 Okay, welcome back. We're here live in Silicon Valley. We're in Mountain View right next to Palo Alto, my hometown, right behind us is the Googleplex. We got HP right up around the corner. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, they strike the signal from the noise. We are at the OpenStack Enterprise Forum event. Our next guest is Bill Franklin, Vice President of OpenStack Technology and HP Cloud, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks a lot, John, excited to be here. HP got a lot of engagement on our crowd chat we did while you were on the panel, but you got hammered hard on the first question. So take us through the panel up there. Here in the Enterprise OpenStack conversation, a lot of interest. Why is the interest so hot and what was the hardest question you've got on stage? I think the interest is so hot because OpenStack as a open source project, fastest growing open source project in the history of open source. In cloud computing is really the third revolution of computing. We started with mainframes, we moved into client server and now we're moving into this third revolution, cloud computing. So you've got this sort of perfect storm of rapidly adopting open source project in the middle of this transformation. And I don't think any of the questions were really necessarily all that hard, but what's exciting about it is HP's right in the middle of trying to deliver hybrid cloud solutions and we are a place where lots of customers have good questions. So we were having some commentary on Twitter and on the crowd chat around, kind of reminiscing around the cloud a lot of the early days, Randy Byas at cloud scaling, who you know, there's a lot of posturing going on, but in the early days of cloud in 0809 and then through those next few years, it was pretty obvious what needed to get done. Where are we now in your opinion with the cloud business? Are we at full adoption, full migration? Where are we in that adoption? Because hey, it's the same concept that we were talking about in 2009 are actually happening now. So what's your take on the evolution? So I think as other participants on the panels today talked about, we were in the early stages. Now we're at a stage where you see strategic adoption by a lot of the customers. The early days, everybody assumed it was going to be a public cloud, for reasons relating to compliance, security, other issues, enterprises are looking at private clouds, managed service clouds, public clouds. So what we're, I think really seeing is companies are making this as a strategic play of what they're doing. And in order to do that, it's not a small home project anymore. So they're dealing with how do they manage the cloud? How do they upgrade it? How do they protect it? How do they manage the whole life cycle of the product? So the first question you got was related to Amazon, so it's just going to go there real quick. Amazon is the kind of like the gold standard for public cloud, right? They're out there, they get the full stack. Kinesis, really a nice innovation. They're launching new products every day. Features, some say, they just say products. And then, I don't know, services. And so services, so you guys have to compete with that. But the enterprise is a different animal. I mean, Amazon has some enterprise customers, but mostly shadow IT, people put their credit card down. We all know what that means. HP is an enterprise company. You have servers, you've got Jim Gontier, Antonio Neri, leading the server charge. And you've got open compute over there. So you have some interesting HP navigation. How do you look at that? Amazon is a threat. They're showing the way. You have enterprise customers, the server business. How do you look at that? So fundamentally, we really believe that those enterprises are going to be building hybrid clouds. And that's private, managed, and public. And we have solutions for customers from different product organizations at HP, software, services, storage, hardware, that allow those enterprises to build hybrid clouds. If they're bursting to Amazon or they're bursting to the HP public cloud, or they're using managed services that are provided by HP's services organization, we're trying to take OpenStack and other solutions, use that to bring it to the market to give them business solutions to allow them to do that. So I got to re-see it fading in. That's follow up, because the other question, and I thought you had a good answer for it, but I want to explore it for our audience's benefit, was the whole Amazon API issue. And you basically laid out, look, HP, if I can paraphrase you, essentially said, look, we're watching the situation. We're going to let customers drive it. But you did point out that if Amazon is allowed to co-op the OpenStack APIs, then essentially if Amazon makes a change, it's not the community making the change, it's Amazon making that change. By inference, I would think that that, you were implying anyway, that that wouldn't necessarily be such a good thing. And then I was in my head saying, wow, is that different from Microsoft? And then you said, well, Bill Gates would say, well, Microsoft is a standard, it's open. So my question then, Bill, is how has the definition of open changed in the last, say, 20 plus years? Because Unix used to be the open standard, and Wintel used to be the open standard. Then the LampStack came along and said, oh, that's the new open. And now things like OpenStack and OCP are the new open. And HP made a choice many, many years ago to commit to open standards. So how is the definition of open changing and what does it mean for customers? So I think it's a great question. I disagree with you on one piece, which is I don't know if necessarily, Windows was necessarily an open standard. Bill Gates would argue that it was an open standard because so many people used it. I agree, but at the time, you remember when it first came out, oh, this is compact, it's open. So the hardware architecture was open, oh, that's not necessarily. Yeah, absolutely. So the comment that I was making with regards at least to Amazon is every six months the OpenStack community gets together, HP's one of the Platinum members, we all get together, it's an open community, anybody can show up, and we talk about how we want to advance the product, if we're going to make any changes to the APIs, how we're doing that as a complete community. So enterprise customers who purchase this have the same right to play as a teeny startup, as a huge corporation like HP. So from OpenStack's perspective, standardizing on a set of APIs that are delivered by Amazon and controlled by Amazon, should Amazon choose to change those APIs, the OpenStack community gets no ability to discuss that or talk about it. So the comment that I made about HP is we're watching this play out and seeing necessarily where that spawns. Lydia made a really good comment about in the early days of OpenStack, we were using the EC2 APIs because most of the developer tools for building cloud things were built around the EC2 APIs. Now you find tooling from multiple vendors that support the OpenStack APIs and the EC2 APIs. So we may get to a point as Chris Kemp said earlier, and he said everybody's going to retweet it. One day we'll see Amazon adopt the OpenStack. Yeah, that was good, I die die retweeted that. So it was kind of tongue in cheek, but he said mark my words. Right, so I think our position is more we're watching where this goes and HP as a full member of the OpenStack community wants to stay behind what the OpenStack community does and decides in an open manner. So the theme of this event is breaking into the enterprise. So one of the premises that John and I have put forth is that OpenStack's actually got a, I mean Amazon's good enough for a lot of applications, but a lot of your clients need more. So they're looking to HP to drive more. We've heard a lot of discussion today about storage. You know, we're talking about Amazon APIs, elastic block storage. There's an analog certainly in OpenStack in Cinder. Is that white space? Is that where it needs to be from HP's perspective? Specifically block storage for mission critical applications. So I think there's a lot of areas where there's as you described it kind of white space. There's the block storage piece. Amazon has ELB load balancing, some of the other pieces. And OpenStack is trying to fill some of those places out. But I think additionally, you know, Amazon is a fantastic public cloud, but there are a lot of use cases where customers can't or don't want to use a public cloud. There's no answer from Amazon as to how they do that. So how do enterprises build up this private cloud? Because most of the customers I talk to, they use public clouds for some things, but there's a bunch of stuff they want to keep in house, either for legislative reasons, data sovereignty reasons, security reasons. Just because. Just because. What I called up on the panel, ego reasons, right? Some people just, they want to be able to hold onto it and touch it. And we're trying to fill that need of where it is. It's a lot of compliance issues too. I mean, a lot of enterprises have unique requirements. They have preexisting vendor relationships. They could have, you know, different vendors but servicing and services, so. Well, let me test that. So it's not necessarily that Amazon's bad or good. It's just they won't do a lot of specials. Will you? Will you? Will you HP? Will you say, okay, hey, we will adjust our, let's say, for example, security policies to meet the edicts of your organization? So we view it in a couple of ways. One is the products that we build for people to stand up private clouds or manage service clouds or even we sell the products for service providers to stand up public clouds that are effectively competing in the same space Amazon is. So if you think about it in terms of we're giving a customer the ability for them to deliver the business solutions they need, they can tailor all of those. So how you configure your cloud and everything, it's just like in the client server world, if you're buying a bunch of our hardware and storage, and either HP UX on older HP Superdoms or whether you're running Red Hat on racks of our hardware, the way you configure the security is up to how you want to structure that, right? And at the end, technology is there to serve business needs and our customers set it up for the business need they're trying to solve and we want to deliver those solutions. So Bill, I was taking some notes while I was doing the crowd chat and listening to the panels all in one multitasker that I am. Here's the key points that I took away from tonight. Enterprise is obviously hot, people are packed here, they want to know more, but here are the four points. One, organizations don't understand cloud fully so they're learning. This is a culture issue. Ops people are really finicky about certain things. Ops dev dev ops, if anyone you put, most enterprises have a hardcore ops component. Got a kind of big hurdle there. Support configurations, not a lot of best practices. And two, standardizations, having clouds look like each other. What's your, and that was a public crowd feedback from what the commentary was doing. What's your take on those four points? One, culture, ops, support configs, and standardization. And standardization. So I think I mentioned earlier, this is really sort of the third revolution of computing and the move from mainframe to client server didn't happen overnight. You heard today some of the questions asked by customers. There's different skill sets that are needed that aren't big in the industry. There's different operational disciplines. There's different management. And at least what HP is trying to do is deliver products that provide solutions to those sets of problems. So we don't believe customers are gonna move all of their workloads to a cloud tomorrow. It's gonna be running in a client server world and in a cloud. So the solutions to be able to do that from an orchestration problem or you have to be able to deal with development, staging, production in a traditional client server world and you have to be able to deal with a DevOps paradigm. So we build products to live in both of those worlds. It's a rock in place tonight all around here, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, so on the standardization of the clouds, does that bother you? Like the open stack's been criticized? We had some folks saying, hey, not one cloud looks like the other. Is that a normal situation? Or you think that there'll be more clouds that look alike? I think in this stage of development where open stack was a year ago and where it's moving, you had different people who implemented or stood up open stack in different ways and there was some degree of, not necessarily incompatibility, but trouble migrating thing from one place to another. And inside open stack, there's an effort, forget what it's called, Jonathan Bryce was talking about it earlier, around trying to come up with a core definition that makes it really easier for customers to move from one place to another. And this looks a lot like what Linux did in the early days or Unix looked like in the really early days. Yeah, well, Linux disrupted a lot of those proprietary server vendors, and now you got open compute summits, so interesting times. Final word I want to have you leave with the crowd. I want you to share for the folks out there, HP's current situation relative to open stack. A lot of people don't give props to HP, and I'll give you some props here. Biri Singh's known with the company, established it early on, Sargalite scaled it up. You guys are doing some great stuff, big part of open stack, so you deserve pride and help form it. Share with the folks what are you currently doing, how deep are you, how committed are you to open stack, and what, tease us with some things coming down the pike for your standpoint. Sure, so for the last release of open stack, the Havana release that got released right at the Hong Kong Design Summit or a couple weeks before, there were roughly 900 developers around the world that contributed code to it. Almost 10% of those developers worked at HP, so we had a little bit more than 90, I think, developers who contributed towards it. We are the project technical lead for triple O and one or two of the other key projects that are in there, and we have a reasonable number of people scattered on all the different core teams. So we're in there working on that. We work on the continuous integration deployment project is run by a guy who works at HP, Monnie Taylor, who sits on the board of open stack, and I think he's also on the technical steering committee. So we're doing a lot of work in that space, and what we're also doing is we spend a lot of time talking to HP customers about it, and that drives where we work. So we work in the SDN network virtualization space, we're working in the whole, as I already mentioned, triple O, and we do a lot of work in the security space, all of which are key things for enterprise customers. Well, we look forward to following you guys. We'll be at the open stack summit in Atlanta, the cube will be broadcasting live, my multiple days there, so we look forward to seeing all the progress and congratulations. You guys are certainly our present. You guys are out in the field contributing, and certainly dominated the crowd chat tonight. Props to HP Cloud, Twitter handle, social media, you guys did a good job. This is the cube, we're right back. Enterprise is hot here in Silicon Valley, open stack, enterprise breaking out with open stack, we're right back, this is the cube. Thank you.