 Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage, day two of the Linux Foundation's open source summit 2023. This is theCUBE. I'm your host, John Furrier with Rob Stretchy. You and I are breaking down the analysis here. We're bringing all the best guests in. Got a great guest, Gabriel Columbro, general manager of the Linux Foundation in Europe as well as the executive director runs FINOS, FinTech open source foundation. Gabriel, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me here, folks. So we were just talking about the FinTech, how AI is going to change that. Obviously, open source has moved the needle, raised the bar, big time on FinTech. And the Linux Foundation in Europe, I don't know where to go. I think the Linux Foundation in Europe, probably easy thing to say. Give a quick overview of what's going on there and then let's jump into FINOS. Perfect. Yeah, so we launched Linux Foundation Europe in September last year. It's been a couple of years in the making. And of course, the Linux Foundation has a pretty strong presence in Europe anyway. You know, about a third of our members is in Europe. We have several sort of, I would call them Europe strong projects like FINOS, for example, or LF Energy or, you know, OS climate. But the reality is that we really saw the need for providing a local entity that would, you know, enable regional level collaboration, but without fostering, you know, fragmentation or geopolitical sort of Balkanization of technology that we're seeing, you know, more and more growing. And so, it's been a pretty fun ride. I have to say running a Linux Foundation Europe out of California, it's an early start. It's a time zone challenge, of course. But yeah, you know, as you can hear, I'm from that Italian part of California, I guess. I was born and bred in Italy and it is also from a personal perspective, something really interesting to really being able to up-level what's happening in Europe. And bringing the infrastructure. The Linux Foundation has matured so greatly and watching it grow from the beginning. I'd say that this event here, again, is a great testimony. There's not the 10,000 or plus 30,000 people you see at KubeCon or CNCF. It's the right people. It's the brain trust. It's the right actors in all the different projects coming together. It's going to set the agenda for open source. In Europe, the Kube is going global. We're going to have a presence in London and in Europe. We're going to create sub-cubes or sub-nets of Kube in our network. So look for the Kube, we're with you. I think that for developers, I think having the Linux Foundation there is going to be a great asset because the support you guys provide projects, just take a minute to explain how important that is because you guys can make or break a project with the right support. Because why would they want to go get venture funding? There's sometimes, even today on stage, we heard that, like Jim Zimlin said, would you take venture funding or go self-funding? And she said, we'll go self-funding. But this is really the dynamic. Take a minute to explain that. Look, I think you're absolutely right. The Linux Foundation has a global platform and I wouldn't go as far as saying that we can make or break projects, ultimately it's our contributors and it's our members that through their investments can make a project successful. But absolutely the platform that we produce and we provide, sorry, to our projects, I'm really excited to see that applied to European-level collaboration. It's a very different landscape. The more time I spend there, the more I realize, you know, the need for a stronger engagement of the public sector, for example. And I think the Linux Foundation over the years has done a massive, fantastic job to really marry the needs of individual developers and the private sector. I think as we go to Europe, the providing and open governance where the public sector can actually have a strong, not only funding role, but really driving role in this project is going to be important. We saw 10,000 people at KubeCon EU and Amsterdam was 2000, the waiting list was packed. That's a tell sign. We also checked in on a lot of the sovereign cloud discussions. Massive growth in countries on the cloud growth side, even the US, they're cost-optimizing a little bit. In certainly Europe, there's a lot of growth there. Big time. I think that was my, I guess, question mark was how much of it is the consumers that are actually then participating back in in Europe versus how much is it really the governmentals that are really contributing? It's a really good question. I would say ultimately, in Europe, there is, there's no such thing as big tech as much as, of course, in the US and in the West Coast specifically. So ultimately, you're right. On one hand, there is a strong grassroots open source engagement. I come from that world. I grew up in the Apache Software Foundation. I had dreadlocks when I was a kid, kind of from that really individual-driven aspect of contributing to open source. But certainly the public sector has a stronger role to play, I think, in Europe, just for the very dynamic of the market and you're seeing regulations coming down, many of which are going to shape technology. If you think about GDPR, it really set the golden standard for data privacy, which is now being sort of copied in California, CCPA and across the world. So certainly, I think the public sector has a stronger role to play than maybe in other regions of the world. But the other angle is, as much as there's no big tech, there are very strong vertical industrial industries that are going through the digital transformation. And again, this kind of, you know, my experience with Finos probably biases me a little on the potential of a vertical foundation. We're seeing it out there in Europe. Definitely awesome. We're looking forward to working with you out there in Europe, looking forward to it. But the exciting thing you did, the FinTech open source foundation, really incredible job. Congratulations. Thank you. It's been a smashing success. Not, you know, it's been a tailwind. FinTech always throws money at new stuff. Yes. Cloud, servers. Yes. High frequency trading. Now with cloud and AI and data and open source. Yes. The needle moved a lot. Can you take us through what's going on with FinOS? What's the update? How many projects? What's the stats? I'll give you a little bit of the background and then I'll tell you what's happening right now. Actually today, let me start from today, we announced Fidelity Investments joining Finos today, which is a major milestone for us. So look, Finos started about six years ago. We were an independent foundation, basically funded by the largest investment banks in the world that really realized that from a talent perspective, from a digital transformation perspective and really from an efficiency perspective, you know, the margins are nowhere nearly where they were, you know, before 2008. Open source could be a pillar of digital transformation, very much like cloud. And so that's where we started. Over the last six years, you know, I'm not going to say that it's always been easy. You know, actually, I'm 21 and I aged a lot. You're 25, right by your ear. But you know, this is an industry that has been very historically conservative, risk averse, and so it took a lot of, and we continue to do a lot of education into how they can really improve their business, be more efficient, be more innovative through open source, share some of this R&D that they definitely invest a lot on. We joined the Linux Foundation in 2020 and since then we've experienced massive growth. I mean, 2022, we had the largest sort of growth in terms of membership. We had the logos like Discover, Amex, Google, this year we had Fidelity joining us. And what we're seeing really is open source starting to really take over the whole value chain of financial services. It started with investment banks. It's now moving to the buy side, the large asset managers and, you know, the likes of Fidelity, the likes of Wellington, the likes of BlackRock who's a great member of the Linux Foundation. We are now seeing the retail and commercial side of the house starting to really embrace like Discover, for example. We reported heavily on the Silicon Valley Bank and the first Republic failure, mainly Silicon Valley Bank, that could have been avoided with good AI. So, you know, we're at a level now where Rob and I were talking yesterday on the open, that open source and AI are going to have a collision course and someone better be ready. So, open source is ready. FinTech is most impacted by this because, one, high frequency trading has done, checked on that physics. Now the data insights, I mean, if you look at Silicon Valley Bank, it was literally an oversight. That domino effect was a data opportunity that could have been solved with good FinTech, good code, good observability, good data. And I would argue, look, one of our three strategic initiatives is called OpenRectec, open source regulation. We think that there's a lot of potential for all the parties involved to really find the third way between regulation and deregulation. There's a way of making regulation very efficient. And to your point, you know, it only so happened that Silicon Valley Bank was a little under the threshold of stress tests and sort of those Dodd-Frank regulations that apply to the largest organizations. So to your point, open source can really bring a much more sort of transparent collaboration, not only across the banks, as we're seeing right now, the FinTechs and the vendors, the buy side, but really the regulators. And to be honest, I'm not going to say that this is going to be easy. You know, the thing that you're onto that thing is super important. The reason why I love your project is and in your organization is banking is a system. If something gets broken, it affects other things. If you look at Silicon Valley Bank, as you look down at that, it's like a patient. That actually had repercussions because they're all working together. JP Morgan, all the banks. So one node gets pulled out in the system. Prior to the regulation, they were all kind of bespoke, but they're all connected very much. And they had to keep things in the family. That's why that whole, you know, it's very well said because, you know, this is one of the ways I pitched to my board members who are pretty senior folks in the organizations in some of the, again, tier one, tier two banks. Look, it took a long time for Big Tech to understand that open source was a great way for them to advance technology, commoditize competitors, you know, create new markets. And these organizations really have no sort of reason, innate reasons to collaborate with each other. As you say, the financial system is completely connected. They could not do business unless they transact with each other. And so things like interoperability, mutualizing common requirements like regulation, it makes a whole lot of sense as long as you're able, of course, to slot in those quick wins that then allow these sort of senior execs to understand, okay, well, I shouldn't be feeding open source. And to be honest, I was very pleased to see that after look for Shell last year, you know, which could have certainly signal a strong slowdown in the open source, you know, in the fear that these organizations have of open source potentially. And even this year with SVB and the complex economic climate, I'm actually seeing firms doubling down on open source, really showing how counter cyclical open source is, like when there is more pressure, people do double down on open source. I think, do you think this is more symptomatic about how their digital transformation journey is going and where they're at in that? I think it's absolutely, I think I wouldn't say that there is a full understanding just yet that open source, in my mind, is as critical as cloud in the process of digital transformation. But certainly if you analyze which are the components that are needed for a successful digital transformation, you know, innovative technology, talent, and even just a better organizational structure that reflects. I would say it's just important, and I'll tell you why. Maybe scope-wise, it might not be, but open source is interconnected to cloud. Everyone will have open source in their cloud period, whether it's a Red Hat or their own project or something. So it's dependent upon each other. Absolutely, and especially as it becomes more of a platform. I mean, I'm a huge fan of, you know, platform plays. I mean, that's my sort of bread and butter. All right, let's talk about the platform. There we go, here we go. There we go, Rob. I was going to say. But the reality is the more the banks become platforms and host applications for fintechs or for their customers, you know, platform and open source go hand in hand because you're not delivering sort of the last mile solution is a perfect fit. The platform is built in the open, and then everyone has a clear demarcation line to go build solutions that they can monetize and hopefully reinvest in the ecosystem. So it makes a whole lot of sense. They just, I think, are starting to understand how this can play in financial services. I think that's the really interesting thing we had Fidelity on yesterday. After their contribution to us. Jenkins plug-in. Yeah, Jenkins plug-in for events. And so the big thing is platform engineering is really all the rage. And I think it's, as we've been talking about for, you know, quite a while now, it's really the new IT, right? It's how do you upskill people? Do you see that really taking hold within your organization as well? Well, I have to say that Finos certainly brought a lot of visibility of financial services into the broader open source community. But the flip side is that we're starting to see actually these organizations invest in upstream. So Fidelity is a great example. They just joined Finos, but they've been a member of OpenSSF, a member of CNCF for the longest time. We're starting to see organizations like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan City being leaders, for example, in OpenSSF, the Open Source Security Foundation in the realization that, yeah, everyone has a role to play in ensuring sustainability of the open source community. And I think to your specific question, there has been a really strong realization over the last 10 years that you cannot continue investing on your internal proprietary platform. I mean, many of these organizations have their own Java virtual machine, their own Linux distribution, their own programming language. How on hell you're going to compete with an open ecosystem of talent that is based on Kubernetes, on open source projects. And so I think the critical part that I think is going to make or break the digital transformation of this organization is that they really buy into open source and can tap into this broad talent because otherwise there is really generational gap. What's your take on platform engineering versus say an app? So Fidelity has like 4,000 apps, millions of apps, that's the makeup of company. But these apps are also using open source, which have ecosystems that look like a platform. Apps, but they have APIs, they connect to other things. So platform engineering has to look a lot like a centralized organization. That's an IT definition in my opinion. That's just me personally. It's a centralized organization to handle all the rules. IT. Okay, that's platform, that's going to be security. Now when you're in open source, you have dependencies. It's not like I have my project, I'm going to load my Ubuntu, done. Now everything's connected. So your customers are now connected to a bunch of other stuff. How do you talk about platform engineering in context to apps that might have dependencies to other projects? It's a complex question. It's a really complex question. I would say there are a couple of angles there. I think the primary angle is, look, there is no way that these folks can manage everything centrally in the new world, to be honest. There is going to be a combination of platform and apps that have to be more open, have to be more, you know, again, at least an open ecosystem of apps. When it comes to the central sort of role of IT or platform engineering, I think policies are going to be the ones that have to be centralized. You're not going to move away out of the compliance department or risk department wanting to impose their interpretation over a certain regulation. So things like, for example, you know, you've heard over the last few years, many attempts to create the financial cloud or a regulator cloud, you know, there's been a big IBM Bank of America announcement a couple of years ago. We think actually that open source and open standards can really become sort of the way that all these organizations agree on common patterns of how it means, what it means to actually run financial workloads in cloud. But then of course, you know, they will have to act in a sort of distributed way within those organizations. I mean, one of the major pro standards that we have in Phoenix is called FDC3 and it's really about financial desktop collaboration connectivity consortium. So it's really about that application interoperability you were talking about. I think we're going to see basically a more centralized IT department that still manages the platform but you're going to see policy, yes. Policy based stuff, here's your guardrails for developers. Including how you engage in open source. I mean, big part of what we do is helping them understand how you provision a developer to actually being able to work in open source because until three years ago, they had to go home, use their laptop, doing it from their own garage, even though they were contributing to something that their company were using. I think one of the big things that, are you seeing those people in that organization, given that they're starting to get more involved in the open source and they're modernizing some are behind others in that space and adopting cloud. Are they going and pushing on those cloud vendors to actually get involved? And do you see that not only from the horizontal, you know, hyperscale types but do you see that more regionally like, you know, the OVHs or the Orange or KPNs and other world? Yes, I would say there's still a major focus on the hyperscalers. Primarily that's been sort of my experience. You know, Google is a member. We are now, we have a project called Compliant Financial Infrastructure that is really now contributed by, contributed to by a bunch of not only banks but, you know, hyperscalers as well. Red Hat clearly plays an important role in there. I have seen, again, this is more through my for LF Europe hat. I certainly think in Europe there is a different dynamic where they are really trying, you know, from the standpoint of digital sovereignty to really invest more on, you know, the open nebulas of the world or the sort of regional players. But I do think that kind of going back to that regulation that is coming down from Europe, you know, the hyperscalers, you know, Europe is too big of a market for not sort of collaborating and complying with some of these regulations. And so, you know, I want to see certainly a more, you know, open sources about creating open ecosystem and a more varied, you know, set of vendors. To be honest, the focus in Phoenix has been primarily with the hyperscalers. Most of the large organizations that are global, they tend to work with hyperscalers. I find it super interesting that it's Google leading the way with you because they're one of their products. Yes. GA, is Google Analytics, is outlawed in five European countries. Yes. So, how do you, for lack of a better way, how do you grok that? Like, understand what's going on between what they're doing on one side of the fence yet with one of their applications and how does that really work out? Well, I think I would counter to you that there is probably exactly the reason why Google is the one that is already in Phoenix because they're trying to make grounds back in sort of understanding exactly what the needs are of their customers. That is from the Phoenix side. I think from the LF Europe side and really sort of what's the landscape in Europe, you know, I'll tell you even more. Most of my banks can't use Google Drive or Google Docs. You know, like a standard way of collaborating in open source communities has become a major friction for us. I think that's certainly one of the reasons why they're in Phoenix. I think in terms of Europe, look, it's always the known market leader that really tries in my mind to invest in open source to make up grounds. I mean, we've seen the example of Kubernetes itself. You know, that's really the very reason why it was contributed originally. Who are the anchor brands then in your area? In Phoenix, it's primarily, look, the Platinum members are the, actually, no, that's the beauty of a vertical foundation. We start from the end users. The Platinum members are Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, CET, all the largest global tier one banks. And then we have, of course, Associated General, AXA, we're starting to really move into more European organizations. And what we're seeing now with Fidelity being, you know, the announcement of the day, we are starting to see open source follow the value chain, follow the money chain. So we started from investment bank, sell side, we're now seeing the buy side and asset manager coming in. We're starting to see payment processors like Discover and American Express being part of the game. And of course, all the vendors to your point that want to better understand this market and use open source to engage both at developer level, developer mind share, and of course, in our board, we have pretty senior C levels. Okay, but great to have you on the queue. We got to run times tight. You know I can talk. You definitely got to come back. There's so much more to unpack. But a real quick final question for you is, you guys nailed the vertical foundation. I think that's a huge accomplishment. And props to you. I think it's been the first I've seen that's been like right on point because that's, you're backing in from the customer. They're incentives are there. Absolutely. It's a real robust market. Man, almost like you read my material. Yeah, we're pretty sharp on this view. Pay attention, we're good. But I got to ask you, is it a thing? Do you think you're going to see more of these? Cause you know, we're a media vertical who can literally open source to queue, but other vertical clouds have been attempted. We call them super clouds. I think you'll see the leaders, the end users, what we saw with hyperscalers and you're seeing Amazon enabled like snowflakes. Snowflake doesn't have a cloud. They're on top of a hyperscaler. So what you're doing might be a super project. Yes. Super foundation. Because you're essentially enabling a vertical solution. Do you think vertical foundations might be a thing? I think so. And of course I'm biased. Having been, you know. It's been tech I've been running since it. It's a robust market. Or do you see this replicating into other vertical like healthcare? I think we should see. And this is where I think my, I thought I was running Aleph Europe just because of my thick Italian accent. But the reality is that I see a lot of the experience that I had in Finos being very applicable to the European market where there's not as much big tech. And so as different industries undergo digital transformation, they all are going to have to be sort of buying into open source. And I think you nailed it. We don't start from the technology. We start from the business problem of a certain customer of a certain industries in a way much more of a sort of product type approach. And so, yes, healthcare. You know, we have a lot of public healthcare which started during COVID, but I think has a lot more potential with the caveats of being probably even more conservative and regulated industry. Aleph energy is strong in Europe. So I think at the crossroads of my experience of Finos and sort of the strategic drivers of development in Europe, vertical industries is going to be a thing. Well, we're definitely going to pick this up. We'll follow up on theCUBE. We'll get back at the ranch. We'll do it. theCUBE here following the bouncing ball on open source, a lot of things happening. We're keeping track of it. We're calling balls and strikes. We're here. I'm John Furrier, Rob Strecce. Gabriel, thank you for coming up. Head of the Europe Linux Foundation as well as the successful Finos, FinTech Open Source Foundation. Great success story. Thanks for coming on. Thank you so much for having me here. All right, we'll be back more after lunch. Day two, CUBE, wall-to-wall coverage after the short break. Stay with us. We'll be right back.