>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020, sponsored by Intel and AWS. >>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 I'm Lisa Martin. Joining me next is one of our cube alumni. Breton McMillan is back the director of us, federal for AWS. Right. It's great to see you glad that you're safe and well. >>Great. It's great to be back. Uh, I think last year when we did the cube, we were on the convention floor. It feels very different this year here at reinvent, it's gone virtual and yet it's still true to how reinvent always been. It's a learning conference and we're releasing a lot of new products and services for our customers. >>Yes. A lot of content, as you say, the one thing I think I would say about this reinvent, one of the things that's different, it's so quiet around us. Normally we're talking loudly over tens of thousands of people on the showroom floor, but great. That AWS is still able to connect in such an actually an even bigger way with its customers. So during Theresa Carlson's keynote, want to get your opinion on this or some info. She talked about the AWS open data sponsorship program, and that you guys are going to be hosting the national institutes of health, NIH sequence, read archive data, the biologist, and may former gets really excited about that. Talk to us about that because especially during the global health crisis that we're in, that sounds really promising >>Very much is I am so happy that we're working with NIH on this and multiple other initiatives. So the secret greed archive or SRA, essentially what it is, it's a very large data set of sequenced genomic data. And it's a wide variety of judge you gnomic data, and it's got a knowledge human genetic thing, but all life forms or all branches of life, um, is in a SRA to include viruses. And that's really important here during the pandemic. Um, it's one of the largest and oldest, um, gen sequence genomic data sets are out there and yet it's very modern. It has been designed for next generation sequencing. So it's growing, it's modern and it's well used. It's one of the more important ones that it's out there. One of the reasons this is so important is that we know to find cures for what a human ailments and disease and death, but by studying the gem genomic code, we can come up with the answers of these or the scientists can come up with answer for that. And that's what Amazon is doing is we're putting in the hands of the scientists, the tools so that they can help cure heart disease and diabetes and cancer and, um, depression and yes, even, um, uh, viruses that can cause pandemics. >>So making this data, sorry, I'm just going to making this data available to those scientists. Worldwide is incredibly important. Talk to us about that. >>Yeah, it is. And so, um, within NIH, we're working with, um, the, um, NCBI when you're dealing with NIH, there's a lot of acronyms, uh, and uh, at NIH, it's the national center for, um, file type technology information. And so we're working with them to make this available as an open data set. Why, why this is important is it's all about increasing the speed for scientific discovery. I personally think that in the fullness of time, the scientists will come up with cures for just about all of the human ailments that are out there. And it's our job at AWS to put into the hands of the scientists, the tools they need to make things happen quickly or in our lifetime. And I'm really excited to be working with NIH on that. When we start talking about it, there's multiple things. The scientists needs. One is access to these data sets and SRA. >>It's a very large data set. It's 45 petabytes and it's growing. I personally believe that it's going to double every year, year and a half. So it's a very large data set and it's hard to move that data around. It's so much easier if you just go into the cloud, compute against it and do your research there in the cloud. And so it's super important. 45 petabytes, give you an idea if it were all human data, that's equivalent to have a seven and a half million people or put another way 90% of everybody living in New York city. So that's how big this is. But then also what AWS is doing is we're bringing compute. So in the cloud, you can scale up your compute, scale it down, and then kind of the third they're. The third leg of the tool of the stool is giving the scientists easy access to the specialized tool sets they need. >>And we're doing that in a few different ways. One that the people would design these toolsets design a lot of them on AWS, but then we also make them available through something called AWS marketplace. So they can just go into marketplace, get a catalog, go in there and say, I want to launch this resolve work and launches the infrastructure underneath. And it speeds the ability for those scientists to come up with the cures that they need. So SRA is stored in Amazon S3, which is a very popular object store, not just in the scientific community, but virtually every industry uses S3. And by making this available on these public data sets, we're giving the scientists the ability to speed up their research. >>One of the things that Springs jumps out to me too, is it's in addition to enabling them to speed up research, it's also facilitating collaboration globally because now you've got the cloud to drive all of this, which allows researchers and completely different parts of the world to be working together almost in real time. So I can imagine the incredible power that this is going to, to provide to that community. So I have to ask you though, you talked about this being all life forms, including viruses COVID-19, what are some of the things that you think we can see? I expect this to facilitate. Yeah. >>So earlier in the year we took the, um, uh, genetic code or NIH took the genetic code and they, um, put it in an SRA like format and that's now available on AWS and, and here's, what's great about it is that you can now make it so anybody in the world can go to this open data set and start doing their research. One of our goals here is build back to a democratization of research. So it used to be that, um, get, for example, the very first, um, vaccine that came out was a small part. It's a vaccine that was done by our rural country doctor using essentially test tubes in a microscope. It's gotten hard to do that because data sets are so large, you need so much computer by using the power of the cloud. We've really democratized it and now anybody can do it. So for example, um, with the SRE data set that was done by NIH, um, organizations like the university of British Columbia, their, um, cloud innovation center is, um, doing research. And so what they've done is they've scanned, they, um, SRA database think about it. They scanned out 11 million entries for, uh, coronavirus sequencing. And that's really hard to do in a typical on-premise data center. Who's relatively easy to do on AWS. So by making this available, we can have a larger number of scientists working on the problems that we need to have solved. >>Well, and as the, as we all know in the U S operation warp speed, that warp speed alone term really signifies how quickly we all need this to be progressing forward. But this is not the first partnership that AWS has had with the NIH. Talk to me about what you guys, what some of the other things are that you're doing together. >>We've been working with NIH for a very long time. Um, back in 2012, we worked with NIH on, um, which was called the a thousand genome data set. This is another really important, um, data set and it's a large number of, uh, against sequence human genomes. And we moved that into, again, an open dataset on AWS and what's happened in the last eight years is many scientists have been able to compute about on it. And the other, the wonderful power of the cloud is over time. We continue to bring out tools to make it easier for people to work. So what they're not they're computing using our, um, our instance types. We call it elastic cloud computing. whether they're doing that, or they were doing some high performance computing using, um, uh, EMR elastic MapReduce, they can do that. And then we've brought up new things that really take it to the next layer, like level like, uh, Amazon SageMaker. >>And this is a, um, uh, makes it really easy for, um, the scientists to launch machine learning algorithms on AWS. So we've done the thousand genome, uh, dataset. Um, there's a number of other areas within NIH that we've been working on. So for example, um, over at national cancer Institute, we've been providing some expert guidance on best practices to how, how you can architect and work on these COVID related workloads. Um, NIH does things with, um, collaboration with many different universities, um, over 2,500, um, academic institutions. And, um, and they do that through grants. And so we've been working with doc office of director and they run their grant management applications in the RFA on AWS, and that allows it to scale up and to work very efficiently. Um, and then we entered in with, um, uh, NIH into this program called strides strides as a program for knowing NIH, but also all these other institutions that work within NIH to use the power of the cloud use commercial cloud for scientific discovery. And when we started that back in July of 2018, long before COVID happened, it was so great that we had that up and running because now we're able to help them out through the strides program. >>Right. Can you imagine if, uh, let's not even go there? I was going to say, um, but so, okay. So the SRA data is available through the AWS open data sponsorship program. You talked about strides. What are some of the other ways that AWS system? >>Yeah, no. So strides, uh, is, uh, you know, wide ranging through multiple different institutes. So, um, for example, over at, uh, the national heart lung and blood Institute, uh, do di NHL BI. I said, there's a lot of acronyms and I gel BI. Um, they've been working on, um, harmonizing, uh, genomic data. And so working with the university of Michigan, they've been analyzing through a program that they call top of med. Um, we've also been working with a NIH on, um, establishing best practices, making sure everything's secure. So we've been providing, um, AWS professional services that are showing them how to do this. So one portion of strides is getting the right data set and the right compute in the right tools, in the hands of the scientists. The other areas that we've been working on is making sure the scientists know how to use it. And so we've been developing these cloud learning pathways, and we started this quite a while back, and it's been so helpful here during the code. So, um, scientists can now go on and they can do self-paced online courses, which we've been really helping here during the, during the pandemic. And they can learn how to maximize their use of cloud technologies through these pathways that we've developed for them. >>Well, not education is imperative. I mean, there, you think about all of the knowledge that they have with within their scientific discipline and being able to leverage technology in a way that's easy is absolutely imperative to the timing. So, so, um, let's talk about other data sets that are available. So you've got the SRA is available. Uh, what are their data sets are available through this program? >>What about along a wide range of data sets that we're, um, uh, doing open data sets and in general, um, these data sets are, um, improving the human condition or improving the, um, the world in which we live in. And so, um, I've talked about a few things. There's a few more, uh, things. So for example, um, there's the cancer genomic Atlas that we've been working with, um, national cancer Institute, as well as the national human genomic research Institute. And, um, that's a very important data set that being computed against, um, uh, throughout the world, uh, commonly within the scientific community, that data set is called TCGA. Um, then we also have some, uh, uh, datasets are focused on certain groups. So for example, kids first is a data set. That's looking at a lot of the, um, challenges, uh, in diseases that kids get every kind of thing from very rare pediatric cancer as to heart defects, et cetera. >>And so we're working with them, but it's not just in the, um, uh, medical side. We have open data sets, um, with, uh, for example, uh, NOAA national ocean open national oceanic and atmospheric administration, um, to understand what's happening better with climate change and to slow the rate of climate change within the department of interior, they have a Landsat database that is looking at pictures of their birth cell, like pictures of the earth, so we can better understand the MCO world we live in. Uh, similarly, uh, NASA has, um, a lot of data that we put out there and, um, over in the department of energy, uh, there's data sets there, um, that we're researching against, or that the scientists are researching against to make sure that we have better clean, renewable energy sources, but it's not just government agencies that we work with when we find a dataset that's important. >>We also work with, um, nonprofit organizations, nonprofit organizations are also in, they're not flush with cash and they're trying to make every dollar work. And so we've worked with them, um, organizations like the child mind Institute or the Allen Institute for brain science. And these are largely like neuro imaging, um, data. And we made that available, um, via, um, our open data set, um, program. So there's a wide range of things that we're doing. And what's great about it is when we do it, you democratize science and you allowed many, many more science scientists to work on these problems. They're so critical for us. >>The availability is, is incredible, but also the, the breadth and depth of what you just spoke. It's not just government, for example, you've got about 30 seconds left. I'm going to ask you to summarize some of the announcements that you think are really, really critical for federal customers to be paying attention to from reinvent 2020. >>Yeah. So, um, one of the things that these federal government customers have been coming to us on is they've had to have new ways to communicate with their customer, with the public. And so we have a product that we've had for a while called on AWS connect, and it's been used very extensively throughout government customers. And it's used in industry too. We've had a number of, um, of announcements this weekend. Jasmine made multiple announcements on enhancement, say AWS connect or additional services, everything from helping to verify that that's the right person from AWS connect ID to making sure that that customer's gets a good customer experience to connect wisdom or making sure that the managers of these call centers can manage the call centers better. And so I'm really excited that we're putting in the hands of both government and industry, a cloud based solution to make their connections to the public better. >>It's all about connections these days, but I wish we had more time, cause I know we can unpack so much more with you, but thank you for joining me on the queue today, sharing some of the insights, some of the impacts and availability that AWS is enabling the scientific and other federal communities. It's incredibly important. And we appreciate your time. Thank you, Lisa, for Brett McMillan. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2020.

>>from around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of AWS Public sector online brought to you by Amazon Web services. >>Everyone welcome back to the Cube's coverage of AWS Public sector summit. Virtual, of course, is the Cube virtual. We're here sheltered in place in our quarantine studio. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. Got a great guest here? Cube Alumni. Can Eisner, Who's the director of worldwide education programs for AWS Amazon Web services? Ken, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. This could be a great segment. Looking forward to chatting. >>Thanks so much, John. Great to talk to you again. >>You know, I'll say, Cube Virtual public sector summit Virtual. We've been virtualized as a society. I'll see the pandemic and all the things that is going on around has been pretty crazy. And one of the things that's most notable is the impact on Education. New York Times This morning and many published reports around the impact College education. Not only economics on the campus aside, the state of the people in the society and Covert 19 is pushed schooling online for the foreseeable future. What's your reaction is you're in charge you've done a lot of work on the foundational level to get Amazon educational programs out there. Take a minute to explain how how this has impacted you guys and your ability to bring that educational stuff to the to the foreseeable future. >>Yeah, the first thing I'd say is this This truly is an absolutely unprecedented time There. Move from virtual instruction. Excuse me from in person classroom instruction into the virtual world at such amazing scale, rapidity is something that educational institutions weren't ready for that couldn't be ready for at this time. We had to enter it with amazing lump levels of empathy for what was going on on the ground in K 12 schools and higher ed schools with our educational technology and publisher providers. So I think the first thing was we had or for the speed at which it happened, we did have to step back and look at what was going on. There are some changes that are happening in the immediacy, and there are some things that Corbett, 19 is has sped educational institutions around the world to look at. An AWS is working with those K 12 providers, higher educational providers teachers and so on on that switch, whether it's providing infrastructure that move into online learning, helping teachers as they prepare for this sort of new normal you some of examples of what has happen. We've been working with the University of Arizona. Help them stand up contact centers with the onset of of cove it and students and teachers. It's being pushed into their home environment or into virtual environments to give instruction to receive instruction. There have been a lot of calls that happen in virtual environments to staff to help them support this. And so we stood up with the University of Arizona and Amazon Amazon Connect help staff provide mobile solutions through the cell phone or computer for for students. >>I want to get your thoughts. Absolutely. I talked to Andy Jassy about this as well as well about agility. This is the Amazon wheelhouse, and you guys have gone into the I T world now developers. You went cloud native, you in that market. He won the enterprise I t market. But the reason why is that you took an old school outdated, antiquated system of I t and made it agile. That seems enough This is the country with Teresa and Andy about education in public sector. The modernization is happening, but there's also the triage and you guys have to do now in terms of getting people online. So what specifically are you doing to help education customers continue their instruction online? Because they still got to execute. They still need to provide this discussion around the fall window Coming up. You got to have the foundational things. I know you've done that, but it is hard. So what's the downstream triage when you come out of this mode of Okay, here you go. And how do you get people set up and then how they transform and re invent? >>Yeah, at this time, the disaster recovery from how do you get in that phase one with this immediate move was so prominent. And we're trying to work through that phase one and sort into sort of phase two delivery of education, which is you're moving with scale moving with agility into this world, speed and agility are really going to be the new normal for education. There were some advances that just weren't happening quick enough. Students should always have access to 24 7 learning, um, and access into that mobile arena. And they weren't having that several things that we did was we looked at our infrastructure were some of those key infrastructure elements that helped with both learning and work remotely. There were things such as Amazon, your work Doc's, which enables thieves virtual our workspaces, which enable virtual desktop environments, and appstream, which enables it APs to be streamed through virtual arena onto your removal or your desktop. Yeah, Amazon connect as I. As I mentioned before, there were services that were vital in helping speed into the cloud that was quick burst into the cloud. And so we enabled some of those services to have special promotional free rates or a given time period, and we have actually now extended that offer a into the fall into September 30th. So first we have to help people really quickly with educators. So I run this program AWS Educate, which is Amazon's global program. To provide students and educators around the world with resource is needed, help them get into cloud learning. But what we saw was that teachers around the world we're not prepared for this massive shift what we did to help that preparedness is we looked at our educators. We found that we did a survey over the weekend and found that 68% of them had significant experience or enough experience in teaching distance or online virtual education, too. Potentially leverage that for other educators around the world. So we and the other thing is teachers are really eager to help other teachers in this move, especially as they saw and they empathize with With her was the panic. Our confusion are best practices and moving into that online arena. So we saw both that they had that experience in a mass willingness to help other people, and we immediately spun up a Siri's of educator and educator help tools, whether it was a Morris Valadez are No a gift, and Doug Berman providing webinars and office hours for other educators around the world. We also did a separate tech talks offering for students. So there were there was the helping scale, whether it's getting blackboard as they ramped up to over 50 x of their normal load in 24 hours to help them deliver on that scale, whether it waas the Egyptian ministry that was trying to had to understand. How could they help students access the information that they need it in speed? And they worked with thinkI, which is a net educational technology provider, to provide access to 22 million students who needed to get access online or whether it was the educator mobilization initiative that we ran. Threat US of AWS Educate Helps Teachers have the resource is that they need it with the speed that they needed to get online. This is we are working. We're learning from our customers. As this happens, this is a moving target. But when I move from this immediacy of pushing people into the virtual space into what's gonna happen this summer, as students need toe recapture, learning that they might have lost in the spring are depending where you are worldwide. There's getting to your point all K 12 higher ed and educational technology providers into the position where they can act with that agility and speed. And it's also helping those educators as they go through this. We're learning from our customers every day. >>Yeah, I want to get into those some of those lessons, but one of things that will say, You know, I'm really bullish about what you do. Getting cloud education, I think, is going to change the literacy and also job opportunities out there. I'm a huge believer that public sector is the next growth wave, just like I t was. And it's almost the same movie, right? You have inadequate systems. It's all outdated. You need these workloads, need to run and then run effectively, which you guys have done. But the interesting thing with Cove it is it essentially exposes the scabs and the uh out there because, you know, online has been an augmentation to the physical space. So when you pull that back, people like me go, wait a minute. I have kids. I'm trying to understand their learning impact. Everyone sees it now. It's almost like it's exposed. Whether it's under provisioned VP ends or black boys networking and everyone's pointing their fingers. It's your fault and its the end. So you brought this up. There's now stakeholders whose jobs depend upon something that's now primary that wasn't primary before. Whether it's the presenter, the content presented the teacher certainly high availability. I t. Um >>all these things >>are just under huge pressure. So I gotta ask you, what are the key lessons and learnings that you have seen over the past few months that you could share because people are shell shocked and they're trying to move faster? >>Yeah. So first of all is speed and agility and education are the new normal. They should have been here for a while. They need to be here now when you've got a 30 year textbook, your ruling over education when students need to get the skills of tomorrow. Today we need to be adapting quickly in order to give those students the skills to give educational institution those opportunities. Every institution needs to be enable virtual education. Every institution needs to have disaster recovery solutions and they weren't in place. These solutions need to be comprehensive. Students need access to devices. Teachers need access to professional development. We need contact centers. We worked with Los Angeles Unified School District not just to stand up a contact center, which we did with yeah, Amazon connect. But we also connected their high school seniors too, with headphones. I think we provide 132,000 students with headphones. We are helping to source with through our Amazon business relationship devices for everybody. Every student needs access in their home. Every student needs access to great learning and they needed on demand. Teachers need that readiness. I think the other thing that's happening is the whole world is again speeding through changes that probably should have happened to the system already that virtual learning is vital. Another thing that's vital is lifelong learning. We're finding that and we probably should have already seen. This is everybody needs to be a student throughout their entire life, and they need to be streaming in and out of education. The only way that this could be properly done is through virtual environments through the cloud and through an access to on demand learning. We believe that this that the work that's being done I was actually talking to some people in Australia the other day and they're saying, You know, the government is moving away from degree centrist city and moving into a more modular stackable education. We've been building AWS educate to stack to the job to stack to careers, and that type of move into education, I think, is also being spent So were you were seeing the that move Apple absolutely accelerate. We're also seeing the need to accelerate the speed to research. Obviously with what's going on going on with Kobe 19 there is a need for tools to connect our researchers two cures to diagnostic, um, opportunities. We worked with the University of British Columbia, Vancouver General Hospital and the Vancouver I Get this thing, the Vancouver Coastal Health Research UNE Institute to develop to use Amazon sage maker to speed ai diagnostic tool so that pushed towards research is absolutely vital as well. We just announced a $20 million investment in helping you speak that that research to market so education needs to operate at scale education needs to operate at speed, and education needs to deliver to a changing customer. And we've got to be partners on that journey. >>And I think I would just add reinvent a word. You guys name your conference after every year. This is a re invention opportunity. Clearly, um, and you know, I was talking to some other parents is like, I'm not going to send my kids to school online learning for zoom interview, zoom, zoom, zoom classes. I'm like, Hey, you know, get a cloud data engineering degree from Amazon educate because they'll have a job like that. Once you put on linked in the job skills are out there. The jobs are needed. Skills aren't so. I got to ask you, you know, with this whole re Skilling, whether it's a Gap year student in between semesters, while this takes care of our up Skilling people on the job, this is huge world economic form said by 2020 half of the employees will need to be re skilled up skilled. This is a huge impact and even more focus with covert 19. >>That's absolutely correct. Yeah, I think one thing that's happening is we're cloud computing has been the number one Lincoln skill for the past four or five years. The the skill. Whether it's software development in the cloud cloud architecture, your data world, our cyber security and other operational rules, those are going to be in the most demand. Those are the skills that are growing. We need to be able prepare people for rules in technology. The lifelong worker, the re skill up skill opportunities, absolutely vital Gap year is going to be available for some students. But we also got a look at you know how the this that how covert 19 can accelerate gaps between students. Every student needs access to high quality education. Every teacher needs to be equipped with the latest professional development. We've got focused like a laser, not just on. The people could afford a gap. Here are the people who who are going to be some schools who actually had solutions that could immediately push there kids into their their youth, their students in college or even employees. You need those re skills. We're all home. But it also needs to extend into the middle of the middle of Los Angeles and and you're into low income students. And in Egypt, I was really excited. We we've been working with Northern Virginia community colleges as I think you know, they were one of the lead institutions. On launching an associate degree in the cloud, they took their courses and offer what they call a jump year to 70,000 high school senior. Our high school students in Northern Virginia in the northern Virginia area, including enabling some of our cloud computing horses, are the work courses that we worked on with them to the students. So yeah, those new partnerships, that extension of college into high school and college into re skill up skills, absolutely vital. But institutions need to be able to move fast with the tools that the cloud provides you into those arena. >>Well, you know, I think you've got a really hard job to do there. It's foundational in love, what you're doing and you know me. I've been harping people who watch the Cube know that I'm always chirping and talking about how the learning is non linear. It's horizontally scalable. There's different application. You can have an application for education. It's a Siri's of different things. The workload of learning is completely different. I think to me what you guys are doing right now setting that basics foundation infrastructure. It's like the E. C two s three model. Then you got more on top of it platform, and I think ultimately the creativity is going to come from the marketplace. Whoever can build those workloads in a very agile, scalable way to meet the needs, because, let's face it, it can't be boring. Education is gonna be robust, resilient and got to deliver the payload and that's gonna be customized applications that have yet to be invented. Reinvented >>absolutely. Hopefully were jump starting that next wave of innovation spreading the opportunities Teoh all students. Hopefully we are really looking at those endemic issues and education and following leaders like University of Arizona. What the Ministry of Education, um in in Egypt has done and Northern Virginia community. Hopefully we are really taking this the opportunity of this disaster to invent on behalf of our students. Bring in you forward to the 21st century as opposed to yeah, just looking at this naval gazing way we do wrong and the past. This is an exciting opportunity, albeit a obviously scary one is we're all dealing with this with this and >>there's no doubt once we've retrenching and get some solid ground postcode 19. It's a reinvention and a reimagine growth market opportunity because you got changing technology, changing economics and changing expectations and experiences that are needed. These are three major things going down right now. >>Absolutely, absolutely. And to your point, the retraining of workers, the up skill that the great thing is that governments realize this imperative as do educational institutions and obviously yet students. This is, and we seem like what educators can do when they want to help. Yeah, other educators, this is This is an opportunity in our society to really look at every everybody is a constant learner were a constant learning from our customers. But everybody, there is no end to education. It cannot be terminal. And this is an opportunity to really provide the students learners with skills that they need in an on demand fashion at all times and re think re innovate, reinvent the way we look at education in general. >>Well, a man, Jeff Bezos says Day one. It's a new day, one, right? So you know that there is going to reinvent Ken. You doing great work. Director of worldwide education programs Ken Eisner with Amazon Web services, Certifications and degrees and cloud computing will be the norm. It's gonna happen again. If you're a cloud data engineer. Data says you're going to get a job. I mean, no doubt about it. So thanks so much for sharing your insights. Really appreciate it. Thank you, >>John. Thank you very much for your time. I appreciate it. >>Can guys They're here Inside the Cube. Virtual coverage of AWS Public sector Online Summit. We've been virtualized. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. Yeah, >>Yeah, yeah, yeah.

(upbeat electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's The Cube, covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of OpenStack Summit 2018 here in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia. I'm Stu Miniman, with my co-host John Troyer. Happy to welcome back to the program, it's been a couple of years, actually, Boris Renski, who is the co-founder and CMO of Merantis And also is on the keynote stage for the OpenDev part of this show here. Boris, great to see you, thanks for joining us. >> Good to see you guys, and great to be back. Thank you for having me back. >> Absolutely, so we're going to talk about OpenDev, we're going to talk about a few things, but let's start with Merantis, your company. I think back to some of my first experiences at the OpenStack show. First of all, Merantis always does great keynotes, I remember there was dancing on stage, there's fun T-shirts I actually coveted. I don't go after swag much, but it was like the Heisenburg 99.999%-- >> I remember that T-shirt, yeah. >> Pure T-shirt for the Breaking Bad fans out there, to date myself on this, but always bring some energy and excitement and Merantis was one of the companies really super glued to OpenStack, so bring us up to 2018. When I think of Merantis, what should I be thinking of and let's get into it from there. >> Yeah, so let me see. We are still super glued to OpenStack. We did go through some changes and some evolutions. I think given how long it's been since we've talked, the notable changes have been a change to our delivery approach and with it some of the changes to actually the underlying software stack, so the most common thing is that we've evolved Merantis OpenStack into what we now call Merantis Cloud Platform and the key difference is how we approach actually the life cycle management of the OpenStack itself. Before our tool for installing and basically updating OpenStack was Fuel which was very prescriptive and monolithic type of delivery method and what we realized is most of it, large customers that we have, they have a fairly heterogeneous reference architectures that you have to cater to and you have to be able to do that in such a way that it is cost effective, so we've rebuilt Fuel for to a new tool called DriveTrain which uses a continuous delivery pattern to manage and deliver updates to OpenStack and with that we've also tweaked out delivery model a little bit. Before we just followed traditional distro-model where we just throw out our software out there. You can download and play with it and call us and we'll support you. When it comes to complicated distributive systems like OpenStack, that are life-cycled following a continuous delivery pattern, most of the companies simply don't have the in-house talent and skills to just take it and start deriving value, so we've moved to what we refer to as a build, operate, transfer model where we actually come in and we set up the environment, we manage an environment to an SLA, give a customer four nines SLA on the up time of the OpenStack environment we're managing and after a period of a year, give the customer an opportunity to gradually take over the operations and by operations I mean, patches, updates, et cetera until after some time we just completely go away or we just take a role of a software support vendor, effectively. So that's on the core business side. Since we haven't talked in a while, so it's a little bit of a long update, sorry. >> Stu: Yeah, yeah, it's okay. >> The thing that we've been talking a lot about recently has been the new thing we launched in beta about a month and a half ago called Merantis application platform, so Merantis Cloud Platform is OpenStack, is our core business. Merantis Application Platform is a new thing that we have launched about month and a half ago that is based on Spinnaker and Spinnaker is this continuous delivery open source tool that's been built by Netflix, originally. >> Yeah, so before we get into the OpenDev and Spinnaker and all that stuff, want your viewpoint on the OpenStack piece, so really appreciate that update. There were years that we thought, oh, it's the battle for who's going to do distributions and as you said, it's not that easy and maybe we had poor expectations as an industry as to where we could take it and where it should be used, so how should people be thinking about OpenStack in general? Can you give us one or two of the key use cases you see in your customer base? >> Yeah, so, I think that what we realized is that when it comes to general purpose cloud, so to speak, there is not tremendous value, at least among the customers that we have the opportunity to interface with, to use OpenStack. You have something that's already in place and you don't touch it and that's usually VMware or you want something new general purpose, people go to public cloud, but there is an enormous opportunity for what we refer to as tuned stacks or clouds that are tuned to particular business use cases and this is where I think is an opportunity for OpenStack to excel and this is historically where we as Merantis been actually delivering value to our customers. So speaking of the use cases, our customer base is split, we split it into enterprise and telco. More than half of the customers, actually, are from the telco side. So telco clouds, there is a variety of use cases. Typically those use cases are function of the, and the overarching use case is NFE, virtually network function virtualization. The specificity and the reference architecture of the actual infrastructure environment is a function of the VNF that is running on that cloud and in some instances if you were to categorize this for telco space, you can think of it in terms of a big cloud for VNFs that don't need to be close to the edge and those that are stretching out to the smaller footprint all the way to the edge and those are vastly different reference architectures and you do different performance optimizations and tuning and this is something that you can only do with something like OpenStack. Now when it comes to the enterprise side, the actually emerging use case that we've been seeing quite a bit of is HPC, because, again, HPC is full of purpose-built equipment, you do networking differently, you do a lot of things differently and a lot of the times the general purpose public clouds don't work for it, so for HPC again, we have a set of reference architectures that are modeled within the Drivetrain that we can just deploy fairly easily out of the box that cater specifically to the HPC use case and the enterprise. >> Boris, do you think HPC then either includes now or evolves into ML and AI as well, again, bespoke hardware, very specific use case? >> Yes, eventually. I think that there is an opportunity there for some of the reference architectures and deployment topologies currently used for HPC to evolve towards some of the AI use cases. Again, I think that, when it comes to enterprise and AI, it's a bit early, so yeah. >> Boris, the tagline of the company is, The Managed Open Cloud Company, and you talked about managing, being a managed cloud. That's been a fascinating development over the last few years. We're seeing it at the OpenStack level and for instance at the kubernetes level as well. Can you talk a little bit about that approach and who are the customers that need that entry ramp or accelerator for these private cloud installations? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that... There are two types of ways to implement infrastructure, implement the cloud. There is those that are trying to, they are looking at public cloud and they are saying, okay, this is like, I see what Amazon's doing, what Google's doing is great. I want the same thing and I want it in-house, for security reasons, for whatever, compliance reasons, doesn't matter. So all of these guys that fall into this category, I think for them to become successful with the cloud on-prem, should follow the managed approach. Again, I'm a little bit biased on this in that I'm selling this-- >> That was always the hit against running your own private cloud is you didn't have, one did not have the expertise in-house-- >> Boris: Yeah, that's exactly correct. >> That's what we need. >> First of all, the whole evolution between Fuel to Drivetrain and using the CD pattern to life-cycling the infrastructure stack is something that there isn't talent out there, there isn't DNA out there and enterprises simply are not able to just go ahead and start doing it and the whole model that, when you go to Amazon, you just have this cloud that is continuously updated for you, you don't have to worry about anything, so this model implies that you focus on delivering the end service rather than delivering the software. When you go to Amazon, you don't get software, you don't get to pick and choose. You just get certain reference architecture that is delivered for you. The guys that want to replicate the Amazon on-premise effectively, in my view, have to be gradually on ramped onto that. You can't just grab the software, do DIY, and expect you'll have an Amazon. There's a second category and the second category is basically like the software guys, the guys that, they are not looking for Amazon, they are looking for cheaper VMware, which is a different experience. I have my own team, I have my opps guys, VMware is great, but it's too expensive, I don't want be locked into it, give me something that is different. So there is value in that, but this is not the segment of the market that we are going after and I don't think that cheaper VMware is what most people refer to when they talk about cloud. So I hope that answers the question. >> Absolutely, so you brought up Spinnaker before. Want to get your thoughts on the things usually, typically on top of OpenStack, but kubernetes, Spinnaker, containers in general. What's Merantis' position on this. What are you hearing from your customers and would love to tease out some of the Spinnaker stuff a bit more. >> Yeah, yeah. Spinnaker thing is fairly new for us. We've been tracking the space and Spinnaker in particular, probably for a year, although have come out publicly just recently about it. The reason why the space was interesting to us was because I think that everybody who is undergoing digital transformation and embracing cloud as a byproduct of it, is really after being able to run the company like a startup, being able to release faster, being able to release more often and in fact, when we'd come to our customers our opening pitch even for OpenStack has always been, buy OpenStack, that'll help you build software faster. On the one hand, it's kind of like a cool pitch, on the other hand, I think everybody in the company, including myself, we're not entirely comfortable with making that leap. OpenStack means I can have an API for my VM's and maybe containers, release software faster. How do you connect the two, right? So, we decided to, in trying to solve this problem of helping companies release software faster, for once rid ourselves of our existing business and our infrastructure centric views of the world and unpack the problem and see what are the real big issues with releasing software faster today. What we realized is that one of the biggest bottlenecks is actually the continuous delivery part because when it comes to continuous delivery or even not to use fancy terms just to, deploying anything to production in the enterprise. It's a very complicated process that requires coordination between multiple teams like the application team, the SRE team, the SEC opps team, all of these teams are using different tools and the handoff process and the handshakes between are very loose, generally so a developer can build something very quickly, but for it to hit production environment, and for the enterprise to actually get feedback from the customers on this, it takes a very long time. So we started thinking about how do you actually shorten that cycle? What can you do? With that kind of frame of mind, we've come across Spinnaker and what we realized is that Spinnaker is actually, in a sense, to continuous delivery what OpenStack is to infrastructure, because the reason why OpenStack became popular is because it's effectively, on one hand, has all these plugins for diverse infrastructure, and on the other hand you can automate the orchestration process of bringing up a VM, instead of having your server people come in, put in the server, your operating people come in and install operating system, the network people come in, configure the network, et cetera, it's actually built a workflow and orchestrated the whole thing automatically without necessarily requiring companies to throw away their existing infrastructure investment. And if you go to the CD space, the situation's kind of similar. You have all these different teams, you have all these different tools, and you need to find a way to automate and orchestrate this process so that you minimize the number of human steps and this is exactly the problem space that Spinnaker's been tackling, so it's a portent of this plugability and having a single API for the entire CD chain and the best implementation would be the one like Netflix has is where the actual developers are able to just deploy to production directly. All of this orchestration between all the testing and all the stuff is done by Spinnaker behind the scenes, so we feel that actually tackling that problem and bringing this innovation into the enterprise is going to be something very dramatic at producing something at an order of magnitude performance gains for our customers. >> Of course, one of the things the foundation announced was the Zule CI/CD. Can you help us reconcile Zule and Spinnaker? >> Zule is from what I would characterize it, primarily deals with VCI side of the spectrum and I mentioned this in my talk, so one of the things we learned as a company is if you unpack CI/CD, which most people, at least in the infrastructure space look at it like it's one thing, like oh CI/CD thing, it's like one thing, basically. In reality, it's not one thing, it's completely separate things, so CI primarily has to do with actually building the code into something that can be deployed, into some deployable artifact and CD takes on from there. So Zule deals primarily with the CI part and it deals with it in a particular way for a set of specific use cases, so Zule emerged as the CI infrastructure for OpenStack Project itself and OpenStack is a very peculiar project in that, there's thousands of developers with different viewpoints on the world that are highly distributed, building many different components that are loosely coupled that all need to come together somehow. So you need to have distributed CI systems that talk to each other and you can merge all of this code and test it all together, so that use case is very relevant for large open source projects and it's probably relevant for enterprises who want to adopt similar type of practices for software development internally, so if you want to some extent de-silo many distributed Dev teams that you have internally as an enterprise and overlay standard process for the CI piece of it for everybody, I think Zule is a good solution and Spinnaker then comes after that, as an additive that does the deployment part. >> John: Yep, that makes sense. >> Alright, for us unfortunately we're running low on time, not going to have much time to dig in to the OpenDev piece. Last question I actually wanted to ask you is what do you say to the naysayers out there. People that aren't here sometimes tend to throw stones at OpenStack failed, OpenStack is dead, all the VCs pulled out years ago. Merantis has been through it and you've got customers. We've had a good experience this week, but it's a different OpenStack than it was a few years ago, so just if you could give us the final word on that. >> Yeah, so, good question. I think that... Basically, OpenStack was at this insane hype back in the day and it's natural to expect that the higher the hype, the bigger going to be the drop, but I think that all technologies ultimately, they can not sustain the hype. You have to level out at a certain point that is equal to the true customer value that you are delivering. So I think that the naysaying is a function of very high hype that has now leveled to the... What it should be, really, in terms of the value being delivered by OpenStack. And there's this pool, it generated this big pool of the naysayers that are walking around and saying that it is dead and the reason why there's the pool is because indeed there is a lot of investment, there is enormous amount of startups that kind of like, ah, we are the cool guys, we are going to change the world, we are going to kill Amazon, whatever, that now are completely gone and now of course they are naysayers and saying that the whole thing's dead, but on the flip side of that, if you just walk around the summit, you can see that there's many more users, there's many more customers that are actually talking about real use cases and then the companies that did stay and stick around, like ourselves, like Red Hat, like Canonical and SUSE, actually, are seeing continued growth and increased usage, so just a nice closing comment is our biggest customer for OpenStack is AT&T. We've been with them for five years now and they've been very excited about it and then, no it's all going to be dead, it's going to be containers now, and nuh nuh nuh, but despite all of that, the usage is continuing to grow and there is 10,000 nodes plus now running physical servers with OpenStack and it continues to work and it just, workloads are moving to it and AT&T is not the only one. There is plenty more that are following this trend, so it's a very long answer to your question, but I remain optimistic. For us it's still very much core of our business and we're continuing to see growth and usage and we are sticking around and sticking to OpenStack. >> Alright, well Boris Renski, it's, as you know, one of our earliest taglines was helping to extract the signal from the noise. We appreciate you helping us to understand the reality outside the hype. So for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, more coverage here from the OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. Thank you for watching The Cube. (upbeat electronic music) (soft piano music)

>> Narrator: Live from Vancouver, Canada it's theCUBE covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Stu Miniman, with my cohost John Troyer, and happy to welcome to the program, fresh off the container keynote, Chris Hodge, who's the senior strategic program manager with the OpenStack Foundation. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Oh yeah, thanks so much for having me. >> Alright, so short trip for you, then John's coming from the Bay Area, I'm coming from the east coast. You're coming up from Portland, which is where it was one of the attendees at the Portland OpenStack Summit, they said, "OpenStack has arrived, theCUBE's there." So, shout out to John Furrier and the team who were there early. I've been to all the North America ones since. You've been coming here for quite a while and it's now your job. >> I've been to every OpenStack Summit since then. And to the San Francisco Summit prior to that, so it was, yeah, I've been a regular. >> Okay so for those people that might not know, what's a Foundation member do these days? Other than, you know, you're working on some of the tech, you're giving keynotes, you know, what's a day in the life? >> Yeah, I mean, I mean for me, I feel like I'm really lucky because the OpenStack Foundation, you know, has you know, kind of given me a lot of freedom to go interact with other communities and that's been one of my primary tasks, to go out and work with adjacent communities and really work with them to build integrations between OpenStack and right now, particularly, Kubernetes and the other applications that are being hosted by the CNCF. >> Yeah, so I remember, and I've mentioned it a few times this week, three years ago we were sitting in the other side of the convention center, with theCUBE and it was Docker, Docker, Docker. The container sessions were overflowing and then a year later it was, you know, oh my gosh, Kubernetes. >> Chris: Yeah. (chuckles) >> This wave of, does one overtake the other, how do they fit together, and you know, in the keynotes yesterday and I'm sure your keynote today, talked a lot a bit about you know, the various ways that things fit together, because with open source communities in general and tech overall, it's never binary, it's always, it depends, and there's five different ways you could put things together depending on your needs. So, what are you seeing? >> I mean it's almost, yeah, I mean saying that it's one or the other and that one has to win and the other has to lose is actually kind of, it's kind of silly, because when we talk about Kubernetes and we talk about Docker, we're generally talking about applications. And, you know, and, with Kubernetes, when you're very focused on the applications you want to have existing infrastructure in place. I mean, this is what it's all about. People talk about, "I'm going to run my Kubernetes application "on the cloud, and the cloud has infrastructure." Well, OpenStack is infrastructure. And in fact, it is open source, it's an open source cloud. And so, so for me it feels like it's a very natural match, because you have your open application delivery system and then it integrates incredibly well with an open source cloud and so whether you're looking for a public cloud running on OpenStack or you're hosting a private cloud, you know, to me it's a very natural pairing to say that you have an OpenStack cloud, you have a bunch of integrations into Kubernetes and that the two work together. >> I think this year that that became a lot clearer, both in the keynotes and some of the sessions. The general conversation we've had with folks about the role of Kubernetes or an orchestration or the cloud layer, the application layer, the application deployment layer say, and the infrastructure somebody's got to manage the compute the network storage down here. At least, in this architectural diagram with my hands but, you can also, a couple of demos here showed deploying Kubernetes on bare metal alongside OpenStack, with that as the provider. Can you talk a little bit about that architectural pattern? It makes sense, I think, but then, you know, it's a apparent contradiction, wait a minute so now the Kubernetes is on the bare metal? So talk about that a little bit. >> So, I think, I think one of the ways you can think about resolving the contradiction is OpenStack is a bunch of applications. When you go and you install OpenStack we have all of these microsurfaces that are, some are user facing and some are controlling the architecture underneath. But they're applications and Kubernetes is well-suited for application delivery. So, say that you're starting with bare metal. You're starting with a bare metal cloud. Maybe managed by OpenStack, so you have OpenStack there at the bottom with Ironic, and you're managing your bare metal. You could easily install Kubernetes on that and that would be at your infrastructure layer, so this isn't Kubernetes that you're giving to your users, it's not Kubernetes that you're, you know, making world facing, this is internally for your organization for managing your infrastructure. But, you want OpenStack to provide that cloud infrastructure to all of your users. And since OpenStack is a big application with a lot of moving parts, Kubernetes actually becomes a very powerful tool, or any other container orchestration scheme becomes a very powerful tool for saying that you drop OpenStack on top of that and then all of a sudden you have a public cloud that's available for, you know, for the users within your organization, or you could be running a public cloud and providing those services for other people. And then suddenly that becomes a great platform for hosting Kubernetes applications on, and so the layers kind of interleave with one another. But even if you're not interested in that. Let's say you're running Kubernetes as bare metal and you're just, you want to have Kubernetes here providing some things. There's still things that OpenStack provides that you may already have existing in your infrastructure. >> Kubernetes kind of wants, it wants to access some storage. >> It wants to consume storage for example, and so we have OpenStack Cinder, which right now it supports you know, somewhere between, you know over 70 storage drivers, like these drivers exist and the nice thing about it is... You have one API to access this and we have two drivers within that, two Cinder drivers, you can either choose the, the flex volume storage or the container storage interface, the CSI storage interface. And Cinder just provides that for you. And that means if you have mixed storage within your data center, you put it all behind a Cinder API and you have one interface to your Kubernetes. >> So Chris, I believe that's one of the pieces of I believe it's called the Cloud Provider OpenStack. You talked about in the keynote. Maybe walk us through with that. >> Cloud Provider OpenStack is a project that is hosted within the, within the Kubernetes community. And it's... The owner of that code is the SIG OpenStack community inside of Kubernetes. I'm one of the three leads, one of the three SIG leads of that group and, that code does a number of things. The first is there's a cloud manager interface that is a consistent interface for Kubernetes to access infrastructure information in clouds. So information about a node, when a node joins a system, Kubernetes will know about it. Ways to attach storage, ways to provision load balancers. The cloud manager interface allows Kubernetes to do this on any cloud, whether it be Azure or GCE or Amazon. Also OpenStack. Cloud Provider OpenStack is the specific code that allows us to do that, and in fact we were, OpenStack was one of the first providers that existed in upstream Kubernetes you know, so it's kind of, we've been there since the very beginning, like this has been a, you know, an effort that's happened from the beginning. >> Somewhat non-ironically, right? A lot of that you've talked about, the OpenStack Foundation and this OpenStack Summit, a lot of the things talked about here are not OpenStack per se, the components, they are containers, there's the OpenDev Conference here, colocated. Is there confusion, there doesn't, I'm getting it straight in my head, Is there, was there, did you sense any confusion of folks here or is that, if you're in it you understand what's going on and why all these different threads are flowing together in kind of an open infrastructure conversation. It seems like the community gets it and understand it and is broadened because of it. >> Yeah, I mean, to me I've seen a tremendous shift over the last year in the general understanding of the community of the role all of these different applications play. And I think it's really, it's actually a testament to the success of all of these projects, in particular, we're building open APIs, we're building predictable behavior, and once you have that, and you have many people, many different organizations that are able to provide that, they're all able to communicate with one another and leverage the strengths of the other projects. >> All of a sudden, a standard interface, low and behold, right? A thousand flowers bloom on top. >> You know, it essentially allows you to build new things on top of that, new more interesting things. >> Alright, Chris, any interesting customer stories out of the keynote that we should share with the audience? >> I mean, there are so many fantastic stories that you can talk about, I mean, of course we saw the CERN keynote, where they're running managed Kubernetes on top of OpenStack. They have over 250 Kubernetes clusters doing research that are managed by OpenStack Magnum. I mean that's just, to me that's just tremendous. That this is being used in production, it's being used in science, and it's not just across one cloud, it's across many clouds and, You know, we also have AT&T, which has been working very hard on combining OpenStack and Kubernetes to manage their next generation of, of teleco infrastructure. And so, they've been big drivers along with SK Telecom on using Kubernetes as an infrastructure layer and then putting OpenStack on top of that, and then delivering applications with that. And so those are, you know we, the OpenStack Foundation just published on Monday a new white paper about OpenStack, how OpenStack works with containers and these are just a couple of the case studies that we actually have listed in that white paper. >> Chris, you're at the interface between OpenStack, which has become more mature and more stable, and containers, which, although it is maturing is still a little bit, is moving fast, right? Containers and Kubernetes both, a lot of development. Every summit, a lot of new projects, lot of new ways of installing, lot of new components, lot of new snaps. All sorts of things. What are you looking forward to now over the next year in terms of container maturity and how that's going to help us? >> So... People are talking so much now about security with containers and this is another really exciting thing that's coming out of our work because, you know, during one of the container keynotes, one of the things that was kind of driven home was containers don't contain. But, we're actually, at the OpenStack Foundation, we're kind of taking that on, and we, and my colleague Anne Bertucio has been leading a project, you know, has been community manager for a product called Kata Containers, which is, you know, you could almost call it containers that do contain. So I think that this is going to be really exciting in the next year as we talk more and more about we're building more generic interfaces and allowing all sorts of new approaches to solving complex problems, be it in security, be it in performance, be it in logging and monitoring. And so, I think, so the tools that are coming out of this and you know, creating these abstractions and how people are creatively innovating on top of those is pretty exciting. >> The last thing I'm hoping you can help connect the dots for us on is, when we talk Kubernetes, we're talking about multi-cloud. One of the big problems about Kubernetes, you know, came out of Google from you know, if you just say, "Why would Google do this?" It's like, well, there's that one really big cloud out there and if I don't have some portability and be able to move things, that one cloud might just continue to dominate. So, help connect OpenStack to how it lives in this multi-cloud world. Kubernetes is a piece of that, but you know, maybe, would love your viewpoint. >> Yeah, so. This is happening on so many levels. We see lots of large organizations who want to take back control of the cost of cloud and the cost of their cloud infrastructure and so they're starting to pull away from the big public clouds and invest more in private infrastructure. We see this with companies like eBay, we see it with companies like AT&T and Walmart, where they're investing heavily in OpenStack clouds. So that they have more control over the cost and how their applications are delivered. But you're also seeing this in a lot of... Like especially municipalities outside of the United States, you know, different governments that have data restrictions, restrictions on where data lives and how it's accessed, and we're seeing more governments and more businesses overseas that are turning to OpenStack as a way to have cloud infrastructure that is on their home soil, that you know, kind of meets the requirements that are necessary, you know that are necessary for them. And then kind of the third aspect of all of this is sometimes you just, sometimes you need to have lots of availability across, you know, many clouds. And you can have a private cloud, but possibly, in order to serve your customers, you might need public cloud resources, and federation across, across this, both in OpenStack and Kubernetes is improving at such an incredible pace that it becomes very easy to say that I have two, three, four, five clouds, but we're able to, we're able to combine them all and make them all look like one. >> Alright, well Chris Hodge, we really appreciate the updates on OpenStack and Kubernetes in all the various permutations. >> Yeah, it was great talking about it. This is, I mean this is the work that I love and I'm excited about, and this is, you know, I'm looking forward to it, I have fun with it and I keep looking forward to everything that's coming. >> Awesome, well we love to be able to share these stories, the technologists, the customers and everything going on in the industry. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, back with more coverage here from OpenStack Summit 2018 in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (tech music)

>> Announcer: Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018, brought to you by Red Hat, The OpenStack Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of OpenStack Summit 2018 in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia. It's Victoria Day, but we're working. So for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Happy to welcome back to the program, we've got Tim Burke who's the Vice President of Infrastructure and Cloud Engineering with Red Hat, and fresh off the keynote stage we have Mark McLoughlin who's the Senior Director of Engineering for OpenStack, also with Red Hat. Gentleman, thank you so much for joining us. >> Our pleasure, thank you. >> Thank you. All right, so Mark, I'll start with you. Keynote stage, you had a good discussion about, we were talking about open source, talking about community, is the themes that we heard at Red Hat Summit last weekend and again here at OpenStack. It's a nice couple of years in a row we've had the back-to-back of those two shows, so give us a little bit encapsulation of that message. >> Sure, I mean the key message of the keynote, really, was talking about the overlapping missions between the OpenStack and Kubernetes and really kind of showing how they come together for our customers and for users generally in terms of tackling that kind of broad, open infrastructure challenge of trying to give businesses the opportunity to be free from the infrastructure providers in terms of being able to switch between infrastructure providers and also OpenStack in terms of its role offering kind of on-premise infrastructure as an alternative to the public cloud. >> Yeah, Tim, I want to get your viewpoint on some things. It's interesting, we talk about we're at the OpenStack show but we're talking about containers, we're talking about edge computing. I think about one of the other foundations, The Linux Foundation does way more than Linux these days. They're doing all the cloud native things. Reminds me a lot of Red Hat themselves, broad spectrum of products. Sometimes it can almost get a little bit overwhelming for most people to say, "Oh my god, "there's so many projects, there's so many products. "How do you help me get to where I need to go "and where I need to go tomorrow?" What are you hearing from customers? How do you manage that? >> I think a lot of this mirrors Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and back when we started it was the day of the Unix wars, right? And in the early days of Linux it was this big challenge of getting your graphics drivers and putting all these pieces together, right? And now today it's more about broader infrastructure orchestration. And you see Mark Collier, for example, from The OpenStack Foundation started today showing a list of 30 different components that you have to piece together. And really, I think that that's what Red Hat focuses on, is two things. It's one, is where do we want to take the technology tomorrow through our open source fund, ranging from Linux to OpenStack and Ceph Filesystems, for example. But it's not just that. It's how do you get these pieces to work together? And I think that that's something that hasn't traditionally been the strength of the open source community because they may stick into these silos of operation. And I think that Red Hat's focus and strength right now is to do what we did for Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the OpenStack space by pulling all of these pieces together in a consumable and supported manner. >> Yeah, it's funny you mention getting graphics cards in. Come on, with the Queen's announcement we now have the virtual GPU support, so it feels like, but you know what, we've come so far yet. We're doing some of the same things over again. What are you hearing that's just massively different about kind of the state of open source today? And we just had one of your customers on talking about their digital transformation. >> I think what's really changed over the years in open source is I think it started out, honestly, as a clone. It was like can we compete with the likes of Solaris, right? And so it was, I'd call it catch up for innovation. Now you look at open source. It's not catching up, it's leading all the innovation today whether it's all the major public clouds are based on open source technologies. When we started open source was unproven and many customers were skeptical of consuming it. Now you're seeing customers, governments, all sorts of different businesses demanding open source because they want choice, they don't want to be locked into any one vendor, and they want to be able to work collaboratively to harness the power. And I think that collective collaborative model has really pretty proven its effectiveness. >> Mark, I wanted to talk a little bit about OpenStack itself. I think last year at OpenStack Summit there was a lot of talk. People seemed to be a little bit confused or at least there was a lot of interesting architectural conversations, containers on top, containers on the bottom, what sits on the bare metal. This year both at Red Hat Summit and here and even in the industry at large I think a lot of that conversation has clarified. There's the (laughs) application layer and there's an infrastructure layer which does very hard things that the application layer does not have to worry about. How are you looking at OpenStack as a citizen of the industry and of the Stack connections with other open source and taking care of that infrastructure piece in 2018, right, which is, we're pretty far from where we started. >> No, great points. To highlight those architectural discussions and really trying to figure out the kind of layering there obviously kind of approach OpenStack as kind of the best tool for managing your infrastructure, getting your infrastructure under control, making it scalable, making it automatable, and then building an application platform on top of that. I may have confused the architectural discussion a little bit this morning with the keynote because what we actually showed in the keynote was on the rack on stage we had an OpenStack cloud running on bare metal and then we would end deploying Kubernetes. Our open shift distribution, we were deploying that also on bare metal alongside OpenStack. Whereas I think often people would assume if you're going to do Kubernetes on OpenStack you're going to do it in virtual machines that are managed by OpenStack. But we were actually showing how you can use OpenStack to manage the bare metal, that you're actually running Kubernetes directly on the bare metal but that there's still integration between Kubernetes and OpenStack when they're side by side. So maybe confused the architectural discussion a little bit more but I think it's really trying to highlight that that assumption of running Kubernetes inside virtual machines isn't necessary. >> You used one of my favorite tools in your keynote. You used Venn diagrams because it is not a thing over here and a thing over here. There's overlap and there's decisions that you'll make, and lots of customers want a platform that will guide them down that path. And they also, oh wait, but I have this custom thing that I need to do. What's the biggest problem we have in IT, is it's not standardized and nothing ever gets thrown away. It's like I want to run my docker image on a z/VM in a mainframe. Oh, Walmart does that, but they also have an OpenStack deployment. So (laughs) you hear all of these discussions out there where it's like wait, is this, you know, (laughs) is this the main thing? Is this modified? What sits on what and where? So it's and, it seems to be, and there's a lot of choices. >> Absolutely, and I think one of the really, you know, one of the really interesting things when you're working in this space is you realize that customers are making really long-term strategic decisions appear. The example I used today was BBVA, and they realized that they needed to kind of keep up with a fast-changing market and they needed an internal platform to allow them to do that. And this is about them making a long-term decision about how they were going to build that platform into the, it's a really kind of long-term and basing their business on that and its future. So that's, it's kind of humbling in terms of having that responsibility of making that work. >> Yeah, Tim, maybe we can get your comments on the ecosystem. We sure have watched three years ago when we were here HP had a big army coming in here as to they doing their distribution. Well, HP's a hardware, HPE, I should say as they are now (laughs) is a hardware partner. Red Hat works across all of the traditional infrastructure companies. This ecosystem changed. Red Hat has a broad ecosystem. What are you seeing out there? What do you get from the partners that they're asking, and how does that play? >> Yeah, I think this really, again, mirrors our approach to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And so if you look at all the different dimensions of compute, network, and storage, we have ecosystem partners in all of those. So we have the likes for storage, we have NetApp, EMC, IBM, many others. We have backup vendors like Trilio in on that. On the network front we have Cisco, Juniper, many others. We have ecosystem partners of all the major hardware OEMs. We have ecosystem partners in Innovee and Telco, all those spaces. So I think what really is the main driver of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the ecosystem. It's not really the kernel anymore. It's like how do you run a consistent platform across multiple footprints? And that's what Red Hat is trying to provide because today I see there is a risk of vendor lock, and just like back in the day it was mainframe, right? Try to get everything from the lowest layer to the top layer on one platform. Many of the public cloud vendors are trying to be that one-stop shop, almost analogous to the mainframe. And what we're trying to do just like we did before for his ecosystem is to provide through leveraging the power of open source a platform that people can run, a hybrid platform that they can accelerate their business not only on all the different public clouds but also on-premise as well. >> It's interesting, last week of course big announcement with Red Hat is Microsoft's up on stage. It was like cats and dogs living together. Year before, Amazon you had a big announcement with. With Kubernetes and so many of these different tools, yes, there's that vertical integration but most of the companies understand that they're going to be in a customer environment and other people are. There's no longer, it's oh, IBM of 50 years ago where I'm going to be full in on that chop. >> Right, and I see Kubernetes is also, it's a huge open source project. So this is the difference between upstream and productization. It's what Red Hat does, is we do our maintenance, our support, our hardening, creation of this ecosystem, long life cycle support. The same thing's going to happen in Kubernetes where it's you don't just grab it upstream and run with whatever happens to be in it. And I think that there's a lot of companies that are claiming that just that Kubernetes is ubiquitous. And it's like the community innovation is ubiquitous and we're all in for advancing that. But it's really, if you're going to bet your business you want something that's productized and hardened by a contributor that you can trust. >> Well Tim, I want to connect that back with some of the other stuff that we've talked about on stage today. RHEL, super solid, history of engineering. The lower levels of your Stack need to be solid because you depend (laughs) on them. We talked a little bit about, on stage, about upgrades and things like that and how people are moving forward, the release schedule. I don't know, Mark, how are you approaching both upgrades and automation with Ansible? But other, OpenStack has other components too. How are you approaching that in the OpenStack day two to day 1000 scenario? >> Well absolutely, great question because today we've just announced our upcoming Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 release, and that's our long life cycle release. So our last long life cycle release was version 10, and we've had a couple of shorter life versions in between. But when it comes to the upstream community what's supported in terms of upgrade is between those individual versions. When we came out with version 13, with this long life version, we have to support seamless upgrades between 10 and 13 in place without disrupting workloads that are running in your environment and make it completely smooth and seamless. And we're doing that with a feature called fast forward upgrades which is completely automated with Ansible. So that's been a big part of our focus with our engineering investment for open-- >> Ansible came up a couple of times on stage both with Zuul and also with the fast forward upgrades and it might have slipped in there a couple more times. It seems like Ansible is a big part of even this community. >> No, we're very happy with Ansible and it's a really powerful tool when it comes to automation. Got an amazing community around us. Kind of real, it's been a kind of an organic growth and we've been really happy with the team since they've joined Red Hat. It's a great foundation for everything we're doing. >> And Ansible's not just a foundation with an OpenStack. It's, for example, we have Ceph integration in with Ansible. We have OpenShift is how we deploy it using Ansible. It's how we're using NREL to what we call System Roles to be able to make it easier to upgrade from one to the other. So by combining a single technology it's making it easier for us to put together an integrated portfolio. >> Great, Tim, when people leave this show what are some of the key messages you want to make sure that they've heard from Red Hat as part of this community? >> I would say that it's Red Hat is bringing an integrated portfolio Stack because it's not just about components. It's really about how can you build, develop, and deploy applications rapidly and what's the most enterprise-ready dynamic environment that enables you to do that, and that's what we think that the power of Red Hat through its credibility in the open source community to bring all of those pieces of the Stack together from top to bottom. >> Stu: All right, and Mark, we'll give you the final word. >> Yeah, I'd actually reach for what we're reinforcing a lot on this summit. We're talking about innovate, empower, and accelerate, and that's really about these businesses that are our customers who are dealing with the challenge of trying to keep up with a rapidly changing market. And they need to innovate more. They need to move faster, need to accelerate. But they also need to empower their own application developers to do that innovation, to really kind of keep pace with the market. >> All right, well Tim Burke, Mark McLoughlin, thanks so much for all of the updates here. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Back with much more coverage here at OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music) (slow tones playing)

>> Narrator: From the SiliconANGLE Media Office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante, and Stu Miniman. >> For several years now, the analysts at WikiBound have been talking about taking the cloud, the public cloud, operating model, and bringing it to your data, wherever that data lives. Hey everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, Stu Miniman. Welcome to HCI: A Foundation For IT Transformation. We're here with Chad Dunn, who's the Vice President of Product Management and Marketing, at Dell EMC. Chad, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, glad to be here, good to spend time with you guys. >> So, we talk a lot about, you know, VxRail, speaking of foundations. Give us a quick update. What is it, and what's new with VxRail? >> Okay, well big news in VxRail land, right, we just completed our transition under the 14th generation of Dell Power Edge servers, so this gives us a substantially more powerful platform, a substantially more predictable performance, and a lot more configuration options that make it fit a lot of different workloads that our customers have, so it really makes it prime time for HCI. >> So, where is the power and performance come from? Is that predominantly, kind of, new compute? >> That's a big piece of it. Some of that is software as well, right? vSAN underlies VxRail as a software defined storage layer, and we've seen pretty amazing increases in performance, just from software, from our 13G, to our 14G transition, but when we look at that performance now, on 14G servers, with the Intel Skylake chipset, we're seeing 2x performance over the last generation, and we're seeing latencies that are very, very low. And that has to do with, more and faster memory channels, more threads, overall faster processors, so really off the hook, in terms of the performance that we're seeing. >> Chad, when we look at HCI, it's really about the software layer, often, it gets overlooked, you know, what actually has to happen between the software and that underlying hardware? Are there optimizations, does it matter if I'm using the software, you know, what's optimized for that next generation Intel chip? >> Yeah, it's all about the software, or so our software vendor would say, but we know that when you're treating something as a system, you need that hardware and that software to work together, in perfect unison, as a system, and, you know, we've done a lot in this generation, working with the PowerEdge team to make sure that we have the right hardware, hooks, and design points that are focused on HCI. That goes from things like the devices that we use to boot up, and where we would execute the hypervisor kernel, to network connectivity, and really importantly, to the inband channels that we use to update all of the little pieces of firmware that operate the hardware inside the system, right? You need to be able to treat those as a system, update, lifecycle manage those, all in context of one another, so having direct and deep, meaningful access into that hardware is critically important when you're operating a system like this. >> When we've looked at, kind of, our cloud strategy, in general, it's about the data. We talk about data, it's things like predictability and latency, it's about, kind of, the power of the underlying thing, maybe, give us a little bit more specifics, as to what you're getting in this generation. >> So, the big difference here, above and beyond the performance, which is about 2x what we saw from the last generation, if we look at the same hardware, the same software, running on the two different pieces of hardware, about 100% better. But that's really just part of the story. It's the predictability of latency that's critically important. If you're going to migrate Tier 1 workloads under this infrastructure, you need to ensure that other workloads are not going to disturb that performance. So when we look at this, we look at how the IOs per second increases, and we look at the overall latency. How long does that latency line stay flat, right? So when we look at this generation, we see over 2x the IOPS, but the horizontal line where we look at the response time in latency, it stays flat nine times longer in this generation than in the last. So if you've got that sub-millisecond response time, even at very high IOPS, you can put a lot of different workloads on that same infrastructure, and still get predictable performance. >> I think, the other thing that people don't understand, is that, oh, HCI, it's just like, it's that little LEGO block you build, but it's not just one LEGO block, what have you seen from customers, what's kind of, the portfolio, what are the decisions that they have to make, to kind of, pick the right configuration? >> Sure, so yeah, when you're a kid and you get your first LEGO set, you get a lot of pretty generalized blocks, they're all, you know, square and some are rectangle, but not a lot of variability. When you get up into the big leagues of the LEGO Star Wars set, right, you've got a lot of specialized parts, and you can do really advanced, really cool things. That's really where we're at with HCI right now. If you want to really tune the infrastructure for the workloads that you have, you need a lot of variability in the processors you choose, the amount of memory, the speed of memory, and even the storage. It could be hybrid, some people still choose hybrid HDDs, but even within flash, people will choose SAS or SATA drives depending on the performance and cost benefits that they want to realize. So being able to scale up and down the processors, the memory, different types of storage, is critically important, so you can fit it into those different workloads. Also, a lot more people use this for VDI, and for high end imaging. So the ability to pack these things full of graphical processing units, and still be able to power and cool the things, is critically important. We have a lot of applications in those verticals where there's video processing and these are required. So, we don't just have one model of VxRail, we've got a number of different VxRail models, all of which can scale up, and then of course, HCI can intrinsically scale out. So that lets you really fine-tune it and get to that expert level, in terms of your LEGO building blocks. >> So Chad, a minute ago, you mentioned workloads. So as you're bringing this sort of 14th generation server technology to VxRail, how has it affected workloads, what are you seeing is the sweet spot for workloads? >> So if I were to think back a year, the question that every customer would ask, is how do I know which workload is right for HCI? And a lot of times they even lack the vocabulary and taxonomy to say, okay, that fits, that doesn't fit. What's happened in the meantime though, are the software's gotten so much better, the hardware's gotten so much faster and more predictable, that the question is, well, what workloads are not right for HCI yet? And there are very few that aren't. So, we've seen people generally start off with one workload, right? Maybe it's VDI, maybe it's a database, and then they start to move other, as they get comfortable with it, they move other workloads over to it. Obviously, we've got a big install block, or install base of VxBlock, and Vblock. We see a lot of those customers start to migrate workloads from there onto a layer of HCI. And more and more, those are becoming Tier One workloads. Crate & Barrel is a great example, a great customer of ours. They're moving their point of sale systems onto VxRail. Now for a retailer, your point of sale system, that's about as mission critical as you can possibly get, so they and others now have the confidence to start to move these things over. The only outliers that we see are some of these very big data applications that are hugely write intensive, and we actually usually end up selling a layer of hyper-converge with our Isilon arrays, to store that data, and then put a layer of hyper-converge compute around it, because in some ways, hyper-converged is just a better way to server, if you know what I mean. >> Wondering if you can talk about the business impact, what a customer's seeing, how are they quantifying the value of these systems, share some stories, or color there. >> Sure, it's all about operational expense savings, right? How much more efficiently am I going to be able to operate this infrastructure? It's not so much about capital acquisition costs. So when you look at the typical operational expense savings, and that comes from us doing all the lifecycle management of the hardware, of the software, of the cluster as a system, you see those costs go down. Really good example, is First Credit of British Columbia. Another one of our good customers. Now, they've deployed this, they've seen 30% OPEX savings and they've seen 50% power and space savings. You get a smaller package because you don't have separate storage array, separate servers, but, you also have really, one function that needs to operate your environment and that's the virtual administrator. He or she is the one that really operates everything, you don't have separate storage, separate compute, separate virtualization teams that have to look after the infrastructure. So, that first run is very easy, very fast to deploy, but it's day two through 700 and day 900 where you see that recurring operational expense saving where it really pays off for customers, all the updates and updates and life cycle management. >> Yeah, so Chad you talk about the success and all the customers. What about the customers that haven't looked at kind of the HCI space yet? What are they missing? You know, what do you say to those customers that maybe, you know, aren't sure if the waters right to jump in yet? >> So there's really three ways that you're going to encounter a customer who's going to consider HCI. You're either going to refresh a server, you know, your servers are up for maintenance and you're going to take a look at HCI as the next step in your evolution of your compute strategy. Or you're going to refresh your storage, and you're going to look at hyperconvergence as the next step in the evolution of your storage strategy. Or you've got that one workload that's probably net new and it's going to be, sort of, an isolated case and they need an infrastructure and they need to stand if up fast. That third case is really the one that drove the initial adoption of HCI, I can't tell you how many of our customers started with VDI. I mean, it's so cliched now to talk about VDI as killer app for HCI, but that's how so many people started. Because it's, you know, a very bound, isolated infrastructure and from there they get comfortable with it and they start to bring other workloads onto it. So, if you're thinking about refreshing your servers and if you're thinking about refreshing storage, it's time to kick the tires onto HCI. If you've got a workload that you need to stand up quickly and you don't know how big it's going to be, you know, one, two, three years down the road. It's another opportunity to look at HCI. Because you can start with a very small infrastructure, but you can grow it to a very very large one. >> What if we could talk a little bit about digital transformation, I mean, everybody's talking about digital transformation, and to us, digital transformation is all about how you leverage data and the edges exploding. We've envisioned sort of a three tier data model. You've got the edge, you've got maybe an aggregation point and you bring it back to the cloud. And that cloud can be a public cloud or it can be on-prem. So you've got to have some kind of cloud infrastructure to manage all this data. So where does this fit in the context of transformations and why does hardware matter? >> Yep, well let's go from the end and work back to the beginning. Hardware matters because of form factor, for one. As you start to push compute out to the edge, right, you want form factors that are small, don't consume a lot of power but, you know, still have a lot of processing power and can manipulate that data. Right, the whole internet of things phenomenon that is, creating all this data out at the edge, you know, presents us with a conundrum right? The data itself is not that valuable, the insights that we get from the data are immensely valuable. Bringing all that data back to the core to do something with is not cost effective. So, it's how do we turn the data at the edge into information and then how do we funnel that valuable information back to the core and leave the unvaluable data out where it is. hyper-converge fits really well there because you can have, you know, devices of very small form factors that are very quick to deploy, very easy to manage remotely. At the aggregation point you can have, simply, larger versions of the same thing or more of the same thing. And then finally at the core you can have very large clusters of hyperconverged appliances, like VxRail, to do your processing. Now the key is from an operational perspective you've still got a single pane of glass that manages everything. Right, it's still the same set of tools, it's still the same hardware and software lifecycle management process that happens out at the edge, at the aggregation point and at the core. So again, it comes back to the operational expense of making decisions closer to the data and then managing everything with a consistent set of tools. >> So I wondered if we could also talk about the competition and when Stu and I think about competition in this sphere we look at, first of all this all sort of software defined, everything can moved into software defined. So we see two vectors, one is head to head competition with other software defined suppliers, and the second big competitor is, hey, I'm just going to roll on my own. >> Chad Dunn: Right >> So let's start with the former, why Delium C vs vendor A, B, C or D? >> Sure, sure it really gets down to what your goal is as a customer and we obviously have multiple options within our own portfolio and those perfectly, you know, find solutions for a lot of people. But, you know, number one if you're a VMware user and you want to optimize around the VMware user experience, then VxRail is the way to go. Because we do co-engineer this with Vmware, it's not just a regular partnership, we have engineers and marketing people and product managers at Vmware that functionally role up to our team and so we do behave as one engineering and one product management organization to really optimize the user experience for VMware. Secondly, architecturally from a VCM perspective, this is a service that's baked into the kernal of vSphere. So, in terms of performance and the overhead that it creates on CPU, memory, et cetera. This is the best game in town. We can do more IO more predictably with flatter latency than really any other solution that's on the market in the HCI space. Every other one takes a virtual storage appliance approach where they have something running on top of the hypervisor. >> Dave Vellante: Right. >> The very long and circuitous data path, we'll performance test against solutions like that all day long, every day, that doesn't worry us at all. So, if you're a vSphere customer, VMware customer it's the most obvious choice and from a performance perspective you're not giving up anything right? We don't want users to have to sacrifice the storage functionality, the performance, the compute functionality. Just because it's hyper-converge and you scale out doesn't mean you can compromise on any to those axis. >> Okay, what about the guys who like to change their own oil in the car and the spark plugs and tune it up and they want to roll on their own. >> (laughs) It's been a long time since I've been able to work on my own car. So I encounter these kind of customers all the time. It's the build your own crowd and it's what they've been doing for a long time. And it's great, alright, I build my own computers at home and I have my own ESX server that I put together. I can't afford a VxRail. (laughing) There's no employee discount. So I'll tell you a story that will hopefully make sense, my first job when I got into this business, I went to Boston College, my first job and work study was to keep a spreadsheet that had all the MAC addresses and all the IP addresses for every host on the BC network and keep those in sync. >> You're really good at that I bet. >> I was excellent at that. That is not a skill set that is in demand right now. Or really even at that time. But when you think about what it means to take a software defined storage product like VMware vSAN and take an x86 server and put those together. Yes, you're getting to the same destination of running vSphere on a host with software defined storage. You're missing the systemness, right? We go to a lot of trouble to make sure we're managing all of things things in the context of the cluster level. All of the little pieces of firmware, and they're roughly 12 or so pieces of firmware that we have to take care of. From the BIOS to the drive controller firmware, the drives, the boss card, which is our boot media, the iDRAC firmware, the backplane, power supplies. In legacy EMC we spent 30 years building arrays. We had all those same challenges with all the different pieces of firmware and software that all had to function as a system, we did that. And we guaranteed that it would live up to 5/9ths of availability for the customer. That's exactly what we do when we deliver VxRail's hyperconverge. If you want to choose to build those things yourself that's fine if you have the skills and that's how you want to operate your business. The 5/9ths is now on you though. Right, because you're the one responsible for bringing all those parts together. So, yeah it's certainly a valid path for others but, the market is shifting and we see more often than not, people are moving towards a buy approach rather than build. >> You bring up a great point. I remember back in the early days before we even called it HCI, you think about vSAN, oh well is the storage admin going to buy it? Is the virtualization admin going to take that over? What's excited me about this wave is the oh, heres the cool stuff that companies are doing now that they're not spending their time keeping spreadsheets of MAC addresses. >> Chad Dunn: Yeah, yeah exactly. >> What is the kind of, you know, owner of this, look like in your environment? And any cool stories you're hearing from customers transforming their organization. >> By and large the operator is your virtual admin. The person who is at home in vCenter and vROps, you know, maybe even vRA if they're going full infrastructure as a service. That's really the user of this, and the dynamic you mention is similar to what we had with Vblock, right. Customers who went Vblock, who said, I'm going to change my operating model to a virtual administrator versus compute, storage, network. You know, customers who didn't change the operating model were not happy Vblock customers. Ones that did change the model did. And, I'll tell ya a real off script anecdote, recently I was traveling in Europe, and I started playing a game with the sales guy we were traveling with. Because in Europe, very often, they have more of an affinity to putting their logos on the sides of buildings in a lot of European cities. So, as we would go to these different cities and we went from Stockholm all the way down to Rome, to Switzerland, to Amsterdam. You know, we're just spotting VxRail customers, right, whose going to spot the most. And the one really interesting one is we checked into a hotel, you know, late night in Switzerland. Next morning we meet for breakfast and he goes, "Did you spot the rail customer?" I said "Who was it?" We went into the bathroom and they have these, you know, squeeze bottles that have the soap in the shower and it's a cosmetics company and they're located in Germany. And they do, obviously, a ton of business all over Europe, and they had outsourced a lot of their IT because, you know, their core competency is not IT, it's cosmetics. And they now have one guy that looks after all of IT for this company rather than outsource it to two different companies to manage all this and he runs it all on VxRail. So, transformative yes, to that company very transformative. But, at a very small scale, but that pattern sort of repeats itself the higher that you scale. >> Alright we're out of time but where can people go to get more information on this and other products your HTI strategy. >> If I were them I'd go to dellemc.com/hci. >> Excellent, Chad, thanks very much, Stu appreciate you co-hosting with me and check out videos on thecube.net, this and other videos will be up there. Thanks for watching everybody, Dave Vellante for Stu Miniman we'll see you next time! (techno music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Voiceover: Live from New Orleans. It's theCUBE, covering VeeamON 2017. Brought to you by Veeam. >> We're back, Mario Angers is here. He's the senior manager of systems at the University of British Columbia. Welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thank you, thank you. >> So how's VeeamON going? >> So far, so good. It's fabulous, actually. I love the event, cause it's not so big that you can't talk to a lot of people, and it's small enough that you get to know a lot of different folks. >> Yeah, it feels bigger, they're saying the number's 3,000. It feels bigger than that to me, but at the same time it is kind of intimate. >> Yeah no, I went to their first event, so certainly this is very different than what it was like. I think their first event was 2014? So, yeah, that's very good. >> So, tell us what's going on up at British Columbia. What's hot these days? >> Well, I spoke to this a little bit yesterday during the partner session, right? So, British Columbia's in a bit of unique position, because we have laws that prevent us from storing data outside Canada, right? So up until recently, we didn't have any of the large service providers, so we had to basically, to some degree, reinvent the wheel. So if wanted to provide or consume cloud, we had to basically build it, which is what the University of British Columbia did a few years ago. And, because we're the largest in BC, we were doing it at scale already, so we were approached by an organization inside British Columbia called BCNET, which basically services all the other higher ed, and they asked us if we wanted to provide cloud services to the community, and we've been doing this for almost three years now. >> Dave: As a partner to BCED? >> Yeah, to BCNET, yeah. >> Dave: BCNET, yeah. >> So we're basically the service operator, they're the service provider, right, but we do everything, we take care of the marketing, the communication. >> And Mark, could you walk us through, what's that stack look like? I did an interview with the OpenStack Summit with a Massachusetts higher ed cloud that they built that used OpenStack as the underlying piece. What's yours built on? >> So we went with, we're a VMware shop. So we went with the cloud directory as the front end basically, but the back end is a combination of Cisco servers, HP servers, net op storage, HP storage, data domain for our backup. Of course we use Veeam for our backup software, and then it's VMware stack end-to-end. >> Okay, it was funny, the gentlemen that I interviewed, actually, was the one who created VCD, when he was at VMware, so I'm just curious to see your viewpoint. One of the things we use to say is, cloud is not virtualization plus, but if you build a stack, if you can have kind of the orchestration and management pieces... So you feel you have a cloud, what differentiates what you have today, versus what you could have built five years ago? >> Well, I think five years ago, it would have been really challenging to provide the services in a self service capability to our end users. So today we can do that. The only involvement we have is we provision a virtual data center for our end user, and then it's self service from there, for them. We also use NSX, which is also a VMware product, so it's self service end-to-end. >> And how has your availability become better with what you have today versus what you had before? >> Veeam is a significant partner of ours, so we've been a Veeam customer for probably five or six years now, on the backup and restore side, probably about four years, and I would say it's made our jobs a lot easier. So historically our legacy backup system was just a bear and a monster to manage. So it required a huge amount of time to not just manage, but understand how it was done. With Veeam, they've really simplified that process, and we have a very large environment, and we basically have one guy managing backup. >> So it used to be, well that's pretty good productivity. So it used to be the conversation around, "Well, we're meeting our backup within the window." That was sort of the challenge. >> Mario: Yep. >> And now increasingly, it's, we want to get as close as RPO zero as possible for certain apps, not everything, as it's too expensive, and we want a much faster recovery time objective. So can you talk to us, first of all, do you converse in those terms with your line of business, and have you been able to affect those metrics? >> So, we're not quite there yet, from a sophistication, or a maturity perspective, We still have a bit of a ways to go to get there. However, can we now guarantee to our folks that we'll be able to bring workloads back within the service level that we have with our customers? Absolutely. So we can provide peace of mind now, knowing that if we lose something we can bring it back very quickly, as it's actually being restored to the production environment. >> So where do you want to go from here? It sounds like you've got the productivity thing nailed. You got one person managing all this, and you're able to meet those SLAs. What's next? >> I would say next for us is, so today we provide what I'll call a managed service around backup. So basically, the team that I manage is looking after backup for all the clients within the service, so our next step is really to provide them the ability to manage that themselves. So we're looking to do that over the summer. Once we do that, then we want to start partnering with Veeam as well and start looking at their Cloud Connect product. We've been in discussions for some time now about how we're going to do that, and that's the evolution of that. And then building on that, we're being also asked to add to the portfolio of services that we provide, and one of those services is disaster recovery as a service. So that's becoming very, very critical to the province. Vancouver is basically like San Francisco or Los Angeles. We live in one of the biggest fault zones in the world, so at one point it will happen. So now we've basically provisioned a data center in the middle of the province where it's outside your quake zone, so now we can start providing those services to our community. >> Could you speak to the relationship with Veeam with the storage arrays that you have? What's the interaction there? >> So when we went to Veeam it was really important that the full integration is there with the storage vendors that we have. So originally we were primarily in that app shop. So in that, integration was in place. So when we started looking at moving off of tape and moving onto disk for backup, we basically narrowed the list down to vendors that also fully integrated with Veeam. So we chose Data Domain, an EMC product. We've been very happy. And just recently we went to RFPing, we basically selected a new vendor for virtualization storage. And the same rules apply. Full integration needs to be in place. We need to be able to know that we're going to be able to read the data off of the storage arrays, and then move it to the backup. Without that integration, there's no guarantees that we can do that successfully. >> So a data demand customer, happy with that as the backup appliance, fast, great data reduction... Didn't EMC get you in a headlock and say, "You got to buy Networker and Avamar," and really push hard? >> Mario: Oh they tried. >> Of course, they did try. >> Okay, so what led to your decision to go with Veeam? >> The complexity of those solutions. So we're not going to reinvent how we're structured or how we're architected just to put a backup solution in place. And if you look at a lot of the other really big vendors in the marketplace today, that's basically the expectation, is okay well, you're built out like this, now you're going to have to do this in order to consume our solution. That just wasn't an option for us. >> And some people would say, "Well I get one thrown to choke and that simplifies things," but you don't buy that. >> Mario: No, not at all. I think it keeps vendors honest if you have more than one. It gives you some leverage to be able to negotiate. And to be quite honest with you, I've yet to find another vendor that provides the level of quality and support that Veeam does. And they're growing as a company, and I expect that things will change to some degree, because that's part of growing. However, so far, the experience that we've had is the same we had four years ago when they were a relatively small company. >> Can you give an example of what resonates with you as customer in terms of that service experience? >> I think as a bunch of IT guys, we think we know everything, right? So when we originally acquired Veeam, we thought, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, we get what you're telling us, but we know better than you do." So we went ahead and implemented based on what we felt was right. It wasn't right. So they didn't come over and say, "Told you so," or "We're not going to help you now, cause you decided to go this way." No, they provided us with all the support we needed in order to actually change what we had done, and there was never any finger pointing or any... It was basically, "You're a partner, we're going to help you be successful." And that's very rare, I think, in the industry today. >> Yeah, really, respecting sort of that you wanted to do it a certain way, and now I learned. >> Yeah, they did try to talk us out of it, but we decided to move in that direction anyway. To me it's like, yeah, it's a fantastic relationship. >> Anything that you've seen here today, or this week, the announcements, that was really interesting and exciting to you? >> Yeah, I think a lot of the things that are coming in Version 10 are going to allow us to expand on the things that we provide to our customers. For example, all the stuff they talk about around availability, primarily disaster recovery stuff, which is such a big thing for us. So I think this is going to add significant value. >> Mario, anything either Veeam or your vendor ecosystem that you're looking for that would make your life easier? You seem to have a pretty opinionated view of what you need. >> So to me is, we're it the business of solving problems. So as a vendor, you're not going to help me solve my problem unless you understand what my problem is. In my experience, I'm not going to say with all vendors, but with a lot of vendors in the past couple of years, is basically the caliber of the sales people I feel have changed. So it used to be that the sales folks used to be pretty knowledgeable about what they sold. Now it feels like all they're trying to do is make their quarter. And as a customer it's becoming frustrating, because I don't want to be sold to. I want someone that's going to help me solve problems, and deliver solutions to my customers. >> You must get a lot of different storage infrastructures, but NetApp is a primary supplier, of course. >> Mario: Yep, it's still very big in our environment. >> We just had NetApp on with Veeam, and they were talking about their relationship. As a customer, how do you find the relationship between Veeam and NetApp? Is there tangible value that you see in that working relationship? How do you interact with those two different companies? >> Oh of course there's tangible value. So we're an enterprise customer, right? And as we scaled within our environment, we came into a bottleneck between Veeam and NetApp. And all we had to do was expose it to both companies, and they worked together to resolve the issue. And I believe it was Version Nine that they released a fix for it. But that's been the experience, is the work that happens behind the scenes, we're not exposed to that, it always creates a positive experience for us in the end. >> We had Dave Russell on earlier from Gartner, and he was talking about pricing, and licensing, and specifically socket-based pricing, and said that that had a big impact on the marketplace. From a customer standpoint, what can you share with us about licensing, pricing, strategies that you employ, and maybe advice for other customers? >> So I think a lot of vendors are starting to try to simplify their licensing. Because if you look, I'm not going to pick on anyone specific, but they had, "Okay well we're going to sell you a number of VMs and then the storage on top of that." And it's like, okay that doesn't make sense. I don't want a PhD in math to be able to calculate how much I'm going to spend for licensing. So give me a model that is easy to manage, and I'm going to know exactly what my cost is, and have a very predictable cost going forward. And I understand Veeam has a couple different model, but they're still very simple. So you're either subscription or you're socket. So to me, just keep it simple. >> Dave: What's your preference? >> Right now it's socket. However, I'm not opposed to looking at something different. If it makes sense for my clients, I'm perfect fine with it. >> When you go subscription, does that have an effect? Does your CFO like that? Switching to a radical model? >> Well, we're just basically turning our capital into operational. And as long as my base cost doesn't change, I think it's perfectly fine. >> Dave: So from a capital budget standpoint, it's got to be neutral and go from there. >> Excellent, alright Mario, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Great insights. >> Thank you for having me. >> Dave: You're very welcome. Keep it right there, everybody, we'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, Stu Miniman, Dave Vellante. We'll be right back. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Man: Live, from Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube, covering Red Hat Summit 2017, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of the Red Hat Summit, here in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm you're host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're joined by Ashesh Badani. He is the Vice President and General Manager of OpenShift here at Red Hat. Thanks so much, Ashesh. >> Thanks for having me on yet again. >> Yes, you are a Cube veteran, so welcome back. We're always happy to talk to you. You're also an OpenShift veteran. You've been there five years, and before the cameras are rolling you were talking about how we really are at a tipping point here with OpenShift, and we're seeing a widespread adoption and embrace of containers. Can you share the context with us. >> Sure, so I think we've spent a fair amount of time in this market talking about how important containers are, the value of containers, DevOps, microservices. I think at this Red Hat Summit, we've spent a fair amount of time trying to ensure that people understand one containers are real, in terms of, you know, adoption level that we're seeing. They're being run in production and at scale. And across a variety of industries, right. So, just at this summit we've had over 30 customers from across the world, across industries like financial services, government, transportation, tech, telco, a variety of different industries talking about how they've been deploying and using containers. At our keynotes we had Macquarie Bank from Australia, Barclay's Bank from the U.K. We had United Health slash OPTUM. All talking about, you know, mission critical applications, how their developers running applications, both new applications, right, microservice-style applications, but also existing legacy applications on the OpenShift platform. >> Ashesh, I've been watching this for a few years, we've talked to you many times, we talked about containers. Maybe I'm oversimplifying it but let me know. It feels like OpenShift is your delivery mechanism to take some things that might be hard if I tried to do them myself and made it a lot simpler. Kind of give like Red Hat did for Linux, I have containers, I have Kubernetes, I have OpenStack, and all three of those I didn't hear a ton at the show, I heard a lot about OpenShift and the OpenShift family because underneath OpenShift are those pieces. Am I gettin' it right, or there's more nuance you need-- >> Great observation, great observation, yeah, and we're seeing that from our customers, too. So, when they're making strategic choice, they're talking about, you know, how can I find the container platform to run at scale. When they make their choice, all they're thinking about well what's the existing, you know, development tools I've got. Can it integrate with the ones that I have in place. What's the underlying infrastructure they can run on. OpenStack of course is a great one, right. We have many customers, Santander, BBVA Bank are just two examples of those, but then also, can I run the OpenShift structure in a hybrid cloud, or I guess what we're calling a multi-cloud world now. Amazon, Google, Asher, and so on. But actually interestingly enough we made some announcements with Amazon as well at the show with regard to making sure some AWS service are able to be integrated into the OpenShare platform. So, we find customers today finding a lot of value in the flexibility of the deployment platforms they have in place, integration with various developer tools. I think my colleague Harry Mower was on earlier talking about OpenShift.io, again, you know, super interesting, super exciting now it's been from our perspective with regard to giving developers more choice. And in addition to that, you know, the other parts of the portfolio, right, going to your point, earlier. We're trying to attach that increasingly as options for customers around OpenShift. Storage is a great example. So we announced some work we've doing with regard to container storage with our classified system for OpenShift. >> So you're talking about simplification and that does seem to be a real theme here. Once you've solved that problem, what's next, what are some of the other customer issues that you need to resolve and help them overcome and make their lives easier? >> Yeah, so, the rate of change in technology, as you well know, you've been following this now for a while is just dramatic, right. I think it's probably faster than we've ever seen in a long, long time. I was having a conversation with a large franchise customer with regard to, you know, just as we feel like, you know, we're getting people to adopt Hadoop, everyone seems to have moved on to Spark. And now we're on Spark and people are talking about, oh, maybe Flink is next. Now that we get to Flink, now they're saying AI and ML is next. It's just like, well, where does this stop, right. So I don't think it stops. The question is, you know, at what point of time do you sort of jump in. Embrace the change, right, that's sort of what Devops all about right, continuous change, you know, embrace it, be able to evolve with it, fail fast, pick yourself up, and then have the organization be in this sort of continuous learning, this kaizen environment. >> Yeah, Ashesh, from day one of the keynote talked about the platforms and you know Red Hat Enterprise Linux was kind of the first big platform that can live a lot of environments. Seems OpenShift is a second platform, and the scope of it seems to be growing. We talked to Harry about the OpenShift.io. He alluded to the fact that we might see expansion into the family there. What is, you said that innovation, and you know change keeps growing. What's the boundaries of what OpenShift's going to cover. Where do you see it today and where's the vision go moving forward? >> Yeah, so (laughs) great question, a double-edged sword right. Because on the one hand of course we want to make sure OpenShift is a foundation for doing a lot of stuff. But then there's also the Linux philosophy. Do one thing, do it well, right. And so there's always this temptation with regard to keeping on wanting to take new things on, right, I mean for a long time people have said, hey, why aren't we in the database business? You know, why aren't you doing more? Well the question is, you know, how many things can we do well? Because anything we commit to, as you well know, Red Hat will invest significant amount of engineering effort upstream in the community to help drive it forward, right. We've done that on Linux container front. We're doing that in Kubernetes. Obviously we do that with RHEL, we've done that Jboss technologies. So, we're very, very cognizant of making sure that we provide an environment and basically an ecosystem around us that can grow and be able to attach the momentum we have in place. As a result of that we announced the container health index at this conference, right. Mostly because, you know, there's just no way for one company to provide all the services that are possible, right. So to be able to grade applications that come in, be able to sort of give customers confidence that, you know, these can be certified and work in our environment, and then be able to kind of expand out that ecosystem is going to be really important going forward. >> Yeah, Ashesh that's an interesting one, the container health index. I'm going to play with the term there. What's the health of the container industry there. We at The Cube at DockerCon a couple weeks ago had a couple of Red Hatters on the program. There was kind of a reshuffling, you know. The Moby project, open source, we've got Docker CE, Docker EE, Docker actually referenced, you know, Fedora and CentOS and RHEL as you know, something that they did similar to but, what's your take on the announcements there? >> Sure, sure, I'll probably butcher this quote tremendously, but it was Mark Twain or someone said, "The rumors of my whatever are greatly exaggerated," so. You know, there's always, you know, some amount of change that sort of happens, especially with new technology, and you've got so many players sort of jumping in, right. I mean of course there's Docker Inc. There's Red Hat but there's, you know, Google and IBM and Microsoft and Amazon, and there's a lot of companies, right, that all look at this as a way of advancing the number of workloads that come onto their platforms. You know, we've seen some of the challenges, if you will, that Docker Inc. has been facing as well as the great work it's been doing to help drive the community forward, right. Those are both interesting things. And they've got a business to run. We've announced, we've seen the changes announced with regard to some of the renaming and Moby, and I think there's still a lot more detail that need to be fleshed out. And so I, we're going to wait for the dust to settle. I think we want to make sure our customers are confident. We've had this conversation with many customers that whatever direction that, you know, we go in, we will continue supporting that technology. We will stand behind it. We will make sure we're putting upstream engineers to help drive the community that will provide the greatest value for customers. >> Ashesh, you're one of the judges for the Innovation Awards here. Can you tell us a little bit more about the secret sauce that you're looking for. First of all, how you choose these winners, and what it is you're looking for. >> Yeah, so I'm really proud of the work I do to help support the judging of the Innovation Awards. You know, I think it's a fantastic thing we do to recognize, I was telling Stu earlier, you know we could probably have done a dozen more awards, right, the entries that are coming in are just fantastic. We try to change up the categories a little bit every year to kind of match with the changes in industry, like for example, you know, DevOps, Macquarie Bank was a great example of enterprise transformation. You know, they had this great line in their keynote right, where their ambition I think really impressed a lot of the judges with regard to, hey our competition is not necessarily the other financial service companies, it's the last app you opened. That's a remarkable thing, right. Especially for an existing traditional financial services company, you see. So, I think what we look for is scope, ambition, and vision, but also how you're executing against it, and what demonstrable results do you have for that. And so, you probably saw that, as, you know, we talked about all the various innovation awards we gave, right, whether it's Macquarie Bank or, you know, British Columbia Empower Individuals, right, so the whole notion of celebrating the impact of individual, and create an exchange for them to engage with the wider civic body. That's really important for us. >> Ashesh, one of the innovation award-winners OPTUM we talked to, they're an OpenShift customer. They're really excited with the AWS announcement. We've been chewing on it, talking to a lot of people. We think it's the most significant news coming out of the show. As you said, there's certain details that need to bake out when we look at some of these things. By the time we get to AWS Reinvent we'll probably understand a little bit some of the pricing and, you know, some of the other pieces, and it'll be there, but, you know, bring us from your viewpoint, from an OpenShift standpoint what this means to kind of an extension of the product line and your customers. >> Yeah, so, we've got, at least at this show you had over 30 customers presenting about their use of OpenShift. And we typically find them deploying OpenShift in a variety of different environments including AWS. So for example Swiss Rail, right, obviously out of Switzerland, is taking advantage of, you know, running it in their own data center, taking advantage of AWS as well. When they're doing that they want to make sure that they can consume services from Amazon. Just as if they were running it on Amazon, right. They like the container platform that OpenShift provides, and they like the abstraction level that it puts in place. Of course they have different choices, right. They can choose to run it on OpenStack, they can choose to run OpenShift in some other public cloud provider, yet there are many services that Amazon's releasing that are extremely interesting and value that they provide to their customers. By being able to have relationship with Amazon, and have an almost native experience of those services with regard to OpenShift, regardless of the underlying infrastructure OpenShift runs, it is a very powerful value proposition, definitely for our customers. It's a great one for Amazon because it allows for their services to be used across a multitude of environments. And we feel good about that because we're creating value for our customers, and of course not precluding them from using other services as well. >> I'm wondering if you could shed a little light on the financials, and how you think about things. I mean, you made this great point about the banks saying our competition is the last app you opened. How do you think, with OpenShift, which is free, how do you view your competition, and how do you think about it in terms of the way companies are making their decisions about where they're putting their money in IT investments. >> Right, so OpenShift isn't free, so I'll just make sure-- (all laugh) >> OpenShift.io >> OpenShift.io, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, yes. >> So, consider OpenShift.io as a great gateway into the OpenShift experience, right. It's a cloud-based web environment allows you to develop in browsers, allows you some collaboration with other developers. There's actually a really cool part of the tech, I don't know if Harry talked about right, which is, we almost have, almost machine-learning aspect part of it, you know, that's in play with regard to, you know, if this is the code you're using, here are what other users are doing with it, making recommendations, and so on, so it's a really modern integrated, you know, development environment that we're sort of introducing. That of course doesn't mean that customers can't use existing ones that they have in place. So this is just giving customers more choice. By doing that, we're basically expanding the span of options the customers have. We introduced something called OpenShift Application Runtimes also at this conference, which is supporting existing Java languages or tools or frameworks, right, whether it's Jboss, EAP, Vortex, WildFly, Spring Boot, but also newer ones like No-JavaScript, right, so again, in the spirit of, let's give you choices, let's have you sort of use what you most want to use, and then from our perspective, right, you know, we will create value when it's been deployed at scale. >> Ashesh, before the event at the beginning of it you guys run something called OpenShift Commons. There's some deep education and a lot of it very interactive. I'm curious if there's anything that's kind of surprised you or interesting nuggets that you got from the users. Either stuff that they were further ahead or further behind, or just something that's grabbin' their attention that you could share with our users. >> Well, what I've been really happy to see with the OpenShift Commons is, well, this is a couple things, right. One is we try our best to make it literally a community event, right, so we call it OpenShift Commons but it is a community event. So in the past and even now, we have providers of technologies, even though they might compete with Red Hat and OpenShift available to talk to. Customers, users of our technology, right, so we want it to be an open, welcoming environment for various providers. Second, we're seeing more and more customers wanting to come out and share their experiences, right. So at this OpenShift Commons, I think we had maybe over 10 customers present on, you know, how they were using OpenShift, and sharing with other customers. Number three, this really attracts other customers. I just had a large financial services institution come and say, you know, we attended OpenShift Commons for the first time. This is a fantastic community. How can we become a part of this? You know, get us involved. There's no cost to join, right, it's free and open, and now our numbers are pretty significant. And then when that's in place, right, the ecosystem forms around it. Now, so we have several different ISVs, global system integrators who are all sort of, you know, coalescing, to provide additional services. >> Ashesh, thanks so much for your time, we appreciate it. It's always a pleasure to have you on the program. >> Ashesh: Thanks again, see you all next time. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. There'll be more from the Red Hat Summit after this. (relaxed digital beats)

>> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2017, brought to you by Red Hat. >> We are wrapping up day two of theCUBE's coverage here at the Red Hat Summit here in Boston, Massachusetts, I'm Rebecca Knight, I'm here with Stu Miniman. Stu, we started off the morning with Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat saying planning is dead. We work so hard to infer order where there is none, you're an analyst, you're a forecaster, so I'm sorry to tell you this, but it's not, stop trying. >> Yeah, thanks Rebecca, it's been great, yeah. No, it's funny, I've looked at this from the analyst world, read a book recently called Black Swan, by Nassim Taleb, talks about how really trying to predict some of these big game changers is really challenging. That being said, I've been involved in some technologies early, it's like, I remember playing with the internet when the first graphical browsers came out, and being like, this is going to be a game changer! I had no idea where it was going, but there, I happened to be involved really early in the VMware virtualization days. I started talking to Docker really early. I don't say I'm predicting the future, but, here at Red Hat, communities, we asked Jim Whitehurst about, you build on communities, and I feel I've got a pretty strong network, I'm tied in a lot, through social these days, and feel like I can kind of get the, where's the interesting stuff happening, and where is it just maybe a little bit too, you know, the hype doesn't meet the reality, and one of the other things is how long it takes for certain technologies to kind of mature, what it will look like when it comes through, it's easier to bet on the waves as opposed to some of the particular tools out there, we really loved the conversation with Jim Whitehurst, I always feel like I'm doing one of those executive case studies, that you take at a good business school when you get to sit down and talk with them. >> I agree, he's a great conversationalist, a great guy. During his keynote, and even when he sat down with us, he was talking about the management challenge of technology leaders today, and this is reflective of the theme of this year's conference, which is empowering the individual, and he said that the role of the leader today is to create the context for the individual to try and modify and try again and fail. My question for you is, it implies that the individual was unempowered beforehand, is that accurate? And did engineers not have a voice? >> It's, what is the role of the individual worker, do they know where they're going, do we have a shared clear vision, you talk about most companies, they have their mission statement, and you do studies, and 70% to 80% of most companies, most people in companies are like, "I'm disconnected from the work, "I don't understand how what I do "translates to where I'm going," Red Hat is an interesting, different company, about 10,000 people, we've heard from many of the Red Hatters that it doesn't feel and act like that company, go back to, this is the kind of military-style hierarchy that most businesses have, the structure there, Red Hat is a lot flatter, we talk in kind of the devops world about like two pizza groups, well, the Red Hats committee involved in all of these various projects, hundreds of them that they're involved, it's not one or two opensource things, it's all over the place, and you kind of put your business out on like, well, okay, how do you understand how to, you know, which do you drive and which ones create money, and how are you working in the right place, or are people just contributing to stuff that, you hope if I put good stuff out there in good code, eventually, it will translate to our business, but Red Hat keeps delivering, keeps growing their base, they've made certain acquisitions, and they keep moving forward. >> So I want to talk about those acquisitions, because we had some Ansible people on the show here today, it seems as though the acquisition has really gone well, and the two companies are blending, and it's setting itself up for success. Is that your take too? What do you see as potential obstacles down the road? >> Yeah, that's great, Rebecca, we talk to talk with three different angles of the Ansible team today, and 18 months after the acquisition, it's really broadly integrated. I can tell you, I've worked in big companies, I've worked through a number of acquisitions, 18 months from acquisition to oh my gosh, their secret sauce is all over the place, I'm like, that is quite impressive. It's just, they're a software company, they are agile in their development, and they get to move things forward. And I'd heard great things about Ansible before the acquisition, I hear good things from customers that are using it, some of the other companies in the space that are standalone have been facing some challenges, the third interview that we did, I talked a little bit about how cloud providers were starting to build some of those pieces in. Infrastructure companies have known for a long time that management is one of those big challenges, so, management still seems to be one of those jump balls, it feels like that beach ball bouncing around and everybody's trying to get ahold of it, but Red Hat's figuring how to bake Ansible in, make sure it's touching open shifts specifically, all those things like the cloud forms and insights, and all the other pieces, so, building in more automation fits a lot with what they're doing, and how the Linux administrators understand how to do things, they always wanted to get past, oh, great, I have to go create yet another script and another script and another script, that they'll do that, so, seems to be a great acquisition for them, and helping to move them forward in a lot of spaces. >> Another buzzword we heard a lot today, and it's going to be funny that I described this as a buzzword, but it's simple, simplified, this is what we kept hearing again from partners, saying that this is what they're hearing from customers, because they just have so many different application, they've got old infrastructure, new infrastructure, the cloud, they've got hybrid, and they just want things to work together and play nicely. They're coming out with solutions, are they solutions? Are they in fact simpler? What's your take? Are you skeptical that things are in fact getting simpler? >> Yeah, Rebecca, there's a line I used, the simple enterprise is an oxymoron, it does not exist. If you look at any enterprise today, how many applications they'd have, it's like, well, do you have hundreds of applications, or thousands of applications, depending on how old you are, what the size of your company is. Everything in IT is additive, we had somebody on this week who was talking about the AS/400 sitting in the back, we had HP on, I'm sure they've got lots of customers, still running Superdomes, we've covered the mainframe pieces, and oh, well, Red Hat Enterprise, Linux, lives on lots of these environments, so we're going to standardize the software pieces, but there's only pieces of the puzzle that I can simplify, and really building software that can live in many environments, and help me move towards more composable or distributed architectures is the way we need to go, I liked Red Hat stories, where they're taking us, but I think if you talk to most IT staffs, even if they're like, "Oh, yeah, we're doing a lot of public cloud," or, "We've standardized on a couple of piece and things," most people don't think that IT is simple. >> And then there's the cost, too, I think that one of our guests made this point about proprietary software, and how it really is, it has a higher bar, because customers are going to say, "Why can't I just get this on opensource? "Why do I have to pay for this?" And so that's another question too, where are you seeing the financials of this all play out? >> Yeah, it's interesting, we're talking a lot about hybrid cloud, and when we first started talking public cloud, it was like, oh wait, it'll be cheaper. And then it's like, wait, no, it'll help me be more agile, and maybe that will then lead to cost, it was like, the old faster cheaper better, there're certain people in the development culture, that's like, "Well, if I can just do faster, "faster, faster, it will make up for everything else," then again, if I move too fast, sometimes we're breaking things, we're not being able to take advantage of things, so, it goes back, is this that simple? It sure doesn't sound simple, so it's, IT is a complex world, pricing is one of those things that absolutely is getting sorted out, Red Hat has a nice position in the marketplace, when I look at the big companies in the market, you need to take software companies like Microsoft or an Oracle, one of the first things most people think about when you hear those companies is like, oh, their price. Red Hat has brought adoption, and a lot of customers, and do I hear issues here or there on certain product lines, where yes, they'd like it cheaper, or there? Yes, but it's not a general complaint, oh, well, hey, you want to do, let's just use the Fedora version, or the CentOS version rather than the full enterprise version, and they have some sliders to be able to manage with that, starting to hear more, kind of the elastic cloud-like pricing, from Red Hat and some of their partners that solution that these pieces with, so, yeah, pricing isn't simple yet, it's definitely something that we're going to see more and more as we kind of get to that cloud-like model. >> Today, as particularly in the morning keynote, some of the use cases were from the government, we had three, including British Columbia, which we just had on our show, also Singapore, so it sounds as though government is saying, "Wait, what is this opensource? "This can really help us, this can help us engage "our citizens and help make their lives easier, "and also, by the way, make it easier for us to govern," will government sort of always lag behind, or do you think that there is a possibility that government could really lead the way on a lot of these things? >> Well, it's funny, 'cause we've known for a long time that government typically doesn't get a lot of budget, so when they go to do something, first of all, they sometimes can leapfrog a generation or two, because they've waited, they've waited, they've waited, and I can't necessarily upgrade it, so I might need to skip a generation, secondly, government has, if we talk about things like IoT, and all of those data points out there, the data has gravity, data's the new oil, government has a lot of data, you just interviewed British Columbia, I'm sure there's the opportunity there that as data can be leveraged and turned into more value, working with entrepreneurs, working with communities, government now sits in a place where, if they can be a little bit more open, and they can take advantage of the new opportunity, they can actually be on the vanguard of some of these new technologies, anything you got from your interviews? >> Yes, no, absolutely, I think that one of the things that really struck me was the recruiting and retention piece, because that seems to be one of the hardest things. If you're a hot coder, or an engineer who's graduating from one of the best schools, it's going to take a lot to get you to go work for the government, it just will. >> Rebecca, when I was in college, I did an internship for a municipal government, I digitized all their land management, did a whole database creation, and did one of those things, the old process took two months, and when I was done with it, it could be anywhere from two minutes to maybe a little bit longer, but boy, that was a painful summer to work through some of the processes, their infrastructure was all antiquated, great people, but government moved at a slower speed than I'm used to. >> And that is what I got out of my interview, so they are using the same kind of tools that these coders and developers would be using in the private sector, they're also doing smaller engagements, so you're not signing your life away to the government, you're able to work on a stint here, a stint there, you can do it in your free time and then get paid on PayPal, so I think that that is one way to attract good talent. Stu, we got one more day of this, what do you hope to see tomorrow, what are you going to be looking for, what do you want to be talking about tomorrow at this time? >> Well, what we always get here is a lot of really good customers, I love the innovation stories, right past the hallway here, there's all of these pictures, and Red Hat's a great partner for us on theCUBE, they've brought us many of those customers, we're going to have more of them on, another two keynotes, full day of coverage, so we'll see how many people make it to the morning keynote after going to Fenway tonight, 4,000 people, pretty impressive, I think we'll see, it's not like we'll see more red in the audience than usual, at a game at Fenway, but yeah, you're rooting for the home team, I'm a transplant here, go Pats, you know? >> Mm, okay, alright, so it's the argument, I think, that they were hoping for. So I want to thank you so much, it's been great doing this with you, and I hope you will join us tomorrow for day three of the Red Hat Summit in Boston, Massachusetts, I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, thank you, and see you tomorrow! (electronic jingle)

(upbeat techno music) >> Host: Live, from Boston Massachusetts, it's the Cube, covering Red Hat Summit 2017, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome to day two of the Red Hat Summit here in beautiful Boston, Massachusetts. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We are welcoming Jim Whitehurst, who is the president and CEO of Red Hat. Thanks so much for taking the time to sit down with us. >> Thanks, it's great to be here. >> So, I want to talk about the theme of this year's conference, which is celebrating the impact of the individual. In your keynote you talked about the goal of leadership today is to create a context for the individual to try, to modify, to fail, to just keep going. Sounds great. How do you do that? >> Well that's why I say, leadership is about creating a context for that to happen. So you have to create a safe environment for people to try and fail. And you know, this is a tough one, because somebody fails 20 times, you know, maybe it's time him to find a new career. >> Rebecca: (laughs) >> But, you have to create the opportunity for people to fail in a safe way and actually then learn from that. And one of the things I talk a lot about, especially CEOs and CIOs is, you got to create that context. The world that we used to live in was all about taking variance out, you know, Lean Six Sigma process. Innovation's all about injecting variance in, and there's no way to inject variance in without making errors. So how do you, I want to say reward making errors, but you certainly want to reward risk taking and recognize, by definition, some risks aren't going to play out. And that's all about culture. Yeah, it's about process and reward systems, but it's mainly about culture. >> So reward, risk taking, no blaming, what are some other defining elements of this culture in which individuals can feel free to take risks? >> Well, I think a big part of it is you have to celebrate the people who try things And you celebrate taking the risk. You don't necessarily celebrate the successes, right? It's like, you know, in school, you miss something, that's bad, you get something right, that's good. Well we have a tendency to say, let's celebrate the successes, versus actually celebrating the risk taking. And so, there are some processes and systems you have to put in place. You have to have systems in place to make sure no one can risk 100 million dollars. If every Red Hatter could risk 100 million dollars, we'd be in trouble. But you have to figure out how you give enough latitude, enough free time. And, I was just yesterday talking to some Red Hatters who had moved over from IBM. They said, "It's great, we can try new things." Now, try new things within a context of a certain amount of budget or a certain amount of time. So there are processes and systems you have to put in place, but ultimately it's culture more than anything else. It trumps anything else. >> Jim, in your keynote, you said, planning is dead, and that, you know, we're lousy predictors, things are changing so fast. Your role though, you're CEO of a public company that has 60 quarters of consecutive revenue growth. So, it seems you guys are doing pretty well at getting involved in some of the waves that are happening, understanding how to keep growing at a steady pace. Maybe you can reconcile that a little bit for us, as to how you're doing that. >> Yeah, so, one of the reasons that I think that we've been able to navigate a whole set of fairly significant transitions in technology is that we don't select technology, we select communities. And I think that's a really important subtlety. So, we didn't come in and say, "Oh, we like OpenStack more than we like CloudStack of Eucalyptus or the other opensource IaaS that were out five years ago. We looked and observed that OpenStack had built the biggest user base. You know the reason we're significantly involved in Kubernetes today, versus Diego, or Swarm, or the other orchestrators for containers out there, is we observed it was building the biggest community. And, we don't just glom on, we actually kind of get in and contribute ourselves. But we look more to say what are the best communities and let's get involved in that. I don't know what the Kubernetes roadmap is for the next five years, but I'm confident that it has the best community that will drive the right direction for-- >> It's probably a little over-simplified to say you looked for the VHS ecosystem versus the Betamax best technology. >> Rachael: (laughs) >> No, exactly. Exactly, but that's what we think we're good at is observing when a community is the best community. And I say that, it's not just a matter of observation. Whether it's OpenStack or Kubernetes, we get in a help think about governance, right? So, one of the things I think really helped OpenStack is we saw it had the best user community, but we help put together the governance structure, which truly made it neutral, made it open. And so, we try to actually help in doing that, but it really is about identifying communities rather than technologies. >> Is it ever possible that you could identify the right community that might have certain elements, but it's got elements that wouldn't quite work for the opensource way, can you change that community? Is it possible to go in and push a new culture into that community? >> We think we're actually pretty good at that. Now, I think there's a mix of not every community has to be the same. We often talk about, there is no opensource community. There are are literally two million open source communities. And Linux has a culture, many of our projects in JBoss. So Drools is different than Fuse that's different than others. And so, it's okay that the cultures can be different. The key is they all have to have a common element about being open, and committing to being open, and truly being a meritocracy, cause if they best ideas don't win, that's when communities fall apart. And that's actually one of the biggest places where they fall apart. So, I do think we can influence open, and I think just by our contributions we probably influence the cultures of some of those communities. But we don't try to say is there's a Red Hat way to do community. There are a lot of different ways. >> Jim, we look at the cloud space, open is one of these terms that doesn't necessarily mesh with your definition with what the cloud guys do. You guys, of course, supported Red Hat Linux in every single cloud environment that I can think of. For many years you have a expanded partnership with AWS. But, I was debating with Sam Ramji yesterday, from Google, about like, there is no open cloud. There are clouds that use opensource, opensource can live here, but all the big public clouds are built on their platforms and openness is a challenge there. What's your thought as to how you fit there? And then we'll want to get into some of the discussion of the AWS announcement. >> Yeah, sure. So, in defense of the public clouds, it's impossible to offer a physical offering that has hardware in a software stack without it having some of your technologies that don't make it totally open, right? Or transferable. >> Is this why we never saw a Red Hat Open Cloud? >> Well, it's just that, yeah, it doesn't quite make sense in our context for that reason as well. So the role we try to play is, we do try to play the abstracter role, and we do that at multiple levels. So, Red Hat Enterprise Linux runs across a physical data center, virtual data center, and the major clouds. And that's an abstraction point that we think adds value. Because all the way back to 15 years ago, Red Hat Enterprise Linux meant that you could run the same application on a Dell server or an IBM, or an HP Blade, right? And so, we're working to apply that at the cloud level, certainly at the operating system level, but, because of all the services and the growth containers, we needed to do it at another level, and that's what we're doing with OpenShift. So, OpenShift allows you to run on physical, or on virtual in your own data center, on the major public clouds, and take advantages of the services underneath, but do it in a little bit more of an abstracted way. >> All right. So, we had Optum on yesterday, who was also part of the keynote. He's using OpenShift. He's using AWS. He was very excited about the opportunity of OpenShift being able to extend those Amazon services. You and Andy Jassy doing a video this morning. Give us a little bit of the inside look. You know, how long did it take to put this together? My understanding, it's not shipping today, but coming a little bit later this year. Give us a little bit behind what happened. >> Yeah, so. You know, this really started off with a breakfast Andy and I had in January, where we said, look, our teams are working really well together, and we've been partners since 2008, but kind of from the bottom up, I think we were taking very much an incremental approach of what we could do together, what customers we could work with. And, I think it's a little bit in the context of they've been out some other kind of big deals with some other vendors, and so, why don't we think about, what's a true net new offering. So let's now just talk about, oh, running it on Amazon's lower cost. I mean, clearly there's a cost thing there, but, what can we do that's like, wow, actually changes the life of some of the people who are using our technologies. And so what we decided is, well, wouldn't it be amazing, literally at breakfast we were talking about it, if OpenShift, which is used by enterprises all around the world, could actually leverage the thousands of services that AWS is putting out, right? So, right now, if you want to use all of these services, you have to be on AWS, which is great, but there are a lot of customers for whatever reasons, for regulatory reasons, or just by choice or economics, who decided to run on-premise or elsewhere. And so, by making those thousands of services available, it's a win-win all around. For Amazon, it's a ability to expose some really amazing innovation to many, many thousands, hundreds of thousands of developers, and for us it's a way to expose all this innovation to our developers, without kind of forcing someone necessarily to go all-in on cloud. Now, I'll say that we were literally, you know, Sunday night still getting the final contract done. >> Rebecca: (laughing) >> But I would say, when you have a really clear, differentiated source of value for customers, the deal came together, I think, relatively quickly. >> Yeah, et cetera. One of the things we've been trying to reconcile a little bit is, when you talk to customers about where their applications live, that hybrid or multi-cloud world, versus the offerings that are out there, it was a mismatch, because, you know, they were like, oh, I'm using VMware in one place, and I'm using Amazon somewhere else. I've got my SaaS in a different place. We're starting to see Amazon mature their discussion of hybrid through partnerships of yours. OpenShift looks like something that can really help enable customers to kind of get their arms around those environments in many locations. >> Well, I think so. One of the things, if you really go and talk to developers, developers really don't care that much about infrastructure software, and they shouldn't care. And, it's interesting. I think developers right now are really enamored by containers, because containers somewhat makes their life easy. But, I was talking to some of the folks in Red Hat that deal a lot with developers, and they say, ultimately developers shouldn't want to care and don't want to care about even containers. They just want to write code, and they want code to work, right? And one of the cool things about OpenShift is that's kind of what you're doing, is you're saying write code. Yeah, use any of the services you want from anywhere you want to use it. They're all there. They're all available. You don't have to worry about, I want this service, so I have to run this on Amazon, or, hey, I got my database on-premise, so I got to run here. Let's just make it easy. And I think that's one of the cool things about this announcement that's cool for developers, but it's also unique that it's something that only we could bring together. >> Yeah, serverless is something that's been gaining a lot of buzz to kind of say, right, it's underneath there. There's probably going to be containers, but my people writing applications don't want to worry about that. Speak to, it's the application affinity and that tie to kind of modernization of applications that seems to be one of the biggest challenges we've been facing for the last couple of years. Why are companies coming to Red Hat, working across your solution set to help them with that challenge of their older applications, but also kind of building the new businesses. >> Well I think for a couple reasons. So first off, if we really think about what Red Hat is, we call ourselves a software company, but we give away all our IP, so that's a stretch, right? >> Rebecca: (laughs) >> You know, when we think about our overall mission is, we think, there's enterprise customers here with a set of challenges, and there's all this phenomenal innovation happening in opensource communities. How do we build a bridge between those. So certainly that's product. So we create opensource, well, products out of opensource projects. It's about architecture, and then it's about process. And we talked about open innovation labs. But in part of thinking about that's what we do, we obviously start off say, well, what are enterprise problems, and what are technologies that help solve those problems? So, one of the things that we've driven so hard into our container platform is the ability to run stateful applications, right? So it's great to talk about scale-out and cloud native, and we certainly do that, but go talk to any CIO and 99.9% of their application portfolio is stateful. And so, we think about that and we drive those needs. And the reason we're the second largest contributor of Kubernetes isn't just because we're nice people. It's because we're trying to drive enterprise needs into these projects. And so, I do think that technologies that would ultimately emerge, and the products we're able to put out, help enterprises consume opensource in a way that is actually value adding. >> I wanted to ask you about the examples that you used in the keynote today. The three that you highlighted were governance. >> Jim: Yeah. >> And I think that that was really interesting because you're showing how opensource is bringing new innovations and ideas into government and agencies not necessarily known for innovation. Where do you see the future of technology in government coming together? >> Well, one of the reasons I wanted to use government examples is that I actually wanted to highlight, well, what's the role of government when you start thinking about innovation. So, certainly, we could've brought up a lot of examples. You know, yesterday the Optum folks that are big users of our platform, and they've kind of created a context for innovation among their developers. But the reason I wanted to highlight governments, and really try to do it from regions around the world, was to say there is a role for government when you start thinking about what is the new system underneath the economy. So, in the 1940s and 50s in the US the interstate highway system was an important piece of infrastructure. We've always thought about roads and bridges and airports as important for creating the underpinnings for an economy, and that's really, really important in a world of physical goods. And it's not that we don't have physical goods now, but more and more we still have to start thinking about information assets. And look, I've gone and seen the FCC and advocated for net neutrality and all that stuff. And so, certainly broadband as a fundamental infrastructure's important, but I think that government plays a more important role. Whether that's education, and we could spend two hours on education, but even kind of creating these contexts where you make data available. That's what I loved about the British-Columbia example. But broadly it's like, how do you create a context for more citizen participation. I think it's just as important in the 21st Century as roads and bridges were in the 20th Century. >> Jim, you mentioned net neutrality. I'm curious your take on just kind of the global discussion that's going on. A lot of your customers here are international, you've got open communities. The question about net neutrality, trade. It feels like many people, we interviews the president of ICANN a few years ago, and was worried about, you know, are we going to have seven internets, not one internet, because there are certain Asian, and even like Germany, worried about cutting things off. How does that impact your thinking? Do you guys get involved in some of those governmental discussions? >> Well we do. A matter of fact, we actually do have, I'd say a small government affairs team that advocates around these issues. Because we see it too, even with OpenShift, where you start saying, well, different privacy laws in Europe versus the US, but what if someone's running OpenShift in Europe, but it's actually instantiated in the US, and who can get access to what data. Those are really, really important issues. And it is a little bit like, you know, we ought to pick the same railroad gauge, right? To some extent, we need to have a set of consistent policies, not necessarily in every area, but enough that you can actually have the free flow of information, without worrying about, oh my god, I'm exposing myself to felony privacy issues because I'm hosting this application on a cloud that happens to be in the US. So there's some real issues that we have to work through. And they're so bleeding edge and so complex, I'm not sure that we're quite ready to get those done. But these are going to be critical, critical to the economy of the 21st Century. >> The other thing, I can't let you go without asking you about just the opensource business models themself. I've been listening to podcasts. We had a couple of companies go IPO recently. >> Jim: Yeah. >> They're better involved, and they're like, oh wait, I'm an enterprise company, I'm a software company. VC, you shouldn't invest in opensource because they can't monetize what they're doing. What's your take on the investment and business prospect for the other companies that are not Red Hat? >> Well, look, I'm thrilled to see Cloudera going public. Obviously Hortonworks public. MuleSoft recently. And I know some of those are hybrid models, they have an open core, and they have some other proprietary around it. But look, it's still dollars that are getting invested in opensource software I think we've clearly proven a model that you can have 100% opensource and build a successful business. For a whole set of technologies, it's clearly a better innovation model. The thing that I continue to push people is, don't think about it as selling IP. And this is, I've actually had conversations with several university presidents about this same issue. University education is more about the content. Don't be scared of MOOCs, right? And most people kind of get that, a university education, yeah, content's a part of it. But there are 50 other things that make up an education. So that's when I always come back to opensource companies and say, assume the content's free, because it's going to be better if it's totally free. And now think about, how do you build a model around the fact that content's free. And, I think education's a great one. Your industry in media is certainly one that needs to continue to innovate around business models as well. So, rather than saying, let's take a development model that's superior in a number of regards for a set of technologies, especially around infrastructure, and say, let's hamper it, and make it work in the old school business model. Let's continue to work to innovate business models that allow the innovation to happen, because it's going to happen, right? You do have to recognize that so much of what you're seeing in opensource is really a byproduct of what Google and Facebook and others are doing. And that's going to continue, so the best innovation's going to come there. You got to figure out business models that work for it. >> You got to figure them out Thank you so much, Jim. Jim Whitehurst, we appreciate your time. >> It's great to be here. Thanks so much for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will return with more from the Red Hat Summit. (upbeat techno music)

>> Narrator: Live, from Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat. (light techno music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Red Hat Summit here in beautiful Boston, Massachusetts. I am your host, Rebecca Knight. I'm here with my co-host, Dave Vellante. Joining us is Marco Bill-Peter. He is the vice president of customer experience and engagement at Red Hat. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> So I want to start out by talking about your management philosophy, and your philosophy really of what you do. Because that is just so core to the Red Hat experience for customers. I noticed that you changed the name, it's no longer Customer Support, it is Customer Experience and Engagement. Do you want to talk a little bit about why you made that switch? >> Yeah, I think, well yes, it would be awesome, yeah. I mean the name reflects actually, in my opinion, also the business model from Red Hat, which is you take an open-source development model, you develop the products, you actually sell them as a subscription. But there's no license behind it, which is the amazing business model, right? That there's no lock-in, right? The customer can buy it, they can use it, if we don't provide the value, then shame on us, they can move on. And so that's where the customer experience has to be good. That they really see, hey, I got something from Red Hat, I'm coming back, I will renew this. And the engagement is as well, it's the part, one is like, experience was great and engagement is, we got to engage them, right? Because shame on us if we didn't engage a customer in during their journey during that year of subscription life that they have, or three-year, whatever it is. That is the, I think it's the business model, but it's also my philosophy, which is, I used to work for proprietary companies and running support or customer success functions. There you make the money on the license and the maintenance is, basically, I always call it janitorial services. This way our model is different, so that's why I also report through Paul Cormier, it's integrated in technologies. It's maybe not the philosophy, but it's our philosophy really, the customer, it's not a joke, it's customer is in the center. And if they are successful, yes, they will come back, they will buy more, they will renew. But it's an honest model. And so that's why we changed the name for various reasons. I also, we looked at other functions at Red Hat, and said, "Which one is really about customer experience?" And security, for example, is in my team, right? It's not just support, because security is a big element of our value that we provide. And so that's why we expanded the team, changed the name to kind of reflect that. >> You mention Paul Cormier and we're actually, he's going to be joining us later today too. And he was talking about how the design process is really led by customers in this new era of cloud computing. >> Marco: Yeah. >> Talk a little bit about what it's like to collaborate with customers in these products. >> Yeah, it's really good. I can give you an example from the innovation award winners this week. We have, like, for example, British Columbia, the government of British Columbia, and they start on this journey and they wanted to create this, I would say, exchange for partners that they have, companies to kind of provide some services and make it easier for them. And they started on a journey and it didn't go well. And shame on whoever was involved in that. But then we got involved. I was like, okay, that's what you're trying to solve. We got one of my guys actually flew out there, spent a few weeks out there. He was like, oh, this is the problem, let's build it differently. Then Ashesh Badani from the open-shift team got involved and we realized, okay, what they're trying to do is this, change the product, adjust it. There's one example from last year's innovation award winner. We had Betfair. It's a horse-race company in England. Same thing, they wanted to really innovate a data center in a complete, like, software-defined way. And having that collaboration with us directly and the upstream communities, but then also with partners, like in that case it was a software-defined network provider, to get involved and really build the solutions. It's a whole different way. And if you go back a few years when we just did Linux, that maybe didn't really happen because it was more Linux was driven by the community. And now I think it's honestly good to see because it's customers involved, there's still a lot of partners involved and there is a strong community and that whole thing working together is pretty cool to see. >> There's a saying that I like. It's customer satisfaction is one thing, customer loyalty is everything. And you live in a world where customer loyalty really is everything. Describe, you mentioned before your previous company, what's the innovation experience and total customer experience like now and how do you innovate versus the way a traditional company might innovate in customer experience? >> I think traditional companies, they innovate around, since it's a maintenance budget, we've got to save costs, right? That's their take. It's like, save costs, deflect cases, deflect customers basically, right? And our model is the opposite, right? If I start deflecting customers that's kind of the negative of engagement, right? So pushing back customers that actually they see value if they have interaction so that's where we look at it completely different. We innovate around, you know, like two years ago when we talked about we presented Red Hat insights, the tooling that basically out of our customer support cases we provide back to our customers a connection that they know, hey, this might happen. That's one piece that, you saw it probably at the keynote today, it's integrated in our products now, right? And so that's one piece we innovate around. Support is not seen as an afterthought. It's like, how do we build this into our tooling? So insights was a good example as an innovation. We did a lot of workflow changes, which sounds very technical but really to provide more value back to the customers. So it's called a knowledge center support approach that you really basically take what customers provide you, rephrase that and provide it back as a documentation. If you run into this situation, and it can be a support situation, but it can also an innovation situation, they want to build something new, you provide that back in the form of documentation customer form. >> One of the other things that's changed in the last two years is this explosion of artificial intelligence, some people call it cognitive, and we saw the kickoff video this morning how, and we talked about this a little bit a couple of years ago, how you're going to use data to improve customer experiences and now we're here. How are you using data and insights and analytics to improve the customer service? >> Analytics, I think, we started in a way in a traditional way, right? You have data and then you've got to figure out the data and then you kind of just create rules out of it. If this and this happen you do this. Call it AI, sounds cool, but basically it's rules matching. This happens, that. Now I think it's detecting the trends more automatically that's more done in, I would say, in more real AI. That's where we are. I would say the last year we spent more time figuring out, hey, how do we, instead of trying manually find the trends to actually automatically find them. And I think there is, I just gave an interview a few weeks in Japan where AI is a really hot topic, I think we're just scratching the surface. You saw it in autonomous driving but I think in support there's so much more to do in this area as well. >> When I asked you, you know, about juxtaposing Red Hat versus, say, a traditional software company it would seem like cutting costs was in conflict with innovating for customer experience but when I hear you speak about AI, is it possible there's a relationship between the two? That you can actually improve customer service and cut costs? >> Absolutely, but you want to do it in a good way. You want to do it in a way that it provides value back to the customer. If you do it an way, hey, we've cut out this and this things, then the customer just gets a lousy experience. That doesn't, I think that doesn't even work for a traditional company or proprietary company any more. That whole old, no, there's other companies that do autodeflection, right? But I think if you actually optimize the experience in a way that also the customer sees, hey, this is actually great value, right? If you just optimize things and the customer experience is great, you might actually create a situation where customer doesn't see value, right? Like in the old days, we had a lot of customers saying, hey, I never had the support case, why should I pay you guys? So, you know, obviously you can talk about that's great you didn't have a support case, but a customer paying a few millions and they only had one support case is a tough recovery. Today, not AI, but a lot of data is we can tell the customer, yeah, you had one support case, but look at all the tools you used in the customer portal, all the interactions you have. We have a nice dashboard we can present back to a customer. And, I'll give you, if you have a minute >> Yeah, please. a story quickly of a CTO from a bank that, a few years we met, and then he said, "Oh, Red Hat, you guys are good." That was in a bar. "You guys are good but, you know, I don't really need "your support, Marco. "My guys, they know how to do things." And so, I was like, okay. So in the evening I went back to the hotel, looked at the dashboard and then realized his story was maybe not as realistic. Next day, I see him again and show him the dashboard. And support was involved. There was documentation in use. I showed him back, I was like look at this, this is the value we provide you. And out of that came a whole different discussion, as in we do it annually now, and we looked at this data and he sees trends. He sees like, "Oh, my Latin America bank, "they still use this and this. "My North America team does that and that." And it's a whole different discussion. It's awesome, right, that they realize from the data we have there is a lot of value that he can change his operation. That's a short example. >> I want to talk to you about security. You mentioned this earlier in our conversation. The era of cloud computing is maturing and we are seeing now customers caring more about compliance and governance and management. What are the big concerns that you're hearing from customers? >> Obviously the big concern is still the traditional vulnerabilities, right? If there is a security hole, how do we fix it? How quickly fix it? Do we have the right data that we provide back as a customer realizes, is this a security hole I need to worry about or not. And that's what we do, we kind of focus on, we have a pretty large security team, I think, for the size we are because of the open-source model. So they're involved in a lot of the communities. So we provide fast response and we also provide response not just with a security fix but also with information about, hey, this is why you should worry or this is why you shouldn't worry. 'Cause sometimes the press creates this frenziness about, hey, pick your favorite name of a security hole, Heartbleed, et cetera. And for some customers it doesn't really matter because in their environment this is not a real scenario, right? And so we provide the patch, we provide data or documentation, but then also tooling that they can figure out are we exposed or not. That's one of the things. The other problem is in containers, right? You have these containers. You build the containers from everywhere. To actually realize, hey, is this container also compliant with security is a big topic. We just released, released, or we will release this week, it's not a secret, the container catalog, with actually a scoring that actually says, yes, this container is quality A, B. Kind of a freshness score. >> Ah, a ratings system. >> Yeah, rating. And this is a huge effort for every company and we do it as well, as in how do we keep these containers updated, right? Because you, if you build a container from application to middleware down to the operating system, you've got to worry about a lot of security. >> It's a fresh date. >> Yeah, it's like expiration date. >> A sell-by date. >> And that's what we do actually. We have an expiration date but depending on security hole, that just changes. >> So we were talking to John Hodgson who was at the keynote as well and he was telling us, and he mentioned this in the keynote, that he went from 17 developers in 2009 to 1,600 today. He was talking about that a lot of them are kids right out of college and we were talking about how you have to treat millennials differently and give them flexible time. And, Rebecca, you were talking about a new way to work at the beginning of our segments today. So how is that new way to work affect the customer experience and what are you guys doing in that regard? >> I mean obviously, like you say, right, there's a whole new generation coming and I actually think the new generation, they're actually a pretty sensitive customer experience. I think they're growing up in a different age of like digital age so, and social media as well, so actually I was worried that the new generation maybe, but I have to say, I think contrary, right? So that's good. So I don't think customer experience will suffer. What will change is, like, you can't have people, you know, we don't have it, but like call centers, if you have a little farm for everybody. That just ain't going to fly anymore, right? And so that's where we got to adjust. We don't do call centers, but we got to just adjust, like, how is the office done, where is it, and things like that. But it's, I think, I'm not too worried about that. >> And mobile is huge for you guys obviously, right? The mobile trend. And there's a lot of talk in Silicon Valley about, you know, what's next beyond mobile. How we, this is not how we're going to interface with our two thumbs in the future. It's going to be voice and, you have to be careful not to over-rotate either, right, because you could ruin the customer experience. Do you do that type of advanced, you know, research in total customer experience? >> Yeah, we do research. We actually also research how do they interact with us. You know, mobile is always a topic but our customers aren't engaging as mobile. You know, like it's, I mean-- >> You say they're not? >> They're not, no. >> They're out there. >> You know, our portal is all mobile enabled so you could go with it, but mostly it's still laptops, notebooks, et cetera, that they're using to engage us. So we haven't really invested a lot in that, but we invest in the digital experience, right, so make it easier, provide the tooling, don't force a customer to jump through, like, hoops to find something out. Give them the tool to find out. They want to self-solve a lot, right? Which goes back in the old discussion, is that deflection? But if a self-solve tool helps you, I think customers see, hey, this is value from Red Hat. >> If they can do it themselves, yeah. >> Marco: If they can and they can learn something, right? That part is good. >> Well thank you so much for joining us, Marco Bill-Peter, who is the vice-president, customer experience and engagement, at Red Hat. I'm Rebecca Knight, for Dave Vellante, thank you so much for joining us and we'll be back after this break. (light techno music)