 This is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Stu Miniman. We're with Wikibon and this is the Cube SiliconANGLE's continuous production of Amazon's re-invent conference. We're here in Las Vegas at the Venetian Palazzo Sands Convention Center, it's the place to be this week. About 8,000 people here up from last year, last year it was 5,000 or 6,000. This is really becoming the cloud conference, hearing about Amazon's innovations, we're hearing keynotes from executives, from customers, from partners. The cloud Kool-Aid injection. And Ashash Pradhani is here, he is the head of the cloud business unit, he's the general manager of that business unit, runs OpenShift at Red Hat. Welcome to the Cube, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me on Dave. So Pass is starting to really gain momentum in the marketplace, you've seen some new entrants, OpenShift obviously is your play there. Talk about your role and then we'll get into it. Sounds good. So I'm the general manager for the cloud business unit, I focus my time a lot on OpenShift platform and service area. And of course, there's a bunch of cloud technologies that we're working with at Red Hat, including OpenSAG, CloudForms, Cloud Management Technologies, and then Associate Technologies that go with cloud, like Storage, and of course goes without saying Red Hat's known for Enterprise Linux and J Boss Metalware. So what's the connection with Amazon? Why are you here at this event? Yeah, great question. So we've been running OpenShift online, OpenShift online is our public platform as a service offering and we've been running that on AWS for over two years now. And what we did when we started off first was to say, well, Red Hat's always been great at enterprise software. It's been providing enterprise class Linux technologies for 20 years, acquired a company called J Boss, which you're well familiar with. And that's been providing enterprise class Metalware and then Red Hat's acquired that and that's been over six or seven years. And ever since then, what you realized was, look, developers want choice, right? And so in as much as we have affinity and we have expertise developed around the Linux area and Java, right, with the J Boss technologies, we want to make sure that we had an opportunity to reach out to folks using Ruby or Node or other language and frameworks like Python and Perl and PHP, and we didn't have an offering for that, right? So we started on the journey to make sure that, you know, we could attract them. That was number one. Number two, we realized was, look, there's a whole movement happening to the cloud for all the reasons that we've talked about and that we all well know, right? Whether it's agility or flexibility. And we want to make sure that we had a public cloud offering that we could attract developers to have a platform that they got value from. At the same time, you know, we as an organization developed a fair amount of expertise around what it meant to stand up and run a public cloud. So help us think through this and squint through some of the confusion around, you know, IAS and SAS and past. I mean, there are those who say you got, look, you got cloud plus or IAS plus and you got SAS minus. You know, why do we need past? Could you explain that to us? Yeah, great question. So one of the things that, you know, we're comfortable with and we're seeing increasingly the most sophisticated users are comfortable with is, past isn't applicable for every single situation that you have out there, right? There are a fair number of customers who are very comfortable with the notion of, I find value in SAS, software, the service, right? I take an application, maybe like a Salesforce, ERM type of application and I use that and I don't want to worry about anything underneath it. There's another set of organizations that say, I want a new infrastructure, right? That is cloud ready, that handles my cloud class workloads and where I can take out costs and increase flexibility in my infrastructure and they want to focus infrastructure as service, right? So there's more control there and obviously less control as you move to SAS. And then there's a whole other group of folks, right? Whether they're doing transformational cloud types of projects or just want the ability to build applications the way they want to but want the complexity, the updating, the configuration around the middleware or the operating system to go away and they find great amount of value in platform and service and for them, that's the absolute right choice. Okay, so it's a clear market in your mind. Can you help us understand your TAM a little bit? I mean sure, how do you look at the TAM? Yeah, that's a great question. So we're finding that the TAM, the total addressable market for PAS in general, right? Is both around the public area, right? So some public PAS service that's provided where folks want to have nothing to do at all with the underlying software. And then there's another group that find a lot of value in private PAS, right? So enterprise class software that they can run either on their own data center, a cloud of their own choice, right? Or some of the third party that's running on their behalf. And there's a lot of value created in that segment as well. And so the total TAM for us because we play in both the public PAS as well as the private one, right? Is I think IDC said 14 to $20 billion, right? Depending on the latest estimates that you look at. And we believe all of that marks addressable for the Red Hat solution. So Ashash, you know, for those of us kind of industry watchers out there, you know, I remember the early Clowderati are always saying, you know, the future is past, but it's going to take a while to get there. Things almost seem to die down for a couple of years. And now Pivotal came on the marketplace and seems to have reinvigorated the conversation. You know, IBM bought SoftLayer, there's a lot going on. You know, what have you seen change in the PAS conversation over kind of the last six to 12 months? Yeah, great point. So one of the things that we're realizing more and more is, and we've hosted a cloud advisory board with some of our leading customers in Palo Alto just a couple of weeks ago. We had senior decision makers and their architecture teams in attendance. And there's a lot of confusion in the marketplace, right? There's a lot of people putting out, you know, whether knowingly or otherwise, you know, fair amount of complex concepts, which even these senior leaders don't necessarily fully grok for a reason because they haven't necessarily needed to change the infrastructure to take advantage of the agility. And so we think as there is more knowledge in the marketplace, as there's more experience that happens, there's going to be a better understanding of value it creates. And I'll give you one example. We've been running the OpenShift public platform that's service now for over two years. We've stood up ourselves over a million and a half applications in that process, right? Our user crown has grown in the last year by over 250%, right? And so we know there's a lot of people who are starting to see this and use it. And one of the things that we also see is, you know, when people go away, right? The vote with their feet or, you know, with their desktop. And we try to understand, you know, why that is, right? And so it's very comparative marketplace that we're in and we take all the lessons we've learned there, you know, all the developer experience that we created there and then that same technology and code base ends up in a private pass with an enterprise customer. So now when we go and have a conversation, we've now had this multiple times, right? Large financial service institutions, large government organizations, all of them, when they evaluate our private pass solution, they want to talk to the folks in our team, our operations organization, that's run the public pass. Because one thing to say there's value in pass and another thing for us to come and say, you know, we're eating our own dog food, we're serving this up for over two years and here's all the folks who are working with it and here's what we've learned in the process. Okay, I wonder if you can walk us through, you talked about private pass and public pass. You obviously partner with Amazon, you also partner and can work on a lot of different infrastructures. I understand you can do OpenShift on OpenStack also. So can you walk us through what that dynamic is and what the adoption in general that you can talk about it is? Yes, great. So yeah, I can absolutely do that, right? So maybe the best way to describe it is there are three flavors of OpenShift, right? There's OpenShift Origin, that's our upstream community, right? So true to the Red Hat model and our philosophy, everything we do is available out in the open, right? Folks contribute, folks get involved, submit, pull requests and we'll work with them, right? To help move that technology forward. That same code base is leveraged in OpenShift Online. OpenShift Online is our public pass, right? That's the one we stand up on AWS. The user doesn't see that, right? They don't necessarily- Are the other public clouds are also supporting it? Not yet, right? So we've been doing this for a couple of years. We've got interest from a lot of other public clouds who want us to move it there. It's a matter of us trading off the resources to be able to get it in some other public cloud. And then again, the same code base is leveraged for OpenShift Enterprise, right? And that's a private pass that someone can run in their own data center in bare metal in a virtual environment, right? Whether it's Red Hat virtualization, VMware or some other virtual environment or they can run it in OpenStack. And I've got to say, Stuart, that in the last, I want to say 12 months or so, maybe every third conversation we had with the customer they'd say, I'm interested OpenShift and OpenStack. At this point, it's probably every other conversation, right? Because there's so much transformational type of activity that's going on today, that people say, I want to look at much more flexible infrastructure and when I have that, I want to look at the platform. So let me just finish on that point, sorry. It's an interesting conundrum in some sense, right? Because when we go and have that conversation with the folks who are making the decisions, we ask them a question and we say, would you rather be able to save money infrastructure and are on developer productivity? They want to do both of course, right? But the money that they save on developer productivity as well as obviously the great efficiencies that they get, pay out for them for long periods of time, right? And so obviously the value proposition is very compelling. Yeah, so Red Hat is working closely with the OpenStack community. That's right. And since you also have OpenShift, I'm wondering if you have any commentary on what's happening in OpenStack with Sollum being announced and it's still early days, but what's your take on the discussion today? You know, it's great, just took us 10 minutes to get to that point. I was expecting to get there faster, but that's probably because I've been talking a lot. So we're believers in community. We always have been, right? When OpenStack first started, right? I'll be the first to say, you know, we weren't the first ones in, right? As soon as a great governance model got put in place, right? We got engaged, we got involved, right? And of course Red Hat is now the number one contributor to that. Will it always stay that way? You know, it's not clear, but we have been for the last two releases, right? So both Folsom and Havana. We're also seeing a family interest in OpenStack in a variety of different areas, right? You know, of course there's compute and storage and networking, right? But there's other projects that are going on around it, right? One of those areas has been application lifecycle management, or someone calls that platform as a service, right? Or some combination of the two. If there's interest in value being created for users of OpenStack in that area, and we're participants in OpenStack, we're great believers in the future and the possibilities that that has, we're happy to contribute in the same way that we contribute to OpenStack, right? So from our perspective, we're happy to support that. We also have a partnership, for example, with Docker that's working on container portability, right? And we're going to support that through OpenShift as well as work on OpenStack. So from our perspective, I think there's a lot of goodness if that ends up creating value for the users. So we're in an environment which goes very pro-Amazon, the developers here, obviously AWS friendly, but so at lunch, you heard a couple of pejoratives around OpenStack, FrankenStack, BrokenStack. So that's their heralds of things, all a good fun. But Jerry Chen was on yesterday, VC at Greylock, and he made the point, he just came back from Hong Kong. He said, well, you know, what'd you think? What'd you take? He said, well, here's my bumper sticker on the whole thing. OpenStack is really trying to be all things to all people, you know, open it up to the community and really trying to, as an ambitious plan. Amazon's trying to be one thing to all people. And I thought that was kind of a fair assessment. I mean, OpenStack really is about the community and about bringing in all these different perspectives, but it makes it harder. Amazon's about, here's the API, here's the data center, here's the way you get to the data center through this API. That's it. So I wonder if you could comment on some of those statements. What's your take? It's a great point, right? But let me respectfully provide a different opinion to this. I'm not sure, I agree with the notion that Amazon's trying to be only one thing, right? If you notice the number of areas that Amazon and Amazon web services gone into, they're phenomenal, right? And I don't think that's a bad thing, right? They're providing great value we heard yesterday from Werner, yesterday from Andy, talking about the new areas that they're going into, right? In the last conference, they went into data warehousing, right? This time, they're talking about going into streaming and so on. In many ways, right? What OpenStack doing is also trying to provide the choice. But for those customers, those service providers, organizations that have the capability to work in an environment where they can deal with the complexity of setting this up, but there's no requirement in OpenStack that everyone's got to do every one of the things that OpenStack works on, right? So there's some choice being provided. So now you have choice, right? That AWS providing, when you use AWS, you don't necessarily need to use all their services. But of course, they're trying to create value so that you use multiple services. I think the same holds true for OpenStack. So from my perspective, I think having the choice in the marketplace is a great thing, right? If it ends up driving down prices, which Amazon does on a regular basis, and I think OpenStack will do the same. Yeah, well, and I would agree. Having choice is a great thing. We love OpenStack. We did the OpenStack summit up in Oregon, we had the cube there. In your opinion, will an OpenStack cloud developed by company A and an OpenStack cloud developed by company B be interoperable? I mean, is that the objective? Will that happen? That's a great question. And I think it's still too early to say, right? My gut tells me that if someone's using OpenStack or a flavor OpenStack from one provider and someone's using one from the other, they want there to be some amount of interoperability between the two. How that will play out, right? Whether that's going to be a standardized testing suite. I mean, you know, in Java, we had that with Java and someone tests against a framework, right? They could drive a framework. There could be a set of certifications that could happen against one. We've seen that happen in Linux as well, right? You know, people make sure they do that. In many cases, you know, people want the compatibility, the hypervisor level, right? Maybe that's the way to do it. Docker is a project, right? That's trying to contain a workload portability, right? Maybe that's the way to do it, right? So I think there's a lot of choices, right? And we'll see what the community decides and work with. You guys had ahead of re-invent, you made some announcements. You see Amazon cutting prices all the time. Looks like you're drafting off that similar philosophy. You guys cut prices substantially in your offering, right? Half, is that right? Yes, 50%. Yeah, okay. So do you see that kind of cadence going forward? Being able to sort of cut prices the same way Amazon cut prices? Obviously in a different business, but what's the motivation there? Look, you know, for a second, let's just step outside of this table and go the other side, right? It's a fantastic time to be a technology user today, right? I mean, everyone's cutting prices. Everyone wants your business. They want to support a multiple variety of languages and frameworks and tools and give you everything you wanted in a consistent manner, in a secure manner, everything, right? So it's a good thing. The perspective that we have is if you're working in cloud scale, right? Presumably as a provider, you're going to create some efficiencies. If you're not, you're probably not doing something right, right? If you truly are creating those efficiencies, right? Then it's only fair to pass on the value to some of the folks who helped create, right? Amazon talks about this all the time, this virtuous circle that gets set up, right? Yeah, the flywheel. More users ride the flywheel and then as the flywheel goes faster, more and more people get involved, greater value is created and then you should share the value. We're believers in that philosophy, right? And we want to adopt it and take it as far as we can. Last question we've been asking a number of our guests and so I'm going to ask you about, if you had to put a bumper sticker on the Amazon re-invent 2013, just sort of a short phrase to summarize what's been going on here. What's your bumper sticker as to what you saw in re-invent 2013? So I got to say, one of the things that I always enjoy coming to the AWS show for re-invent, is the kinds of startups that start with Amazon and stay with them and then achieve the kind of scale that they do, right? And we saw the example of Airbnb. I had no idea Dropcam was responsible for the greatest amount of inbound video traffic more than YouTube, right? It's unbelievable, right? And so the fact that you can have those ideas, I think it was a Dropcam that said, or maybe it was Airbnb, that their operations team was a group of five people, right? I think Pinterest came the last time and had a similar story. There's 20 of us running one of the most popular websites in the United States, at least. Having and hearing those kinds of stories, right? It's truly great, right? Because it also empowers the users to believe that cloud can provide true value. It excites us to work in partnership with Amazon as well as provide other alternatives, right? They can go and deliver the same, right? So I think it's goodness all the way. Changing the industries, fundamentally changing the industries, right? Vishesh Bhudani, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate your time and good luck. All right, great. Thanks for having me. Okay, you're welcome. I'll keep it right there, everybody. We'll be right back. This is theCUBE, we're live from Las Vegas at Reinvent 2013. We'll be right back.