 Okay, we're back here live inside theCUBE. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angle. I'm here with Sacha Bates, the bratty redhead. Goes by, that's her firm name. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you for having me. So we were ending the day on a power women note here. We have a tsunami of power ladies coming into theCUBE. So welcome. Are you saying we're rolling over here today or something? I mean, it's got us some amazing guests. So tell us first, what's going on here in your world? Obviously, the Velocity Conference, this isn't about the browser anymore. It's about UI, UX performance, but it's about deployment, production, DevOps. That world is now kind of coming together. It's true. It's about people, really. I mean, a lot of what we talk about, they look like technical problems, but they're really people problems. And when you can solve the people problems, I think the tech really just kind of falls into line. So what's your big take on, how would you describe Velocity Conference as someone saying, what kind of conference is that? Cloud Conference, the UI conference. What kind of conference is it? Well, if you touch the web, it's a place you want to be. And if you are in operations at all, or if you understand scale at all, or if you're working in a big way, or if you are looking for people like you in open source a lot of times, you will find them here, really. There's a lot of, you can also say hug ups, because we have a lot of that going on. We are big into people. I mean, there's a lot of tech here. You will, we talk about tech all the time, but if you check out the talk that I did today, one of my biggest points is that this is hard, but people are harder, and inside yourself, you're even harder. So these are the problems that you need to solve a lot of times, and the tech will fall into line. And if you go out and look at the talks, you'll see a lot of that where people are talking about, I just left a talk where James Turnbull was talking about the mythology of operations and how we tell ourselves stories and build up these mythologies around things. I love the hug ups we had in the earlier. So just talk about what you talked about, getting started with configuration management. This is an area that's in automation, it's a tricky thing, especially when you have convergence going on. It's not the same old load balancers, you got firewalls, you have networking gear. I mean, networking stuff is kind of in transition anyway. You got SDN and virtualization. So configuration managers is getting, seems to be getting harder and harder. When you look at that, is it getting harder? What's making it easier? I mean, puppet chef, these are some tools that are out there, but I mean, how do you look at that? What are some of the things that are happening there? Well, and first of all, I'm actually not sure that I would say that we're losing a lot of the old stuff, because yeah, I mean, if you live here in San Francisco and in Silicon Valley, that's the truth. But you know what, there's a big bubble here, and the enterprise exists, right? So the enterprise is not going away anytime soon, and neither are there data centers, and neither are there special snowflakes. I mean, we like to say that the world is no longer full of snowflakes, but it really is. And so, what you really get out of configuration management anytime is that it does make some things harder, but it allows you, when you use it, to actually get rid of the tedium. You automate out a lot of chance and unknowns when you write the automation, and it allows you to get the day-to-day stuff that you have to do over and over off your hands, so that you can actually concentrate on real problems. So, what you really get, it's a lot like automated testing, right? When you have automated testing, you have smarter QA folks, because they're writing code to do more testing. And what you get with automation is you get, you automate the stuff that you don't want to work with. It's tedious, it's boring, it's repetitive, and then you have smarter ops folks because they are actually working on real problems to solve instead of pushing buttons. So let me ask you about the enterprise, because that's an area we cover a lot of. She suffered a fine data center, it's the big bubble hype, but that's a destination, that's like the moonshot. That's like saying we want to get to the moon in the 60s, right? Eventually we might get there, we'll see what happens. But certainly like IT still has automation issues and planned downtime is a big problem. So planning the downtime to do the upgrades, to do the configuration, so it's still manual. What are you seeing? Where is the world at in your view? If you look at mainstream IT, mainstream enterprises, where are they on the scale? Are they almost in college? Are they still in kindergarten? Relative to, you know, I got multiple gear, I got rack and stack stuff. It really depends on where they are in the cycle of getting it. I don't really want to be all like clickish about that, but it's where they're getting it, right? So if you talk to places like Nordstrom or if Best Buy in Minneapolis has been doing platform transformation for three plus years now, and they have started to get it, so they are in that transition, right? Where they've started to start using the cloud and they understand the concept of disposable servers. You don't get attached to servers if they break, if they don't work, you get rid of it, and you only worry about it if it becomes a pattern of a problem, right? So a lot of these companies are starting to really get it. Some places have not yet, but like, again, HP and IBM are starting to really push a lot of this stuff too, and while they have corporatized some of the message, the patterns that they are taking with them are pretty sound, you know? And so some companies are still way back in the dark ages, but they're trying, so I've talked to a few companies who are really close to just kicking off this whole desire to, I mean, you hear it a lot, the concept of platform transformation, where you take stuff that is maybe five, 10 years old, and you start really trying to break it up, and you realize that you actually need the culture to go with the tools, otherwise it doesn't get very far. You know, I will say, we had the queue at HP Discover for three days there, and one of the things I will say, HP is willing to make change. They have moonshot, they're recognizing the challenges, and if they don't eat their own, someone else will. So, you know, obviously density in the data center, those are all challenges, but beyond that, it's a software issue, right? With big data and open source, what's your take on open source's impact to the enterprises? Because those guys are all trying to be the next Facebook, but they don't want, they can't get there fast enough. So they don't want to buy Oracle either, because they've done that, right? So a lot of the enterprises are like, hey, I bought the Oracle, I got the general purpose computing. I don't want that necessarily. I want to go commodity scale out, and I want to use open source. So, how does that change the game in your mind? It really does. I mean, what it does, one of the big things, one of the really obvious things, is it makes it more fun to work there for us. So the really smart people that you want to hire, if you say, come work on open source, you might actually get somebody going, okay, instead of, you want me to what? Yeah, how? You know, why do you want me to come in and do this thing with this proprietary software that I hate, as opposed to, come in, work on open source, we're going to let you be a part of the community, we're going to let you contribute back. Nordstrom's is doing that, Disney has started doing that a little bit, Best Buy is doing that, and it makes it more fun to work there, and that means that you can attract talent. Yeah, and you know what, that's the key thing you mentioned earlier, the human, it's all human issues, right? The technology was evolving, and that's the key, but I want to ask you a question, because we brought this up last week, I said in talking with the HP event, and the IBM event, we were at both events last week, open source is the new standards bodies. In the old days, when I was getting into the business, the IETF brand stuff, IEEE, all the standards bodies, they ratified stuff, right? Committees, hierarchies, not anymore. I mean, they're still around, but I mean, if you look at all the major innovation, it's community-driven. So, one, do you see that same picture, and two, what is out there? I mean, just look at OpenStack, what OpenStack has done in just such a short time, I mean, we were super critical of OpenStack at the beginning, because it was such a marketing program, they were, oh, I got cloud, I got OpenStack, but they kind of retooled and reset, and now it's just really delivering, because they deliver code. But OpenStack went from zero to hero, literally, in less than a year. Sure. Or maybe two, maybe 18 months. So, what's your view on that? Like, that's that dynamic that's people, it's tech. What's your- You mean open source in general? Open source is a standard driving, because a lot of stuff going on here at Velocity is a lot of the same way, the alpha geeks in the communities are driving through, I guess, crowdsource, democratization, I don't know what to call it, but it's certainly not a standard driving. I think people are starting to understand that the tech they use is not their secret sauce, right? I think that this is something we talk about a lot. The tech that you're using to drive your stuff, everybody else is using it too, and there's no point in keeping the stuff that you're doing a secret, because that's not what matters. Again, if you go back to people, especially with a lot of these web companies and stuff, what really matters is your customer and how you treat them, and how they can actually interact with you in things, and that's really where you're going to make a break, and not the technology that you use. Sasha Betts with Bates with Braddy Redhead Consulting. We are the queue. We will go until they turn the lights off. We will go where the stories are, we go where all the action is, so let's keep going until they pull the, at Oracle Open World was the only place they actually pulled the plug on the queue. They actually pulled the plug, literally pulled the plug out of the wall. So let's continue. This is quickly, just wrap this thing up. Velocity this year, how would you describe this event two days? What happened? What's your sound bite for velocity this year? Oh, well, it's different for different people, right? So we have a lot of different crowds that come in here. Those of us who have been here two or three years in a row or more, it's a lot like summer camp because we don't get to see each other very often. That's why Twitter is so active, right? Because that's how we keep in touch, and so it's like summer camp for a lot of us, but it's also a revelation for a lot of the folks who are new, right? I mean, a lot of folks are coming in from the enterprise now and they're really having their minds blown by a lot of the concepts that are still really fresh in the enterprise, and I'm really excited about that for them, having worked in the enterprise myself. It's great, great event. We got a wrap up here. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. We really enjoyed the conversation. I think you hit a lot of great points here that we need to amplify DevOps culture. It's not just what's in the Echo Chamber in Silicon Valley, certainly a lot of good stuff going on here, but mainstream IT, they're still got to be retooling big transformation there. People, people problem. Velocities at the center of it. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with our wrap up after the short break here at the Velocity Conference, siliconangle.com and wikibond.org. We'll be right back.