 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of SousaCon Digital, brought to you by Sousa. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is CUBE's coverage of SousaCon Digital 20. Happy to welcome back to the program. One of our CUBE alumni, Alan Clark, he is in the CTO office of Sousa, works on emerging technologies and open source. Sit down on many of the boards for many of those open source organizations. Alan, nice to chat with you. Thanks so much, Stu. Thanks for the invitation. I appreciate the opportunity. It's always fun to chat with you, Stu. All right, so Alan, open source, of course, had a broad impact on the industry. Lots of talk, he talked about software reading the world, the impact open source has on software. Give us, start us a little bit kind of the state of the state as to what you're seeing broadly when it comes to open. I enjoy this industry because it's just booming. I got into open source a long time ago before my hair was gray. And it just continues to surprise me and amaze me at how much it's grown. And even from not just as projects, those continue to exponentially grow, but think about the adoption. And from Susie's perspective, we've got critical mission infrastructure running on open source. And that is just totally amazing, right? And they've got aerospace, manufacturing firms, Fortune 100s, Fortune 500s, Fortune 50s, the world's largest banks, four or five of the world's largest banks are running on Susie Linux, right? Automotive vendors, 10 or 12 of the 15 largest automotive vendors are running on open source, running on Susie Linux. And 10 of the largest telecommunications firms are running on Susie. And it just goes to show that open source is really growing and is being adopted and used by critical infrastructure for the world, particularly in these troubling days, right? Yeah, I mean, Alan, I've always loved digging into the data, but I haven't followed up for quite as long a few, but I've been involved for coming up on 20 years now. And you think back 15 or 20 years, it was somebody in the back room contributing some code in their spare time when they have it. When I look at the state of open source today, you mentioned lots of enterprises are using it, but lots of enterprises are contributing to it. And it's not necessarily somebody in their spare time doing it, but more and more part of my job is leveraging and contributing back, up source to what's happening there. How are you seeing that? How does that impact the overall governance of open source? So that's a very good question because the amount of change is huge, right? So these open source foundations have grown very large and the number of people that are contributing to them not just in code, but in ideas, in best practices and so forth has exponentially grown. And it's amazing to see that. Plus, I guess the other part of it that I really enjoy is it's gone global, right? It used to be these projects were kind of regional and perhaps North America to Europe, but it's, they've gone global. So these larger projects will have 170, 180 countries that are involved, that's truly amazing. And the thing that I find very interesting, particularly given the pandemic era, we're all sitting at our homes right now, as open source developers, we're very used to this environment. We're working from home, we're scattered around the globe, we're used to working in different time zones, different geographies. And we know how to communicate and work together. So having this distance and lack of an office is actually not that much of an impediment for open source. So it's actually kind of to their advantage. Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. I've done lots of interviews with developer communities and remote work is just the way they do things. That the contributing code, it's very much an asynchronous nature of what they were doing. I love you talked about the global nature. One of the things I was looking forward to being at this event in person was we were going to go to Dublin. It's a great city, love to travel. When we cover a European show, it's always okay, what is different about different geographies compared to North America? You talk about cloud adoption in general tends to be a little bit higher in North America. Any data or anecdotes that you have globally as to how open source is maybe a little bit different and culturally thought of from organizations that might be based in Europe, Asia, Latin America or the like. Yeah, that's to me, one of the strengths of these communities now is the difference in perspectives that you get from the different geographies from Europe to Asia and so forth. And it sometimes surprises you, right? You get so used to a few vendors maybe dominating a certain area and what you find out is they may be strong in a certain geography, but they're not globally and as other developers and community members and users come in and start talking about their needs and their use cases, you find that their perspective is different than yours and it's kind of that aha moment of oh, we need to make sure the software works for everybody and fits their need. And I guess the second part of that would be with this pandemic, it's causing the whole industry dynamics to change and businesses are finding that they've got to rapidly adapt and change and open source is one of the ways they're able to do that, right? Our customer sentiments are changing. Their purchasing habits are obviously changed. The way we shop, the way we do business, the way we're meeting people, right? We're all doing it digitally now. That's changing the services that companies need to deliver. And one of the powers of open source is being able to provide that to them and deliver those services very rapidly to them. And another dynamic here that finding is interesting is customers or consumers of open source, the businesses that are consuming open source are realizing that with these times, you've got to have multiple sources for your supply chain. We've have a lot more discussion about national, being nationalized instead of globalized when borders shut down and you can't get your supplies from another country. Where are you going to get them? So those kinds of discussions change your supply, your source of supplies and so forth. So you have to diversify a little bit. And that's causing new types of services that are going to be created, needed. The beauty of open source though is it's global. And so I can get access to it, whether I'm here in Salt Lake City or I'm sitting up in Dublin, wherever I'm at. And it's awesome. It's just amazing. Excellent, Alan. So you talked about some of the impact of what the global pandemic happening. They can leverage remote work, open source, something that they can get ready access to. I'm curious if there's any other things in the community rallying points that you're seeing, any good stories or anecdotes that you might be able to share. So I guess the other aspect of this, I find extremely encouraging is open source is amazing for individuals, not just businesses, right, to consume it, but me as an individual to learn new ideas, new technologies, try things out. And it's a great opportunity right now, particularly for homebound to go out and learn new ideas, learn about new concepts, new technologies, learn about Kubernetes, learn about containers, learn about rapid software development, right? And SUSE has actually caught on to this. This is one of the things I find really cool is they've got a couple of things that are going on. First, they've created a sandbox out there where I as an individual for free can go out there and give a rapid application development a try. Being at home, often I don't have the full equipment that I would have at the office, right? So getting an environment set up, having the equipment and access that I need to get an environment set up to try something out, you know, like Kubernetes or application development. I may not have that at my home. So SUSE set up some sandboxes out there where as a developer I can go out and give SUSE's application platform development a try. It's easy, it's all set up for me. I go out there and I can play, try out new concepts, see what Kubernetes is about, see what rapid development is about, and minimizes the task and the equipment that I need to be able to do that. Second part of that is they've opened up a lot of their online training courses for free for developers as well and operators. So it's a great time, you know, we're stuck at home at the great time to take advantage of these resources and learn more about open source. Right, yeah, absolutely. Alan, I spoke to, you know, your CEO, Melissa and we talked about the importance of the developer opportunities. You know, you mentioned the sandbox there. You know, I'm curious, anything else you've seen, kind of the changing dynamic about how developers integrate with the business. You know, one of the constant themes we talk about is, you know, IT isn't just something that's on the side, but is, you know, a clear partner with the business and often is a driver for the business. So, you know, the developers often need the education, they need communication, you know, what do you see and, you know, how are the developer communities changing? So I think a great part of this this year is all the events that are going virtual and the, so we've got tons of resources available within these communities and through companies like SUSE, as we just talked about. And we also have these events that are going virtual. So all this content is now becoming readily accessible. I hear often from developers saying, well, my company doesn't, you know, give us much for money for traveling to these events and conferences and so forth. Now that they're all going virtual, it's given them great access to amazing materials. And the beauty of these events is that a lot of the material is framed around helping you understand how to develop open source, how to become a part of the community. And then also about what this technology is about, where it's heading. So you, as particularly as an IT organization, I get a great insight as to where the technology is going. What's the future look like? What are the ideas that are being formed by all these individuals from around the world? What's their perspectives? And then I can turn and tie that to the business. See, as I can take that and take that to my business and say, look, here's where the technology is heading. Here's how we can use it to enhance our business and deliver better services to our customer. So it's a great opportunity this year. Yeah, you're right, Alan. There's often that gap between the people that can attend and what content is available to everyone else. And, you know, seems to be opening up everything from, you know, it's funny, you know, Disney is giving away the recipes for some of the things that they're doing through, you know, the conferences. Typically free to attend and, you know, on demand, soon after doing. All right, Alan, you know, you're in the emerging technologies group. So last thing I want to ask is, give us a little bit, look forward. You know, what is your group looking at, the communities that you're involved in? What are some of the things that are exciting you and your peers? So, Susie's spanning from the edge to the cloud to the core, right? And so we're covering things all the way from the gamut. A lot of new exciting stuff happening out on the edge with IoT and with edge services. Pretty excited about that area. Susie's had a lot of experience in that space, particularly if you look at manufacturing, providing, you know, helping them, those businesses, manufacturing firms provide or meet their SLAs. Had a lot of experience in the retail space around point of service. That, of course, is pivoting to self-service, to frictionless shopping, that type of stuff. So it's pretty exciting in those areas. So there's a lot going on in the edge. Healthcare, Susie's been very involved and embedded in a lot of healthcare devices. That business will continue to grow. So we're seeing a lot about on the edge. We talked a bit about rapid development. So back at the core and the cloud, we're trying to make that a seamless experience so you can push those workloads, build those workloads in a containerized, micro, service manner, and distribute those pieces where it makes sense, right? So we talk about artificial intelligence, gathering the data out on the edge, doing a bit of filtering and processing, moving that up to the core and the cloud, being able to mine that data, learn intelligently, then orchestrate your services, orchestrate your core appropriately, right? To meet those demands that your customers are putting on you. There's just a lot going on. We've got containers, we've got hybrid cloud, we've got multi-cloud, we've got intelligent orchestration. Then we could go on and talk a ton. We could talk for 30 minutes, just about what's happening in the data space. So there's a lot to look forward to when it comes to open source and the innovation that's happening out there. All right, well, Alan Clark, great to catch up with you. Thank you so much for giving us a little bit of vision where we've been and where we're going. Thank you very much. All right, I'm Stu Miniman and stay tuned for more coverage from SousaCon Digital 20. Thank you for watching theCUBE.