car connectors, similar to server infrastructures already, so that you can seamlessly integrate applications, services from the cloud into the car. And I think these are the trends. And the partnership we are the moment working with SUSE is really coming into play as well to combine experiences from other industries, from other technologies, open source technologies with the embedded world. And create added value for our customer. >> Yeah so let's dig into that SUSE partnership a little bit. Obviously community is a big thing that's talked about there, at the show and from SUSE's customers. There's what can we learn, what is the role of open source, and how do we really enable innovation? So what's important about the partnership with SUSE? >> I think, let me give a little bit of a background. So when becoming an IT device, the amount of software, the complexity is increasing like hell. What he have at the moment, round about 10% created by software in the car, we will see 30% value created by software in 10 years from now. And this is done by a disruptive change in the development model. At the moment we stopped developing functions and features at the point when we introduce the car into the market. This will completely change. Just think about a mobile device like I have it here in my hand. During the whole life cycle of this device, which is of course much shorter than the life cycle of a car, you will innovate and update functions here. This will also be introduced in the next generation, which is under development at the moment, of cars. So that you can update applications, new services during the whole life cycle of the car. And this requires new platforms. It doesn't stop at the introduction of the car. It will continue over a real, real long period of time, years it takes, even. We have a long maintenance cycles. And therefore you need to have new partnership models, and also other technologies where this is already applied with other technologies in other industries. And here our partnership really comes into play, where we need to even get other talent pools. other pools of creativity, other pools of and forces of innovation, so that we really enable with existing methods, new methods, our customers to focus on their differentiating functions to compete against their competitor. And here exactly our partnership is targeting it. >> Okay so it sounds like we're talking specifically Linux means that there's a common underlying programming model, and that there's a skill set pool out there. Am I getting that right? >> Yes, correct. At the moment, so the automotive industry stands for reliable, high performance, high quality of cars and maintaining these features and essential functions over a long, long period of time. But when using embedded technologies, you are endangered always to re-implement it again and again and reuse is not necessarily that what is implemented here from one generation to the other, completely innovated sometimes, And here with other technologies, like you're doing with Linux for example, an open source, you open up a complete new field of innovation and creativity, and of course also access to talent pools, which is very much limited at the very moment in the embedded world as well. >> Alex, I'm curious how Elektrobit thinks about data. Number one, all the training data, how AI is done. Is there any industry sharing going on with that discussion? Let's start there and then maybe we'll talk a little bit about security when we get through the basic data points. >> (laughs) Yeah so, indeed, just think about cars. One of the most accurate sensor in our environment, with all the sensors you have, camera sensors, radio sensors, liter sensors, and so on and so forth, which create a hell lot amount of data, a terabyte by day. And of course this is something which needs to be shared, because the road infrastructure, we talked about this beforehand, is the same independent, whether it's a BMW car, whether it's a GM car, whether it's a Ford car, or a Daimler car, or a Toyota. So it's for all the cars the same car infrastructure. And of course there's a lot of discussion ongoing to share this data. Although now when making business out of that, the business model needs to, as you mentioned, for sure recognize and respect the privacy of the data in order to make business out of that. >> Excellent-- >> So then--Sorry >> Please, please continue. >> So yes, I think there is discussion ongoing. And already in, for example, in map data and traffic control, there is already ongoing the share of the data amongst the manufacturers as well. >> Excellent. And of course, security is paramount. When I look at Elektrobit, cyber security is prominent in the automotive discussion. How does that play in? What's the experience that you've had there from the security side. >> Yeah, so Elektrobit, so we built up our security, but really coming from inside the car. Now three years ago we acquired a company with out mother company together which is now integrated and consolidated within Elektrobit. It's called Argus Cyber Security from Tel Aviv in Israel. And with that we are now able to really provide solutions, end to end solutions from deep inside the car up to the cloud, so that the data stream is secure to the highest standards of security, of course. And this is, on the long side, really securing remote control, maintenance of the car, but also then privacy in terms when you download new services, when you provide information into the cloud where you are. For example we talked abut this data as new currency from the sensors existing in the car. So for that reason exactly we acquired this company with their technologies we are able to provide end to end solutions also for the existing software we are providing to our customers. >> Right, Alex, I'm curious just when you talk about autonomous vehicles, anything distinct about Europe? I think about the challenge and the opportunity. Number one, you're in Germany. You've got some of the best highways in the world. Well thought-out, really well architected. But throughout Europe you also have some the oldest cities where it could be really challenging to traverse. So anything different you might be able to share with our audience about what we should look for for that journey of autonomous vehicle in Europe? >> So... basically your question, already lined it out. So yes, I think autonomous driving and it's starting with functions like hybrid pilot so that you really create a kind of a clean room, where you have a very well-defined environment, where you can start to drive autonomous, and really hands off, eyes off, so level three, level four. In old cities, the structure is yeah, grown, grown over hundreds of years. So it's for sure not foreseen for autonomous driving, at that point in time. Or let's say at that point in time you had an autonomous vehicular horse which found all the time the stable. But nowadays it's a little bit different. So the more difficult environment is for sure the center of cities. And there it will take a while. But we are on the go by going really step by step from a very well-defined environment like a highway, where you can define certain use cases. And with the evolution of sensors, with the evolution of algorithms, with the evolution of processing power, then go step by step to a more complex environment like inner cities. >> Excellent. What should people be looking for when it comes to autonomous vehicles? What can you give us on the next 12 to 24 months, what you're expecting in the industry? >> So I think at the moment, I think in the 12 to, we're still in the face when it comes to autonomous driving, we have driver assistance functions evolving from there. A level two, level two plus. Level three functions where you really then have hands off, will probably come in two, three, four years. Here it's not only the industry by itself who is the limiting factor, but also the regulations on the outside. We just recently saw the announcement of Audi that homologation related to topics at the moment not clear. This is also to be considered. Technology is already prepared, ie, I'm now, even with driver-assistance functions, able to drive. I had an experience with my car by 200km/hr around the curve, and pulling the steers a little bit off So it's still in the face. You have to be aware that you can control. So the function itself is already existing. But homologation that you really can do this for more than 10 seconds, this is the critical thing. And really be prepared techonology for all the eventual things. So here we have limiting factors also from the regulations around that. And this is basically what we have to deal with. So just recently announced by Audi A8 in the introduction. >> Excellent stuff. All right, Alex, I want to give you the final word. Just share with the audience at SUSECON, what it means for Elektrobit to participate in this partnership. >> Yeah, I think the main thing of this partnership is really that we... We are enabled to really provide and infrastructure which fulfills the complete requirements of the car industry. So long-term maintenance, enablement of secure downloads during the whole life cycle of the car, and reusabilty, backward compatibility which is very important thing as well, when you produce technologies for products which have a very long product life cycle. And with the experience SUSE brings into play from other industries, with their solutions, with their Linux distributions and container technologies, with our experience from the automotive industry, I'm really sure that with that partnership, we enable our customers to focus on their innovations, and we enable ourselves to provide the basic solutions for the industry, and for... new future intelligent vehicles. >> All right, well, thank you so much for sharing all of the updates. Fascinating stuff. Thank you so much for joining. >> Thank you, Stu, for inviting me. >> All right, lots more coverage from SUSECON Digital '20. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante with theCUBE, and welcome to this special CUBE conversation. I've been running a CEO series for the last several weeks, talking to leaders about how they're dealing with the COVID-19 crisis and really, trying to understand how they've been navigating through and communicating to their employees, and their customers. I'm really excited to have Melissa Di Donato here, she's the CEO of SUSE. Melissa, great to see you again. >> Great to see you, thank you for having me. >> You're very welcome, and you and I met last September and one of the reasons I've been looking forward to this interview, I'm a fanboy. I threw the kitchen sink at you last year, and you batted everything out of the park. We were talking about digital transformation, digital business, and you were really one of my favorite guests of the year. So, >> Thank you. >> Talk about kitchen sink. This COVID-19 thing came out of nowhere, when did you see it coming? And what was your first move as a leader? >> Well, so for us, we had a really unique position, Dave, because we have a number of people staying in China, so we've got more than 250 employees sitting in China, so for us COVID-19 is not new, we've been dealing with this for quite a long time, since December when first started becoming ill in China, realizing that there was an issue. As of the seventh of January we had to move very quickly when China went onto lockdown, we had to find a way to get our employees to be able to work from home very quickly, and taking a couple of hundred of employees that are sitting in China and being able to empower them and enable them to work from home very quickly, nearly overnight, was no short task, so we took all of that learning back in January, and then we were able to respond as the countries fell ill, and the government requirements went in place around the world since then. So for us, this is nothing new, we were really fortunate that we had the mechanisms in place to handle the pandemic first in China, now as it came across Europe, and then of course into the US. >> Yeah so, you had the canary in the coalmine, so to speak, Well before >> Kind of, something like that >> Yeah, well before you had to start making decisions about SUSECon in Dublin, which was scheduled to be in March, so that was your other big decision point, wasn't it? >> Yeah, it was really difficult for us, because obviously, we had customers, we had partners, all wanted to come to Dublin, in fact, we were scheduled to be there together as well, and we had to give them enough time to be able to make alternate arrangements, but at the same time, we had to wait to see what the government was going to do in Ireland, because obviously that has a very big impact on the structure, the cost, et cetera. But we made a early decision, as early as we could, and that was the beginning part of March, to make the decision to unfortunately move it to a digital event, which was not an easy solution. The first time in our history, bringing a big, annual conference that's physical and in person, to a virtual event that's in digital, it wasn't an easy over-the-night kind of process and decision to make, so it was a hard one, but we're really confident, and May 20th is the announcment and the start of our SUSECon digital event, so not too long away from where we are now. >> Melissa, how have you altered, enhanced, your communications to your employees, your team, and ultimately your customers and partners? Have you increased the cadence? How have you altered? >> Yeah, so much so. I do a video with my team that I announce and push out every Monday, so every Monday I give them a business update, I tell them what's happening in the industry, what's happening with SUSE, what's happening with our customers. That happens every week, once a week. That's for every employee, and its a video call, something like this, almost. Then what we do is weekly updates on the great things that are happening around SUSE. You know, we've got a lot of amazing employees here in the open source community, but also employees as well. We've had employees in Italy who created virtual classrooms for their employees, we had an employee in the US who dedicated 30% of his bonus to give back to his local school, he's bought lunches for all the people at his hospital locally, we've had our entire Nuremberg, Germany office give all of their lunch vouchers to the homeless in Germany, so we also like to publicize all the good work that all of our employees are doing, to give back to their local communities and globally, so the cadence has definitely been increased. We just ran a survey this last week that closed yesterday. We got very, very favorable results. And that was definitely geared towards communication, no more so than now, do the employees and the customers need to be aware of what's going on. You probably feel the same thing, and through me and probably loads of other interviews, know that we're not a magician, we're not a scientist here that could predict necessarily the future. I think the scientists themselves don't even know what's going to happen, but we're doing our best to take outlook, and take a lot of concerted approach to educate our employees and our customers with what they can expect. Now for us, I'm in the very fortunate position that before COVID-19, 38% of our employees work remotely, so working from home for us is quite easy, it's quite natural for our community and our open source community as well as a whole. So for us to make that transition, we were uninterrupted in way of dealing with our customers. I've been communicating with them as well, through emails and phone calls and other means, pretty much at least once a month, if not every other week or so, to communicate what we're doing for them, but again, you said it, being proactive and being communicative right now, it's never been more important. >> So you, it sounds like, are maintaining productivity. A lot of organizations are actually seeing a productivity hit, and they're having trouble getting work-from-home infrastructure up and spun a bit. People joke on Twitter that's the new tissue paper, you can't, I don't know what it's like in London, but you can't get toilet paper (laughs) on the shelves here, so work from home infrastructure, laptops, VDI, et cetera, But it sounds like you really haven't taken a productivity hit, it's sort of a natural progression for you. >> Yeah, you know when we met last September, we talked about the importance of open source, and we've been a business for nearly 30 years, and we've always run our business in open source community, and that is a community that's obviously geographically dispersed all over the world, so people have been working from home, working in their community, being transparent and collaborative, regardless of where they sit, so from an innovation perspective, we've had no impact to our business, so being able to work from anywhere, across any boundary, has been been uninterrupted, so that's been great. 99% of our workforce are now working remotely from home, versus up from 38% pre-COVID, it doesn't change the fact that things like hardware and software and the means that they need to actually operate from home is difficult, so we've made the concerted effort, for example, to make sure our employees in Germany have the capability to bring home their desk chairs, to bring home their monitors, to bring home their machines to set them up with the ability to be able to work from home. Building on the experience from China, we learned we needed to provision early, so what we did in the beginning part of February was to begin to procure software and hardware that enabled us to have a bench of technology that we could utilize, in case we had this pandemic run wild to support our employees to work from home, so I'm very happy to say we were well prepared. In our survey, we asked the question how prepared are you to be able to work from home? And it was extremely high, best practice in way of benchmarking for any employee survey, to be able to provide them the productivity tools necessary to be able to work from home, so we're very, very proud of that. >> I want to ask you about the recovery, nobody knows, we've never seen this >> No >> Forced shut down of the economy before. Saw Bill Gates this morning on TV, saying he thinks it's really through June that we're going to have to live with this, I know the president of the United States is saying we'd like to happen before that, but assuming there is a comeback, lets say June, start to bring back the economy in waves, how do you see open source in a downturn, some prolonged downturn, months, maybe as much as a year or even more, how do you see open source playing there? >> Yeah, that's a good question, I'm glad you asked it. I think that as the pandemic continues, and any crisis for that matter, open source adoption is going to accelerate, there's no doubt. There's a huge pressure we're all going to face, even those successful businesses like us here at SUSE, we're going to have to go under some crunch and consideration around cost. Open source adoption will accelerate digital transformation efforts, and will definitely speed up organizations to respond to the crisis, because they're able to utilize all the technology innovation, and standardization of Linux and other open source technologies, from anywhere. Whether it's on-premise, the cloud, utilizing Edge, they're going to look for innovations in constant uptick whilst gaining cost-saving at the same time. There's no better place to achieve that, besides being in an open source community, so we're very fortunate, I never would've predicted a pandemic, if I had I'd be a multi-millionaire, would've played the lotto by now, nonetheless, I think there's no place I'd rather be for sure, and I wouldn't want to run any other company besides an open source business right now, because we're seeing an uptick rather than having a decline. >> You know, I want to ask you about culture, because you've been in SUSE as the CEO less than a year, inside of a year, and you really have always focused on culture, you know, CEOs obviously got to worry about growth, you got to worry about profitability, productivity and the like, but I want to actually pull up something that I found on LinkedIn, it was from one of your newer employees, new to SUSE, he said "my first month here, amazing colleagues, high amount of trust, lots of collaboration, willing to help each other succeed, giving back to the less fortunate in the community, high amount of respect for diversity, amazing values, leadership is open, honest, trend-setting, industry defining, really smart, and genuinely superior." Wow, I mean >> (Melissa laughs) >> He said, "in short, best organization I've ever contributed my efforts to and been a part of." Your leadership, whether it's diversity, openness, transparency, you really have set from day one a cultural foundation, which I think is playing out well for you right now, but I wonder if you could talk about the culture that you're trying to drive with SUSE. >> Yeah I mean, wow I did read that post, and that's life -changing I think for leaders like myself, when you have employees that feel the sense of urgency around the criticality that they play, and the role they play in the company, you can't ask for more than that, really genuinely, and I think that when I came, I took it personal to make sure that we led the company leading with people first. We're probably one of the very few companies in the world that have one trademark, and our trademark is our SUSE Chameleon. We don't have any other trademarks or patents on any of our technology, because it is open. So the only thing I have is the people. The link to the world, and this business being successful, is our people, and there inevitably lies the importance that's pertaining to their culture. And I think that because we're community-based and open source, it's really important that we continually collaborate, that we're constantly giving back and giving insight and giving support in the community, and that needs to transcend the community and be living every single day in our company. You mentioned something in that post, which is the philanthropic side of who I am, I believe very whole-heartedly in the responsibility we carry as CEOs, executives, as companies, to give back to our community. When I started nearly year ago, I instituted the Month of Giving, which happens to be May, in conjunction with one day off every year for every single employee to give back to their local communities, or a charity of their choice. Now that's proven very well, particularly now. Folks are taking time off, they're donating their time to local hospitals, they're creating that sense of community giving and care that again, bleeds itself into the fabric of what this culture is. On top of that, recently you may have read the press, I'm sure you have, about us giving any medical device supplier, or any medical device, and not just manufacturer, but institution for research of COVID-19, we're giving them free software and support to run and develop technologies associated with solving this pandemic. And that is truly a gift, I feel incredibly privileged to be able to give back because you again well know we supply all the operating systems to many of our really important medical devices, like CAT scan machines and mammogram machines, in fact, probably most of the machines being used in the US today to combat many diseases are running on a SUSE operating system. We want to offer that back, again, to the community. The employees went wild over the fact that we were being able to give back on a big scale, to solve a problem like this, so I think when it comes down to who we are and what our culture is Dave, people are the most important thing to me. I did an interview recently, and they said you know, going from a CEO that's very focused on sales and like you said earlier, very focused on outcome and deliverables and forecasts and budgets and EBITDA, is that still the case? And I have to say confidently, no that's not the thing that keeps me up at night now. What keeps me up at night now, and how I wake up every morning is wondering about the health of my employees. We had a couple of employees, one that was quite ill in Italy, we were phoning him and calling and emailing him from his hospital bed, and that's what's really keeping me going, what's inspiring me to lead this incredible company, is the people and the culture that they've built that I'm honoring and taking forward, as part of the open source value system. >> Well I think those metrics, those business performance metrics, what I've learned is they're actually a symptom of a great culture, and so I'm really excited and amazed at what you're building there, and thank you. You know, in this day and age you hear, at least prior to COVID, you heard a lot of attacks on technology companies and big tech, on billionaires, and it's really refreshing to see technology companies stepping up, you mentioned the example of medical device, there are many, many examples, and so thank you for that, really appreciate it. >> Thank you too. >> Dave: All right Melissa, great having you, I hope we can talk again leading up to SUSECon virtual slash digital, thanks so much >> (Melissa laughs) >> For coming on theCUBE, great to see you again. >> It's been great to >> Stay safe. >> Thank you very much for having me again as well and inviting me back, I look forward to seeing you next month. >> All right ditto, and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)