 The EMC World, this is SiliconANGLE's exclusive coverage of EMC World. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Dave, what do you think so far? Well John, you know, it's more the same, right? I mean, EMC World is just a flood of announcements, innovation, customers, it's just, you know, the Federation keeps getting bigger. Cloud is obviously a big theme and John Weedage is here. He's the CTO of Enterprise Solutions at Rackspace. Sean and I were on a panel yesterday in the solution providers area. Sean, welcome to the queue. Thanks, thanks, appreciate the opportunity to be here today. Yeah, so it was a good interaction yesterday. I thought, you know, the theme of the panel, John, was how can EMC's partners collaborate, you know, and cooperate and compete at the same time. You know, this whole ecosystem notion and the conversation Sean, yesterday, it just kept coming back to OpenStack. You know, there was something about OpenStack having so much momentum, it's got to have propelled your business in a big way in terms of just interest. So talk about your part of the business a little bit and then we can get into the trends you're seeing and of course OpenStack. No, absolutely, so I've been at Rackspace about a dozen years and Rackspace has been around about 15 years and you know, one of the world's leading providers have managed hosting traditionally, coming out of the SMB space and now making big inroads in the Enterprise space. So OpenStack was started off as a collaborative effort between Rackspace and NASA and what we did was we had a couple of components that allowed us to create a cloud operating system if you will. NASA brought to the table a compute orchestration tier and we brought the table in an object store. So we paired those together, put them out in the open source community and the project has really taken off and it's done a couple of things. The project has really gained critical mass in terms of the ecosystem and providers that are involved in participating but it's also really propelled Rackspace to more of a household name. We'd always had a great niche and a great market carved out for us but we're seeing more and more enterprises having us come in and talk about cloud transformation and how they can leverage OpenStack and the benefits of that to propel their organizations. Yeah, we had Pat Gelsinger on before, the CEO of VMware and we've been talking about, wow, look at all this momentum that OpenStack has. At first we thought, okay, it's a buffer against Amazon and now we're saying, wow, it's really in the mix in the Enterprise. We asked Pat Gelsinger about that. He said, hey, if customers want to go OpenStack, service providers want to go OpenStack, they're going to go OpenStack. We have to play in that environment and that's a very powerful statement about OpenStack, isn't it? No, absolutely and they're extremely important. Their purchase of Mysera and the software to find networking capability that's been involved from the very early stages of OpenStack so we see VMware and the EMC as the broader organization, very committed to going forward and they have different use cases and customers have used them in different ways so we look forward to continue to collaborate and cooperate with VMware. Yeah, so I mean I watched a lot of the coverage, John, at the OpenStack Summit and David Floyer actually said it was the best analyst event he'd ever been at because it wasn't BS, it was just like, okay, here's what we're doing, we're going to cut right to the chase with customers talking. Yeah, I mean, David, I was there for three days so it was pretty clear. It was all signal, not a lot of noise and our slogan is extracting the signal from the noise, that's what theCUBE does and it was there, it was nonstop, pure developers, pure excitement, pure demand, not just from developers and alpha geese, tire kicking, but there was genuine interest from the enterprise. Now, you know, that is really to me the tell-tale sign that the developer mindset is coming into the enterprise. So, John, I got to ask you, I mean, Rackspace, I mean, I remember talking to Lou Mormon and the guys in early 2009 around pre-OpenStack and you guys had challenges. I mean, OpenStack didn't have a cloud, you bought cloud sites and you realized and you're all open source guys, you realized you had to get this up and running so you created an ecosystem. You, in a way, primed the pump for OpenStack and you don't get a lot of credit for that as much credit as you should, NASA stepped at the table but, more importantly, you built the developer mindset, the DevOps. So, talk about your experience at Rackspace knowing that culture, compare and contrast it to the trends happening in the enterprise where this is a developer message. I mean, you hear EMC saying developer. Absolutely, it's been a real shift, a pendulum-swift shift in terms of going from the traditional infrastructure-driven focus to the DevOps and software deployment capabilities that accelerate time to market for our customers. So, within Rackspace, it's been a real shift. My background is on the, I come out of the sales engineering background solution design heavily focused on networking, compute, storage and traditional take days, deal with inventory, get it through supply chain, build it into infrastructure, tune it, tweak it, test it, deploy it. And the new model- Classic hosting environment. Classic hosting model. And the new model is, customer comes in, they've already made their decisions, they come to our website, they spin things up very quickly. So, what we're finding is that we're having to get more involved, our concept of fanatical support that's carried us as far. Traditionally, it was based more upon a response, help keep customers' application up and running. We're finding more and more is that we're having to speak to different people in our customer organizations. So, instead of dealing with the infrastructure guys, now we're talking to the developers and we're having to find, we're finding that the fanatical support piece really is applying earlier in the engagement process. So, helping customers understand what application should we go to the cloud, which cloud consumption model makes the most sense and how do I get the most efficiency out of my developer organization and be able to do rapid prototyping, rapid provisioning and rapid deployment for customers? And you're seeing how realistic are you seeing that in the enterprise? I mean, Opistec doesn't have a lot of, you know, notches on its belt yet in terms of massive successes. You guys did showcase out, use cases and you had a lot of proud and loud and proud people standing tall on the stage, but in the scheme of the evolution, there's a lot of interest in this and you're seeing now some of those proof points. It's still early. I mean, and that's you guys, that's developers, the Canary and the coal mine. What about like the enterprises? I mean, where are they on the life cycle? So, the enterprise, I've spent a lot of time out here this week and last few weeks meeting with enterprise customers that are bringing us in to talk about how do they make that transition? So, what's compelling about Opistec is it's allowing customers to take a look at and leverage a public cloud infrastructure and a very familiar capability on their private cloud infrastructure. So, we're seeing customers that are kicking the tires on the public cloud and saying, okay, we're going to start building to this, we're going to do some test and dev out here. And then, over time, they're bringing those applications and looking to see, do they really belong in the public cloud or do I get better efficiencies or better economics or better delivery or control by bringing that into a private cloud infrastructure? So, the corporate IT organizations are struggling to try and figure out how to get the benefits of utility and how to get that fast time to market, that fast delivery that their business units can go out and get from an Amazon or a Rackspace cloud. So, we're having to help them figure out how to accelerate their IT delivery process and Opistec is an ideal way to be able to do that. So, talk about the new Viper thing and the EMC impression there. I mean, obviously, EMC's rolling out, I always say the old Polaroid picture, but now it's the Instagram picture. EMC's putting out a new image of themselves. I mean, they're talking about choice, they're talking about Dr. Evil Lock-in pointing really at Amazon. So, you're looking at a shift there. So, you guys playing an interesting market, what do you think of that? I mean, obviously, storage is a key component of what you guys do. You've been in that engineering side and now you're looking at an app-friendly environment with orchestration, et cetera. I mean, what do you think of EMC and VMware and Pivotal and all this stuff? I think it's a great time to be in IT. Things seem to be moving faster than ever and these large organizations that are the traditional superpowers of IT delivery are having to reinvent themselves and find ways to be more consumer-friendly and EMC is really showing their dedication focused on that with the Viper project. You know, we work with them very closely. We've been a very good partner. They've been very good to us over the years. We also have, we don't talk about it a lot, a very close relationship with VMware. We run a very large private virtualization practice for our customers on VMware. So, there's an opportunity for everyone and WaxFace is very much about giving customers choice. So, if the customer chooses to use a VMware stack with EMC in the back end, we're happy to help customers do that if it makes sense. But if the customer needs OpenStack and decides to pick and choose components when you use EMC in the back end there, we're more than happy to do that. OpenStack is not just about open source, it's about open decisions. Let me ask you a question. Since you have a background in solutions, architecture and understanding a lot of the technology, certainly in the hosting side, that's like I look at the bare metal, the facility side and you need that requirement. Everyone has to go to the cloud at some level. But I got to ask you about OpenStack in context to your customers now on the enterprise side. Why do you think OpenStack is so popular and is such high interest for enterprise? What is the reason? Is it just demand or is it the methodologies, the approach, both? What's your take on that? You know, it's a trying to find a way to bring that cloud benefits to the private data center and these IT organizations are really struggling. Rogue IT, departmental IT is going out, spinning up in the clouds, in public clouds and the centralized IT is losing control over those assets that they've been given domain and are required to have control over. So you're seeing more and more critical data being pushed into simple services like Dropbox or applications being developed on Amazon. So central IT is trying to find a way to be able to balance the flexibility of a cloud delivery model along with the controls they be in their environment. So OpenStack is really the other alternative that's out there. Some of the traditional software vendors, they don't have the greatest relationship with centralized IT. Central IT likes the idea of open source, they like the idea of not having licensing but they also like the idea of having control and visibility into how they shape the direction of product and OpenStack provides them. The RackSpace has some interesting evolution. We just talked a little bit about how you guys migrate to cloud, literally in a nanosecond, in internet years. You really bought cloud sites and you guys cobbled together, you broke things in the spirit of Mark Zuckerberg and all that stuff. But you guys are now stable. You guys lived the life of what Enterprise is actually looking at now. Can you share with the folks out there? I mean, what'd you learn? I mean, obviously you have a relationship with EMC. Just talk about the things that you've learned because you guys, you brute force through essentially a hosting on-prem big business and added on a whole nother cloud operation at the same time. And you did it by brute force. You did it by partnering. And there was some mistakes we talked to and some of the folks at OpenStack, Jim Curry, you know, he was going and laughing in a funny way. It was like, no, really, we learned. Share with what you guys have learned in journey. Yeah, it's been quite the journey. And the thing, I think the biggest thing we've learned is don't be afraid to make little bets. I mean, the cloud sites, which was previously Mosa, which was hosting Matrix before that, they were little bets that we made, small investments that allowed us to really understand cloud technology before anybody was calling it cloud. Small purchases like SliceSuppost, which was the original foundation of our cloud offering, that was an opportune acquisition at the right time and really set us up for success. The other thing we've learned is that we've taken some of these initiatives and we've kind of spun them out and incubated them on their own. And we've given these developers the flexibility to go and pursue those things that they're good at and pull them out of some of the constraints that our more mature business had to allow them to be able to accelerate that development, accelerate that growth. Did you work with EMC at all on this? Developers in a room, they will help us in creation. Did you work with EMC at all on that? With the support and software and storage? You know, we have in the past on this, the cloud site stuff, EMC was a big piece of that. We've worked with EMC throughout our history on things like our backup solutions and now looking at them in our more traditional product lines around enabling us to provide more disaster recovery type solutions and application resiliency. So EMC has been a great partner to help us with that. We're learning from each other. They bring a certain capability around the enterprise, understanding those customers and we bring a certain capability around agility and cloud that's a very natural mechanism. What advice would you have for CIOs out there who are trying to balance the old DNA of, hey, I could do more with less, cut down on the bone, consolidate, do outsource everything to now, hey, invest, invest, hire people. Like you said, it's like you said, it's best time to be in IT, a lot of things happening. What's your advice to CIOs and other practitioners? Yeah, my best advice is if you aren't looking at these technologies and aren't looking at this transformation, you're late to the game already. Get out there, start looking at it now. Start evaluating the skill sets of your teams and figure out how to help those teams get a comfort level with this transition. A lot of the traditional infrastructure people in these centralized IT organizations, they're having a real tough time, they're feeling threatened. So what's happening is you're getting a lot of pushback, you're getting a lot of bureaucracy and challenges to be able to adopt. So make them a part of the transition. Don't let them feel threatened. If they feel threatened, the transition never goes well. And figure out how you can bring them along. And that goes a long ways. The organizations we're seeing having the most success are investing in their people, letting them know what the path is for what the benefits are to the company and giving them the opportunity to grow and progress with them. So what you just said was self-serving, but it's true. Are you concerned that organizations are not tuned in to that mindset? I think it's coming around. So just the conversations I've had in the last six months are far different from the conversations six to 12 months ago. So we're getting better engagement, better visibility at the C level suite, at the senior director and at the architects in organizations. So previously, when we would go in as an organization and talk about our capabilities, it was all very much departmental. And now having seen us make the shift from the dedicated infrastructure to a cloud-enabled infrastructure, these large organizations are asking us, okay, how is Rackspace doing this? Tell us about your Racks on Racks project. Tell us about how you run your OpenStack cloud at the scale that you do. So there's a lot of lessons that we've learned that we're able to pass on this organization. So it's no longer a threatening type of engagement. It's very much a collaborative and partner oriented. Well, Sean, we really appreciate you coming on. We've been watching Rackspace, very impressed with what you guys have done and expect big things. And thanks for all your time. Absolutely appreciate it. It's been a great week. Okay, we'll be right back for theCUBE. This is the flagship program. We've got the events extracted from the noise. We'll be right back at exclusive coverage, silken angles, exclusive coverage of EMC world, day two of three day coverage. We'll be right back.