 Everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante. I'm with Wikibon.org, and this is theCUBE. SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage of Dell World 2012. We're here down in Austin. We've been covering this event wall-to-wall. We had Michael Dell on yesterday, number of leading executives, and you know, when we come to events like this, we talk about solutions, we talk about the hardware, we talk about the software, we talk about the products, but where the rubber meets the road in this industry and has for decades is the developer community. And we're here with Barton George and Dave Coté of Dell. We're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about those trends. We're going to talk about DevOps and all the action that's going on there. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much for having us. So you guys are very active in the developer space. You've got, we're going to talk about Project Sputnik, which is this new thing you guys have going on. So why don't you talk about your general approach to developers and what's going on here at Dell World, and then we'll get into it. Yeah, so the way we got into this is that my day job is the head of the web vertical. So basically we're focusing on those people from the startups in the dorm room, all the way up to the Googles and the Facebooks. And how do we better understand and serve them as customers? As we started digging in, and Coté helped out quite a bit with this, is we realized, of course, as you say, rubber meets the road. It's the developers specifically in this community. You can't go anywhere. You can't do anything without the developer. So what we did was we started looking at solutions that we could create that would target these developers specifically. And what we came up with was Project Sputnik, which is this whole idea of taking an XPS 13 laptop, which is our thin ultrabook, putting Ubuntu on it, the OS of choice of most developers, and then connecting it to the cloud. And so that was the basic concept behind that. Okay, so where are you at with Sputnik? Is it something that you just recently launched? Yeah, it came out nine days ago, basically, the 29th. And I think the thing that's really exciting about this is it started its life as a Skunkworks project within Dell. So one of the things that we've been trying to do is Coté, along with a couple other folks within the company, has set up an internal innovation incubation program. So basically, they're acting like a little angel fund within Dell, saying, hey guys, there's probably a lot of people within Dell who have ideas locked up in their heads that probably wouldn't make it through the normal processes. So if we get those people to come to us and pitch them, we'll pick the ideas that we think are the ones that are most likely to succeed and then back those. And so Sputnik, which is what I pitch, was the first one. And so this was back in March 15th. It was basically slideware, and we got the go ahead. We announced the project, as a project, the Ubuntu Developer Summit on the 7th of May. We then announced, two months later, a beta program. We got 6,000 applications from people around the world who want to be part of this beta program. And that was what really pushed us over the edge and said, you know what, this is realistic for a true product. And so we then set the wheels in motion, announced it at OSCON, and then pushed it from there, and then it finally came out as a real product here in the States on the 29th. So Dave, let's talk a little bit about DevOps. I mean, you've been blogging about this for years. I mean, you go back to Agile and Scrom, and now we're seeing this DevOps movement take off, and I think many, many more people are familiar with it now, but essentially, you're seeing examples where DevOps is being implemented as having, delivering massive improvements in developer productivity. So I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit, explain the concept for those who might not be familiar with it, and then we can talk a little bit more about Dell's angle. Sure, so like with all the emerging theories of software development, there's probably like five different definitions. But I like to focus on the reasons why people do it, and essentially the idea is in starting in the consumer space, and then more and more in the business enterprise space, like to be competitive, you want to get new features out and new software out as quickly as possible, right? Like you open up some app on your phone, and if it hasn't been updated in a while, you probably are bored with it, right? Like you want new features. And so a lot of where DevOps came from was this idea of how do we accelerate development so we can push more features out more frequently, like a couple times a week or maybe even more instead of waiting six, 12, 18 months. And so also in a cloud context, what becomes important is you have to worry a lot more about the infrastructure and the cloud platform you're deploying to, not just the software you're writing. So developers are forced to be a lot more system administrator minded. And so what DevOps is trying to do is fold together those two ideas so you can really accelerate the delivery of your software. And also, there's all sorts of phrases like, I think software defined stuff is like the new way of putting it, but basically you look at your infrastructure as programmable, right? You look at your infrastructure as just an extension of your application. And developers are a lot more interested in knowing how they can program that to get their software out quickly. And there's a whole bunch of tools and other stuff wrapped around it. But that's the general idea of DevOps. Yeah, so what do you see as the skills around that? I mean, is it DevOps or are you seeing ops dev and how are the successes occurring in the marketplace? What do you see as working? I think the main thing, like with a lot of shifts in development, you need a developer who's tolerant of being curious, if that makes sense, right? So, you know, they've got to be willing to get their hands dirty with system administrator stuff and kind of understand what's going on below their runtime level, outside of their area of comfort. Now, thankfully they don't have to like do that perfectly because there's a lot of tools like, one of the things we use in Spudnik is this open source tool Chef that seeks to automate a lot of things. And then there's Puppet and CF Engine and some other things. But what's been interesting to occur is a lot of those tools, most of those were written by system administrators who became very good programmers. And so it appeals to programmers a lot and it's a much more programmer friendly approach to doing system administration and doing system admin stuff. And so a developer just has to be willing to like, you know, use a man page every now and then understand like what's happening at the lower operating system level and just sort of expand beyond the sort of sandbox comfort that we like the dot net and Java error made us pretty comfortable with way back in the early 2000s. Yeah, so you guys are doing a lot in the OpenStack community. Everybody's now hopping on the bandwagon, right? I mean, my sense is a lot of companies are joining OpenStack because they don't want to get left out of the open conversation. I mean, you guys were there in the early days. What do you see is happening in OpenStack? Clearly a lot of developers are excited about it. You go to the OpenStack events and it's developers are saying, hey, this is the real deal. It's going to happen. I've actually said to a lot of CIOs it's not ready for prime time yet there's a lot of big companies behind it. What's your take on OpenStack and particularly in the context of the discussion we're having here today? Well, I think what we've done, it's not for the faint of heart quite yet. So I think you're correct in that assessment. The labor of love. But what we've done with Sputnik is we've taken it, as I said, as a client to cloud solution, the idea of being that OpenStack is where you're going to be deploying it to. Now you can also do it to Amazon. You can also, we're trying to get it so that it also works to our vCloud. But the primary target we're thinking of is OpenStack for it. And we think there's going to be a community around that to develop it. But I'll turn it over to Kote to talk a little bit more broadly about this as in his day job as the head of strategy for our cloud efforts here. He can give you his own thoughts there. Yeah, we actually have a group that's been bringing OpenStack to market for a while now. And the types of customers they have are what I would call sophisticated people. They're users and customers who know what they want and they're willing to put together the parts of OpenStack. But increasingly, we get a tremendous amount of interest on people coming to us and just saying they want to use OpenStack to run their private cloud. Or they're interested in the compatibility that OpenStack would promise between a private cloud and an open cloud. And so I think it is, if you think back to the Linux days, right? Like it is, the state of OpenStack is like the early days of Linux. Kind of like, I don't know, let's say 99, 2001 or so, right? And like today or was it yesterday? But sometime at Dell World here, we announced a very strong commitment to OpenStack. And I think increasingly, as you see more big commitments like that from the players. Again, to be analogous to the Linux world, you probably remember back when IBM and Oracle were like, yep, Linux is a big deal. And then that helped accelerate OpenStack work. And like you're saying, there's a tremendous amount of vendor interest and effort around OpenStack. But also a tremendous amount of people who really just want an open platform with a rich, vibrant community around it. And that's the sense that people get, is that of all the OpenCloud platforms you could choose, there's lots of stuff hanging around it. Yeah, well, every decade or so, we see this confluence of events. You mentioned IBM and Oracle. Not really teaming up, but sort of going in the same direction, frankly, against Microsoft. I mean, I remember Steve Mills said, we're going to spend a billion dollars on open source. Exactly. And it was a really effective way to compete. I mean, in a way, I look at OpenStack and I see Amazon charging into the enterprise and I see a lot of people saying, whoa, wait a minute, there's maybe a better way that's more open and something that we can participate in. Is that, do you think that's a fair assessment? Yeah, I think that the way I think about it is, there's, if we put out mainframes and AS 400s and those older platforms, there's basically two giant platforms at the moment. There's Linux and Microsoft, right? And those are big platforms for just generic IT. And I think increasing the way you'll see, and then VMware is sort of substrated around that as another, I don't know if it's a full platform or a half, but it's a thing you run IT on, it's very important. And I think as you see OpenStack emerge, it'll be whatever the count is, it'll be another platform over the next five or 10 years and things will just run on that platform. And that's what's exciting for us at Dell and all the other people who are interested in the industry is like, there's a whole new platform. And so it's kind of like a nice green field that you can go out there and bring your customers along with you and actually build that platform out to fit the needs that they have and also put a nice business around it. And so I think that's the opportunity we would have with OpenStack. You mentioned VMware. What do you make of the recent moves to spin out Cloud Foundry and all the cool kids have set up their own shop now under Pivotal. So it's sad. Pivotal Labs, you mean? Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of fun assets they have in there. I was always a big fan of Spring Source. I'm an old Java developer and I really like the work that they did. Yeah, they've got a good collection of stuff there for application developers. Well, I think there's, I have to say, I mean, I don't know. I mean, I'm not as nearly as close to the space as you guys are, but the developers I've talked to felt like they were sometimes getting mixed signals from VMware in terms of the commitment. So, you know, maybe this'll solidify that. Yeah. Well, it was interesting, I think, just seeing Paul Moritz over the last couple of years and talking about VMware, how he went from focusing more on the traditional VMware. The last time I saw him speak, it was all about Spring Source. It was all about Cloud Foundry. It was all about this new stuff. And so I think he was laying that foundation, sort of dropping the hints, and now it's been set out. In fact, one of the things that we've got here showing, here is called FastPass, which is a pass offering that we have that's built on top of Cloud Foundry. And I think one of the things that this shows is also illustrative of is the fact that we at Dell are trying to do things a little bit more experimentally. In other words, not wait until they're completely baked to get out there. For a lot of these things like open source, like this pass solution, get it out there. Get people to react to it in much more of an agile kind of a DevOps way and then take it back, take that feedback and correct on it. In fact, that's the way we ran the entire Project Sputnik was from the very beginning, getting people to blog on it, to talk about it and idea storm. What do you like? What do you don't like about it? And take that feedback to course correct along the way. And I think that that's something that we're going to see more of us doing doing more of in the future. So how about the Hadoop and the big data crowd? I mean, are they glomming on to this? I mean, you guys developing Absolutely, in fact, we have a lot of, to throw HPC into the mix, but let's just say grids that do a lot of data crunching. Like the open-sac business we have does a lot of interesting work in standing up Hadoop clusters. And yeah, I mean, there's a tremendous amount of interest in. And again, starting with the generalized thing of HPC and maybe the way you solve it is with Hadoop or maybe there's all these ways. But yeah, there's a lot of interest in doing things with data. And I think that's one of the things that's attractive for Dell about cloud is because of the, not only the economic shift of cloud making things more affordable, but also because of the agility that it brings. In my opinion, it means that it makes enterprise class technologies applicable and easy to consume by the wider market. And that's where Dell does really well is like, you don't have to be like a giant bank to have like a really good data crunching cluster, right? Like it can be easy to stand up a Hadoop thing and affordable and then you can like rent a supercomputer for 10 minutes, right? Give the underdogs an advantage. Right, right. Or the levels of the playing field, I guess. Yeah, and it's like, it's always great when like a previously esoteric, expensive, but interesting technology gets just like spread across the market to see what they do with it. I mean, there's kind of no predicting what happens. Like, you know, like, what's an example? Like square is an interesting example, right? Where like, you go to the food truck wagons around town and everyone's got a square device. And it's just like, what? Like, I mean, that's fascinating that that happens. So, and I think we, and we do actually have an offering based on Cloudera's distribution of Hadoop. And that's what we've partnered with. So that's something we've been looking at. We've got partnerships also with Pentaho on top of that. And who else have we partnered with, you know? It's mostly Cloudera and the Hadoop. It's a CDH, you package it up solutions for Hadoop. So you don't have to be, you know, map-reduced genius to deploy. Exactly, yeah. Great. And actually the second incubation project we have is this project called Riptide. And it's not a Hadoop thing, but it's based around the idea of how do we easily package up business intelligence for people to buy. And there's a little, well, little compared to Dell. They're a big company. But there's a small company down in San Antonio that does sports equipment. And they're using this Riptide product to just analyze their sales data and just find out how they can sell things better, find their top sales performers, like companies that buy all of their equipment, like all this raw data. And it's a good example of how you take what was previously a very expensive, hard to use technology and package it up and simplify it so that it's just applicable to lower parts of the market basically. So it's BI in a box? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like one of the other guys, this guy at NAMDI, who's my boss now, who also helps run the incubation fund, he, I think when this project was pitched to him the previous week and he'd seen a Magic Jack commercial. And he was like, we got to have Magic Jack for BI. Just like, it's an easy thing to plug in. And that's totally what the intention is. It's like, plug it in, hook it up to Salesforce, hook it up to your on-premise database or whatever, and it'll just kind of integrate things together with you. And we use Boomi for that, which is a data integration asset that we have. And, you know, we have hardware laying around every now and then we can do something with. And it's nice. Well, it could be, could you play? You could connect it. Exactly. Yeah, right. And you can imagine that you could burst out to cloud to like do some, you know, renting super computer stuff and things like that. And it'd be interesting. Well, we've heard a lot this week, people walk around the show and they see the solutions, they go, wow, I didn't know you did that. And that's, you know, you're hearing it again, folks. It's pretty impressive. It's pretty staggering just to look at all the things we've got here. I'm impressed. That worked here. It's a big organization, no doubt. But you guys are really focusing the messages, you know, in a few key areas. And so we're always pleased. We love the developer angle and really appreciate you guys coming on and thanks for sharing your insights. Thanks, Dave, appreciate it. All right, this is Silicon Angles theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest. We've got a big lineup coming. My co-host, John Furrier is coming back. We've got Steve Felice coming on. We've got Karen Kintos and Pete Kors might even show up today. So keep it right there.