 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of SousaCon Digital, brought to you by Sousa. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, coming to you from our Boston area studio and this is theCUBE's coverage of SousaCon Digital 20. Happy to welcome to the program two of the keynote present presenters. First of all, we have Dr. Thomas DiGiacomo. He is the president of engineering and innovation and joining him, his co-presenter from the keynote stage, Daniel Nelson, who is the vice president of product solutions, both of you with Sousa. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, thank you for having us. All right, so Dr. T, let's start out, innovation, open source. Give us a little bit of the message for our audience that you and Daniel were talking about on stage, how we've been watching for decades, the growth and the proliferation of open source in communities. So give us the update there. Yeah, and it's not stopping. It's actually growing even more and more and more and more innovations coming from open source. The way we look at it is that our customers, they have their business problems, they have their business reality. And so we have to curate and prepare and filter all the open source innovation that they can benefit from because that takes time to understand how that can match your needs and fix your problems. So at Sousa, we've always done that since 27 plus years. So working in the open source projects, innovating there, but with customers in mind. And what is pretty clear in 2020 is that large enterprises, small startups, everybody is doing software, everybody is doing IT, and they all have the same type of needs in a way. They need to simplify their landscape because they've been accumulating investments, hardware, infrastructure, software, different solutions, different platforms from different vendors. They need to simplify that. They need to modernize and they need to accelerate their business to stay relevant and competitive in their own industries. And that's what we are focusing on. Yeah, it's interesting. I completely agree when you say simplify thing. Daniel, I go back in the open source communities about 20 years and in those days, we were talking about the operating, how Linux was helping to, you know, go past the proprietary Unix platforms, Microsoft, the big enemy, and you were talking about, you know, operating systems, server storage, the applications that on top, it was a relatively simple environment compared to today's, you know, multi-cloud, AI, container-based architecture, you know, applications going through this radical transformation growth. So it gives a little bit of insight as to, you know, the impact this is having on ecosystems and of course, you know, Susie now has a broad portfolio of that at all. It's a great question and I totally get where you're coming from. Like if you look 20 years ago, the landscape is completely different. The technologies we're using are completely different. The problems we're trying to solve with technology are more and more sophisticated. You know, at the same time, though, you know, there's kind of nothing new under the sun. Every company, every technology, you know, every, you know, modality goes through this expansion of capabilities and then the collapse around simplification as the capabilities become more and more complex and manageable. And so there's this continuous tension between capabilities, ease of use, consumability. What we see with open source is that, that's kind of dynamic, it still exists, but it's more online of like developers want easy to use technologies, but they want the cutting edge. They want the latest things. They want those things within their packages. And then if you look at operations groups or people that are trying to consume that technology, they want that technology to be consumable, simple. It works well with others. Be able to pick and choose and have one pane of glass to be able to operate within that. And that's where we see this dynamic. And that's kind of what the SUSE portfolio was built upon. It's like, how do we take, you know, the thousands and thousands of developers that are working on these really critical projects, whether it's Linux, like you mentioned, or Kubernetes, or Cloud Foundry, and how do we make that then more consumable to the thousands of companies that are trying to do it, who may even be new to open source, or may not contribute directly, but want to have all the benefits that are coming to it. And that's where SUSE fits, and where SUSE fits historically, and where we see us continuing to fit long term is taking all those Legos, put them together for companies that want that, and then allow them a lot of autonomy and choice and how those technologies are consumed. One of the themes that I heard you both talk about in the keynote, it was simplify, modernize, accelerate really reminded me of the imperatives of the CIO. There's always run the business, they need to help grow the business, and if they have the opportunity, they want to transform the business. I think in the keynote you said, run, improve, and scale. Scale, absolutely, you know, a critical thing that we talk about these days. When I think back to the Cloud Foundry Summit, in the keynote stage, it was in the old way, if I could do faster, better, cheaper, you really could choose two of them. Today, we know faster, faster, faster is what you want. So give us a little bit of insight as to, you talked about Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes, application modernization. What are the imperatives that you're hearing from customers and how are we with all of these tools out there helping IT not just be responsive to the business, but actually be a driver for the transformation of the business? It's a great question. And so when I talk to customers, and Dr. T, feel free to chime in, you talk to as many or more customers than I do. They do have these, what are historically competing imperatives. But what we see with the adoption of some of these technologies is that faster is cheaper, faster is safer, you know, creating more opportunities to grow and to innovate better is the business. It's not risk injection when we change something, it's actually risk mitigation when we get good at changing. And so it's kind of that modality of moving from, you know, a simplified model or a very kind of like manufacturing model of software to a much more organic, much more permissive, much more being able to learn with an ecosystem model. And so that's how we see companies start to change the way they're adopting these technologies. What's interesting about them is that same level of adoption, that same thought of adoption is also how open sources is developed. Open sources developed organically. It's developed with many eyes, make shallow bucks. It's developed by like, let me try this and see what happens, right? And being able to do that in smaller and smaller recommends, just like we look at red-green deployments or being able to do microservices or canary or any of those things, it's like, let's not, you know, do one greatly forward, but we're used to in waterfall, because that's actually really risky. Let's do many, many, many steps forward and be able to transform iteratively and be able to go faster iteratively and make that just part of what the business is good at. And so you're exactly right. Like those are the three imperatives of the CIO. What I see with customers is the more that they are aligning those three imperatives together and not making them separate, but we have to be better at being faster and being transformative. Those are the companies that are really using IT as a competitive advantage within their industry. Yeah, because most of the time they have different starting points. They have an history, they have different business strategy and things they've done in the past. So you need to be able to accommodate all of that. And the faster microservice, start native development for sure for the new apps, but they're also coming from somewhere. And if you don't take care of that together, you can just accelerate if you simplify your existing because otherwise you spend your time making sure that your existing is still running. So you have to combine all of that together. And Stu, you mentioned Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes and that's really, I love those topics because, I mean, everybody knows about Kubernetes. Now it's picking up in terms of adoption, in terms of innovation, technology, building AI, ML framework on top of it. Now what's very interesting as well is that Cloud Foundry was designed for fast software development and cloud native from the beginning. The 12-factor apps and several like four, five years ago, right? What we see now is we can extract the value that Cloud Foundry brings to speed up and accelerate your software development cycles. And we can combine that very nicely and very smoothly, in a simple way, with all the benefit you get from Kubernetes and not from one Kubernetes. From your Kubernetes running in your public clouds because you have workloads there, you have services that you want to consume from one public cloud. We have a great Suzecon fireside chat with Alpansha from Microsoft Azure, actually discussing those topics. Or you might have also Kubernetes clusters at the edge that you want to run in your factory or close to your data and workloads in the field. So those things, and Daniel mentioned that as well, taking care of the IT ops, like simplify, modernize and accelerate for the IT ops and also accelerate for the developers themselves with benefiting from a combination of open source technologies. And today there's not one open source technology that can do that. You need to bundle, combine them together at best, make sure that they are integrated, that they are certified together, that they are stable together, that the security aspects, all the technology around them are deep integrated, the services as well. Well, I'm really glad you brought up some of those Kubernetes that are out there. We've been saying for a couple of years on theCUBE, Kubernetes is getting baked in everywhere. Suze's got partnership with all the cloud providers and you're not fighting them over whether to use a solution that you have versus theirs. I worry a little bit about how do I manage all of those environments? Do I end up with Kubernetes sprawl just like we have with every other technology out there? Help us understand what differentiates Suze's offerings in this space and how do you fit in with the rest of that very dynamic and diverse. So let me start with the aspect of combining things together. And Daniel, maybe you can take the management piece. So first of all, we are making sure at Suze that we don't force our customers into a Suze stack. Of course, we have a Suze stack and we're very happy if people use it. But the reality is that our customers, they have some investments, they have different needs, they use different technologies from the past or they want to try different technologies. So you have to make sure that for Kubernetes, like for any other part of the stack, the IT stack or the developer stack, your pieces are modular that you can accommodate different elements. So typically at Suze, we support different types of hypervisors. We're not focused on one, but we can support KVM, Zen, Hyper-V, V-Sphere, all of the Nutanix hypervisor, NetApp hypervisors and everything. Same thing with the OS. There's not only one Linux that people are running and that's exactly the same with Kubernetes. There's no one probably that I've seen in our customer base that will just need one vendor for Kubernetes because they have a hybrid cloud needs and strategy and they will benefit from the native Kubernetes they found on AKS, EKS, GKE, Alibaba clouds, you name them. And we have cloud vendors in Europe as well doing that. So for us, it's very important that what we bring as Suze to our customers can be combined with what they have, what they want, even if it's from the so-called competition. And so the Suze Cloud Fundry is running on AKS. You can find it on the marketplace of public clouds. It could run on any Kubernetes. It doesn't have to be Suze Kubernetes. But then you end up with a lot of clusters, right? So how do we deal with that, Daniel? So it's a great question and I'll actually even broaden that out because it's not like we're only running Kubernetes. Yes, we've got lots of clusters. We've got lots of containers. We've got lots of applications that are moving there. But it's not like all the VMs disappear. It's not like all the beige boxes, like in the data center, like suddenly don't exist. You know, we all bring all the sins and decisions of the past forward with us wherever we go. And so for us, it's not just that lens of how do we manage the most modern, the most cutting edge. That's definitely a part of it. But how do you do that within the context of all the other things you have to do within your business? How do I manage virtual machines? How do I manage bare metal? How do I manage all those? And so for us, it's about creating a presentation layer on top of that where you can look at your clusters, look at your VMs, look at all your deployments and be able to understand what's actually happening within your environment. We don't take a prescriptive approach. We don't say you have to use one technology or you have to use that technology. What we wanna do is to be adaptive to the customer's needs and say, you've got these things. Here's some of our offerings. You've got some legacy offerings too. Let's show you how to bring those together. Let's show you how you modernize your viewpoints, how you simplify your operational framework and how you end up accelerating what you can do with the staff that you've got in place. Yeah, I'm just on the management piece. Is there any recommendation from your team? Last year at Microsoft Ignite, there was the launch of Azure R. And we're starting to see a lot of solutions come out there. Our concern is that any of us that live through the multi-vendor management days, don't have good memories from those. It is a different discussion if we're just talking about kind of managing multiple Kubernetes, but how do we learn from the past and what are you recommending for people in this multi-cloud era? So my suggestion to customers is you always start with what are your needs? What are strategic problems you're trying to solve? And then choose a vendor that is going to help you solve those strategic problems. So it isn't going to take a product-centric view, it isn't going to tell you use this technology and this technology and this technology, but it's going to take the view of like, this is the problem you're going to solve. Let me be your advisor within that and choose people that you're going to trust within that. That being said, you want to have relationships with customers that have been there for a while, that have done this, that have a breadth of experience in solving enterprise problems. Because I mean, everything that we're talking about is mostly around the new things, but keep in mind that there are nuances about the enterprise, there are things that are intrinsically bound within the enterprise that it takes a vendor with a lot of enterprise experience to be able to meet customers where they are. I think you've seen that in some of the real growth opportunities within the hyperscalers as they've kind of moved into being more enterprise view of things, kind of moving away from just an individual developer's perspective to enterprise problems, you're seeing that more and more. I think vendors and customers need to choose companies that meet them where they are, that enable their decisions, don't prescribe their decisions. Okay. I want to make sure we- Let me just add to that, I think- Please go ahead. Yeah, sorry, it's true. Yeah, I also wanted to add that I would recommend people to look at open source based solutions because that will prevent them to be in a difficult situation potentially in a few years from now. So there are open source solutions that can do that and look at viable, sustainable, healthy open source solutions that are not just one vendor but multi-vendor as well because that leaves those options open for you in the future as well. So if you need to move for another vendor or if you need to complement with an additional technology or you've made a new investment or you go to a new public cloud, if you base your choices on open source you have a better chance to accommodate a lot. I think that's a great point, Dr. T. And I would, you know, glom on to that by saying customers need to bring a new perspective on how they adjudicate these solutions. Like it's really important to look at the health of the open source community. Just because it's open source doesn't mean that there's a secret army of gnomes that, you know, in the middle of the night go and fix bugs. Like there needs to be a healthy community around that. And that is not just individual contributors. That is also, what are the companies that are invested in this? Where are they dedicating resources? Like that's another level of sophistication that a lot of customers need to bring into their own vendor selection process. Excellent, you know, speaking about, you know communities in open source, want to make sure you have time to share a little bit about the AI platform that we've discussed in your... Yeah, it's very, very interesting. And something I'm super excited about at SUSE. And it's kind of this, we're starting to see AI done in these really interesting problems to solve. And like, I'll just give you one example is that we're working with a Formula One team around using AI to help them actually manage in-car mechanics and actually manage some of the things that they're doing to get super high performance out of their vehicles. And that is such an interesting problem to solve. And it's such a natural artificial intelligence problem that even when you're talking about cars instead of servers, you're talking about race tracks, you know, instead of data centers you still got a lot of the same problems. And so you need an easy to use AI stack. You need it to be high performance. You need it to be real time. You need to be able to get decisions made really quickly. These are the same kinds of problems, but we're starting to see them in all these really interesting wheel-weld scenarios. Which is one of the coolest things that I've seen in my career, especially as it turns out of IT, is that IT is really everywhere. It's not just grab your sweater and go to the data center because it's 43 degrees in there. You know, it's also get on the racetrack. It's also go to the airfield. It's also go to the grocery store and look at some of the problems being addressed and solved there. And that is super fascinating. One of the things that I'm super excited about in our industry in total. All right, well, really good discussion here. Daniel, Dr. T. Thank you so much for sharing everything from your keynote and been a pleasure watching. Thank you. All right, back with lots more coverage from SUSECON Digital 20. I'm Stu Miniman and as always, thank you for watching the Q.