Reliance Jio: OpenStack for Mobile Telecom Services
>>Hi, everyone. My name is my uncle. My uncle Poor I worked with Geo reminds you in India. We call ourselves Geo Platforms. Now on. We've been recently in the news. You've raised a lot off funding from one of the largest, most of the largest tech companies in the world. And I'm here to talk about Geos Cloud Journey, Onda Mantis Partnership. I've titled it the story often, Underdog becoming the largest telecom company in India within four years, which is really special. And we're, of course, held by the cloud. So quick disclaimer. Right. The content shared here is only for informational purposes. Um, it's only for this event. And if you want to share it outside, especially on social media platforms, we need permission from Geo Platforms limited. Okay, quick intro about myself. I am a VP of engineering a geo. I lead the Cloud Services and Platforms team with NGO Andi. I mean the geo since the beginning, since it started, and I've seen our cloud footprint grow from a handful of their models to now eight large application data centers across three regions in India. And we'll talk about how we went here. All right, Let's give you an introduction on Geo, right? Giorgio is on how we became the largest telecom campaign, India within four years from 0 to 400 million subscribers. And I think there are There are a lot of events that defined Geo and that will give you an understanding off. How do you things and what you did to overcome massive problems in India. So the slide that I want to talkto is this one and, uh, I The headline I've given is, It's the Geo is the fastest growing tech company in the world, which is not a new understatement. It's eggs, actually, quite literally true, because very few companies in the world have grown from zero to 400 million subscribers within four years paying subscribers. And I consider Geo Geos growth in three phases, which I have shown on top. The first phase we'll talk about is how geo grew in the smartphone market in India, right? And what we did to, um to really disrupt the telecom space in India in that market. Then we'll talk about the feature phone phase in India and how Geo grew there in the future for market in India. and then we'll talk about what we're doing now, which we call the Geo Platforms phase. Right. So Geo is a default four g lt. Network. Right. So there's no to geo three g networks that Joe has, Um it's a state of the art four g lt voiceover lt Network and because it was designed fresh right without any two D and three G um, legacy technologies, there were also a lot of challenges Lawn geo when we were starting up. One of the main challenges waas that all the smart phones being sold in India NGOs launching right in 2000 and 16. They did not have the voice or lt chip set embedded in the smartphone because the chips it's far costlier to embed in smartphones and India is a very price and central market. So none of the manufacturers were embedding the four g will teach upset in the smartphones. But geos are on Lee a volte in network, right for the all the network. So we faced a massive problem where we said, Look there no smartphones that can support geo. So how will we grow Geo? So in order to solve that problem, we launched our own brand of smartphones called the Life um, smartphones. And those phones were really high value devices. So there were $50 and for $50 you get you You At that time, you got a four g B storage space. A nice big display for inch display. Dual cameras, Andi. Most importantly, they had volte chip sets embedded in them. Right? And that got us our initial customers the initial for the launch customers when we launched. But more importantly, what that enabled other oh, EMS. What that forced the audience to do is that they also had to launch similar smartphones competing smartphones with voltage upset embedded in the same price range. Right. So within a few months, 3 to 4 months, um, all the other way EMS, all the other smartphone manufacturers, the Samsung's the Micromax is Micromax in India, they all had volte smartphones out in the market, right? And I think that was one key step We took off, launching our own brand of smartphone life that helped us to overcome this problem that no smartphone had. We'll teach upsets in India and then in order. So when when we were launching there were about 13 telecom companies in India. It was a very crowded space on demand. In order to gain a foothold in that market, we really made a few decisions. Ah, phew. Key product announcement that really disrupted this entire industry. Right? So, um, Geo is a default for GLT network itself. All I p network Internet protocol in everything. All data. It's an all data network and everything from voice to data to Internet traffic. Everything goes over this. I'll goes over Internet protocol, and the cost to carry voice on our smartphone network is very low, right? The bandwidth voice consumes is very low in the entire Lt band. Right? So what we did Waas In order to gain a foothold in the market, we made voice completely free, right? He said you will not pay anything for boys and across India, we will not charge any roaming charges across India. Right? So we made voice free completely and we offer the lowest data rates in the world. We could do that because we had the largest capacity or to carry data in India off all the other telecom operators. And these data rates were unheard off in the world, right? So when we launched, we offered a $2 per month or $3 per month plan with unlimited data, you could consume 10 gigabytes of data all day if you wanted to, and some of our subscriber day. Right? So that's the first phase off the overgrowth and smartphones and that really disorders. We hit 100 million subscribers in 170 days, which was very, very fast. And then after the smartphone faith, we found that India still has 500 million feature phones. And in order to grow in that market, we launched our own phone, the geo phone, and we made it free. Right? So if you take if you took a geo subscription and you carried you stayed with us for three years, we would make this phone tree for your refund. The initial deposit that you paid for this phone and this phone had also had quite a few innovations tailored for the Indian market. It had all of our digital services for free, which I will talk about soon. And for example, you could plug in. You could use a cable right on RCR HDMI cable plug into the geo phone and you could watch TV on your big screen TV from the geophones. You didn't need a separate cable subscription toe watch TV, right? So that really helped us grow. And Geo Phone is now the largest selling feature phone in India on it. 100 million feature phones in India now. So now now we're in what I call the geo platforms phase. We're growing of a geo fiber fiber to the home fiber toe the office, um, space. And we've also launched our new commerce initiatives over e commerce initiatives and were steadily building platforms that other companies can leverage other companies can use in the Jeon o'clock. Right? So this is how a small startup not a small start, but a start of nonetheless least 400 million subscribers within four years the fastest growing tech company in the world. Next, Geo also helped a systemic change in India, and this is massive. A lot of startups are building on this India stack, as people call it, and I consider this India stack has made up off three things, and the acronym I use is jam. Trinity, right. So, um, in India, systemic change happened recently because the Indian government made bank accounts free for all one billion Indians. There were no service charges to store money in bank accounts. This is called the Jonathan. The J. GenDyn Bank accounts. The J out off the jam, then India is one of the few countries in the world toe have a digital biometric identity, which can be used to verify anyone online, which is huge. So you can simply go online and say, I am my ankle poor on duh. I verify that this is indeed me who's doing this transaction. This is the A in the jam and the last M stands for Mobil's, which which were held by Geo Mobile Internet in a plus. It is also it is. It also stands for something called the U. P I. The United Unified Payments Interface. This was launched by the Indian government, where you can carry digital transactions for free. You can transfer money from one person to the to another, essentially for free for no fee, right so I can transfer one group, even Indian rupee to my friend without paying any charges. That is huge, right? So you have a country now, which, with a with a billion people who are bank accounts, money in the bank, who you can verify online, right and who can pay online without any problems through their mobile connections held by G right. So suddenly our market, our Internet market, exploded from a few million users to now 506 106 100 million mobile Internet users. So that that I think, was a massive such a systemic change that happened in India. There are some really large hail, um, numbers for this India stack, right? In one month. There were 1.6 billion nuclear transactions in the last month, which is phenomenal. So next What is the impact of geo in India before you started, we were 155th in the world in terms off mobile in terms of broadband data consumption. Right. But after geo, India went from one 55th to the first in the world in terms of broadband data, largely consumed on mobile devices were a mobile first country, right? We have a habit off skipping technology generation, so we skip fixed line broadband and basically consuming Internet on our mobile phones. On average, Geo subscribers consumed 12 gigabytes of data per month, which is one of the highest rates in the world. So Geo has a huge role to play in making India the number one country in terms off broad banded consumption and geo responsible for quite a few industry first in the telecom space and in fact, in the India space, I would say so before Geo. To get a SIM card, you had to fill a form off the physical paper form. It used to go toe Ah, local distributor. And that local distributor is to check the farm that you feel incorrectly for your SIM card and then that used to go to the head office and everything took about 48 hours or so, um, to get your SIM card. And sometimes there were problems there also with a hard biometric authentication. We enable something, uh, India enable something called E K Y C Elektronik. Know your customer? We took a fingerprint scan at our point of Sale Reliance Digital stores, and within 15 minutes we could verify within a few minutes. Within a few seconds we could verify that person is indeed my hunk, right, buying the same car, Elektronik Lee on we activated the SIM card in 15 minutes. That was a massive deal for our growth. Initially right toe onboard 100 million customers. Within our and 70 days. We couldn't have done it without be K. I see that was a massive deal for us and that is huge for any company starting a business or start up in India. We also made voice free, no roaming charges and the lowest data rates in the world. Plus, we gave a full suite of cloud services for free toe all geo customers. For example, we give goTV essentially for free. We give GOTV it'll law for free, which people, when we have a launching, told us that no one would see no one would use because the Indians like watching TV in the living rooms, um, with the family on a big screen television. But when we actually launched, they found that GOTV is one off our most used app. It's like 70,000,080 million monthly active users, and now we've basically been changing culture in India where culture is on demand. You can watch TV on the goal and you can pause it and you can resume whenever you have some free time. So really changed culture in India, India on we help people liver, digital life online. Right, So that was massive. So >>I'm now I'd like to talk about our cloud >>journey on board Animal Minorities Partnership. We've been partners that since 2014 since the beginning. So Geo has been using open stack since 2014 when we started with 14 note luster. I'll be one production environment One right? And that was I call it the first wave off our cloud where we're just understanding open stack, understanding the capabilities, understanding what it could do. Now we're in our second wave. Where were about 4000 bare metal servers in our open stack cloud multiple regions, Um, on that around 100,000 CPU cores, right. So it's a which is one of the bigger clouds in the world, I would say on almost all teams, with Ngor leveraging the cloud and soon I think we're going to hit about 10,000 Bama tools in our cloud, which is massive and just to give you a scale off our network, our in French, our data center footprint. Our network introduction is about 30 network data centers that carry just network traffic across there are there across India and we're about eight application data centers across three regions. Data Center is like a five story building filled with servers. So we're talking really significant scale in India. And we had to do this because when we were launching, there are the government regulation and try it. They've gotten regulatory authority of India, mandates that any telecom company they have to store customer data inside India and none of the other cloud providers were big enough to host our clothes. Right. So we we made all this intellectual for ourselves, and we're still growing next. I love to show you how we grown with together with Moran says we started in 2014 with the fuel deployment pipelines, right? And then we went on to the NK deployment. Pipelines are cloud started growing. We started understanding the clouds and we picked up M C p, which has really been a game changer for us in automation, right on DNA. Now we are in the latest release, ofem CPM CPI $2019 to on open stack queens, which on we've just upgraded all of our clouds or the last few months. Couple of months, 2 to 3 months. So we've done about nine production clouds and there are about 50 internal, um, teams consuming cloud. We call as our tenants, right. We have open stack clouds and we have communities clusters running on top of open stack. There are several production grade will close that run on this cloud. The Geo phone, for example, runs on our cloud private cloud Geo Cloud, which is a backup service like Google Drive and collaboration service. It runs out of a cloud. Geo adds G o g S t, which is a tax filing system for small and medium enterprises, our retail post service. There are all these production services running on our private clouds. We're also empaneled with the government off India to provide cloud services to the government to any State Department that needs cloud services. So we were empaneled by Maiti right in their ego initiative. And our clouds are also Easter. 20,000 certified 20,000 Colin one certified for software processes on 27,001 and said 27,017 slash 18 certified for security processes. Our clouds are also P our data centers Alsop a 942 be certified. So significant effort and investment have gone toe These data centers next. So this is where I think we've really valued the partnership with Morantes. Morantes has has trained us on using the concepts of get offs and in fries cold, right, an automated deployments and the tool change that come with the M C P Morantes product. Right? So, um, one of the key things that has happened from a couple of years ago to today is that the deployment time to deploy a new 100 north production cloud has decreased for us from about 55 days to do it in 2015 to now, we're down to about five days to deploy a cloud after the bear metals a racked and stacked. And the network is also the physical network is also configured, right? So after that, our automated pipelines can deploy 100 0 clock in five days flight, which is a massive deal for someone for a company that there's adding bear metals to their infrastructure so fast, right? It helps us utilize our investment, our assets really well. By the time it takes to deploy a cloud control plane for us is about 19 hours. It takes us two hours to deploy a compu track and it takes us three hours to deploy a storage rack. Right? And we really leverage the re class model off M C. P. We've configured re class model to suit almost every type of cloud that we have, right, and we've kept it fairly generous. It can be, um, Taylor to deploy any type of cloud, any type of story, nor any type of compute north. Andi. It just helps us automate our deployments by putting every configuration everything that we have in to get into using infra introduction at school, right plus M. C. P also comes with pipelines that help us run automated tests, automated validation pipelines on our cloud. We also have tempest pipelines running every few hours every three hours. If I recall correctly which run integration test on our clouds to make sure the clouds are running properly right, that that is also automated. The re class model and the pipelines helpers automate day to operations and changes as well. There are very few seventh now, compared toa a few years ago. It very rare. It's actually the exception and that may be because off mainly some user letter as opposed to a cloud problem. We also have contributed auto healing, Prometheus and Manager, and we integrate parameters and manager with our even driven automation framework. Currently, we're using Stack Storm, but you could use anyone or any event driven automation framework out there so that it indicates really well. So it helps us step away from constantly monitoring our cloud control control planes and clothes. So this has been very fruitful for us and it has actually apps killed our engineers also to use these best in class practices like get off like in France cord. So just to give you a flavor on what stacks our internal teams are running on these clouds, Um, we have a multi data center open stack cloud, and on >>top of that, >>teams use automation tools like terra form to create the environments. They also create their own Cuba these clusters and you'll see you'll see in the next slide also that we have our own community that the service platform that we built on top of open stack to give developers development teams NGO um, easy to create an easy to destroy Cuban. It is environment and sometimes leverage the Murano application catalog to deploy using heats templates to deploy their own stacks. Geo is largely a micro services driven, Um um company. So all of our applications are micro services, multiple micro services talking to each other, and the leverage develops. Two sets, like danceable Prometheus, Stack stone from for Otto Healing and driven, not commission. Big Data's tax are already there Kafka, Patches, Park Cassandra and other other tools as well. We're also now using service meshes. Almost everything now uses service mesh, sometimes use link. Erred sometimes are experimenting. This is Theo. So So this is where we are and we have multiple clients with NGO, so our products and services are available on Android IOS, our own Geo phone, Windows Macs, Web, Mobile Web based off them. So any client you can use our services and there's no lock in. It's always often with geo, so our sources have to be really good to compete in the open Internet. And last but not least, I think I love toe talk to you about our container journey. So a couple of years ago, almost every team started experimenting with containers and communities and they were demand for as a platform team. They were demanding community that the service from us a manage service. Right? So we built for us, it was much more comfortable, much more easier toe build on top of open stack with cloud FBI s as opposed to doing this on bare metal. So we built a fully managed community that a service which was, ah, self service portal, where you could click a button and get a community cluster deployed in your own tenant on Do the >>things that we did are quite interesting. We also handle some geo specific use cases. So we have because it was a >>manage service. We deployed the city notes in our own management tenant, right? We didn't give access to the customer to the city. Notes. We deployed the master control plane notes in the tenant's tenant and our customers tenant, but we didn't give them access to the Masters. We didn't give them the ssh key the workers that the our customers had full access to. And because people in Genova learning and experimenting, we gave them full admin rights to communities customers as well. So that way that really helped on board communities with NGO. And now we have, like 15 different teams running multiple communities clusters on top, off our open stack clouds. We even handle the fact that there are non profiting. I people separate non profiting I peoples and separate production 49 p pools NGO. So you could create these clusters in whatever environment that non prod environment with more open access or a prod environment with more limited access. So we had to handle these geo specific cases as well in this communities as a service. So on the whole, I think open stack because of the isolation it provides. I think it made a lot of sense for us to do communities our service on top off open stack. We even did it on bare metal, but that not many people use the Cuban, indeed a service environmental, because it is just so much easier to work with. Cloud FBI STO provision much of machines and covering these clusters. That's it from me. I think I've said a mouthful, and now I love for you toe. I'd love to have your questions. If you want to reach out to me. My email is mine dot capulet r l dot com. I'm also you can also message me on Twitter at my uncouple. So thank you. And it was a pleasure talking to you, Andre. Let let me hear your questions.
SUMMARY :
So in order to solve that problem, we launched our own brand of smartphones called the So just to give you a flavor on what stacks our internal It is environment and sometimes leverage the Murano application catalog to deploy So we have because it was a So on the whole, I think open stack because of the isolation
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Sumedh Thakar, Qualys & Nayaki Nayyar, Ivanti | CUBE Conversation, July 2020
>> From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. Welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm Lisa Martin, and today I'm talking with Ivanti again, Nayaki Nayyar, their Chief Product Officer EVP is back with us, as is another Cube alumni, Sumedh Thakar, the President and Chief Product Officer of Qualys. Nayaki, sweet, great to have you guys both back on the program. >> Great to be back here, Lisa. I think it's becoming a habit for me to be here, talking to you almost... >> I like it. >> every week. >> Good to be here, thank you for inviting me. >> So, let's go right into some exciting news here, so Ivanti has had a lot of momentum in the last week or so, Nayaki with launch announcements, talk to us about what you're announcing today in terms of an expansion with the Ivanti-Qualys partnership. >> So Lisa, as you remember, this week we had a great week this week with the launch of our Ivanti neurons platform, that really helps our customers address end-to-end management of their endpoints and security of those endpoints. How we can help them, would be called self fuel, self secure and self service the endpoints. And one of the key strengths Ivanti has, in our portfolio, is our ability to manage all the patches. Today, with our Ivanti patch management solution, we patch approximately 1.2 billion patches on an annual basis. So that's a pretty big volume, and we are extremely excited as a part of this launch announcement, to also share the partnership we have with Qualys and how we are extending and helping Qualys with their overall vision for VMDR. >> So Sumedh, let's go right into that, talk to us about the VMDR, vulnerability management has been around for a while, what is VMDR and Qualys perspective? And what are you looking to do with your partnership with Ivanti? >> I should know about vulnerability management being around for a while, I've been 18 years at Qualys, so we've been doing for a long time, and, what's happened is with the hybrid infrastructure exploding and a lot more devices being added and focus shifting from just servers to endpoint, I think that is just a need to be able to do vulnerability management, in addition, also have the ability to do assessment of your devices in terms of inventory, etcetera, so, discovering your devices, being able to do vulnerability assessment, configuration assessment, but also be able to prioritize those vulnerabilities on which one do you really need to patch because you just have way too many vulnerabilities. And then at the end, all of this vulnerability management is not useful if we can't do something about it, and that's where, you need the ability to patch and fix those issues, and this is where VMDR really brings that workflow in a single platform end-to-end, So instead of just throwing a big report of CVEs, we provide the ability to go from detection of the device, to the patching, and this is where Ivanti partnership has been something that has really helped our customers because they bring in that patching piece, and this is one of the most complicated things you do, and because taking a vulnerability and mapping it to a particular patch is very complex to do and that's where the Ivanti partnership is helping us. >> And so, this is an expansion Sumedh, you guys have been doing this for Windows and Linux, and now this is adding Mac support and others. Tell me a little bit more about the additional capabilities that you're enabling. >> What's interesting is that, when we started working on this, this was before the pandemic hit, and COVID has certainly added a very interesting twist to the patching challenge, and the ability for the system admins to suddenly patch 100,000 to 200,000 devices, which are not in your office with a high speed internet anymore, they are sitting in little apartments all over the world with low bandwidth, WiFi connections, etcetera, how do you patch those endpoints? And so when, while the focus of the beginning was a lot more on Windows and Linux, which are more on the server side, with the pandemic hitting, there is a big need now for people also to be able to do their Macs and other endpoints that are now remote and at people's homes, and so obviously, with the success of the patch management capabilities on Windows that we got with Ivanti, they are a natural partner for us to also expand that into being able to do it for the Macs as well, and so, now we're working together to get this done for the Macs. >> So Nayaki, in terms of the announcements from Ivanti that they've been coming out the last week or so, we talked with Jeff Abbott last week about the partnerships and the GTM, talk to me about from a strategic perspective, how does the expansion of the Qualys partnership dial up Ivanti's vision? >> Lisa, when you take a look at what's really happening across every enterprise, every large company, especially during COVID, and post COVID, is what we call this explosive growth of remote workers, as everyone is trying to manage what the transformation to remote working means, the explosive growth of devices that now have to be managed by every IT organization, not to mention how to secure those devices, which is where this partnership with Qualys becomes extremely strategic for us. Now we can extend that overall vision that we have with our Ivanti neurons to discover every device we have, the customers' have, sense any security vulnerabilities, anomalies that are on those devices, prioritize those based on risk-based priority of it and going through priority as we embed more and more AI Amal into it, and get into what we call this auto remediation, remediating all those vulnerabilities, which nicely fits into Qualys's, or our VMDR vision and strategy. So, this truly helps our customers, go beyond just managing the endpoints to now what we call sub securing those endpoints, being able to automatically detect all security vulnerabilities and issues and get closer and closer to the self remediation of those vulnerabilities, and that's why this partnership makes, a great strategic benefit for all of our customers and large enterprise. >> So Sumedh, talk to us about the VMDR lifecycle, give us a picture of where your customers are and that how does this really going to help them deal with the new normal of even more devices going to be remote for a long period of time? >> what's happening now is that, this is being extended to home devices, customers in the past were only looking at enterprise devices that were owned by the organization, and we continuously now see, we can't get a new laptop to the user, or they're using their home device, home desktop, because it's bigger screen, more powerful, whatever it is, so people are starting to do that, and you can't really stop them from doing that if you want to get work done, and so, essentially VMDR is four things, which is, continuous asset inventory discovery, Second is, detection of all security issues, including vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. Third is the prioritization based on the knowledge of the device, and what's running on the device just because you have a severity, five vulnerability or highly exploitable vulnerability does not mean that you need to prioritize that as the first one to patch, and then you need to be able to patch it, and so that's the four elements that make up the VMDR lifecycle, and as customers have no good way to detect what devices are there, what is connecting to the VPN, because now they don't actually, physically see the devices, the traditional network devices that were... office firewalls that are sitting in the office, that were detecting devices are now not useful because everybody's outside the firewall. And so that entire life cycle, is something that customers want to do, because at the end, you want to reduce your risk quickly. And having a single platform that does all of that, is the key benefit that we get from there. >> Talk to me a little about the go-to market, in terms of how are your customers, joint customers buying the solution? >> I think what we've really worked on is typically what happens today is the customers'... different vendors are providing individual pieces, you have to go buy a different inventory solution, a different vulnerability solution, a different prioritization, a different patch solution, so, working with Ivanti, we've really worked on creating a single platform, and this took us a quite a bit of time to really make that engineering integration work, to be able to have Ivanti patch management directly embedded into the Qualys' agent. So that way, customers don't have to deploy another agent, and they don't have to buy different solutions for different consoles, so, from a go-to market perspective, we keep it very simple for our customers, they essentially have a one price for the entire asset and then if they choose to do the patch management, this is something that we sell as a capability that is directly available through Qualys and Ivanti has done a huge amount of work to integrate seamlessly in the back end to help the customer so that they don't have to, buy from one, buy from another and try to integrate it themselves. >> And Lisa if you look at it, it's really a way for customers to handle heterogeneous landscape, patching of heterogeneous landscape that they have, in their environment all the way from the data centers to those endpoints, the Windows devices, Mac devices, Linux devices, and in future, we'll also be supporting multiple other devices and platforms through Qualys VMDR, absolutely. >> Let's talk about the target audience and really understanding, from a security perspective, it's top of mind for the C-suite all the way up to the board, now with COVID and the increase in ransomware, and some of the things, the device spread, that's probably only going to spread even more, Nayaki, starting with you, how are you seeing the customer conversations change? Are you now not just talking to ITs elevated up the stack? Is this a CEO, board level concern that you're helping them to remediate? >> Absolutely, Lisa, this conversation about cyber security challenges, especially as organizations are trying to figure out what this transformation to remote working means, this is really not just limited to an IT organization or a CIO level conversation, this is a C-suite conversation at the CEO level, and in most cases, I'm also seeing this becoming a board conversation and I'm on a couple of boards myself, and this is truly a board conversation where discussing how we help enterprises transform to remote working and cyber security challenges as more and more workers are working from home, securing those devices is top of mind, for pretty much CEOs and the boards, and helping them through the transition is a number one priority. So, this is between the partnership with Qualys and Ivanti, for us to offer this joint solution, and really make it available where they can address the security concerns that they have, in their environment. >> And Sumedh, in terms of target market, we talked with Nayaki and Jeff last week about, from a vertical perspective, they've got a lot of strengths in healthcare and retail, for example, are you looking at any leading edge markets right now, verticals that really are at most risk? Or are you attacking us from a GTM perspective, or in a horizontal way? >> It's not even our choice anymore, because what's happened with remote working in no matter what industry you are in, everybody's workers are working from home essentially, and using laptops and the number of attacks have significantly multiplied because now that this endpoint is outside of your traditional defenses that you have in an office environment, these endpoints are a lot more vulnerable, and they are in a home network, I have devices in my home network for my kids that are running all kinds of fortnight and things like that, that now actually could have access to my work laptop, so that is becoming a big concern and the other realization that you cannot really use enterprise solutions as you have in the past, for patching and securing your endpoint that's not inside the enterprise, because if a single SMB goes vulnerability patches 350 Megs for one device, if you have that patch 1000 devices trying to download that over VPN, it's just not going to work, and it kills the VPN, so that is this big push towards moving into a cloud based method of deploying these patches, So you going to actually get these patches deployed without hitting your VPN environments, and this is really the big thing, and the other day I read something that that asked like, what is accelerating the digital transformation to the cloud for your enterprise? And, there was a CEO and the Sea So and then COVID, so unfortunately, the pandemic has been bad in many ways, but in other ways, it has really helped organizations move more quickly, to get approvals from the board and the management because the other option is just not a choice anymore, which is trying to use on-prem solution so that resistance to cloud based solutions is significantly decreasing because, today, we're all sitting in different locations and meeting every day on video, etcetera and that's really powered by that cloud-based platforms that we have today. >> I call it the COVID catalysts, there are a lot of interesting things that are positive, that are being catalyzed as a result of this massive change. One more question Sumedh for you, in terms of, this enabling VMDR to become a category, a target market for endpoint security, how does this help? >> I think, the more we can provide the customer ability to reduce the number of different steps that they have to go through and the different tools that they have to purchase and multiple agents and multiple consoles that they have to put together, then it just becomes a category in itself because you kind of have that ability to do detection, prioritization and response in a single solution, which is something that nobody else offers today because everybody is focused on just one aspect of it, and so, today the response from our customers has been absolutely tremendous, they are extremely happy to have this ability to very quickly figure out what's wrong, one of the things we didn't talk a lot about, but I would say in patch management process, the biggest challenge and where most time is spent is mapping a CVE to a specific patch that needs to be deployed on a specific machine, because of 64-bit architecture, 32-bit architecture, so, the Ivanti catalog helps us tremendously to help bring the knowledge that we have on the CVEs to that catalog, and then give our customers a way to be able to get those patches deployed in a very, very quick way, and so that essentially is just created this new category, when you have this end-to-end ability on a single platform. So whether it comes from Qualys or somebody else, I think the need is there to say, when I'm looking at patch management, I want the discovery of vulnerability and patching all of that to be done together. >> And that speed is absolutely critical. So in terms of the general availability, Sumedh, is this available now, when do customers get access? >> So with the partnership with Ivanti, VMDR in general has been available now for our customers for a couple of months, but now with the enhanced partnership, it was available for Windows or is currently available for Windows and now we are working with Ivanti for the next few months to get the Mac version out, so, we would think about in the next couple of quarters, we will have that available through Qualys VMDR, the ability to patch the Macs as well. >> Excellent. Nayaki let's go ahead and take this home with you, in terms of give me kind of an overall, round this out, the expansion of the partnership, the importance of helping customers in these disparate environments, and the momentum that this gives Ivanti for the rest of the year and going into 2021? >> This really rounds our entire Ivanti's vision and strategy, reservoir, our ability to discover every asset customers have on their endpoints and point assets as devices, being able to manage those devices holistically and to secure those devices, and also do service management of those devices and I had mentioned this, we are the only vendor in the market, that can do all of this end-to-end all the way from discovery, to security, to service managing the devices which... and the partnership with Qualys really helps as round it off across the board is full lifecycle of endpoint management, device management, and also enables us to extend to the natural adjacencies of IoT with Ivanti neurons, vision and strategy and truly get into a world of what we call self healing and self securing, the autonomous edge that we really strive to in the longer term. >> Congratulations both of you on this expansion of the partnership, we thank you for taking the time to explain to us the value in it, the challenges that this going to solve for your customers, Nayaki it's always great to have you on the program, thank you for joining me. >> Thank you, thank you Lisa and Sumedh, absolutely a great pleasure talking to all of you. >> Thank you for inviting me and good seeing both of you and I look forward to seeing you guys again. Have a good day >> Yeah, Sumedh. Great to meet you as well. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching this CUBE conversation. (upbeat music)
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Wim Coekaerts, Oracle | CUBE Conversation, May 2020
>> 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. Welcome to this Cube Conversation. We're really excited to have Wim Coekaerts in, he is the senior vice-president of software development at Oracle. Wim, it's great to have you on, and, you know I often say I wish we were face-to-face but if we were you'd have to cut off my tie, cause developers and ties just don't go together. >> No, I know, and this is my normal outfit, so this is me wherever I go. Hi again, good to see you. >> Yeah, great to see you. So, of course, you know a lot of people are confused about Oracle, and open-source, they say "Oracle? Open-source? What is that all about?" But I think you're misunderstood. People don't, first of all, realize you as the leader of the software-development community inside of Oracle, I mean, you've been involved in Linux since the early 90s. But you guys have a lot of committers, you do a lot. I want to talk about that. What is up with Oracle, and open-source? >> Ah, well, it's a broad question. So, you know, a couple of things. One is, we have many different areas within the company that are dealing with open-source. So we have the cloud team doing a lot of stuff around cloud SDKs and support for different languages like Python and Go, and of course Java and so forth, so they do a lot around ensuring that the Oracle ecosystem is integrated in the open-source tools that customers use, or developers use, Terraform companies and so forth. And then you have the Java team, and so forth. Java is open-source and then the Graal project, GraalVM which is a polyglot compiler that can run Java, and Python, and Javascript and so forth together in one. VM do really cool optimizations, that's an open-source project, also on GitHub. There's of course MySQL, which is along with Java, they're probably the two most popular and widely used open-source projects out there. There's VirtualBox which is of course also a very popular project that's open-source. There's all the work we do around Linux. And I think one of the things is that, when you have so many different areas, doing things that are for that area, then as a developer or as a customer, you typically just deal with that group. And what you see is, oh you're talking to the Java developers, so you know what's going on around Java. The Java developers might not necessarily say, "Oh well we also do MySQL, and we do Linux and VirtualBox and so forth," and so you get a rather myopic, narrow view of the larger company. When you add all these things up, and there will be one big slide that says "This is Oracle, these are all these open source projects," and there's multiple ways. One is, we have projects that we've open-sourced and all the code came from us and we made it publicly available, we're the main contributor and we get contributions back. There are other projects where we contribute to third-party in terms of enhancing things, like I said with the Cloud Team, and then in general something like Linux where we're part of an external project and we participate in development of that project at large. And so there's these three different ways, when you count up all the developers that we have that deal with open-source on a daily basis. And in terms of contributions, in terms of bug fixes, testing, and so forth, it's thousands, literally, full-time paid developers. And of course, all the projects are all either on GitHub or similar sites that are very popular. So yeah, I think the misunderstood is probably a lack of knowledge of the breadth of what we do. And, you know, our primary goal is to provide services and products to customers, and so the open-source part is sort of embedded in a development methodology. But that's not something we sell or market separately, we just work with customers and products and services, and so in some cases it's not well-understood. >> Yeah. Well, we're talking of course, we're talking about the state of the penguin, I think it's important for people to understand, Oracle got into the Linux game in the 90s, maybe the latter part of the 90s and Oracle, of course, wants to make Linux-- wants to make Oracle, it's applications and database run better on Linux, but as you're pointing out, your Linux distro, full support, end-to-end, thousands of people in your open-source community, and the contributions that you make to Linux, many if not most, they go upstream, everybody can benefit from those, but of course you want an Oracle distro that is going to make Oracle stuff run better, that's always kind of been the Oracle way. >> Well, so, yes, two things though. One is, so everything we do is upstream. So we have no Linux patches that are not contributed upstream; There's no proprietary code in Oracle Linux at all, it's all completely open, publicly available: the source code, the change log, all the commits, it's fully open and public, which sometimes is not well-understood, but it's completely open. And, everything we do in terms of feature development or functionality or bug fixes goes upstream to the Linux kernel mail-list. It's actually, it's the only way to be able to manage a Linux distribution and be a Linux vendor is to live in that eco-system. Otherwise, the cost of maintaining your own fork, so to speak, is very high and it doesn't really solve the problem. Now, the functionality we work on obviously is focused on making Oracle products run better, making Oracle Cloud run better, and so forth. However, again, what's important to understand, though, is an Oracle database is a program running on an operating system. It does IO, it does networking, it deals with memory management, lots of processing. So, for the most part, the things that we work on to improve that helps everyone out, right? It helps every other database run better, or helps every other language run better. So none of these changes are specific to Oracle, they're just things that we found doing performance benchmarks and testing and so forth, where we say "Hey, if Linux did the following, it would make boot-up faster. Now boot-up has nothing to do with the database. But our customers run on 1-terabyte, 4-terabyte, 8-terabyte systems, and so booting up, and Linux starting up, and cleaning up memory takes a long time. So we want to reduce that from an availability point of view. So here, we're now talking about just enterprise for you. So there's this broad set of things we work on that definitely help us, but they're actually really completely generic and help everyone out. >> Yeah, that's great. So I wanted to kind of get that out of the way and help our audience understand that. So let's get into it a little bit; What are you seeing, what's going on in IT, pick your observation space and your vision of what you see happening out there. >> Well, you know, it's very interesting, it's sort of, there's two... there's sort of two worlds, right, there's the cloud world and the move to cloud, and there's the on-premises world, where people run their systems on their own. And, one of the things that we've learned is, when you talk about machine-learning, obviously, is something that's very popular these days, and automation. And so in order to rely on machine-learning well, and have algorithms that are very effective, you need lots of data. And so being a cloud vendor, and having Linux in our cloud on tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of servers, or more, allows us to have a view of how an operating system works across an incredibly large scale. So we get lots of data. And so for us to figure out which algorithms work well in terms of how can we do network optimizations, how can we discover anomalies on the storage site, and deal with it and so forth, we can do that at scale. And what's interesting is, how do we then bring that on-prem? Well, if we can get the data and the learning done, the training done, in our cloud directly, then when we provide that service also for people running Oracle Linux on premises then that will work. The alternative is to have point solutions where you provide something to a customer, and he needs to learn something from small amounts of data. That doesn't work so well. So I think having both worlds, on-prem and cloud directly, allows us to kind of benefit from that. And I think that's important, because lots of customers are interested in going to cloud. Many of the enterprises have not yet. You know, they're starting, but there's still a huge on-premises space that's important. And so by being able to get them familiar with how these things work at scale, autonomy is again important, right, Autonomous Database is incredibly popular and so forth, that allows us to then say, "Here, try these things out here, it's a service. We can show you the benefits right away," and then as that improves we bring that, to a certain extent, on-premises as well. And then they can have it in both places. And that, I think, is something, again, that's relatively unique but also very important, is that we want to provide services and products that act similarly on-premises as well as in cloud, because at some point when people move we want to make that transition seamless. And what you have today for the most part is one world that's on-prem, and then the cloud world is completely different. And that is a big barrier of moving, and so we want to reduce that, we can run the same operating system local as well as cloud, you can the same functionality, and then that helps transition people over much easier. >> Yeah, well Oracle actually was one of the -- I think Oracle was the first company to actually market same-same, you actually used that term. Others put forth that concept, but Oracle was the first to announce products like Cloud at Customer, that were same-same, now it took some time to actually get it perfected, and get it to market, but the point is, and we've written about this, is Oracle, because of the ascendancy of cloud, flipped and has a cloud-first mentality, and you just kind of referenced that, you just said, "And you can bring that to on-prem." So I wonder if you could talk about that cloud-first mentality, and the impact on hybrid. >> So yeah, I think the cloud-first part is of course in cloud we work on services moreso than products that we deliver. And there's a number of things that are happening. So one is that we obviously continue to provide products to customers, you can download Oracle Linux, you can download the database and what not, you can install it on your own, you can do the traditional way of working. Then in the cloud-world, what typically happens is "Oh, I use a database service. I'm not installing anything, I push a button and I get an IP address and a SQL that connects extremely quickly to the database." And we take care of everything underneath that is on this database. Now, in order to do that, you need a whole infrastructure in place, you need log-in agents, you need a back-end that captures all that stuff, you need monitoring tools, you need all the automation scripts for bringing the service up and monitor it. And so, that takes a lot of time to do right, and we learn a lot by doing this. And so the cloud-first part of these services means that we get to experience this ourselves with direct access to everything. Now taking that service with all of the additional features like autonomy, and bringing that to an on-premises world, we have to make sure we can package that so that all these pieces around it go along with it. And that takes a little bit more time, so we can do everything at the same time. And so what we've done with Autonomous Database is we created everything in Oracle Cloud, we have the whole system running really well, and then we've been able to sort of package that and shrink it into something that can be installed on-premises, but then connected into Oracle Cloud again. And so that way we can get all the telemetry over the metric, and that allows us to scale. Because part of providing a cloud service that runs on-prem in the customer environment is that we need to be able to remotely manage that similar to how that runs in our own cloud. Right, otherwise it doesn't scale. And so that takes a little bit of time, but we've done all that work, and now with Cloud at Customer Database that's really in place. >> Yeah, you really want to have that same cloud experience, whether with on-prem, in the public cloud, hybrid, et cetera. So, I want to explore a little bit more who is using Oracle Linux, and what's the driver for using it. Can you describe maybe some of the types of customers and why they buy? >> Sure, so we started this fourteen years ago, in 2006, October 25th, 2006. I remember that day very well; Penguins on stage and a big launch for Oracle Linux in San Francisco Moscone Center. So, look, the initial driver for Oracle Linux was to ensure that Oracle database customers or Oracle product customers had a good operating system experience, and the ability to be able to handle critical issues when that occurs, because typically a database runs the company's critical data: the most essential stuff that a company has is typically in a database, an Oracle database. And so when that thing has issues with the operating system, you don't want just to talk to multiple vendors and have finger-pointing, and having to explain to an operating system vendor how the database works. In the Unix world, we had a good relationship with the OS vendors, and the hardware vendors, they were the same. And they knew our products really well, and in the Linux world, that was very different. The OS vendor basically did not want to understand or learn anything about the products living on top. And so while to a certain extent that makes sense, it's an enterprise world where time is of the essence, and downtime needs to be limited absolutely. We can't have these arguments and such. And that was the driver, initially, for doing Oracle Linux. It was to ensure there was a Linux distribution really backed by us, that we could fix, that we could fully support. That was completely the original intent. And so the early customer base was database customers. Database and middleware. Mostly database. But that has then evolved quickly, and so what happened was, people say "Look, I have a thousand servers, a hundred run Oracle, so we'll run Oracle Linux on those hundred, and we'll run something else on those other nine-hundred." Now after a year or so, they realize that our support is really good; We fix all these issues, and so then they're like "Why are we having two Linux distributions? This thing works really well, it runs any application, it's fully compatible, so we'll do a thousand with Oracle Linux." And so the early days, the first few years, was definitely Oracle Database as the core driver, and then it sort of expanded to the rest of the estate. And over the years, we've added lots of features and functionality, like Ksplice, and so forth. We have an attractive pricing model for running on servers, and so now lots of our customers have a very small Oracle percentage running and many other things running. So it's really become a all-or-nothing play in the Linux space, and we're well-known now, so it's actually very good. >> You just mentioned Ksplice. We've been talking about cloud, and on-prem, and hybrid. Let's talk about security, because security really is a differentiator, particularly if you're going to start to put stuff in the cloud. Talk about Ksplice specifically, but generally security and your policy there. >> So, "Security first" is sort of what you hear us say and do, in everything we do. The database obviously security, on the Linux site security matters. Ksplice as a technology is there to do critical bug-fixing and make sure that we can apply security vulnerability fixes without affecting the customer, and not have downtime. And if you look at most of the cases or many of the cases where you have security vulnerabilities and exploits, it tends to be because systems were not patched. Why were they not patched? Well not that our customer doesn't understand that it's important, but it's a whole train of events that needs to happen. You have to, you get notified that there's a security issue in your operating system or application. Then, well, an application typically means it's a multi-layered setup. So if you have to bring your database server down, then you first have to coordinate with the application users to bring the app server down, cause that talks to the database. So to patch one system, you basically have to bring down the whole application stack. You have to negotiate with the DBAs, you have to negotiate with the app admins, you have to negotiate with the user. It takes weeks to do that and find time. Well during that time, you're vulnerable. So the only way, really, to address security in a scalable and reducing that window of time is to do it without affecting the customer. And so Casewise is something that, it's a company we acquired in 2009, and have since evolved in terms of capabilities, and so it allows us to patch the Linux terminal without downtime. We lock the kernel for 8 microseconds. It's literally no downtime. You don't have to bring down applications, the user doesn't see it, there's no hang, there's no delay. And so by doing that, you can run a Linux operating system, or gLinux, and you can be fully patched on a system that hasn't rebooted for 3 years. You don't even know it. And so by doing that type of stuff, it makes customers more secure, and it avoids them-- It saves them a lot of money in terms of dealing with project management and so forth, but it really keeps them secure. And so we do that for the Linux kernel, we do that for some of the libraries on top that are critical like OpenSSL and 2 LVC, and, you know one example-- I can give you two examples. So one example is, Heartbleed was this bug in OpenSSL a number of years ago. And so everyone had to patch their SSH server. And that meant, basically, systems around the world had to reboot. Like a whole IT reboot across the world. With Ksplice today, if Heartbleed were to happen tomorrow, we would be able to patch this online for all the Oracle Linux customers without any downtime. No reboots, no restarting of applications, everything keeps running. The amount of money saved would be massive, and also, of course, the headache. Another example is, and this was in Oracle Cloud, when some of these CPU bugs that happened a few years ago that were rather damaging on the cloud side, where you could basically see memory potentially of other CPUs running, the cloud is incredibly critical. We were basically able to basically patch our entire cloud in four hours. And the customer didn't know, right, a hundred and twenty million patches, or something, that we applied within four hours, all online, without any downtime. And so that technology has been really helpful, both for us to run our cloud, but the exact same patches and same fixes go to customers on-premises as well. But this comes back to the whole, what we do in cloud we also do for customer. And I think that's a unique thing that we have at Oracle which is quite fascinating. The operating system we run for our customers, the operating system that's the host part of VMs, is the exact same binary and source code that we make available, just to be clear, the exact same binaries are the ones that you run as a customer on-premises. So if you run Oracle Linux with KVM, you run VMs, you're actually running the exact same stuff as we run underneath our customer's stuff. Nobody else does that, everyone else has a black box. So I think that helps a little bit with transparency as well. >> Yeah, and that homogeneity just creates an environment, you're talking about that sort of security mindset, it's critical, you're not just bolting it on, it's part of the culture. But you started your career, and then of course you were a Linux person when you came to Oracle, but then I think you spent some time in database, back in the day when there were serious database wars going on, before Oracle became the king of database. So now you've got, obviously, this great portfolio, and a lot of really sharp software developers; What should we expect going forward, from Oracle? What should we look for? >> You know, I was talking to some, I was welcoming some interns to the company, for their summer internship yesterday, and one of the things I mentioned to them was that -- so cloud obviously gives us a lot of opportunities, but there's a number of things. One is, we have such a breadth of applications and software and hardware together. We have the servers, we have the storage, we have the operating systems, we have the database layer and so forth, and we have the cloud side, and one of the great opportunities, and I think we've shown a lot of this happening with the ability to create something like Autonomous Database, is to combine all these things. Right, we have such a broad portfolio of really cool technology that by itself is okay, but if you combine the things it really becomes awesome. You cannot create autonomous database without having autonomous learning. You cannot create those two and make them really safe without also controlling the firmware on the hardware and so forth. So by being able to combine all these layers, and by having a really great relationship across the teams within the company, that opens up a lot of opportunities to do stuff really quickly. And having the scale for that. I think that has been, for the last few years, a really great thing, but I can see that being one of the advantages that we have going forward. We have Oracle Fusion Applications, which is incredibly popular, and has great growth, and then we have that running on Oracle Cloud, that talks to Oracle Autonomous Database, so we bring all these pieces together. And no other SaaS vendor can do that, because they don't have these other pieces. They have one area, we have all of them. And so that's the exciting part for me, it's not so much about making my own world better, and having Linux be better, and Casewise and so forth, which is important, but that becoming part of the bigger picture. And that's the exciting part. >> Well, Oracle's always invested in RND, we've made that point many, many times. Whether it's database, you know Fusion was a painful but worthy effort, the whole public cloud piece, obviously many acquisitions, but the investments that you've made in open-source as well, Wim, you're a great spokesperson, and a great representative of the open-source community generally, and then Oracle specifically, so thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing with us the state of the penguin, and best of luck. >> You're welcome. Thank you, thanks for having me. >> Alright, and thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (cheerful music).
SUMMARY :
the world, this is a Cube Conversation. Wim, it's great to have you on, is my normal outfit, so So, of course, you know a lot of people and so the open-source part is sort of and the contributions the things that we work on to improve that get that out of the way and the move to cloud, and get it to market, but the point is, And so that way we can in the public cloud, hybrid, et cetera. And so the early customer to put stuff in the cloud. and also, of course, the headache. back in the day when there We have the servers, we have the storage, acquisitions, but the investments Alright, and thank you
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NEEDS EDITS, DO NOT PUBLISH Wim Coekaerts, Oracle
>> 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. Welcome to this Cube Conversation. We're really excited to have Wim Coekaerts in, he is the senior vice-president of software development at Oracle. Wim, it's great to have you on, and, you know I often say I wish we were face-to-face but if we were you'd have to cut off my tie, cause developers and ties just don't go together. >> No, I know, and this is my normal outfit, so this is me wherever I go. Hi again, good to see you. >> Yeah, great to see you. So, of course, you know a lot of people are confused about Oracle, and open-source, they say "Oracle? Open-source? What is that all about?" But I think you're misunderstood. People don't, first of all, realize you as the leader of the software-development community inside of Oracle, I mean, you've been involved in Linux since the early 90s. But you guys have a lot of committers, you do a lot. I want to talk about that. What is up with Oracle, and open-source? >> Ah, well, it's a broad question. So, you know, a couple of things. One is, we have many different areas within the company that are dealing with open-source. So we have the cloud team doing a lot of stuff around cloud SDKs and support for different languages like Python and Go, and of course Java and so forth, so they do a lot around ensuring that the Oracle ecosystem is integrated in the open-source tools that customers use, or developers use, Terraform companies and so forth. And then you have the Java team, and so forth. Java is open-source and then the Graal project, GraalVM which is a polyglot compiler that can run Java, and Python, and Javascript and so forth together in one. VM do really cool optimizations, that's an open-source project, also on GitHub. There's of course MySQL, which is along with Java, they're probably the two most popular and widely used open-source projects out there. There's VirtualBox which is of course also a very popular project that's open-source. There's all the work we do around Linux. And I think one of the things is that, when you have so many different areas, doing things that are for that area, then as a developer or as a customer, you typically just deal with that group. And what you see is, oh you're talking to the Java developers, so you know what's going on around Java. The Java developers might not necessarily say, "Oh well we also do MySQL, and we do Linux and VirtualBox and so forth," and so you get a rather myopic, narrow view of the larger company. When you add all these things up, and there will be one big slide that says "This is Oracle, these are all these open source projects," and there's multiple ways. One is, we have projects that we've open-sourced and all the code came from us and we made it publicly available, we're the main contributor and we get contributions back. There are other projects where we contribute to third-party in terms of enhancing things, like I said with the Cloud Team, and then in general something like Linux where we're part of an external project and we participate in development of that project at large. And so there's these three different ways, when you count up all the developers that we have that deal with open-source on a daily basis. And in terms of contributions, in terms of bug fixes, testing, and so forth, it's thousands, literally, full-time paid developers. And of course, all the projects are all either on GitHub or similar sites that are very popular. So yeah, I think the misunderstood is probably a lack of knowledge of the breadth of what we do. And, you know, our primary goal is to provide services and products to customers, and so the open-source part is sort of embedded in a development methodology. But that's not something we sell or market separately, we just work with customers and products and services, and so in some cases it's not well-understood. >> Yeah. Well, we're talking of course, we're talking about the state of the penguin, I think it's important for people to understand, Oracle got into the Linux game in the 90s, maybe the latter part of the 90s and Oracle, of course, wants to make Linux-- wants to make Oracle, it's applications and database run better on Linux, but as you're pointing out, your Linux distro, full support, end-to-end, thousands of people in your open-source community, and the contributions that you make to Linux, many if not most, they go upstream, everybody can benefit from those, but of course you want an Oracle distro that is going to make Oracle stuff run better, that's always kind of been the Oracle way. >> Well, so, yes, two things though. One is, so everything we do is upstream. So we have no Linux patches that are not contributed upstream; There's no proprietary code in Oracle Linux at all, it's all completely open, publicly available: the source code, the change log, all the commits, it's fully open and public, which sometimes is not well-understood, but it's completely open. And, everything we do in terms of feature development or functionality or bug fixes goes upstream to the Linux kernel mail-list. It's actually, it's the only way to be able to manage a Linux distribution and be a Linux vendor is to live in that eco-system. Otherwise, the cost of maintaining your own fork, so to speak, is very high and it doesn't really solve the problem. Now, the functionality we work on obviously is focused on making Oracle products run better, making Oracle Cloud run better, and so forth. However, again, what's important to understand, though, is an Oracle database is a program running on an operating system. It does IO, it does networking, it deals with memory management, lots of processing. So, for the most part, the things that we work on to improve that helps everyone out, right? It helps every other database run better, or helps every other language run better. So none of these changes are specific to Oracle, they're just things that we found doing performance benchmarks and testing and so forth, where we say "Hey, if Linux did the following, it would make boot-up faster. Now boot-up has nothing to do with the database. But our customers run on 1-terabyte, 4-terabyte, 8-terabyte systems, and so booting up, and Linux starting up, and cleaning up memory takes a long time. So we want to reduce that from an availability point of view. So here, we're now talking about just enterprise for you. So there's this broad set of things we work on that definitely help us, but they're actually really completely generic and help everyone out. >> Yeah, that's great. So I wanted to kind of get that out of the way and help our audience understand that. So let's get into it a little bit; What are you seeing, what's going on in IT, pick your observation space and your vision of what you see happening out there. >> Well, you know, it's very interesting, it's sort of, there's two... there's sort of two worlds, right, there's the cloud world and the move to cloud, and there's the on-premises world, where people run their systems on their own. And, one of the things that we've learned is, when you talk about machine-learning, obviously, is something that's very popular these days, and automation. And so in order to rely on machine-learning well, and have algorithms that are very effective, you need lots of data. And so being a cloud vendor, and having Linux in our cloud on tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of servers, or more, allows us to have a view of how an operating system works across an incredibly large scale. So we get lots of data. And so for us to figure out which algorithms work well in terms of how can we do network optimizations, how can we discover anomalies on the storage site, and deal with it and so forth, we can do that at scale. And what's interesting is, how do we then bring that on-prem? Well, if we can get the data and the learning done, the training done, in our cloud directly, then when we provide that service also for people running Oracle Linux on premises then that will work. The alternative is to have point solutions where you provide something to a customer, and he needs to learn something from small amounts of data. That doesn't work so well. So I think having both worlds, on-prem and cloud directly, allows us to kind of benefit from that. And I think that's important, because lots of customers are interested in going to cloud. Many of the enterprises have not yet. You know, they're starting, but there's still a huge on-premises space that's important. And so by being able to get them familiar with how these things work at scale, autonomy is again important, right, Autonomous Database is incredibly popular and so forth, that allows us to then say, "Here, try these things out here, it's a service. We can show you the benefits right away," and then as that improves we bring that, to a certain extent, on-premises as well. And then they can have it in both places. And that, I think, is something, again, that's relatively unique but also very important, is that we want to provide services and products that act similarly on-premises as well as in cloud, because at some point when people move we want to make that transition seamless. And what you have today for the most part is one world that's on-prem, and then the cloud world is completely different. And that is a big barrier of moving, and so we want to reduce that, we can run the same operating system local as well as cloud, you can the same functionality, and then that helps transition people over much easier. >> Yeah, well Oracle actually was one of the -- I think Oracle was the first company to actually market same-same, you actually used that term. Others put forth that concept, but Oracle was the first to announce products like Cloud at Customer, that were same-same, now it took some time to actually get it perfected, and get it to market, but the point is, and we've written about this, is Oracle, because of the ascendancy of cloud, flipped and has a cloud-first mentality, and you just kind of referenced that, you just said, "And you can bring that to on-prem." So I wonder if you could talk about that cloud-first mentality, and the impact on hybrid. >> So yeah, I think the cloud-first part is of course in cloud we work on services moreso than products that we deliver. And there's a number of things that are happening. So one is that we obviously continue to provide products to customers, you can download Oracle Linux, you can download the database and what not, you can install it on your own, you can do the traditional way of working. Then in the cloud-world, what typically happens is "Oh, I use a database service. I'm not installing anything, I push a button and I get an IP address and a SQL that connects extremely quickly to the database." And we take care of everything underneath that is on this database. Now, in order to do that, you need a whole infrastructure in place, you need log-in agents, you need a back-end that captures all that stuff, you need monitoring tools, you need all the automation scripts for bringing the service up and monitor it. And so, that takes a lot of time to do right, and we learn a lot by doing this. And so the cloud-first part of these services means that we get to experience this ourselves with direct access to everything. Now taking that service with all of the additional features like autonomy, and bringing that to an on-premises world, we have to make sure we can package that so that all these pieces around it go along with it. And that takes a little bit more time, so we can do everything at the same time. And so what we've done with Autonomous Database is we created everything in Oracle Cloud, we have the whole system running really well, and then we've been able to sort of package that and shrink it into something that can be installed on-premises, but then connected into Oracle Cloud again. And so that way we can get all the telemetry over the metric, and that allows us to scale. Because part of providing a cloud service that runs on-prem in the customer environment is that we need to be able to remotely manage that similar to how that runs in our own cloud. Right, otherwise it doesn't scale. And so that takes a little bit of time, but we've done all that work, and now with Cloud at Customer Database that's really in place. >> Yeah, you really want to have that same cloud experience, whether with on-prem, in the public cloud, hybrid, et cetera. So, I want to explore a little bit more who is using Oracle Linux, and what's the driver for using it. Can you describe maybe some of the types of customers and why they buy? >> Sure, so we started this fourteen years ago, in 2006, October 25th, 2006. I remember that day very well; Penguins on stage and a big launch for Oracle Linux in San Francisco Moscone Center. So, look, the initial driver for Oracle Linux was to ensure that Oracle database customers or Oracle product customers had a good operating system experience, and the ability to be able to handle critical issues when that occurs, because typically a database runs the company's critical data: the most essential stuff that a company has is typically in a database, an Oracle database. And so when that thing has issues with the operating system, you don't want just to talk to multiple vendors and have finger-pointing, and having to explain to an operating system vendor how the database works. In the Unix world, we had a good relationship with the OS vendors, and the hardware vendors, they were the same. And they knew our products really well, and in the Linux world, that was very different. The OS vendor basically did not want to understand or learn anything about the products living on top. And so while to a certain extent that makes sense, it's an enterprise world where time is of the essence, and downtime needs to be limited absolutely. We can't have these arguments and such. And that was the driver, initially, for doing Oracle Linux. It was to ensure there was a Linux distribution really backed by us, that we could fix, that we could fully support. That was completely the original intent. And so the early customer base was database customers. Database and middleware. Mostly database. But that has then evolved quickly, and so what happened was, people say "Look, I have a thousand servers, a hundred run Oracle, so we'll run Oracle Linux on those hundred, and we'll run something else on those other nine-hundred." Now after a year or so, they realize that our support is really good; We fix all these issues, and so then they're like "Why are we having two Linux distributions? This thing works really well, it runs any application, it's fully compatible, so we'll do a thousand with Oracle Linux." And so the early days, the first few years, was definitely Oracle Database as the core driver, and then it sort of expanded to the rest of the estate. And over the years, we've added lots of features and functionality, like Ksplice, and so forth. We have an attractive pricing model for running on servers, and so now lots of our customers have a very small Oracle percentage running and many other things running. So it's really become a all-or-nothing play in the Linux space, and we're well-known now, so it's actually very good. >> You just mentioned Ksplice. We've been talking about cloud, and on-prem, and hybrid. Let's talk about security, because security really is a differentiator, particularly if you're going to start to put stuff in the cloud. Talk about Ksplice specifically, but generally security and your policy there. >> So, "Security first" is sort of what you hear us say and do, in everything we do. The database obviously security, on the Linux site security matters. Ksplice as a technology is there to do critical bug-fixing and make sure that we can apply security vulnerability fixes without affecting the customer, and not have downtime. And if you look at most of the cases or many of the cases where you have security vulnerabilities and exploits, it tends to be because systems were not patched. Why were they not patched? Well not that our customer doesn't understand that it's important, but it's a whole train of events that needs to happen. You have to, you get notified that there's a security issue in your operating system or application. Then, well, an application typically means it's a multi-layered setup. So if you have to bring your database server down, then you first have to coordinate with the application users to bring the app server down, cause that talks to the database. So to patch one system, you basically have to bring down the whole application stack. You have to negotiate with the DBAs, you have to negotiate with the app admins, you have to negotiate with the user. It takes weeks to do that and find time. Well during that time, you're vulnerable. So the only way, really, to address security in a scalable and reducing that window of time is to do it without affecting the customer. And so Casewise is something that, it's a company we acquired in 2009, and have since evolved in terms of capabilities, and so it allows us to patch the Linux terminal without downtime. We lock the kernel for 8 microseconds. It's literally no downtime. You don't have to bring down applications, the user doesn't see it, there's no hang, there's no delay. And so by doing that, you can run a Linux operating system, or gLinux, and you can be fully patched on a system that hasn't rebooted for 3 years. You don't even know it. And so by doing that type of stuff, it makes customers more secure, and it avoids them-- It saves them a lot of money in terms of dealing with project management and so forth, but it really keeps them secure. And so we do that for the Linux kernel, we do that for some of the libraries on top that are critical like OpenSSL and 2 LVC, and, you know one example-- I can give you two examples. So one example is, Heartbleed was this bug in OpenSSL a number of years ago. And so everyone had to patch their SSH server. And that meant, basically, systems around the world had to reboot. Like a whole IT reboot across the world. With Ksplice today, if Heartbleed were to happen tomorrow, we would be able to patch this online for all the Oracle Linux customers without any downtime. No reboots, no restarting of applications, everything keeps running. The amount of money saved would be massive, and also, of course, the headache. Another example is, and this was in Oracle Cloud, when some of these CPU bugs that happened a few years ago that were rather damaging on the cloud side, where you could basically see memory potentially of other CPUs running, the cloud is incredibly critical. We were basically able to basically patch our entire cloud in four hours. And the customer didn't know, right, a hundred and twenty million patches, or something, that we applied within four hours, all online, without any downtime. And so that technology has been really helpful, both for us to run our cloud, but the exact same patches and same fixes go to customers on-premises as well. But this comes back to the whole, what we do in cloud we also do for customer. And I think that's a unique thing that we have at Oracle which is quite fascinating. The operating system we run for our customers, the operating system that's the host part of VMs, is the exact same binary and source code that we make available, just to be clear, the exact same binaries are the ones that you run as a customer on-premises. So if you run Oracle Linux with KVM, you run VMs, you're actually running the exact same stuff as we run underneath our customer's stuff. Nobody else does that, everyone else has a black box. So I think that helps a little bit with transparency as well. >> Yeah, and that homogeneity just creates an environment, you're talking about that sort of security mindset, it's critical, you're not just bolting it on, it's part of the culture. But you started your career, and then of course you were a Linux person when you came to Oracle, but then I think you spent some time in database, back in the day when there were serious database wars going on, before Oracle became the king of database. So now you've got, obviously, this great portfolio, and a lot of really sharp software developers; What should we expect going forward, from Oracle? What should we look for? >> You know, I was talking to some, I was welcoming some interns to the company, for their summer internship yesterday, and one of the things I mentioned to them was that -- so cloud obviously gives us a lot of opportunities, but there's a number of things. One is, we have such a breadth of applications and software and hardware together. We have the servers, we have the storage, we have the operating systems, we have the database layer and so forth, and we have the cloud side, and one of the great opportunities, and I think we've shown a lot of this happening with the ability to create something like Autonomous Database, is to combine all these things. Right, we have such a broad portfolio of really cool technology that by itself is okay, but if you combine the things it really becomes awesome. You cannot create autonomous database without having autonomous learning. You cannot create those two and make them really safe without also controlling the firmware on the hardware and so forth. So by being able to combine all these layers, and by having a really great relationship across the teams within the company, that opens up a lot of opportunities to do stuff really quickly. And having the scale for that. I think that has been, for the last few years, a really great thing, but I can see that being one of the advantages that we have going forward. We have Oracle Fusion Applications, which is incredibly popular, and has great girth, and then we have that running on Oracle Cloud, that talks to Oracle Autonomous Database, so we bring all these pieces together. And no other SaaS vendor can do that, because they don't have these other pieces. They have one area, we have all of them. And so that's the exciting part for me, it's not so much about making my own world better, and having Linux be better, and Casewise and so forth, which is important, but that becoming part of the bigger picture. And that's the exciting part. >> Well, Oracle's always invested in RND, we've made that point many, many times. Whether it's database, you know Fusion was a painful but worthy effort, the whole public cloud piece, obviously many acquisitions, but the investments that you've made in open-source as well, Wim, you're a great spokesperson, and a great representative of the open-source community generally, and then Oracle specifically, so thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing with us the state of the penguin, and best of luck. >> You're welcome. Thank you, thanks for having me. >> Alright, and thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (cheerful music).
SUMMARY :
the world, this is a Cube Conversation. Wim, it's great to have you on, is my normal outfit, so So, of course, you know a lot of people and so the open-source part is sort of and the contributions the things that we work on to improve that get that out of the way and the move to cloud, and get it to market, but the point is, And so that way we can in the public cloud, hybrid, et cetera. And so the early customer to put stuff in the cloud. and also, of course, the headache. back in the day when there We have the servers, we have the storage, acquisitions, but the investments Alright, and thank you
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Wim Coakerts, Oracle | CUBE Conversation, May 2020
>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a Cube Conversation. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this Cube Conversation. Really excited to have Wim Coekaerts and he is the senior vice president of software development at Oracle. Wim, it's great to have you on. And you know what I often say I wish we were face to face but if we were you'd have to cut off my tie 'cause developers and ties just don't go together. >> No, I know, and this is my normal outfit so this is me, wherever I go. Hi again, good to see you. >> Yeah, great to see you. So of course, you know a lot of people are confused about Oracle and open source. They say, Oracle, open source? What is that all about? But I think you misunderstood. People don't first of all realize you as the leader of the software development community inside of Oracle, I mean, you've been involved in Linux since the early '90s but you guys have a lot of committers. You do a lot, I want to talk about that. What is up with Oracle and open source? >> Well, it's a broad question. So you know, a couple of things. One is we have many different areas within the company that are dealing with open source, right? So we have the cloud team doing a lot of stuff around the cloud SDKs and support for different languages like Python and go and of course Java and so forth. So they do a lot around ensuring that the Oracle ecosystem is integrated in the open source tools that customers use, or developers use Terraform, so on and so forth. And then you have the Java team, and so of course Java is open source. And then, the Graal project, GraalVM, which is a polyglot compiler that run Java and Python and JavaScript and so forth together in one VM, do really cool optimizations, that's an open source project. Also on GitHub, there's of course MySQL which is along with Java, they're probably the two most popular and widely used open source projects out there. There's VirtualBox which is of course also a very popular project that's open sources is all the work we do around Linux. And I think one of the things is that when you have so many different areas doing things that are for that area, then as a developer or as a customer, you typically just deal with that group and what you see is, oh, you're talking to the Java developers so you know what's going on around Java. The Java developers might not necessarily say, oh, and we also do MySQL and we do Linux and VirtualBox and so forth. And so you get sort of a rather myopic narrow view of the larger company. When you add all these things up and there would be one big slide that says, "This is Oracle, these are all these open source projects there". And there's multiple ways, right? One is we have projects that we've opened sourced and all the code came from us and we made it publicly available. We are the main distributor and we get contributions back. There are other projects where we contribute to third party in terms of enhancing things, like a separate the cloud team. And then in general, something like Linux where, you know, we're part of an external project and we participate in the development of that project at large. And so there's these three different ways when you count up all the developers that we have that deal with open source on a daily basis and in terms of contributions, in terms of both Pyxis testing and so forth, it's thousands, literally, full time developers. And of course all the projects is on GitHub or similar sites that are very popular. So yeah, I think the misunderstood is probably a lack of knowledge of the breadth of what we do. And our primary goal is to provide services and products to customers. And so the open source part is sort of embedded in the development methodology, but that's not something we sell or market separately. We just work with customers and products and services. And so in some cases it's not well understood. >> Yeah, well, we're talking, of course we're talking about the state of the Penguin. I think it's part of what people understand. I mean, Oracle got into the Linux game, in the '90s, maybe the latter part of the '90s and Oracle of course wants to make Linux, wants to make Oracle its applications and database run better on Linux. But as you're pointing out you're Linux distro, full support, end-to-end, thousands of people in your open source community and the contributions that you make to Linux, many if not most, they go upstream, everybody can benefit from those. But of course you want an Oracle distro that is going to make Oracle stuff run better. That's always kind of been the Oracle way. >> Well, so yes, two things. The one is that, so everything we do is upstream. So we have no Linux patches that are not contributed upstream. There's no proprietary code in Oracle Linux at all. It's all completely open, publicly available. The source code, the change log, all the commits, everything. It's fully open and public, which sometimes is not well understood, but it's completely open. And everything we do in terms of feature development or functionality or bug fixes goes upstream to the Linux kernel mailers. It's actually, it's the only way to be able to manage a Linux distribution and be a Linux vendor is to live in that ecosystem. Otherwise, the cost of maintaining your own forks so to speak is very high and it doesn't really solve problems. Now the functionality we worked on obviously is focused on making Oracle products run better, making Oracle cloud run better and so forth. However, again, what's important to understand though is an Oracle database is a program running on an operating system that does IO, it does networking, it does memory, it deals with memory management, lots of processes. So for the most part, the things we work on to improve that, helps everyone out, right? It helps every other database run better or it helps every other language run better. So none of these changes are specific to Oracle. They're just things that we found doing performance benchmarks and testing and so forth. But we say, "Hey, if Linux did the following, it would make boot up fast." Now boot up has nothing to do with the database. But if our customers run on one terabyte, four terabyte, eight terabyte systems, and so booting up and Linux starting up and cleaning up memory takes a long time. So we want to reduce that from an availability point of view. So here we're now talking about just enterprise, right? And so there's this broad set of things we work on that definitely help us, but they're actually really completely generic and help everyone customer. >> Yeah, that's great, good. So I wanted to kind of get that out of the way and help our audience understand it. So let's get into it a little bit. What are you seeing, what's going on in IT? Pick your observation space and your vision of what you see happening out there? >> Well it's very interesting. There's sort of two worlds, right? There's the cloud world and move to cloud and there's the on-premise world where people run their systems on their own. And one of the things that we've learned is, when you talk about machine learning obviously is something that's very popular these days and automation. And so in order to rely on machine learning well and have algorithms that are very effective, you need lots of data. And so being a cloud vendor and having Linux in our cloud on tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of servers or more allows us to have a view of how an operating system works across incredibly large scale. So we get lots of data and so for us to figure out which algorithms work well in terms of, how can we do network customizations, how can we discover anomalies on the storage side and deal with it and so forth, we can do that at scale. And what's interesting is how do we then bring that to on-prem? Well, if we can get the data and the learning done the training done in our cloud directly, then when we provide that service also to people running Oracle Linux on-premises, then that will work. The alternative is to have point solutions where you provide something to a customer and he needs to learn something from small amounts of data. That doesn't work so well. So I think having both worlds on-prem and cloud directly allows us to kind of benefit from that. And I think that's important because lots of customers are interested in going to cloud. Many of the enterprises have not yet, you know, they're starting, but there's still a huge on-premises space that's important. And so by being able to get them familiar with how these things work at scale, autonomy is again important, right? Autonomous database is incredibly popular and so forth. That allows us to then say, "Here, try these things out here. "It's a service, we can show you the benefits right away". And then as that improves, we bring that on to a certain extent on-premise as well and then they can have it in both places. And that I think is something, again, that's relatively unique but also very important is that we want to create an... we want to provide services and products that act similarly on-premises as well as the cloud. Because at some point when people move, we want to make that transition seamless. And what you have today for the most part is one world that's on-prem and then the cloud world is completely different and that is a big barrier of moving. And so we want to reduce that. You can run the same operating system local as well as cloud, you can get the same banality and then that helps transition people over much easier. >> Yeah, well, Oracle actually was one of the... I think but Oracle was the first company to actually market same-same, you actually use that term. Others put forth that concept, but Oracle was the first to announce products like cloud to customer that was same-same now it took some time to actually get it perfective and get it to market. But the point is, and we've written about this is that Oracle, because of the ascendancy of cloud flipped and has a cloud first mentality and you just kind of referenced that you just said, "And you can bring that to on-prem". So I wonder if you could talk about that cloud first mentality and the impact on hype? >> So yeah, I think the clouds first part is of course in cloud we work on services more so than products that we deliver and there's a number of things that are happening. So one is we obviously continue to provide products across you can download Oracle Linux, you can download the database in web blog, you can install it on your own, right? You can do to the traditional way of working. Then in a cloud world, what typically happens is, oh, I use a database service. I'm not installing anything. I push a button and I get an IP address and a SQL, and a connect string and connect to a database. And we take care of everything underneath the database. Now, in order to do that, you need to hold infrastructure in place, right? You need lugging agents, you need a backend that captures all that stuff, you need monitoring tools, you need all the automation scripts for bringing this service up and monitor it. And so that takes a lot of time to do, right? And we learned a lot by doing this. And so the cloud first part of the services means that we get to experience this ourselves with direct access to everything. Now taking that service with all of the additional features like autonomy and bringing that to an on-premises world, we have to make sure we can package that so that all these pieces around it go along with it. And that takes a little bit more time, so we can't do everything at the same time. And so what we've done with autonomous database is we created everything in Oracle cloud, you have the whole system running really well. And then we've been able to sort of package that and shrink it into something that can be installed on-premises but then connected into Oracle cloud again. And so that way we can get all the telemetry, all the metrics, and that allows us to scale because part of providing a cloud service that runs on-prem in the customer environment is that we need to be able to remotely manage that, similar to how we manage something that runs in their own cloud, right? Otherwise it doesn't scale. And so that takes a little bit of time, but we've done all that work and now we've got our customer database that that's really in place. >> Yeah, you really want to have that same cloud experience, whether it's on-prem, in the public cloud, hybrid, et cetera. So I want to explore a little bit more. Who is using Oracle Linux and what's the driver for using it? Can you describe maybe some of the types of customers and why they buy? >> Sure, so we started 14 years ago, right? 2006, October 25th, 2006 (giggles). I remember that day very well. Penguin's on stage and a big launch for Linux in San Francisco Moscone Center. So look, the initial driver for Oracle Linux was to ensure that Oracle database customers or Oracle product customers had a good operating system experience, right? And the ability to be able to handle critical issues when that occurs because typically a database runs the company's critical data. The most essential stuff that a company has is typically in a database, in Oracle database. And so when that thing has issues with the operating system, you don't want just to talk to multiple vendors and have finger pointing and having to explain to an operating system vendor how the database works. In the Unix world, we had a glitch relationship with the OS vendors and the hardware vendors. They were the same. And they knew our products really well, and in the Linux world that was very different. The OS vendor basically did not want to understand or learn anything about products living on top. And so, while, to a certain extent, that makes sense. It's an enterprise world where time is of the essence and downtime needs to be limited absolutely. We can't have these arguments and such. And so that was the driver initially for doing Oracle. So it was to ensure there was a Linux distribution really backed by us that we could fix and we could fully support, right? That was completely the original intent. And so the early customer base was database customers. Database and middleware, mostly database. So but that has then evolved quickly, and so, (clears throat) sorry. What happened was, people would say, "Look, have a thousand servers, a hundred run Oracle, "so we'll run Oracle Linux on those hundred "and we run, something else on those other 900." Now after a year or so, they realized that our support was really good. We fixed all these issues and so then they're like, "Why are we having two Linux distributions? "This thing works really well. "It's runs any application, it's fully compatible. "So we'll just go a thousand with Oracle Linux". And so the early days, the first few years was definitely Oracle database as the core driver and then it sort of expanded to the rest of the estate. And over the years (clears throat), we've added lots of features and functionality, like Ksplice and so forth. We have an attractive pricing model for running on servers. And so now lots of our customers have a very small Oracle percentage running and many other things running. So it's really become a all or nothing play in the Linux space and we're well known now, so it's been actually very good. >> You just mentioned Ksplice. I mean, we've been talking about cloud and on-prem and hybrid and let's talk about security because security really is a differentiator but particularly if you're going to start to put stuff into the cloud. Talk about Ksplice specifically, but generally security and your policy there. >> So security first is sort of what you hear us say and do in everything we do, right? The database obviously security on the Linux side, security matters, Ksplice as the technology is there to do critical bug fixing and make sure that we can apply security vulnerability fixes without affecting the customer and not have downtime, right? And if you look at, most of the cases or many of the cases where you have security vulnerabilities and exploits, it tends to be because systems were not patched. Why were they not patched? Well, not that a customer doesn't understand that it's important, but it's a whole train of events that needed to happen. You have to get notified that there's a security issue in your operating system or application. Then, well, an application typically means it's a multi-tiered set up. So if you have to bring your database server down, then you first have to coordinate with the application users to bring the app server down because that talks to the database. So to patch one system, you basically have to bring down all application stacks. You have to negotiate with the DBAs, you have to negotiate with the app admins, you have to negotiate with the user. It takes weeks to do that and find time. Well, during that time you're vulnerable. So the only way really to address security in a scalable way and reducing that window of time is to do it without effecting the customer, right? And so Ksplice is something that... It's a company we acquired in 2009 and have since evolved in terms of capabilities. And so it allows us to patch the Linux kernel without downtime, right? We lock the kernel for a microsecond, so it's literally no downtime. You don't have to bring down applications. The user doesn't see it. There's no hang, there's no delay. And so by doing that, you can run the Linux operating system, Oracle Linux, and you can be fully patched on a system that hasn't rebooted for three years and you don't even know it. And so by doing that type of stuff, it makes customers more secure and it avoids them... It saves them a lot of money in terms of dealing with project management and so forth, but it really keeps them secure. And so we do that for the Linux kernel. We do that for some of the libraries on up that are critical, like OpenSSL and glibc and one example, I can give you two examples. So one example is Heartbleed was this bug in OpenSSL a number of years ago and so everyone had to patch their SSH server. And that meant basically, systems around the world had to reboot, like a whole active reboot across the world. With the Ksplice today if Heartbleed were to happen tomorrow, we would be able to patch this online for all the Oracle Linux customers without any downtime. No reboots, no restarting of applications, everything keeps running. The amount of money saved would be massive, right? And also of course, the headache. Another example is, (clears throat) and this was an Oracle cloud when some of these CPU bugs that happened a few years ago that were rather damaging on the cloud side, right? Where you could basically see memory of potentially of other machines running that the cloud it's incredibly critical. We were basically able to patch our entire cloud in four hours and the customer didn't know, right? 120 million patches or something that we applied within four hours all online without any down time. And so that technology has been really helpful both for us to run our cloud, but the exact same patches and same fixes go to customers on-premises as well. But this comes back to the whole what we do in cloud, we also do for customer, and I think that's a unique thing that we have at Oracle, which is quite fascinating, right? The operating system we run for our customers, the operating system that's the host for the VM is the exact same binary and source code that we make available, just to be clear. The exact same binaries are the ones that you run as a customer on premises. So you run Oracle Linux with KVM, you run VMs, you're actually running the same stuff as we do for our... That we run underneath our customer stuff. Nobody else does that. Everyone else has a black box. So I think that helps a little bit with transparency as well. >> Yeah, and that homogeneity just creates an environment you're talking about sort of the security mindset is critical. You're not just bolting it on, it's part of the culture. Look, you were, you know, started your career, and then of course you were a Linux person when you came to Oracle, but then I think you've spent some time in the database back in the day when there were some serious database wars going on before Oracle, became the king of database. So now you've got obviously this great portfolio and a lot of really sharp software developers. What should we expect going forward from Oracle? What should we look for? >> I was welcoming some interns to the company, (clears throat) for their summer internship yesterday. And one of the things that I, (clears throat) I'm sorry. One of the things I mentioned to them, was that one of the... So cloud obviously gives us a lot of opportunities, but there's a number of things. One is we have such a breadth of applications and software and hardware together, right? We have the servers, we have the storage, we have the operating systems, we have the database layer and so forth, and we have the cloud side. And one of the great opportunities and I think we've shown a lot of this happening with the ability to create something like autonomous database is to combine all these things, right? We have such a broad portfolio of really cool technology that by itself is okay, but if you combine the things, it really becomes awesome, right? You cannot create autonomous database without having autonomous Linux, right? You cannot create those two and make them really safe without also controlling the firmware on the hardware and so forth. So by being able to combine all these layers and by having a really great relationship across the teams within the company, that opens up a lot of opportunities to do stuff really quickly and having the scale for that. I think that has been for the last few years a really great thing but I can see that being one of the advantages that we have going forward, right? We have Oracle Fusion Applications, which is incredibly popular and has great growth. And then we have that running on Oracle cloud that talks to our autonomous database. So we bring all these pieces together and no other SaaS vendor can do that because they don't have these other pieces. They have one area, we have all of them. And so that's the exciting part for me is basic... It's not so much about making my own world better and having Linux be better and Ksplice and so forth, which is important, but that becoming part of the bigger picture. And that's the exciting part. >> Well, Oracle has always invested in R&D. We've made that point many many times, whether it's database, fusion was a painful but worthy (giggles) effort. The whole public cloud piece, obviously many acquisitions but the investments that you've made in open source as well. Wim, you're a great spokesperson and a great representative of the open source community generally, and an Oracle specifically. So thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing with us the state of the Penguin. The best of luck. >> You're welcome. Thank you, thanks for having me. >> All right, and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (soft music)
SUMMARY :
leaders all around the world. and he is the senior vice president Hi again, good to see you. So of course, you know a lot of people And so the open source part and the contributions So for the most part, the things get that out of the way and the learning done the training done and the impact on hype? And so that way we can get of the types of customers And the ability to be able and your policy there. and make sure that we can apply and then of course you were a Linux person We have the servers, we have the storage, of the open source community generally, You're welcome. We'll see you next time.
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