 Live from the Computer History Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering OpenStack Silicon Valley 2016. Brought to you by Morantis. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Lisa Martin. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Silicon Valley for the OpenStack Silicon Valley Conference. This is where the OpenStack Foundation and the OpenStack community comes to Silicon Valley to essentially talk amongst themselves and also talk about the progress of OpenStack. I call it the Open Cloud Initiative. This has really been a multi-year effort with a robust community, and of course, Silicon Angles. theCUBE has been there from the beginning. I'm John Furrier, attracting the signal from noise with Lisa Martin, my co-host, our next guest, the Sean Roberts director at technical program management at Walmart Labs. And we're excited to have him on because even though he can't talk about the news of Jet.com being sold to Walmart, he can talk about some of the innovations that Walmart Labs has, and give us some insight into how that relates to the innovations with OpenStack. So Sean, welcome to theCUBE. Great to see you. Thanks, thank you. So up on stage today, every year, the thing that's been really most impressive to me is that OpenStack puts out use cases. People up on stage aren't selling vaporware. They're talking about real things, real changes. And this is really important because cloud growth is so fast. We're seeing Amazon's numbers, Azure's tooling up. The stacks are different among the different bigger cloud vendors, yet the enterprises want to have, you're blocking and tackling cloud for their enterprises. So give us the update. What were you talking about up on stage and what are some things you're working on? Sure. So the two themes in my talk were about agility and meritocracy. So more specifically to what you're focused on, but the agility that OpenStack and OneOps, two open source projects that Walmart uses quite extensively has really allowed and is continuing to allow Walmart to transform into an agile technology company. So that's a really important part of our present and our future. And I'll see with the technology Walmart left, it's no secret in the tech community, Walmart has been very data driven, very technology focused, really powering a lot of the e-commerce on the retail side. But I'll see with all the changes in the marketplace, I'll see the jet.com acquisition really points to the digital aspect of it, which means the consumption of commerce is going to be blurred between retail and online. It's not your shopping cart anymore. It's a lot more. So this agile really kind of connects the dots to this preferred user consumption. How do enterprises get set up for that? Because this is kind of where everyone's thinking about, they call it digital transformation, but basically they need to have some infrastructure. It has to be aligned with subscription based stuff. What's your take on the open stack, under the hood, capabilities? Is it solid? Is it ready? It is, but there's an important distinction to be made. Open stack and other open source projects by and large are research and development projects. Back in traditional enterprise days where we really relied on vendors exclusively to give us products, the research and development was done within the companies, and you wouldn't really see the results of that for sometimes five to six years after they actually started with an idea and developed it in private. It's like a black box almost, really, right? Yeah, and I think IBM coined the phrase walled garden, where they would try to cultivate skunkworks programs and they'd really try to come up with innovative ideas, but they'd do it within a walled garden. It would be closed off. So what we've done with open source in the last 10 years, most significantly, we've really accelerated development of research and development by coming up with an open garden, if you will. So we do research and developments in the open, and that's really what open stack is. It's a giant research and development group of projects that we work on collaboratively with friendly organizations. Sometimes we're competing on a lot of other things, but we come together to collaborate and then from that, we can either create products based on that research and development to sell or to use internally. So you guys at Walmart Labs are doing things in the open with open stack. Can you share some of the projects you're doing and some of the recent news you guys have done around some of these projects? Sure. So there's three projects that would probably be the most important to highlight. There's other traditional projects we've been involved in, but the most notable three are the Creighton Project, which is an inventory management system that aims to become as similar to a CMDB for open stack. That project just got started a couple months ago. There's another project that was started a little bit earlier, but it's still growing and developing. It's called Watcher, and it's a resource optimization project. And then there's the OneOps project that we put into GitHub into the open source community in December. But now we're exploring the option of actually moving that project into the open stack foundation as an open stack project. So definitely see some considerable maturation of what Walmart is doing. I think one of the things that is interesting to me is a lot of people know Walmart as a retailer. We're here talking to you today about Walmart as a technology company. And I think one of the neat things about that that's transcendent is a lot of companies today have to be technology companies to be competitive. We look at e-commerce 3.0, we as consumers want any product, any time, anywhere, how many of us bought things online over the weekend and it's at our doorstep yesterday. Talk to us about what Walmart is doing to tackle some of the challenges of e-commerce 3.0 and how that's being fueled or facilitated by open stack. Sure. Well, you guys may have heard of Walmart Pay, which is very similar to the way that Starbucks allows consumers to purchase items. And it works pretty well. I've been actually using it quite a bit myself. And the other, probably the most notable other thing that really is being fueled by our adoption of agile technologies like one option open stack is the grocery home shopping. So that's really changed the relationship between Walmart and its customers. And arguably, back in the 90s, there was the web band. That was an awesome idea, but it was way too early. I really think nowadays, this is the really the maturation of the idea, the right place, right time. We really see that the commercial business and the ability for our customers to actually drive up and have their groceries waiting for them when they drive up and have them put in the back of their car and have them drive away. I mean, you think about the web band and create an example. Let's take, let's double down on that, because at the time, there was some process operationalizing of what that means. The technology costs were extremely high. There was no mobile, right? So now you have everyone's connected. You have sensors for IoT potentially there. All supply chain work that's done on the brick and mortar side is done. So a lot of things are kind of lined up beautifully for that. So as enterprises look at that and they say, okay, all those promises and bubble type trends that happened from dot com days, even in web 2.0 and even in the social now, we do see Uber and stuff out there. It's okay, they say, okay, I think it's now safe to put my toe in the water. Why is agile important for them? And you share your perspective on that because a lot of folks, they see that they should jump in and build. They just don't know how, right? So there's a lot of, kind of maybe over the top of saying too much, they need the use case, they need the playbook, but they don't know how. The number one question we get is, I got to go there, it's a mandate. How do I become agile? How do I do it? And unfortunately, isn't just one thing. But if I was to call out a group of things that you can put together, it's continuous integration, continuous delivery. So those terms CICD are thrown out, thrown around quite a bit. But those things really mean is it allows, well, maybe just use OpenStack as an example. It's what the strength of OpenStack's infrastructure and its ability to manage the software pipeline, the continuous integration has really been the strength of how OpenStack has evolved and really been successful. Without that ability to be agile, to be able to deliver thousands of patches a day, OpenStack wouldn't be as a group of projects where it is today. So for companies to adopt that similar group of technologies, which unlike OpenStack, there is no one way of building a CICD, that software pipeline, that delivery of software packages into production. But we're getting a lot closer. So for any company like Walmart, we need to invest in the people to develop and curate that infrastructure to support that CICD so that we can be successful so we can hire and retain the developers that will not only come to work for us, but they'll want to stay. Along that front, I'm glad that you brought that up. That was actually going to be my next question, which is about the cultural change, the people, the processes that are needed to facilitate such a transformation. Looking at Walmart, Labs is a great use case, as John was saying, to learn from for other enterprises who are struggling or maybe thinking, I need to move to cloud, when, where, with whom. Talk to us about some of the cultural change that needed to be implemented or is probably in implementation. In addition to the technology, to help Walmart Labs be successful here and really become a retailer that is clearly competitive with Amazon. Sure. So it started with a couple acquisitions, I believe it was 2011, 2012. And the idea of Walmart Labs was born out in the valley, locally here. So from that, it allowed Walmart as a company to reinvent, reinnovate some ideas that would already have been around and to move forward faster. That concept has grown and is, I'd say that a lot of what would be considered to be traditional Walmart has joined in on what Walmart Labs represents, which is really the dot-com side of Walmart. So that's born out over the last few years and it's gone through an amazing, one of the slides I didn't show, but it shows the rapid increase of the number of application deployments, which is really the, I think, the strength of an agile company. If you can push changes into production rapidly, we're doing 40,000 a month now. It's an amazing number. So it allows us to make a small change, test it in-flight, the code itself, and then to actually push in in production. So we can do that many times a day. Kind of looking at the customer experience perspective for a second, one of the things that Jonathan Bryce talked about in his keynote this morning was the impact that OpenStack is having on the net promoter score of its users. Walmart being a very well-known big global retailer with affiliates in a lot of global locations. Can you share with us the impact to the net promoter score or the impact that you're seeing to the customer experience as a result of the Walmart Labs and what it's facilitating for e-commerce? Yes, so it allows us not only to fix problems. If there's a failure, it allows us to recover quickly from that failure and push the chain, test it, verify that it's not going to make things worse, it's actually going to fix the failure and push it into production very quickly. But it also allows us to be very agile with features that the many different parts of Walmart and Walmart Labs are developing on a day in and day out basis. So it allows us to really be very agile with our features that we make available to our customers, which provides a much better experience to them. One of the things I've been admiring about Walmart Labs, I've been following since, I think it was Cosmix was the acquisition that came in and the value you mentioned, has been that Walmart Labs has been always big data. I mean, it's always been using technology and integrating it in as fast as possible. Now with the cloud, a new power source is there, you have the supply chain locked and loaded solid there, huge scale on the Walmart side. What are some of the new things that you guys see with cloud? Can you share some examples where you go back to the ranch or so to speak, you're in the valley and say, okay, here's the stuff we're doing with OpenStack, here's how we at Walmart can create a new power source to blend that new bridge to stay on the cutting edge for Walmart. What are some of the things that you talk about when you go back to the ranch that you could share with the folks here that they could take away as a learning point? Sure, so probably the thing that I haven't spoken about very much is our ability to burst a cloud. So by all means it's not complete, it's not finished, but in the OneOps project that we have an open source in our implementation, we do have the capability of utilizing public cloud for extra capacity. So really critical for not only a large retailer, but for any enterprise that has peak capacity times of their business, their ability to not have to run that infrastructure all year round and be able to only rent it when they need to, rent to peak, so to speak. So classic e-commerce spikes, we talk about Black Friday, all these things. Yes, yes. When I was at Yahoo, we did much of the same thing, but it was usually around some social event that would happen, somebody passes away or the Olympics or something like that, so. Scale up instantly, no big provisioning. Yes, that's the ideal scenario. It's not quite that automated at this point, but we're working towards it, and that's part of the reason that we want to push OneOps into open stack, or we want to explore pushing OneOps into open stack. The management piece's visibility into the operations, the Nirvana is okay flash mobbing the compute or resource. Making it completely automatic where it dials up and dials down capacity. And treating our availability zones, our data centers, just like any other resource, like the public availability zones of our partners. It's hard to back into that, I can imagine, it must be very difficult to try to predict and understand that without understanding the management piece. So it sounds like your OneOps has been a key to that, is that, am I reading that right? It is, it is, it's a very important, well as I said before, the ability to continue to deliver changes into production is a really important way for the company to be nimble with failures but also delivering new features. So it's really allowed the company to move a lot faster and to think on its feet. Well thanks for coming on theCUBE, I really appreciate you taking the time from the keynote. I got to ask you a final question then at least Lisa might have one herself. OpenStack has always been kind of viewed as the OS of the cloud and that was kind of the early day kind of view of it. But as the swim lanes are being developed and as it's hardening out with clear market opportunities within the foundation, the challenge has always been how to get the builds from the trunk up and running. Can you give us an update? What's happening this year for the folks watching? What's the state of OpenStack today in your mind? How would you share the impact of this event here in Silicon Valley? So I would say the state of OpenStack is pretty healthy. I had a couple of slides up earlier that showed the month over month contributions and the number of projects. It's pretty consistent, it's a little bit of a heartbeat but it's consistently trending up. And that's really those consistent contributions is such an important indicator of the health of OpenStack, the health of the community and it didn't seem to be slowing down. And again, calling out to the very important infrastructure team that supports the CI that is the lifeblood of OpenStack. Those guys and girls make it happen every single day and it's what makes OpenStack strong. From your perspective as a technologist, the future of retail, obviously we see what Amazon's doing. You guys have Walmart, you have Jet.com, that one coming together with that. As a technologist, enable in the future, are we going to be living in a totally digitally transformed world soon? What year can you peg it? Predict the future. What's the future of retail? As soon as I have a flying car, I think we're there waiting for it. I think we're just going to see more features, more expectation on that. We all have very high expectations. Now we expect our phone to do pretty much everything. I always expected it to do, but my poor Nokia back in the day could only make phone calls. So our expectations are so high nowadays and I think we're getting close to the point where we can really be able to meet those expectations as companies like Walmart strive to do. Last question for you is one of the things that Jonathan Bryce talked about in the keynote was, number one, business driver is standardization. Clearly a tremendous amount of success that Walmart Labs has achieved, leveraging OpenStack. If you could just sum it into a couple of sentences, what would your advice be for enterprises looking at Walmart Labs as a model for how to leverage OpenCloud? That's a good question. So I'd say it's really about focusing on your people. Higher and retaining the best quality people is so critical. Without it, you can't survive, you can't grow as a company, at least not consistently. So it's the most important thing that I always focus on as a leader to make sure that my team and the teams around me were always focused on hiring and retaining the best quality so that we can move forward and have the best ideas and be the company that I think we can all be. Couldn't agree more. All right, final bumper sticker. What are you most excited about right now in your role here in the OpenStack Foundation and the industry? What are you most excited about? Well, not to keep tooting my own horn, but I'm really excited about the prospect of moving one ops into OpenStack. I think it's something that we've been missing for a long time. It'll allow us to complete our mission of being able to easily deploy and scale, which we've been successful at Walmart doing. So I'm really excited about the opportunity to explore that with the rest of the OpenStack community and to fulfill our dream. All right, Sean Roberts here from Walmart Labs. It's theCUBE live in Silicon Valley. I'm John Furrier, Lisa Martin. We'll be right back with more. For more, go to siliconangle.com, go to siliconangle.tv and follow us on the Twitter handle at The Cube. We'll be right back with more, you're watching The Cube.