 No, no jokes about the Toronto Blue Jays. It's about 5'10", and they tell me in this country, things start on time. Where I'm from, we usually start about 10 minutes late, but we're going to start on time. It's 5'10", and you're in the Analyst Q&A Analyst session. My name is Sean Michael Kerner. Hopefully you're not here to see me. You're here to see our panelists, but I'm a senior editor at eWeek. I also manage a small site called Linux today. I've been writing about open stacks since day one. But that's enough about me. I'm going to have everybody on the panel just introduce themselves. Just a quick two second introduction and tell us what you cover. And then we'll just jump into, I'll just jump into a bunch of questions from there. The session goes till 5.50, and I will break at 5.30. And then again at 5.40 for questions. So if you have questions, you can hold on to them until then or just raise your hand. And then there are mics in the middle. So let's start closest to me, Al, introduce yourself. Hi, good afternoon. My name is Al Sidalski. I'm a research vice president with 4.51 Research based in New York. And I have a responsibility for something called Voice of the Service Rider. And I've been covering open stacks for, I've been to all the open stacks since the Grizzly release and even had some experience with it prior to that. Lauren Nelson from Forrester Research, a principal analyst. So I lead up our private cloud coverage. And I've been at the open stack summits since the Essex release. Chris Drake with Global Data, principal analyst covering data center technologies. What were they focused on private and hybrid cloud solutions, increasingly looking at other things like edge computing and blockchain as well. My first summit was Barcelona, so that makes it my fifth open stack summit based in London. Most of our team members are US based. We used to be called Current Analysis. So that's still a bit of the global data brand was introduced last year. Hi, I'm Gary Chen from IDC. I cover software defined compute. So I look at things like virtualization containers and open stack. In terms of open stack summits, I don't know what number it is, but my first one was the one in San Francisco. I don't remember what release Essex. Yeah, so it's been a long time. I've been to everyone since then. And the first one I saw you at Gary was, I think, Portland, where we did a panel together that I was at. And then after that, I did a panel, I think, with you, Lauren, in Atlanta, probably. So we've all done one or two of these things, which is great. To start, the only news, the interesting news today, was that they're going to rebrand this summit as the open infrastructure summit. So just starting with you, Gary, when you think of open infrastructure, is that a term or a concept that resonates with you as something that's viable and legitimate? Or is it just window dressing, as it were? I mean, I think the term is fine. I mean, I think it's one of those things that people kind of intuitively understand. Like when you say open infrastructure, and you look at all these projects and what's happening in open source, I think it's probably harder, like, to nail it down in terms of paper. Like, if you wanted to come up with a comment, what's open infrastructure? And probably people have maybe slightly different interpretations of it. But, you know, as a, I guess as a marketing and branding thing, I think that term works, you know, if you want to turn it into like an IT strategy, I think maybe that's, you know, probably a little bit more vague. Yeah, I think it makes sense that probably shouldn't have come as too much of a surprise. And it's in line with the broader focus on furthering integrations between the OpenStack platform and other open source projects. The focus on these other projects and sitting alongside the sort of core OpenStack project. So I think, yeah, a rebranding move. I think the focus will be a need to think about how to differentiate and how to, or how to kind of associate the open infrastructure concept with the wider audience and whether the aim is to actually reach out to a wider audience. So, you know, there are questions that I think need to be asked going forward. Yeah, I think it's a bit of a marketing term. In the early days, Richard Stallman used to talk about the free software movement and talk about kind of the purest movement of open source and what it could be. And open infrastructure is a little bit more of a corporate enterprise phrase where you're talking about principles of leveraging open source software for this freedom of choice, similar to the way you use free, not from a cost perspective, but freedom of speech type perspective of how do you have choice? How do you be able to adjust software for your own purposes with also the ability to integrate with what you'd like? And OpenStack for quite some time has been working on how do we play nice with others and get others to believe that we play nice with them. And even since the Paris Summit, we saw early sessions that we're talking about use of containers on OpenStack. And since then, we've seen almost every single summit having more and more sessions about how it integrates with other open source technology. And so I think this is one step further in trying to communicate that OpenStack is not just going to be supporting OpenStack projects and ecosystems, but looking at itself in the context of this broader open source world. But I think there's a lot of answers, questions to be answered from the OpenStack group of what does this mean for an enterprise audience, for those that already use OpenStack today, and also to try and make it more applicable to be the de facto approach to private cloud for enterprises. Because today I think it's a pretty small group of organizations that consider and have that approach in following of how they target private cloud issues. Yeah, I would not to just to add to it, I would say it was probably a necessary move for the OpenStack Foundation to be something more than just OpenStack, because OpenStack was compute and storage and networking and a couple of ancillary things. And in order to stay relevant in machine learning and edge computing and others, they needed to brand themselves something bigger than just OpenStack. So Open Infrastructure and what Lauren was saying about playing nice in the with Kubernetes and with other technologies, shows an embrace of other open source communities. Yeah, one thing is, I mean, I think Open Infrastructure is great and working with other open source projects. But I mean, one point is like, should that be a limiting factor? I mean, what if something is an open source and what customers are using it? You know, it could be a public cloud, it could be other technology. In the real world, people use things that aren't open. So should that, you know, should that stop OpenStack from reaching out and doing more with, you know, some of those other things that might not be open? Yeah, that's actually an interesting conversation because the Open Infrastructure Summit, and I know Lauren you mentioned Richard Stallman, RMS who believes in this as a religion. There's no word open source in there. There's no defining boundaries other than the word open. And I don't think calling the summit, the closed infrastructure summit would have worked very well. For those of you that might be thinking about AWS re-invent in two weeks, I don't know if we should call that the closed infrastructure summit, but we'll leave that, leave that alone. And then just going the other way, in terms of direction for OpenStack, because I know everyone here has mentioned that there's things that need to change, what are your general views? I'll start with you on the current state of OpenStack, whether you see it growing, declining, or otherwise. And I know, you know, all of your various analyst firms, you do different types of market sizing, but what's the general direction that you see at this point in 2018? Yeah, so it's something I could give you a number around. We do something called the OpenStack Market Monitor. So we have bottoms up estimates from a number of folks that either are a distributor, somebody doing private cloud, public cloud, and we expect all of those combined to be about a $5 billion industry by 2020. But if you look at the growth rate, the growth rate, you know, each individual one may have different, but in aggregate it's about 24% growth rate through 2022. But if you think about it, that growth rate is roughly about half of what AWS's growth rate is on its own. So even if it grows at the expected rate, it's still growing a lot slower than AWS. But at this point, I don't think anybody expects OpenStack to be a world beater compared to some of the hyperscalers. It has its role and it's growing. Yeah, what are you seeing, Lauren? Yeah, so the OpenStack user survey just came out and one of the things that came out was that 48% of those that took the open source user survey or using OpenStack are in APAC. And I think 24%, 25% in Europe, 24% in the US. So roughly you're looking at one fourth, one fourth, and one half. So if you want to answer the question of do most enterprises today in North America and Europe have private clouds based on OpenStack, the answer is no. Does that mean it's not legitimate? Does that mean it's not growing? No. A lot of organizations, they've started to look at their private cloud strategy is one of three things either we're going to make it really easy to converge, type or converge, and try and focus on what sits above that, do total replacement. Those looking at classic journey to cloud but semi more developer focus, generally on a VMware based private cloud. And those looking at open source, cost affordable private cloud at scale where their biggest cost is not technical skill or cost of change in their organization. Their biggest cost is software licensing and looking at solutions that help them fulfill that. So I think it's a tiny of a tough question to say. Is it growing? Is it doing successful? I think it's been really successfully in certain audiences, certain verticals, and among those with high technical acumen. And I think it's struggling at having applicability and enterprises where that's not the case. I agree with you and I'll just say one word is in the beginning I thought probably like others that the rack space public cloud would be a challenger. And apologies to anyone that works for rack space in the audience. That didn't quite work. What's your view? It's interesting the weeks leading up to this summit, there were a number of people asked me a question, you're going to the open stack summit, hasn't open stack run out of steam? And these were analysts that don't come along to the summit. So they may be not so familiar with the way that the focus has evolved. But I responded by saying that it does depend on who you ask. And I think it is important to consider these sort of geographical differences, as Lauren's already pointed out. But also if you speak to vendors, there does seem to be a sort of backpedaling in terms among some vendors who are putting less emphasis. They have an open stack offering, an open stack distribution still, but their focus is on and their priority is on other cloud solutions. And it may be that following the early hype that gets discussed with reference to open stack, we've seen a bit of a rationalization within the industry and the emergence of a much smaller number of strong players in this sector. And they will tell you that they're seeing growth. And in terms of actual customer numbers, I agree that that's probably more like a slow and steady increase. I think that we can, if you're talking about growth, there are different ways of looking at growth. And I think that beyond actual customer numbers, and even beyond looking at the attendees at a summit like this, we're seeing, you can define growth in terms of the expansion of existing open stack footprints. I mean, this morning, some of the speakers from Deutsche Telekom and OVH talked about how they're expanding their existing footprints. And also how the way in which existing users are engaging with more open stack projects. So there's a sort of deepening of engagement amongst existing customers. So different ways of understanding growth. I think it's probably fair to say that open stack is in a state of transition. You know, it's coming out of that sort of earlier hype cycle. And it's starting to move towards its sort of future model, which, you know, we're here to discuss at the moment this event. Yeah, I've seen the same thing. I mean, it's varied, right? I mean, certainly, I think overall, yes, the growth rate has slowed. Not to say open stack still isn't growing. But I think where we've seen the biggest declines in our research is really in the enterprise, private cloud. I think the pipeline, we've seen that noticeably shrink over the past year or two. But, you know, it's still doing really well in areas like telco and NFV. And, you know, the US is probably right now the worst market for open stack. I think China's doing China's probably the fastest growth right now for open stack. And then in Europe is doing okay. But I think going forward, I mean, I think, you know, there's a bunch of things that kind of, you know, kind of change the trajectory of the stack. I mean, one is sort of where cloud is today, where you have the top three providers and everyone else. And that gap is growing bigger. And the top three are not using open stack. And the second is really containers where a lot of the Kubernetes took all the way a lot of the orchestration value. And, you know, open stack could still be great for containers, right? But it's, I think it's a different story. It's probably a harder story to tell why, you know, open stack is a great infrastructure for containers. So I think that's sort of kind of the headwinds that we've seen open stack kind of fighting against at the moment. That's interesting. And Gary, you just mentioned that you're seeing declines in enterprise, private cloud. And just a question for everybody, we'll start with you, Gary. What is the demand for enterprise, private cloud? There are some vendors that will tell me private cloud is really just a euphemism for VMware. And then everybody just bursts out to one of the three big providers. And that's it. Or is there really still a use case among, you know, Fortune 500 or Fortune 1000 enterprises for private cloud, whether it's open stack or otherwise? Yeah. I mean, I think private cloud is one of those things, especially for an analyst, right, when you get starting at a taxonomy, right? What do you, how do you define a private cloud, right? Because a lot of customers define private cloud as some installation of VMware of varying, you know, sophistications. And people probably have different, you know, definitions of that. And maybe at the end of it, it doesn't really matter, right? I mean, if they say it's a cloud that fulfills whatever need that they have for, you know, getting things done quickly, okay, you know, it's maybe a private cloud for them. But, you know, I mean, I think the market is still good for private cloud and concept and the people still have on premises and they're certainly modernizing that. I think it looks a lot different now. People are starting to think of, you know, Kubernetes and containers as, you know, what their private cloud might look like and what's underneath that may not be open stack, right? So, I mean, I think that's sort of the difficult thing is, you know, I think a lot of what's, you know, I guess default in containers is, you know, hey, it runs on any infrastructure, right? So, it can run on sophisticated infrastructure and not so sophisticated infrastructure. It can run on, you know, just basically raw virtualization. So, you know, I think that makes people think, you know, can I, you know, they, the reality is they have VMware. Do I just keep that and just put containers on top of that? You know, what motivation would I have to move to open stack if I want to do containers? You know, it might be better. Is it that much better, you know, versus the amount of work and effort I have to put in that? So, yeah, so I think private cloud is still a market, but I think it's rapidly changing of what the requirements for that cloud is, and it's not so much VM based anymore. Great. Are you seeing similar things on your analyst group, Chris? Yeah, I mean, I think there, you know, were, you know, I think with the, I think there's a lot of focus on the move towards hybrid cloud adoption. I think that's, that implies the existence of a private cloud in some shape or form. And I think there are different, you know, there was a while where analysts were predicting the sort of steady decline of private clouds and, you know, this sort of dramatic shift towards the use of public cloud services. I think that's certainly leveled off. And again, it depends on, you know, particular regions, the regional dynamics. And I think there are reasons why some enterprises need to keep workloads within a private cloud environment. It doesn't actually have to be an on-prem environment, but there are, you know, there are compliance pressures, there are security reasons, there are performance reasons that require enterprises to continue maintaining a private cloud. I think that the attention that the private cloud solutions is getting from the big public cloud providers shows that they also recognize that there's not going to be, you know, it's not all going to be a shift to the public cloud. I mean, whether it's AWS, Microsoft, IBM, Google, Oracle, we're seeing this, you know, very interesting. And just in the last few months, it seems every other day there is a new hybrid cloud announcement emerging. There's one Cisco yesterday, and I was at the Cisco AWS. So, yeah, I think that that is also showing that that recognition that hybrid cloud, the private cloud isn't going to disappear. But, you know, there are many different forms of private cloud, clearly. Yeah, I completely agree. And I'll just say that, you know, talking about taxonomies, the AWS, Kubernetes, Cisco thing, they're now calling that multi-cloud. VMware used to call it vCloud Air, hybrid, they're, you've got rid of the word hybrid, now they just use multi-cloud instead, but it keeps changing. What are you seeing, Lauren? I hate both of those terms. I recently did a report talking about how they're both equally useless terms. NIST actually defines hybrid as being able to burst from one in cloud environment to the other. It's actually one of the only NIST definitions that we don't follow. And anytime somebody says that they're the leader in hybrid cloud, I roll my eyes a little bit. A lot of companies, when they think about cloud, they're starting to come down off of the hype cycles and away from the shiny objects and thinking about what is the context of my organization? Do I need to look at the investments I have? Is there a certain moment in time when I have a moment of change where I need to do something radically differently? Whether that's a refresh cycle, whether that's executive change, whether that's some time or period when the economics drastically change or in favor of you doing something radically different. And that's when we've seen the more aggressive shifts towards public cloud. Some industries feel that pressure more than others, some companies feel that pressure more than others. And there's certainly applications migrating to the cloud. But for a lot of companies, the pace of change is not tolerable to do something so quickly. And oftentimes when they are migrating or outsourcing drastically, they're looking at something more similar to their internal environment. They're looking at a VMware-based, hosted private cloud environment in the interim. They're trying to shut down their data center before they actually think about true transformation. Migrating an app from an on-prem environment to a public cloud is not easy. I think we all know the challenges there in terms of architectural changes and looking at an app that's built to vertically scale in a horizontally-scaling environment. But I think when we think about private cloud as a context, I agree with Gary on the fact that that line is shifting. People care less about whether it's technically a private cloud or not. I think the question of is if that's good enough for that organization, what's the rate of maturity needed for their end goal? And for some, that's a small environment within their data center that's called the private cloud. For others, it's about slow maturity of that internal environment. I think a lot of companies are starting to come back off of that and realizing they've over-invested in some cases in private cloud on trying to mature it faster than it needs to or that their people or process was able to handle. And organizations that are going most aggressively at private cloud are those that actually should be building a private cloud and want to be in the data center business. And they've been making the most strides in this space because they realize it's a fundamental change for them at their modern business, at digitally transforming that data center faster. For a lot of organizations that's not the goal, it's about getting their people moving faster. It's about not changing too many things at once. It's about just trying to get some results at the end of the day rather than biting off too much so that they can chew. Yeah, I would just to add is the one company that's not talking about hybrid cloud or multi-cloud is AWS. And that's because they expect all the workloads to end up there. So the ones that are talking about hybrid and multi are the ones that are trying to at least get a piece of that business. So something's going to be rooted on-prem or in a hosted environment and leverage AWS. Even Microsoft, their answer is their on-premise Azure with their public Azure. So I think most people that are talking about hybrid are trying to win some of that business that may be going to one of the hyperscalers. Fun fact, if AWS continues to grow at the rate it's growing, it's going to be bigger in terms of revenue than Amazon.com as far as the company is concerned over the next 10 years. But I think the research that we do with our voice of the enterprise actually shows that that road to hybrid is actually private. Meaning that their hybrid scenario requires some sort of private deployment that leverages the public cloud for either a piece of the application functionality or to do bursting or things like that. But that hybrid component is going to be private and we expect private cloud to grow especially within that open stack market monitor, the service providers, the distros, the private part is growing a lot faster than the public part for sure. Yeah, don't discreet. They'll expect that AWS reinventing two weeks, some interesting private, hybrid, multi-cloud news, whatever we want to call it. There's entire industries that are holding their breath waiting to find out if they're going to be displaced by AWS reinventment. They'll find out at the 10-minute mark in Werner's keynote and then again at the 16-minute mark when he says something different and that's how it goes. Just a quick time check, it's 535, we've got about 15 minutes left. If anybody wanted to ask a question we've got mics on the side, otherwise I've got a few more. We've got one question, hooray. We've got two questions, that's great. Just on my right and then the left first. Go ahead, sir. Good. It should be on. Thank you very much for the sessions and finally you touched the hybrid cloud side. Actually, Stummer's, who is looking for private cloud solution these days, they embraced with Microsoft technology like a source stack. The simple reason is that they wanted to have a seamless data flow which needed to be powered after a couple of years, like when they think about having their data moving into public cloud for DRSS service or backup SS service. The implementation of private cloud in Microsoft Azure, for example, this is getting more and more popular because of the support capabilities and all that. So whether this one will be a threat for open stack based private clouds? So the question is if any of the panelists here think... I think the gentleman on the right side, you already, yes, you already talked about this right, the hybrid cloud like Microsoft Azure and all that. So maybe you are the right person to do that. Like, I mean, I'm coming from an area background, a principle vendor, so the second question will be... I mean, I will put the second question later. I think a simple answer is yes, open stack is a competitor to Microsoft's Azure and Azure Stack for sure. If you look at service providers that are partnering for hybrid cloud scenarios, there's a lot more that are partnering with Microsoft and AWS and Google and even Oracle. They're not partnering nearly as... Probably by large percentages, they're not partnering with open stack based public cloud providers, but open stack has a role and it's mainly used for private cloud, but for hybrid it has a piece, but it's going to partner with the hyperscalers for the most part, which are not open stack based. So in the morning, in the keynote presentation, I don't remember who showed that slide talking about 75 data centers, I mean, not data centers, 75 public clouds based on open stack. So if a customer is going for a private cloud solution based on open stack, will they be able to move their data like non-critical data for backup as a service or DRSS service to any of these kinds of public clouds, which is built on open stack because open stack is very powerful in public, private and hybrid, plus it can be in virtual environment, it can be in physical environment and in container environment. So the power is there, so can it offer today the same thing what Microsoft is targeting, except the support services? Yeah, that's 75 number, it was 75, I believe it was 75 data centers that are bind across all the public cloud providers. And I think a third of them were maybe OVH. I think the answer technically is yes, but whether all of those public cloud providers are configured the same way is a different question, where there's only one AWS, but not all open stack public clouds are built the same way, but I'll let others. Yeah, I'll just chime in just for a quarter second. There's something called the open stack federation where you do it through Keystone, and if they have the same directory layer, then you can federate. Yeah, go ahead, Lauren, and then if we get the second question after and thank you for your question, sir. I'm just going to add one little tiny bit on that, so you're specifically asking about the DR and backup scenario for this, and I think Microsoft... Not only that, that is only one of the things, because see, I will make it generalized. It is called seamless data flow from private cloud to public cloud. Yeah, so what you're talking about is the first thing... Or it's not only DR. So what you're talking about is like the original pitch of open stack was that it would be able to do this, that it would be able to have consistency for public and private, and give you the seamless flow between those two worlds, and vendors that meet and have certified against core projects, you would theoretically be able to do that. And for the most part, that's done on the infrastructure perspective today, and not on the data side of portability for those applications. Now, can you do it for a use case like DR and backup? That is something that's probably very achievable. When you look at something like Microsoft Azure Stack, that is typically, well, from everything I've heard is incredibly expensive stack, that is very difficult to do unless there's a very specific region why you need capacity at the edge. And so although it's a popular scenario, very rarely is it used for something like DR or backup. But I mean, there's a kind of drawing line. Theoretically, yes. Yeah, you said the right thing, but still customers are going for that. Like, 43 VMs required for a private cloud scenario in Microsoft Azure, but still, customer is going for that. That is a point. Anyway, I'll come to the second question. Thank you. You've had the mic for a little while. I appreciate your time, but if we could move on to the next question, and then we'll come back to you, just so that everyone get the chance to ask. But thank you. Go ahead, sir. Thank you. Yeah, with the recent acquisition IBM have made for Red Hat, and of course, the interest in OpenShift. What are your thoughts regarding this move that has been made for IBM to become more in the mix, should we say, with BlueMix? That's a great question. Thank you for asking that. That would have been my last question. So you saved that from me. Go ahead. And my only comment on that is six months ago, IBM kind of moved away from OpenStack. So IBM Cloud Private is not OpenStack at all, but I'll let all the analysts chime in. Thank you. I'm sure we all have a comment, but somebody will start. Sure. Yeah. I mean, IBM and Red Hat, I mean, Red Hat was really known for being open source, right? I mean, IBM probably didn't get a lot of credit for some of the open source things that it does a lot of customers. I think they don't know that side of IBM, but I mean, they're two of the largest contributors to open source, including OpenStack. So I think however that deal works out is going to have a big impact on open source in general. So I think it's early to tell, but I mean, I think IBM's aware of some of the issues with Red Hat and how things it needs to do to keep that momentum going in terms of keeping it separate and independent and things like that. I think whether IBM will really pump more energy into Red Hat's OpenStack business is to be terminated. I mean, they made a go of it and they pulled out of that market. You know, underneath things like OpenShift or underneath Cloud Foundry, it could play a role. I don't think it'll play a kind of front and center role. I think it'll play a supporting role. They'll use it where it makes sense, but I think less and less kind of OpenStack is kind of like a standalone product. I think a lot of it's moving to these container or dev pass type platforms and OpenStack will be something that's dragged along with it. So I don't think it won't be a valuable asset. I don't know if it'll be like something they're going to lead with. Yeah. I think IBM's statement at the moment is they're going to be very hands-off with Red Hat. Red Hat actually had an analyst this past Thursday. Gary and I were both there. Were you there too, Chris? I was the one in London. You were the one in London. And they were basically said we're going to remain a wholly owned subsidiary and continue down our path. And they're going to, for now, operate as usual. I don't think IBM bought Red Hat for its products or its IP because it's built on open source software. It bought a culture. It didn't buy customers because IBM's strategic accounts are like, they think they said like 2,000 strategic accounts and Red Hat's strategic accounts was like 40. So I think there's an opportunity to get Red Hat more embedded with IBM customers was a big part of it. Yeah. It's the one thing that they're remaining tight-lipped about at all of these events, including today and the analyst events that they've had in the last couple of weeks that they're more interested to hear what we think about it rather than actually give away anything about what it might mean. They have said that they aim to safeguard and preserve Red Hat's independence. But what does that mean? It almost to not look for ways of leveraging the new relationship, leveraging product synergies. It raises questions about why they've acquired Red Hat in the first place. Maybe there are lessons to be learned from Dell EMC VMware where VMware's independence has been preserved, but there have been definite moves to leverage synergies. For now, Dell EMC remains committed to some competing offerings Will that happen? Will that continue over the long term? Not so sure. The questions about IBM, they frame the announcement in terms of hybrid cloud and this is going to position IBM as the leading number one hybrid cloud provider. Not quite sure why they chose to use that language when Red Hat is, I guess with OpenShift is growing certainly, but they're more commonly associated with their strengths in private cloud. There are overlaps as well, which will need to be addressed. Again, it wouldn't make sense to continue having those. Great. Go ahead, Lauren. Then we have five minutes left, then we've got one last question after. Sure. A couple quick things. One, yes, they won't talk about it yet. We won't know anything for a year. Some fun things that I like to think about. I love doing the Dell EMC analogy in terms of keeping it as a separate entity. It brings a big question for large technical tech companies that have kind of are past their time in terms of brand sexiness to see what do they do to try and win that peel back. IBM for a long time has had an acquisition strategy where they will acquire new companies and then integrate them. That has not been particularly successful. What do they have to do to make it successful? We'll truly keep it separate and really mean it. A lot of Red Hat folks are former IBMers that had left IBM because they felt it wasn't a place they could really innovate. How do you keep that culture? How do you preserve that brand? IBM plays in a ton of different markets. I think Forrester has scored them the last two years in over 100 evaluations and they only overlap with Red Hat in five. There's not a ton of overlapping products. There are certainly some. Interestingly enough, when you look at how they fared in our evaluations versus Red Hat, IBM actually did better in the actual product evaluation. I couldn't agree more that it's not product adoption. It's the brand association, the culture, and the ability to monetize the open source world where they think it's going to be core for success in the private cloud side. Go ahead, sir. You've got 30 seconds to ask your questions. Lightning round. I'll be playing a little bit of devil advocate here. Both vendors and customers are looking at the analysts to provide the recommendation, you know, where they should invest their money, where they should focus their product development. My question to you is what would be the message to this audience? Why open infrastructure matters? The reason I'm asking it is if you look at what you said about the market, the growth is slowing down in the open stack and so on. The ecosystem looks very different. The public cloud gorillas are fighting each other. You know, vendors like VMware and Microsoft are fighting for legitimacy in the private cloud. And that all benefits the enterprise users because, you know, they can play them against the other. They have lots of options. So I would say to this user that both to the vendors, let's say hybrid vendors, infrastructure vendors, it makes sense to invest in product development in open infrastructure. I would you say the enterprise users or user who purchase the services, I would matter to purchase open infrastructure solutions. Thank you sir. That's a great closing question. So just as a closing remarks, if everyone can just give a minute or so, which I know is tough, just a response. Why open infrastructure matters as per the question. Go ahead. We'll start with El. Okay. I think it matters to any enterprise or any vendor that's looking to monetize everything that's not going to a proprietary platform. And I think what they need to do is work together. So I think a lot of right now what's happening within the open source community is, yeah, they have these various communities. But when it comes down to the hardware vendors, they're all competitors. You know, we wrote a report about the, you know, the tragedy of the commons versus the cornucopia of the commons and as it applies to open source. And if you don't all work together, you know, that commons is going to fail. So I think they all need to figure out how to work together. And that's what the open stack foundation and others that have these open source communities and coming together as something called open infrastructure need to do. But they currently are all for profit businesses that, you know, at the end of the day, are competitors as well. So it's a tough row to hoe to continue that commons theme there. I don't know what advice I particularly give. For a lot of folks, open infrastructure is very hard. For those doing open infrastructure to its extremes, they're trying to reduce software licensing costs. That's part of the initiative. And so for a lot of vendors playing in this space, it's a tough market to be in because they're going to expect very scalable costs or costs for licenses that scale. And so it makes it very difficult for them to make less profit at the expense of the overall standard being successful. It also makes it difficult when large hyperscalers like Google is donating Kubernetes and TensorFlow to try and establish standards on the private cloud side and trying to figure out how do you still try and monetize or look at brand and open source compared to solutions like that. So I think it's a challenge. I think the next big foray that folks are looking at is the services space. How do you have services that work cross solutions that actually allow you to have flexibility and choice about deployment model for when it makes sense to move? Kind of the repatriation for very specific applications when the economics change. How do you give that type of flexibility in a way that's not too time intensive or cost intensive? So I'd say monetization is changing and prepare. I think the attractions of open source technology is open stack and open source. They still remain the sort of flexibility that it offers users to develop new services, the ability to avoid vendor lock-in. And I think that's one reason why some users will continue to be wary of the Azure stacks, for example, the cost savings as well and the opportunities that it offers to actually participate in community forums to help shape the evolution of the technology as well. Certainly having said that the challenges, the issues associated with open source, the complexity and the perceived complexity, and I think that going forward, I think one of the main focus areas does need to be on integration and promoting better integration between different open source technologies. Great. We're at the end of time, but go ahead, Gary. I think at the end of the day, customers spend money on solutions. I think all things being equal, open infrastructure is great if it's got cost or lock-in benefits, but it's also not really black and white either. There's a lot of things that are sort of in the middle and it really depends on who brings it to market and what form. There's things that have bits of proprietary code. You need to really make it run well. There's different models of open source. You can build a really closed lock-in service based on open source, but as a cloud service, it doesn't really matter what it uses. I think at the end of the day, what we're seeing is a lot of the innovation in things like cloud and containers are coming from open source. I think people are really coming because of that cutting edge technology. They're consuming it in different ways. Some of it is more open and flexible and portable than others, but I think that's probably the attraction is right now that the open source is really taking a leadership position in new innovation, where I think in the past they were more like, let's make an open version of something that already existed, and now they're really kind of creating new technology. Great. Completely great. Thanks everyone for coming to our session today. We're at the end of time, and if you could all help me thank our panelists. Appreciate it, and thanks again.