>>Good morning live from Chicago. It's the cube on the floor at Ansible Fast 2022. This is day two of our wall to wall coverage. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. John, we're gonna be talking next in the segment with two alumni about what Red Hat and IBM are doing to give Ansible users AI superpowers. As one of our alumni guests said, just off the keynote stage, we're nearing an inflection point in ai. >>The power of AI with Ansible is really gonna be an innovative, I think an inflection point for a long time because Ansible does such great things. This segment's gonna explore that innovation, bringing AI and making people more productive and more importantly, you know, this whole low code, no code, kind of right in the sweet spot of the skills gap. So should be a great segment. >>Great segment. Please welcome back two of our alumni. Perry is here, the Chief scientist, IBM Research and IBM Fellow. And Tom Anderson joins us once again, VP and general manager at Red Hat. Gentlemen, great to have you on the program. We're gonna have you back. >>Thank you for having >>Us and thanks for joining us. Fresh off the keynote stage. Really enjoyed your keynote this morning. Very exciting news. You have a project called Project Wisdom. We're talking about this inflection point in ai. Tell the audience, the viewers, what is Project Wisdom And Wisdom differs from intelligence. How >>I think Project Wisdom is really about, as I said, sort of combining two major forces that are in many ways disrupting and, and really constructing many a aspects of our society, which are software and AI together. Yeah. And I truly believe it's gonna result in a se shift on how not just enterprises, but society carries forefront. And as I said, intelligence is, is, I would argue at least artificial intelligence is more, in some ways mechanical, if I may say it, it's about algorithms, it's about data, it's about compute. Wisdom is all about what is truly important to bring out. It's not just about when you bring out a, a insight, when you bring out a decision to be able to explain that decision as well. It's almost like humans have wisdom. Machines have intelligence and, and it's about project wisdom. That's why we called it wisdom. >>Because it is about being a, a assistant augmenting humans. Just like be there with the humans and, and almost think of it as behave and interact with them as another colleague will versus intelligence, which is, you know, as I said, more mechanical is about data. Computer algorithms crunch together and, and we wanna bring the power of project wisdom and artificial intelligence to developers to, as you said, close the skills gap to be able to really make them more productive and have wisdom for Ansible be their assistant. Yeah. To be able to get things for them that they would find many ways mundane, many ways hard to find and again, be an assistant and augmented, >>You know, you know what's interesting, I want to get into the origin, how it all happened, but interesting IBM research, well known for the deep tech, big engineering. And you guys have been doing this for a long time, so congratulations. But it's interesting here at this event, even on stage here event, you're starting to see the automation come in. So the question comes up, scale. So what happens, IBM buys Red Hat, you go raid the, the raid, the ip, Trevor Treasure trove of ai. I mean this cuz this is kind of like bringing two killer apps together. The Ansible configuration automation layer with ai just kind of a, >>Yeah, it's an amazing relationship. I was gonna say marriage, but I don't wanna say marriage cause I may be >>Last. I didn't mean say raid the Treasure Trobe, but the kind of >>Like, oh my God. An amazing relationship where we bring all this expertise around automation, obviously around IP and application infrastructure automation and IBM research, Richie and his team bring this amazing capacity and experience around ai. Bring those two things together and applying AI to automation for our teams is so incredibly fantastic. I just can't contain my enthusiasm about it. And you could feel it in the keynote this morning that Richie was doing the energy in the room and when folks saw that, it's just amazing. >>The geeks are gonna love it for sure. But here I wanna get into the whole evolution. Computers on computers, remember the old days thinking machines was a company generations ago that I think they've sold or went outta business, but self-learning, learning machines, computers, programming, computers was actually on your slide you kind of piece out this next wave of AI and machine learning, starting with expert systems really kind of, I'm almost say static, but like okay programs. Yeah, yeah. And then now with machine learning and that big debate was unsupervised, supervised, which is not really perfect. Deep learning, which now explores some things, but now we're at another wave. Take, take us through the thought there explaining what this transition looks like and why. >>I think we are, as I said, we are really at an inflection point in the journey of ai. And if ai, I think it's fair to say data is the pain of ai without data, AI doesn't exist. But if I were to train AI with what is known as supervised learning or or data that is labeled, you are almost sort of limited because there are only so many people who have that expertise. And interestingly, they all have day jobs. So they're not just gonna sit around and label this for you. Some people may be available, but you know, this is not, again, as I as Tom said, we are really trying to apply it to some very sort of key domains which require subject matter expertise. This is not like labeling cats and dogs that everybody else in the board knows there are, the community's very large, but still the skills to go around are not that many. >>And I truly believe to apply AI to the, to the word of, you know, enterprises information technology automation, you have to have unsupervised learning and that's the only way to skate. Yeah. And these two trends really about, you know, information technology percolating across every enterprise and unsupervised learning, which is learning on this very large amount of data with of course know very large compute with some very powerful algorithms like transformer architectures and others which have been disrupting the, the domain of natural language as well are coming together with what I described as foundation models. Yeah. Which anybody who plays with it, you'll be blown away. That's literally blown away. >>And you call that self supervision at scale, which is kind of the foundation. So I have to ask you, cuz this comes up a lot with cloud, cloud scale, everyone tells horizontally scalable cloud, but vertically specialized applications where domain expertise and data plays. So the better the data, the better the self supervision, better the learning. But if it's horizontally scalable is a lot to learn. So how do you create that data ops where it's where the machines are gonna be peaked to maximize what's addressable, but what's also in the domain too, you gotta have that kind of diversity. Can you share your thoughts on that? >>Absolutely. So in, in the domain of foundation models, there are two main stages I would say. One is what I'll describe as pre-training, which is think of it as the, the machine in this particular case is knowledgeable about the domain of code in general. It knows syntax of Python, Java script know, go see Java and so, so on actually, and, and also Yammel as well, which is obviously one would argue is the domain of information technology. And once you get to that level, it's a, it's almost like having a developer who knows all of this but may not be an expert at Ansible just yet. He or she can be an expert at Ansible but is not there yet. That's what I'll call background knowledge. And also in the, in the case of foundation models, they are very adept at natural language as well. So they can connect natural language to code, but they are not yet expert at the domain of Ansible. >>Now there's something called, the second stage of learning is called fine tuning, which is about this data ops where I take data, which is sort of the SME data in this particular case. And it's curated. So this is not just generic data, you pick off GitHub, you don't know what exists out there. This is the data which is governed, which we know is of high quality as well. And you think of it as you specialize the generic AI with pre-trained AI with that data. And those two stages, including the governance of that data that goes into it results in this sort of really breakthrough technology that we've been calling Project Wisdom for. Our first application is Ansible, but just watch out that area. There are many more to come and, and we are gonna really, I'm really excited about this partnership with Red Hat because across IBM and research, I think where wherever we, if there is one place where we can find excited, open source, open developer community, it is Right. That's, >>Yeah. >>Tom, talk about the, the role of open source and Project Wisdom, the involvement of the community and maybe Richard, any feedback that you've gotten since coming off stage? I'm sure you were mobbed. >>Yeah, so for us this is, it's called Project Wisdom, not Product Wisdom. Right? Sorry. Right. And so, no, you didn't say that but I wanna just emphasize that it is a project and for us that is a key word in the upstream community that this is where we're inviting the community to jump on board with us and bring their expertise. All these people that are here will start to participate. They're excited in it. They'll bring their expertise and experience and that fine tuning of the model will just get better and better. So we're really excited about introducing this now and involving the community because it's super nuts. Everything that Red Hat does is around the community and this is no different. And so we're really excited about Project Wisdom. >>That's interesting. The project piece because if you see in today's world the innovation strategy before where we are now, go back to say 15 years ago it was of standard, it's gotta have standard bodies. You can still innovate and differentiate, but yet with open source and community, it's a blending of research and practitioners. I think that to me is a big story here is that what you guys are demonstrating is the combination of research and practitioners in the project. Yes. So how does this play out? Cuz this is kind of like how things are gonna get done in the cloud cuz Amazon's not gonna just standardize their stack at at higher level services, nor is Azure and they might get some plumbing commonalities below, but for Project Project Wisdom to be successful, they can, it doesn't need to have standards. If I get this right, if I can my on point here, what do you guys think about that? React to that? Yeah, >>So I definitely, I think standardization in terms of what we will call ML ops pipeline for models to be deployed and managed and operated. It's like models, like any other code, there's standardization on DevOps ops pipeline, there's standardization on machine learning pipeline. And these models will be deployed in the cloud because they need to scale. The only way to scale to, you know, thousands of users is through cloud. And there is, there are standard pipelines that we are working and architecting together with the Red Hat community leveraging open source packages. Yeah. Is really to, to help scale out the AI models of wisdom together. And another point I wanted to pick up on just what Tom said, I've been sort of in the area of productizing AI for for long now having experience with Watson as well. The only scenario where I've seen AI being successful is in this scenario where, what I describe as it meets the criteria of flywheel of ai. >>What do I mean by flywheel of ai? It cannot be some research people build a model. It may be wowing, but you roll it out and there's no feedback. Yeah, exactly. Okay. We are duh. So what actually, the only way the more people use these models, the more they give you feedback, the better it gets because it knows what is right and what is not right. It will never be right the first time. Actually, you know, the data it is trained on is a depiction of reality. Yeah. It is not a reality in itself. Yeah. The reality is a constantly moving target and the only way to make AI successful is to close that loop with the community. And that's why I just wanted to reemphasize the point on why community is that important >>Actually. And what's interesting Tom is this is a difference between standards bodies, old school and communities. Because developers are very efficient in their feedback. Yes. They jump to patterns that serve their needs, whether it's self-service or whatever. You can kind of see what's going on. Yeah. It's either working or not. Yeah, yeah, >>Yeah. We get immediate feedback from the community and we know real fast when something isn't working, when something is working, there are no problems with the flow of data between the members of the community and, and the developers themselves. So yeah, it's, I'm it's great. It's gonna be fantastic. The energy around Project Wisdom already. I bet. We're gonna go down to the Project Wisdom session, the breakout session, and I bet you the room will be overflowed. >>How do people get involved real quick? Get, get a take a minute to explain how I would get involved. I'm a community member. Yep. I'm watching this video, I'm intrigued. This has got me enthusiastic. How do I get more confident with this opportunity? >>So you go to, first of all, you go to red hat.com/project Wisdom and you register your interests and you wanna participate. We're gonna start growing this process, bringing people in, getting ready to make the service available to people to start using and to experiment with. Start getting their feedback. So this is the beginning of, of a journey. This isn't the, you know, this isn't the midpoint of a journey, this is the begin. You know, even though the work has been going on for a year, this is the beginning of the community journey now. And so we're gonna start working together through channels like Discord and whatnot to be able to exchange information and bring people in. >>What are some of the key use cases, maybe Richie are starting with you that, that you think maybe dream use cases that you think the community will help to really uncover as we're looking at Project Wisdom really helping in this transformation of ai. >>So if I focus on let's say Ansible itself, there are much wider use cases, but Ansible itself and you know, I, I would say I had not realized, I've been working on AI for Good for long, but I had not realized the excitement and the power of Ansible community itself. It's very large, it's very bottom sum, which I love actually. But as I went to lot of like CTOs and CIOs of lot of our customers as well, it was becoming clear the use cases of, you know, I've got thousand Ansible developers or IT or automation experts. They write code all the time. I don't know what all of this code is about. So the, the system administrators, managers, they're trying to figure out sort of how to organize all of this together and think of it as Google for finding all of these automation code automation content. >>And I'm very excited about not just the use cases that we demonstrated today, that is beginning of the journey, but to be able to help enterprises in finding the right code through natural language interfaces, generating the code, helping Del us debug their code as well. Giving them predictive insights into this may happen. Just watch out for it when you deploy this. Something like that happened before, just watch out for it as well. So I'm, I'm excited about the entire life cycle of IT automation, Not just about at the build time, but also at the time of deployment. At the time of management. This is just a start of a journey, but there are many exciting use cases abound for Ansible and beyond. >>It's gonna be great to watch this as it unfolds. Obviously just announcing this today. We thank you both so much for joining us on the program, talking about Project wisdom and, and sharing how the community can get involved. So you're gonna have to come back next year. We're gonna have to talk about what's going on. Cause I imagine with the excitement of the community and the volume of the community, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Absolutely. >>This is absolutely exactly. You're excited about. >>Excellent. And you should be. Congratulations. Thank, thanks again for joining us. We really appreciate your insights. Thank you. Thank >>You for having >>Us. For our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Barton and you're watching The Cube Lie from Chicago at Ansible Fest 22. This is day two of wall to wall coverage on the cube. Stick around. Our next guest joins us in just a minute.

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

(lively electronic music) >> Announcer: It's The Cube! Covering Sapphire Now 2017. Brought to you by SAP Cloud Platform and HANA Enterprise Cloud. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone, to our special Sapphire Now 2017 coverage from our studio, I want to thank SAP Cloud Platform and SAP Enterprise Cloud for sponsoring our three day coverage, to allow us to go and do some original content. Also, we have Google IO going on, some coverage there, we'll get some of those segments on also, other events going on all around tech. Wanted to bring in to this studio session for discussion is Bill Norton, a CUBE alumni, the chief scientist at Console Connect, also known as Dr. Peering, a real expert in networking, and how networks are built and how they run and the impact of how packets move around the network, and of course, networks are being abstracted away to software and of course, no better person to talk about software-defined networking, the changes in the network landscape, and more importantly, the security implications. Bill Norton, here inside our CUBE conversation, it's good to see you again. >> Great to see you, John. >> So, you've got a couple whitepapers, I wanted to call you on twofold. One: a lot of CIF going up the network, okay, as much as people are moving up the stack as fast as they can, the network still has got a lot of action going on. Software-defined, scaling issues, now security issues, still an important part, you've still got to move packet from point A to point B. Now things in the cloud have certainly escalated the conversation. >> Absolutely. >> John: Your thoughts. >> We're at a crossroads right now. We have two forces that are colliding. The first is increased dependence on the cloud, as more companies are using cloud for business-critical activities, as in, you can't take orders if you can't access your Salesforce.com service, or maybe you have cooperating colleagues in different parts of the planet, that are using a shared storage system, right, and they can't cooperate, they can't do their thing unless they can get access to that infrastructure, so there's great dependence on these cloud-based applications, which is clashing with the continued vulnerabilities of the public internet. >> So the internet's at stress, it's like changing the airplane engine out at 35,000 feet. A lot of stuff's going on. What's the bottom line? What are the core issues right now that people are facing? Is it just availability, or is it just bad packet movement, bad network design? What's the core issue right now facing the stress on the internet? >> You know, it's funny, I work with customers all the time, in my daily job, and the number one reason that they come to Console Connect is for security reasons. It's so funny that every single time it's security reasons. They want to be directly connected to those business-critical or mission-critical applications, and the reason is clear: if you're directly connected, the shortest path between two points is a straight line, right, so you get better performance and better reliability. >> Unless the backhoe hits the link and then you're dead, anyway, that's physical connection. So before we get further, I want you to take a minute to explain Console Connect, 'cause I just want to get that out of the way so we can set the context >> Sure >> for the conversation. >> What do you guys do? >> I know what you do, but share with the audience what you do. >> Yeah. Console Connect is a cloud interconnection company. We believe that what the internet needs is to have the ability to directly connect to mission-critical destinations, whether that be a storage service, or an infrastructure-as-a-service company, maybe it's a particular SaaS application. If you depend on it, if it's business-critical (and when I say business-critical, what I mean is, if it's down for a couple of hours and you can't access it, then your business is adversely impacted, so that's what I call business-critical.) If it's business-critical, you ought to be directly connected because you can mitigate against the concern of not being able to access that particular service. >> Alright, so now you have also two things that you've brought as props, whitepapers. >> (laughter) Yeah. >> Let me just see those for a second. >> What's the first one? >> This one is called 'Cloud Connections' and this is a paper I did when I started initially doing some research on how cloud systems work. This is a comparison between the interconnection regimes of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, and what I found in the research is that these interconnection mechanisms are completely different from one another. It's so interesting that they not only chose different names for all of their services, but in the case of interconnection for direct connections, they also chose a different model for interconnecting. So for example, Amazon Web Services has what's called Direct Connect, and I talk about how that's set up, and both a single and a redundant path to access into your AWS resources. But if you look at Google Cloud's interconnection (they call it Google Cloud Interconnect) and that's really a peering with propagation, it's kind of like peering with somebody, while leaking those routes to the other sides. >> John: Yeah. >> So the Google Cloud Interconnect partner is the one who's propagating that, essentially P2P peering across the infrastructure. And Azure's completely different. Azure decided they wanted to have two bundles of three-tuple peering relationships. One for private resources you can't access over the internet, one for public, which you can access over the internet, and one for Microsoft services. So I laid all this out >> And they call that ExpressRoute connectivity provider? >> That's right. >> I think that's the word you used here. Alright, so let's bottom line, we now have four, well okay, three major horses on the track. Is there any other ones in the air? >> Oh yeah. >> Or shall we just look at the three ones you did? >> I chose those three because AWS, according to Gartner is, whatever, 14 times larger than the next 10 competitors combined, so that's an obvious one to put in there. But Google Cloud and Azure are making strong >> And they have good tech and they've just had their event, too. I did watch that network diagram, Amazon does share a lot. James Hamilton shared a lot of information at re:Invent. Look, he's so popular the phones are ringing. Do you want to grab that? >> No, that's okay (laughter) >> You sure? Is your wife calling? >> Probably, yeah (laughter) >> Alright, so bottom line here is with the horses on the track, three horses, Amazon, Google, Azure, who's better? >> You know, they're just different, they're just different. >> Come on, pick one. >> I think it's really >> Pick one, if you had to bet your life on one which would it be? >> It depends what resources do you need to get access to, it really does. >> Maslow's hierarchy of needs, go. Google, Amazon or Azure. >> I would observe this, I'll get in trouble for saying this but I would observe that AWS seems to appeal to the broad IT crowd. If you're an engineer, you're like me, you like to hack code, you might want to play around with the Google Cloud platform 'cause that's pretty neat. It was designed by engineers so you can see what their mindset was when they designed it. >> Yeah, and YouTube is not a small operation. >> Oh no, no, not at all. >> I mean it moves a lot of traffic. >> Yeah. >> So then, Google knows their traffic game. >> Oh yeah, and of course, massive scale for all these guys. But I also like Azure for .NET types of activities, and of course you can do any workload on any one of these. >> So what you're saying is, some run great on the dry days, some 1k and the horses run good on the rainy days, so different horses, different courses, strengths, >> Bill: Yeah. >> John: weaknesses. As Steve Awodney says, horses for courses. >> You know what the really interesting thing is, is when you can connect those together. We just announced over at the ITW conference our CloudNexus product that we couldn't be more excited about. >> Explain that, what does it do? >> Yeah, it's a mechanism for you to take your availability zones or your regions in one cloud and be able to send traffic through the CloudNexus to get access in to another cloud or another region or another availability zone, and do so without having to go all the way back to your corporate datacenter to exchange that traffic. >> Got it. So basically not a lot of latency. >> Not a lot of latency, it's going to be direct, it's not going to be intermixed with other traffic, it's a internet bypass just like our (mumbles) >> Okay, what's that other paper you have here, let's talk about that one. >> Yeah, just real quickly, this one's called 'The Emerging Private Internet'. >> Okay, how to build your own private business ecosystem for business-critical... and by the way you're the author of both of these, so I'm just going to hold it up there. True private cloud marketshare is going to be in the billions of dollars, Wikibon just put out a study on that. >> Yeah. >> So, hybrid and private clouds are still going to be there heavily with duty, so the notion of private is going to be around. >> Yeah. >> What's this paper find? >> This is a little bit different, this is in response to the denial attack of April 21st or 22nd, I forgot which it is. When that attack happened, that took down dozens of very popular websites that depended on that DNS service. >> Yeah. >> And talking with a lot of the folks that were affected, they recognize that in order to not have that problem happen in the future, they're going to have to have direct connections to those mission-critical destinations, so no matter what happens in the public internet, their critical interconnections and their critical data paths are still solid and robust. So this is the private side of the internet, where you tie down, you essentially lock in connectivity to those mission-critical destinations and the public site is still where you deliver your traffic out to all those who can really get access. >> After a while, yeah, access to all the routes that can be manipulated and or policy-based manipulation as well. >> Yeah, so this is a little bit of a trend now that we're seeing, as companies are migrating over to this new platform. >> I mean, it's like a whole new virtual roadway's got to be reconstructed. I'm a lot fascinated with what... you know, you like to geek out on wide area network stuff, in the past we have. But to me, I think that whole WAN, wide area network concepts from origination to final destination on the packets path is really complicated with cloud, and now we have multi-cloud. >> Bill: Yeah. >> How do you see the routes and the maps and all the naming, all the addressing evolving to support the capacity? >> It's an interesting question. I don't think my crystal ball is any better than yours is. >> John: Well you've got two good papers here. >> I do think we're migrating towards two halves of the internet, the public internet which everyone knows and loves, and gives you great connectivity globally, but that traffic that is attacking somebody else is traversing the same routers and links that your traffic depends on, so I think we're going to see >> I want a secure route that's highly patrolled, and without bad guys. >> And it's solid, and it's robust, the traffic is not intermingled with others, so your traffic is not impacted by the traffic of others. >> Console Connect is your company, had a couple name changes but you guys have grown really fast, you do have a great team by the way, but you're just going, doing your business and it's successful, I've got to ask you what's the main reason why people come to you guys besides your awesome technical knowledge and ability to write great whitepapers and be Dr. Peering, well-known in the industry. Seriously, why are people coming to you right now? Is it because of the alternative? What's the main reason? >> The main reason, as I said before, is security, the fact that any traffic that's being used to DDoS against somebody else is traversing the same routers and links that you depend on. So your traffic, fundamentally in the public internet, is intermingled with other people's traffic, and therefore your traffic can be impacted by other people's traffic. For the mission-critical traffic, you want to have that go across no intermingling elements, so you'd like to have that be directly connected. So security is the number one. Number two and number three kind of go back and forth, it's either better performance or better reliability depending on what issues that particular customer is facing. >> Alright, Bill Norton, chief scientist, Console Connect here inside theCUBE for special coverage of SAP Sapphire 2017. Thanks for watching and stay with us for more after the short break. (lively electronic music)