 Live from Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE. Covering OpenStack Summit 2016, brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation and headline sponsors Red Hat and Cisco. Now here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and Brian Gracely. Welcome back to SiliconANGLE Media's production of theCUBE here at OpenStack Summit 2016 in Austin. Happy to have back on the program two return guests. We've got Redesh Balakrishnan with Red Hat with us early in the week and first time this week but been on the program a few times before. Lou Tucker, who's the vice president and CTO of cloud computing Cisco. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Great to be here. All right, so Redesh, we talked to you a little bit earlier about kind of looking back and we're OpenStack.com. So Lou, we need to get your thoughts. You've been involved, you know, since the earliest days, you know, here we are from 75 people around the corner to 7,500. You know, what's your impressions for OpenStack and where it's gone? Yeah, well, it's not a surprise. I think that, you know, five, six years ago, we really saw, I think an entire industry moving around the development of this kind of an open platform for anybody to build cloud. So we were hopeful, but it has been a journey but it's also been a very rewarding one because I think we've seen developers from around the world. We truly have global conferences now. So as cloud computing is spreading around the world that we're seeing that OpenStack is the platform of choice for that. So it's been great to see that kind of adoption. And Lou, I mean, you've been a big proponent of some of the open source initiatives inside Cisco but open and networking is a big talking point, you know. It gives full insight of the kind of conversations inside of Cisco and how that's proliferating in the industry. I think, again, over that same time period, even Cisco has seen all of our customers asking for open platforms. They want the industry to work together on these things. Before it was always driving standards. And so you could have standards and industry leaders could agree upon the standards, but then there wasn't, then there were different software implementations. Now we're really looking for a common software implementation that can build upon that. And that's affected Cisco, almost every part of Cisco's business. We're seeing that move towards open systems and the cloud. All right, so Radesh, I mean, Red Hat really understands how the open source things work. I used to work on some standards, and I used to work with Cisco on some standards, and there was a joke sometimes, it's like, well, Cisco would make something work and eventually that would become the standard. So what's it like partnering with Cisco and their participation? How have they been coming along in the open source space? Yeah, so Lou was saying about the journey. So our partnership has also seen an amazing journey specific to OpenStack in the last two to three years, right? It's not that we were strangers before, of course, our partnership dates way back to the Linux days as well, but at the same time from an OpenStack perspective, it's rewarding to see that across the multiple businesses within Cisco, be it public cloud from an inter-cloud perspective, or UCS, or NFV, or even the recently acquired Metapod side, we have an amazing partnership across engineering as well as go to market to make sure that we are jointly pushing the boundaries of what OpenStack can do, as well as more customers can benefit from the solution. So it's been an amazing journey with Cisco. Yeah, so Lou, we've had a good chance to talk with Red Hat about the solution they're building, how they're, you know, the OpenStack solution is, it's been about two years since the inter-cloud solution was launched. Give us the update, what is it, how does it fit in the environment and what is the connection with Red Hat? In many ways we're seeing a, many of Cisco's new businesses that we're entering or either through acquisition, more and more we're seeing management moving to the cloud and so Cisco's inter-cloud will be the place where we will start to see more and more management of infrastructure, whether it be an on-premise and an enterprise or even a service provider, this kind of service delivery model from the cloud is very compelling, it gives the best of both worlds because that way, oftentimes companies don't have the expertise to manage their infrastructure, we can provide that service so more and more we're seeing Cisco's own SaaS businesses moving to inter-cloud and being able to be delivered from that. Yeah, I remember when you joined Cisco from Oracle back in about 2009, 2010, and at the time there was a lot of people who would go, you know, that Lou guy, he said some stuff and I have no idea what it means, you know, he's talking about software and it's open and all these sort of things and I have to wonder, as you go jointly talk to customers right, we're now talking about, you know, blurred lines of who runs network and who runs compute and like, talk about just kind of language-wise what it's like talking to customers now is you're talking about software, you're talking about open, you're talking about, you know, managed cloud, like how has that evolved the last couple of years, especially, you know, working jointly together? Well, I think I can start, and then we, I think a year ago it was a big, you know, awakening I think that we saw in the service providers space particularly, that they have large data centers and that this whole shift with SDN or towards virtualizing network functions, it's becomes a cloud software issue and so that's why they're looking and we're working very closely with Red Hat on this, they're looking for really where's the platform for OpenStack and then where can we get the virtualized network services that run on top of that? So we're collaborating and we see, even in the user survey of OpenStack users or whatever, that the number one thing that they're interested in right now is containers, number two is NFV, that's amazing. I never, I would not have predicted that. Yeah, five years ago, no way. That fast a change towards networking and the virtualization and networking. Right, and how much do you, I mean, you guys work very closely on package solutions, making it easy to, whether you want it completely built for you or you know, it's best practices, how much demand do you see that from customers who just go look, I want to get to running things, I don't care so much about the underlying bits, I want them to be open, but how much, how important is that for your customers? Yeah, that is pervasive, right? So the reason we are aligned with an engineering perspective and contributing upstream together and looking at and reacting to demand signals be it NFV and tomorrow there's a new workload is because customers by default have come to demand that the operational excellence that Cisco brings to bear as well as the enterprise life cycle that Red Hat brings to bear should be default, right, for the newer solution area. So that's the kind of the natural synergy that we are working to make sure that we are meeting the customer where they are. Yeah, yeah. So you were essentially one of the original open-stack cheerleaders, you were chair of the foundation when it was just getting started, kind of somewhat neutral. Somebody made a comment to us yesterday, this show is, it's obviously it's huge, but a lot more suit, maybe not as many suits as t-shirts, but kind of an interesting mix. Do you guys feel like having been in this space for a long time, people questioned, how do you make money? Are we sort of at a tipping point where this becomes less about just technology and more about making these businesses happen, we saw so many customers this week. Do you feel like we're hitting that point? Yeah, I absolutely do. I think we've seen a steady progression towards building out of a larger ecosystem. And when we talk about an ecosystem in technology, that is a set of companies that are being built around the platform. And that's exactly what we're seeing. Yesterday's platform, I mean, was Linux, it sort of started with Linux. And now we're seeing open-stack being the platform that is kind of an open integration place. Some of us on the foundation are talking about open-stack's mission going forward is also to connect to a lot of other open communities so that we become this kind of open integration platform. So whether you're doing containers or virtual machines, we have a lot of these services that allow it easily to integrate, which creates an opportunities for all of the companies that you see here today. And so I'm very pleased to see actually the growth of this into something that can be economically sustainable. And that's what I think an ecosystem is for. And that's what our customers are looking for. And from our perspective, if you listen to our analysts call, whiter's would be calling out names or if not names. The fact that some of the top deals that we do across the globe include open-stack, right? The percentage is increasing every quarter. So we are well beyond the point of, are we going to monetize? The question is, can we keep up the acceleration in monetization that we are seeing, right? So, and that's where I think the partnership that Cisco also comes in the picture. The reality is that the breadth of Salesforce that Cisco has and the level of trust relationship that Cisco has established across multiple verticals, particularly in the service provider segment, is a great opportunity for us to make sure that open-stack adoption is driven hard there. And I think that, if I might add, the working together in the community upstream is what makes it all possible because it's the way our developers want to work and that they have a natural synergy with other people who are galvanized activity around a particular project. And that means that we can simultaneously do the two things which are most difficult. One is improve the stability, performance of the platform reliability while we continue to expand into new areas. There's always that tension. And the only way you can do it, and I've managed engineering teams for a long time, is to really have multiple teams that are one sum that are really looking towards that kind of resiliency of the platform while others are looking for, okay, what are the new things that we can do? Getting that timing right is really critical. That's the hardest thing to do in tech, I think, is timing, timing the market transitions, timing the introduction of new technologies. Yeah, I think I'd add to that. And we kind of see what we internally refer to as a fast-train customer and a slow-train customer. Customers with slightly different needs in terms of what they expect from that. But as leaders, we need to be able to address the needs of both the camps, right? So that's the ongoing challenge that we are on. Right, yeah, right. Can you talk a little bit about the metapod solution that came from the MetaCloud acquisition? How's that look going forward from a partnership standpoint? That's really going well, and it's actually not that of a surprise because in fact, deploying and operating OpenStack is not a skill that every enterprise has. So particularly in the enterprise spaces where they would like to get the benefits of cloud computing, of public cloud computing, but they have a requirement to run it on-premise. And that means that they want to deliver it as a service on-premise. So we think of it as delivering OpenStack as a service on-premise for the customers. So they get to have the benefits of running on top of a cloud without having to worry about the infrastructure. They consume it like a service. So it's a very interesting model. I think that we'll see, I mean, not only Cisco, there are other players also looking to see, you know, for those kinds of opportunities. Yeah, I'm curious just, and please feel free to discuss it too, but also, I mean, you know, you take your typical Linux admin or network admin, and you know, there's definitely a shift coming in place. So maybe we could talk a little bit of dynamics, you know, who helps make the purchasing decision and what happens from some of the internal pieces of that. Yeah, there's always going to be a set of customers who would graduate from having to manage servers to having to manage cloud, right? In fact, we are excited about the fact that just last calendar year, 10,000 IT professionals across the globe went through training of our OpenStack platform offering. But at the same time, to lose point, there is an emerging set of customers who would like to get the benefits of OpenStack from an agile infrastructure, as well as from the freedom from vendor lock-in that OpenStack promises, but amidst the priorities that they have, they don't have the very vital to invest resources. So that's where I think Metapod becomes an amazingly compelling value proposition. Yeah, interesting, you know, I'd say there are sometimes criticism out in the community, Cisco and even Red Hat, that there is some, you know, a little bit of lock-in despite the fact that there's open source. So I'm curious, how do you address that and what are the real conversations you have with users on it? It's a great question, because I think there's always such a thing as natural lock-in, and that is what you have familiarity with, that's what you've been used to. You get comfortable with that. You don't want to swap systems in and out so fast that you really can't get the experience with it. So that I don't view as a negative, I view that as a natural way that we operate businesses today. What we're trying to avoid is unnecessarily locking in a customer, giving them no other choice. So by the fact that we have an open platform with OpenStack, it forces all of us as vendors to compete for the customer's business, and the customer gets to standardize on OpenStack and insulate themselves and really create, I think, the proper pressure back into the environment for this. Yeah, too, from our perspective, you can look at it as technology lock-in versus value lock-in. Technology lock-in is something we definitely will do everything to make sure it doesn't happen. That's by doing one simple thing, which is doing everything upstream first. The value lock-in to lose point can happen anytime, because of the fact that you're used to engaging with a particular provider, the value that the vendor is providing on a consistent basis, et cetera. Now, given our subscription business model, we're on an annual pace where every year we got to go eyeball to eyeball with the customer and earn the trust all over again. So we, I think, have solved the problem from our perspective, saying that, hey, look, even if you acquire a company which is a proprietary code base, we'll do the due diligence and ultimately make sure that it's upstreamed and made available. So the technology lock-in problem, take it off the table. The value lock-in is something that we want to earn every single day, coming to work and making sure that the customer journey is supported. Yeah, but both of you have big events coming up later on Cisco Live and Red Hat Summit. Without giving away the punchline, give us something that people can be excited about beyond OpenStack Summit that you guys expect to have driving the summer and something to look forward to for those types of things. I can go first, Red Hat Summit. Clearly, the graduation from infrastructure to more of the application-centric journey with containers as a core focus will be a key thing. We're excited about the fact that we do have a full-fledged offering that's based on community, adopted Docker, Kubernetes as standard. So how do we enable customers on this digital disruption is going to be the key theme there. So we're looking forward to not just the customers the next step in the journey, but our own organizational next step in the journey of maturing from being an infrastructure provided to becoming a trusted advisor in the new scheme of things. Yeah, I think the work we're seeing at each one of these events is that continued sort of digitization that is happening. We're far from complete. And so that creates always great new use cases, customer examples and everything else as company after company is getting further along in that process. We're also now intersecting, I think, the world of IoT so that a lot more of the growth and devices and everything else is creating other pressures that, again, pushes then much more towards cloud-native computing. The applications, and we've talked, I think, before and in previous shows about that the application landscape is going to really start to shift next, I think, where we're seeing applications that are built right from the start for the cloud. That gives them very different characteristics. That gives them a resiliency beyond what we've seen before, and it gives them a scale. And so I think as more and more you'll see coming out, I think, more and more cloud-native applications coming out and that you'll see our companies participating in that. That's great. I want to give each of you the last word on kind of takeaways from the week, maybe something good you've heard from a customer or things that we should think about going forward. British? Excited about the progress we've made together in this community. Even more excited about the partnership that Cisco and Redat have struck and grown along the last few years, that we have meaningful offerings across, like I was saying, ranging from public cloud all the way to NFV and telco opportunities. I think we touched upon the fact that pervasive adoption is the next step in the journey from an open-stack perspective. So looking forward to meeting again and comparing notes on that. I think I'm just most pleased by the sort of universal acceptance that open-source and open-source communities are the wave of the future. And that we are now seeing the adoption, we're seeing this is now accepted, and that we're seeing then conferences such as this, which is actually a mixture of a design conference where developers are getting together with actually a big marketplace here where people are making deals. And that kind of growth I think is a real tribute to give the power of what we have in open-source today. Rajdeshan Loo, thank you so much. Always a pleasure to catch up with you. Be sure to check out siliconangle.tv for all the upcoming events where theCUBE is coming around, especially the spring tour. We'll be right back, getting towards the end of three days of coverage from the open-stack summit 2016 in Austin. You're watching theCUBE. It's always fun to come back to theCUBE because the discussion is always interesting and relevant. It's not scripted, which I think makes it real. But I think it's really good service for...