 Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE at OpenStack Summit Vancouver 2015. Brought to you by headline sponsors EMC and jointly by Red Hat and Cisco with additional sponsorship by Brocade and HP. Welcome back everyone. We are live in Vancouver, British Columbia. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angle and my next guest is Sam Ramgy, the CEO of Cloud Foundry Foundation. Here, breaking it down at the OpenStack Summit, welcome to theCUBE. Awesome, great to see you. Great to see you. It's been a while. I know you just got the plane and Vancouver's a great city. Rock and roll, craft beer, all kinds of great stuff here in Canada that you can't get in the U.S. So your tweet, YYZ, the big rush song, it's YY, you say, YYX is the airport? This is YVR, but only the Canadian airport start with Y and as soon as I saw Y we are, I just couldn't get YYZ out of my head. It's one of those songs that's stuck in us rockers' heads. Let's talk about Cloud Foundry. Give us the update. Obviously OpenStack, it's all about speed right now, getting stuff up quickly. The builder economy we're in right now, that's what we're calling here in theCUBE. A lot of build out, a lot of proof points in the table, but Cloud Foundry, interesting evolution in its history. Great success in the business metrics, adoption, certainly we cover obviously IBM events and all the other events. You're seeing EHP, IBM. Maritz kind of shook the tree and kind of corraled the industry for Cloud Foundry with the foundation. Big success since the foundation's been- It's been really something. So last Monday was the Cloud Foundry Summit. It was the 110th day of existence of the foundation and my 110th day on the job. So I think we've had a lot of good will to ride on, but we've gotten a lot done in a very short amount of time. A lot of us, including myself, a little bit poo-pooing on Cloud Foundry because it was pivotal. It smelled like it was like a land grab, a little party, and they're cobbling together. Red-ass and all this stuff. It's just like putting a portfolio together, but they were open about it and there were a lot of buzz going on. But the question was, can it break through as a pivotal federation company, EMC, VMware, a lot of skeptics? But the success really took off when you broke it out into the foundation. That really became the flash point for Cloud Foundry. Explain that dynamic. A lot of you might not know the history. So I'll start with sort of where we're ending, which is that I think we're all waking up in a world where we care about two things, multi-vendor, multi-cloud. You should be very concerned. We've learned about single-vendor open source. Single-vendor open source is really not that open, right? And you still have a lot of risk when you adopt it. So they want multi-vendor. So when a year ago, an IBM announced that Cloud Foundry was going to be part of Bluemix and moved to create the foundation along with Pivotal. And then, you know, nine months ago when HP made the same announcement around HP Helion and said they were also going to join the foundation, that was when the ball really started rolling and they got real serious about getting the bylaws and the governance and the funding and the staffing and all that stuff so we could create this, this brand new foundation. That's what we're building on, right? A foundation should be something that the entire industry can now rest on. And that's what we're seeing. Everybody's building bigger and bigger stacks. ActiveState, based right here in Vancouver, built Staccato. That's a Cloud Foundry implementation and it sits right on top of OpenStack. So that's the other component, right? Multi-Cloud, you know that you can't build all of your stuff forever on Amazon because we learned what happens with single vendor not open source solutions in the 90s from Microsoft. So we're in wave two of cloud adoption and it's multi-vendor and multi-cloud. That's, I think, the driver that's pushing Cloud Foundry. And the big tailwinds for you guys is, one, the pressure for all the other incumbent vendors that didn't have anything. This OpenStack was really a lot of confusion at the time. Now it's relegated to the infrastructure to service, which where it needs to focus its action on, hardening up a lot of the table stakes. But then it was also, I got to move and pivot. This is IBM, this is HP. Cloud Foundry, the perfect storm foundation to make it open. Where people can compete and cooperate at the same time. The co-opetition is the key, right? The nice way to say it is co-innovation, sort of the frank way to say it is co-opetition. It is collaboration around the table. We have to have trustworthy governance and make everything work. And also embrace that they're going to compete and be commercially successful. The key is, it's not just the vendors though, it's users. We were in the Wall Street Journal last week with JP Morgan Chase joining the foundation and explaining how they're using it as a strategic platform internally. You'll hear from Bank of New York, Mellon, the biggest bank by trading volume in the world. AT&T, Verizon use it, right? Swisscom is also on the board of the Cloud Foundry Foundation as a user. So we're going through a change where users are taking a lot more control. That's part of what's exciting about OpenStack. And that's why on top of pretty much every OpenStack, we're starting to see interest or adoption of Cloud Foundry. So having basically the evolution of a platform is key, right? So we look at like OpenShift for instance with Amazon, OpenShift Open was a success. You see some of that. Dockers and Kubernetes is emerging with Google Cloud and then Docker across clouds. You've seen some success in this platform. What's the vision for Cloud Foundry in that regard? Because you've got a lot of people bet in the farm on Cloud Foundry, IBM is one, HP is the other. So with the emergence of these Kubernetes, with the dockers of the world and the pre-existing stuff, you got Red Hat out there, you got Marantis out there doing some stuff. What does that all this mean? How does a customer make sense of that? I think a customer has to look at building a single platform to deliver business agility, right? It's not how fast can you get from A to B. It's how fast can you turn the entire crank and what's been left behind is operators. The ops people, the developers have been focused on the ops people have been kind of left in the dark. Oh, we got this done really fast but IT ops has kind of dropped it on the floor, right? So Cloud Foundry is something for mature enterprises to be able to say we have a full cycle of innovation, we need to turn that crank every week and we need to do that in multiple departments and here's a system that will actually let you dev, test, operate, maintain, bring all the way through the cycle, basically getting you to a continuous innovation. Yeah, we're at EMC world and one of the things that came out of that for me was the realization of how EMC's certainly reorganized but they've got the core and they've got the emerging group but they put the extreme IO in the core which is actually the new stuff for them which is going to be a sales killer for them. It's going to really kick ass, really going to see, I think they're going to run the table on that, no doubt about it on the high end but that brings up the question of under the covers hardware is getting better and better with Flash. So you have the dynamic of not only the operators challenge and getting modernized if you will with Cloud Foundry, you've got the infrastructure, there's a service going on, all this hardening going on in between the toes, details of drivers, neutron APIs, northbound, southbound, virtualizations talking to each other but then you've got actually deployment of gear. Yes. Yeah, IO stuff, like stream IO, new storage, vSAN for VMware, you've got sand on Brocade. So there's all this stuff going on. You've got IBM soft layer, right? I mean, you've got a manual. The manual is a service. Yes. How does the CA, I mean it's like changing the airplane engine out 35,000 feet and saying, oh yeah, we've got pads for agility. Like, wow, I mean, kind of mind blowing. So that's how you have to think about it though. So when you look at a platform for applications from the top down, it's got to look very clean. You want to have build packs, you want to write a little bit of Ruby, a little bit of Node, a little bit of Java, right? And have it just kind of run. You don't want to see the duck paddling underneath which is what Cloud Foundry as a platform does and you certainly don't want that stuff to reproduce everything you've got in your infrastructure as a service layer. So OpenStack's done a good job of being able to bring in all this different hardware innovation and surface it through the Quantum API or the Neutron API or the API centricity of OpenStack's been great. That in turn lets Cloud Foundry leverage every single OpenStack deployment and make it really simple for app developers. If you think about what's an OpenStack app, an OpenStack app is like high availability or network deployments. This is not what an application developer thinks is an app. It's services. Yeah, they think order to cash is an app or they think Nike's running app is an app or the Coke Rewards is an app. They can't program to OpenStack. They program high level languages, high productivity languages. They need the abstraction layers. That needs open source to land on. It needs Cloud Foundry which then turns around and sends that information to OpenStack. All right, so the question is how do you scale the paradigm of pass? That's the fundamental question in the industry. Or does it matter? That's the flip side. So the platform has to be clean above. It has to be open below. So none of us is smart enough to pick a winner. Like which container is going to win? I don't know. Docker. Great docker files have already won the format war. We don't have to have the VHS versus Betamax conversation anymore. There are 50 odd container companies that are venture capital funded just in Silicon Valley right now or so I'm told. There's a lot of room in container innovation. What about Microsoft? They're coming out with their own container. They're going beyond the job object. So creating artificial bets within Cloud Foundry I think would be really foolish. So what we try to do is run Docker, run Rocket, run Garden, run Photon, right? Run anything that comes up because that layer needs to be able to run whatever comes its way in terms of the Bosch. It needs to be able to run on OpenStack or it needs to be able to run on Amazon Web Services. How do you get portability for that whole application workload? That's the really big question. If we can get two key things which is number one, that portability, number two, ubiquity which is starting to be what we see. We're already installed in hundreds of Global 2000 and if we can get installed in all of the Global 2000 then we've got ubiquity. If we get those two things, ubiquity, portability, then we create an ecosystem for ISVs and I think that's the most exciting thing to me about Cloud Foundry, looking down to three years in the future. Forget some stability in the critical mass, right? You got that with your partnerships. Certainly crossing industry. Create kind of an open but yet stable customizable place where people can put their code base where there's a blue mix versus say HP. They compete but they can also play with blue mix. Then you're saying, okay, differentiation can come on top. Yes. That's the ISV piece. Talk more about where you see the differentiation and the opportunities. So there's two layers of differentiation. One is what are the services you surround your Cloud Foundry implementation with? Like IBM BlueMix, they include Watson. Nobody else has got Watson, right? So they pump the Watson API right in there so people can make their apps smarter. HP Helion, right? They're differentiating by putting it on hardware and putting in systems monitoring and management that ties into the other stuff that you've got. Pivotal Cloud Foundry ties into all their data assets and large scale analytics. So that's sort of the provider side stuff. But riddle me this, right? What's the largest ISV on the planet? It's SAP. They build Cloud Foundry. That's interesting. Why do they do that? It allows them to have an ISV population that builds on and around on a Cloud platform that they can say, yeah, we've got this thing that runs over on BlueMix but when it runs on SAP, on a Cloud platform, it does weigh more because we're able to get right into the fortress or we're getting right into these business flows. Another enormous ISV is documentum, right? They handle vast quantities of what you might see at the lower levels of storage but it really, it's documents and workflows and access control management. That's built on Cloud Foundry in the current release. And why wouldn't you want to do that? I mean, Pat Kelsinger was poo-pooing Docker and then the next year at VMworld, Docker's his partner. It's market extension. Why would you not want to have that? And that's exactly it. You shouldn't belittle any technology that comes up. You should define a platform that can bring any of those technologies in and manage them effectively and that's what Cloud Foundry's built on. All right, so there's a lot, it's still early on. It's still like the second inning in this business. What are you most proud of right now? Because there's a lot of stats out there, X number revenue now, how that gets booked and whose revenue comes from. Definitely. We can always look at that and squint through the marketing but still, success is success. It's not like there are real numbers involved. What are you most proud of? What's going on in the highlights? I guess I'd say three things. One is the awareness of Cloud Foundry is really strong. We just did a 2400 person eight country survey including Asian countries, Western European countries, US. Cloud Foundry name recognition is very high and we see that happening because IT organizations are pulling it in. Second, contribution is enormous. We have over 2000 contributors to Cloud Foundry so far and we see people are beating down the door to come into our Dojo program with this very structured way of thoughtfully bringing people in and getting them to commit our status, which is a big deal. And then the third thing is the ecosystem. We're starting to see EMC, IBM, SAP, HP, Intel, GE. They each have huge partner networks. So if you imagine each one expanding out, right? We have an ecosystem of ecosystems. They're all starting to say that Cloud Foundry matters. They're starting to transmit the Cloud Foundry message, get all of their partners on board. So that makes us not only multi-cloud and multi-vendor, but multi-ecosystems. So I think that is a privilege to lead that because we have a lot of stuff that we can do. Try not to mess it up. But it's starting to take traction or it's starting to get traction in all those areas. It makes sense for people to salute the Cloud Foundry flag because then rising tide floats all boats, as they say, and then people can get behind it and then see where it goes. So I got to ask you the next question, which is, what worries you right now? And you worried about the delivery side of it? I mean, GE have heard some rumblings, as it's going fast. They have huge different requirements. Obviously industrial cloud, machines are a big part of it. So it might not be as touchy-feely as, say, a hyperscaler who might be running a web presence that's equipped in over there. Different ones use GE as a requirement. And then you got to say, it could be someone in healthcare, IBM deal or something. So you have different use cases as these guys start pushing out there. So are you worried, what are you worried about about Cloud Foundry right now? What worries you at night? Mostly I stay up wondering if we're doing enough to get the message out broadly, right? Because I do think that there's a, once in a decade, replatforming happens. All the customers and prospects for Cloud Foundry that I talked to are like, yeah, we kind of built this hand-built platform as a service. Now we're starting to reassess, do we want to do the hand-built thing? Do we want to go with open source? What's our solution? Are we going public cloud, private cloud? There's a lot of confusion there. If we can just get into each of those conversations before we even get there, right? Can we scale the message so that people realize, this is already what you need. If we don't do that, then I think we have a few years of deep inefficiency and then maybe we fumble the ball, right? I'd hate to be, you know, Charlie Brown running up to kick the football again, you know, letting Lucy pull it away. So I worry that we're not, that we're not succeeding fast enough with getting the message out of our awareness. Just viability in terms of road map, is that more of like, just more of a comfort across the bridge of cloud foundry. And then when you go into the conversations, they're much more tactical and much more solution-driven. I think it's name recognition, right? So you'll have developers who are thinking about continuous deployment and, you know, and before that continuous integration. They're like, yeah, you know, I've got a container strategy and then I've kind of got some puppet and chef scripts and I've got it all kind of wired together and we're really agile. And then they go to IT and IT is like, well, I don't know how to manage that. And then they don't know what they're looking for. And, you know, they call each other names and eventually IT goes, okay, I'm going to take over your scripts. They don't know that this thing, a cloud native application platform, right? Many times they don't even know what PAS is. They don't know that there's a solution, right? It's like a guy who's trying to get through from one room to another and he keeps walking into the wall. Doesn't know there's something called a door. So he gets out, he acts, he starts chopping down the wall. Yeah, he'll get through. Not the best way to get there. So when I think about the awareness problem, it's really not just cloud foundry alone, but getting enough people to realize, hey, there's a better way. There's one platform that can be a service that makes it easy for app developers to get at all of your IT assets. Take a cut of that. That's the thing that we're missing. Okay, so share with the audience right now for the folks that are like getting, that might see this, hey, this is pretty interesting. I've heard of Cloud Foundry. Great. What's the high level CXO pitch? I've heard of Docker or another round of funding from Jerry Chen, Kicking Ass, Kubernetes, Google's pushing that, orchestration, this is all my cloud stuff. I've been thinking about, so my brain's full, I'm exploding, my head's going to blow up. Breakdown, what does all that mean? Containers, orchestration, cloud, for the CXO out there, it's just trying to make a path decision on what to do, what bridge to build for the future. What is the kind of the executive conversation that you can share? So the executive conversation that I've had that has been very effective is very simple. The world is changing too fast to be able to adapt your business using the old ways. Redemograph of Columbia Business School is put out a book called The End of Competitive Advantage. You can't just own a market, saturate it, and lock it up for years. These things are constantly changing. So how does your business change? It changes through software. So what you need, the solution to the end of competitive advantage is continuous innovation. You get there by delivering business value in little chunks all the time. So you need to align your team, business person, developer, ops. They need to have a set of software that supports them. If you use your own ingredients and you build it Lego block by Lego block, you will get continuous integration. You'll get continuous activity. You might not get all of that stuff shipped out to the market on the schedule you want because it breaks between development and operations. So I'd say for the CXO, whether you're CMO, CDO, CIO, CTO, any of those, you need to look at what is the sake of all of this work for. It's for the sake of getting your business to continuous innovation. To get there, all this stuff has to be in harmony. So you need to look at the system of containers, orchestration, platform, infrastructure and say, do I get a harmonious whole? If so, then my business can actually win. Dave Vellante and I always talk about competitive strategy in theCUBE. It's one of our fun things we kind of riff around, but you're right, it's interesting. Competitive advantage, the old way, was lockdown, create nestedness, inimitability, lock in, and defend. Right, and fight that. But there's also a concept of barriers to entry. And if you shift to different economic conversation, barriers to entry could be different. What I hear you saying is, and we've seen this on theCUBE, like in Amazon, the speed and differentiation or barriers to entry is your speed and feature richness. So there's a diseconomies of scale if you can build up an agile, competitive market by speed. It's exactly right. Speed is the only, speed of iteration and delivery of business value is the only barrier to entry now. And if you don't make it, you lose. We've seen a lot of companies in retail and media go out of business in the last five years because they haven't kept up, but you can't believe that you can build a table and now you can build the best table in the world and you'll ship that for the next 50 years and your business thought will save. Well, it's interesting what you said, but you said it's interesting, but your point about continuous innovation, that builds a trajectory. This is classic competitive strategy. You want to run. You can have an outcome, have a trajectory, and then if someone tries to buy a table and bolt it in, the diseconomies are how you learn to get there, staff development, that's barriers to entry. Would you agree? Yeah, it's a flywheel. The faster that you're explaining the flywheel on innovation, on learning, on trying, on getting new products in the market, on some of them succeed, some of them fail, but you're learning along with your ecosystem. One great frame references from Marshall Van Alsten who's at the MIT Center for Digital Business these days and he talks about platform economics. He said in the old days it was you'd have products and you'd compete for customers. You'd compete with other companies shipping the same thing. These days you're shipping a platform and you're competing based on ecosystems for multi-sided markets with customers, users, developers, deployers. So it's a much bigger scale phenomenon if you're going to be really, really successful now. You have to build a platform. And now platforms are because of SaaS and platform as a service. You can try before you buy, land and expand, only buy as you grow, which creates interesting benchmark on the competitive piece of it. That's right. Marshall would tell you, five of the top 10 companies on the planet buy value are platform companies. Right, so. Okay, so bring this back down. You got my attention. I love it. I'm on board. I want to be competitive. I want to have an advantage. I buy it. You can see the trajectory. I'm going to build the core competency. I'm going to iterate fast, move fast, add new features, hire the development team. How do I get there? What do I do next? Well, you go straight to GitHub and you go to Cloud Foundry. You pull the sources down. It's free, it's portable, it's consistent, it runs. It ships every month. And then once you've figured out what to do with it, then you start figuring out where is my commercial support going to be. Right, am I going to? I've got hiring decisions. I've got staff decisions. That's right. There's all kinds of other things. That's right. There's a whole context of that, right? So then you say, am I going to work with Accenture? Am I going to work with Morantis? Which part of the ecosystem am I going to go to? And then, am I going to run it myself on my own premises? Am I going to run it in a cloud? What are the vendor relationships I'm comfortable with? Or am I going to build my own core competency to manage it myself? That's a business decision that you make as well. We believe in theCUBE, as we've been seeing with the success of Amazon. We called Amazon way years ago. Turns out they are making a shitload of money. Absolutely right. The way they release, the way they move fast, they do have a virtual barriers to entry, I guess, the way we want to have, we want to call it. That is the future. I totally agree with your thesis there, 100%. Cloud Foundry, obviously you guys are doing it all right. Came together to vision. You guys just blocking and tackling. We're shipping and shipping and shipping. Keeping it going. What's next for you guys? What are you going to be next year? What do you hope to have under your belt for next year? Under my belt, so we've got about 40 members now. A year from now I'd like to see 80 members. And I'd like to see the balance of those be users. I think we're going to see a tremendous expansion in financial services and in telecommunications. We already have great companies like Swisscom on our board. Companies like Verizon as members. I think CenturyLink, I should make a strong point about huge innovation coming from CenturyLink and contribution in the Cloud Foundry. They're doing really well with the hybrid IT. They're doing extremely well and here's the deal. In phase two of Cloud Adoption, there's a lot of discomfort with using a single giant provider based in Seattle. You don't want to just have your whole strategy be based on Amazon. Telecommunications companies are going to start building an inter-Cloud. They've already been doing it at the low layer and the peering. You talk to Equinex, you talk to AT&T. At the top level, they're all willing to give up a little bit of differentiation for portability to create one Cloud Market. I hear it over and over again. If operators can come back and provide a portable Cloud environment on Cloud Foundry that you can move around. Everyone gets a piece of the beach head. They want to do that, exactly. Everyone gets a piece of the pie. So, you know, grow the pie. Make it available to everybody who wants to get on board and make sure that it's returning a lot of value to the members. We differentiate ourselves, I think, from other open source foundations in that we measure our success based on the commercial success of our members. So we expect this to be a commercial, sustainable ecosystem that continues to grow. That's what we hold ourselves accountable for. Sam, thanks for coming on theCUBE and sharing. You're in sight here at OpenStack Summit. What's going on at OpenStack? Quick ending, I'll give you the last word. OpenStack Summit, what's the vibe here? I know you just got into town, but in the ecosystem, is there a feeling of movement? Is there a feeling of growth going too slow? Should they be peddling faster? What's going on? Yeah, the vibe's really great. Vancouver's a great place to have the summit. There's a ton of people here. They're all talking pretty happily. I've met a lot of people that I've worked with on and off over the last couple of decades. I think they need to move towards having a reference implementation or a reference test. And RefStack will be very, very interesting to watch. Certainly, selfishly, it'll make it much easier for Cloud Foundry to be successful if OpenStack has got a consistent landing point. But I think it's going to help the whole OpenStack ecosystem work better if there's a fairly predictable path to OpenStack compatibility. And that stands for... Def Core, you got the reference architecture just coming off of EMC, Brocade, whatnot, a lot of stuff happening. Yeah, so that's going to be really important, right? It's expanded tremendously fast. You can't and don't want to put the genie back in the model, but you probably want to organize the ecosystem to have a little bit more shape and a little bit more sort of half, so they can be a good partner for all the other projects that have mutual dependency, right? The pressure is massive. Doctor, Cloud Foundry, Node.js, right? Open Daylight, OPNFV, OpenStack. There's a family here of open source projects that are making open data centers that people are deploying today. The better that all these work together, the more inefficiency we can remove from today and from the future. But the pressure is more than ever right now. You've got Azure's kicking ass right now, retooling, they're moving all their install base over. Azure contributed code to Cloud Foundry. You can run Cloud Foundry in Azure. Open source code delivered by Microsoft to Cloud Foundry, right? Here you go. They donated reference architecture to the Open Compute. I mean, the new CEO there's kicking some ass. Cube alumni as well. They're pushing hard on Open Compute. It's very interesting to see that. I mean, it's just game changes. The mindset shifts, but you've got to worry about that. This is more pressure, right? This is a big player saying, it validates the market on one hand, but it gives the impression of pedal faster guys or come on. It should be nice to see Microsoft consider taking on the OpenStack APIs. Something that CenturyLink has done is took OpenStack API compatibility even though they're not running OpenStack behind it to say, look, let's just have something that's consistent for IS. Amazon's already run hard and said, we're the dominant people, we're not going to take any input into our roadmap. Our APIs are what they are and you can copy them. But you'd have to be insane to do that for a player like Microsoft to cause OpenStack compatibility by taking on the OpenStack API for Azure. I don't know if it'll ever happen. But wow, that would be an amazingly good thing for them to do for the planet. Yeah, and they could win the whole thing. But okay, and we're going to have a survey on Wikibon. You're going to see a new survey come out from us with data on Azure. The growth of numbers are going to pretty rock everyone when we share that, pretty significant. No one thought they'd be the later that they are when they're winning. So, Sam, thanks for coming on. CEO of Cloud Foundry Foundation, making it happen, congratulations on your success. This is theCUBE here live in Vancouver, British Columbia for all the action for OpenStack Summit here this year. 2015 is theCUBE, we'll be right back.