 Okay, welcome back everyone. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract a signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angles. I'm John, my co-host. Do MiniMan at wikibon.org. And we have Brian Stevens who's here from Red Hat CTO. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So what do you think of the show right now? What's the take, 10 year anniversary? Get right into it. You know, I mean, I think that the show is a different show this year, just because to be honest, you wouldn't think that moving at 3,000 miles could have an impact, but you know what I mean? It's been a Boston show for the past, you know, three years or so. And so just coming out to California, I think we've found that there's a whole nother audience that to be honest, there's an interest in all of this, but it's a little bit easier to travel up from the Bay Area. There's no snow here. There's snow in Boston today. It's a dynamic. It's snowed, I talked to my wife. It was snowing this morning. It's 40 degrees right now there, so. So I want to ask you, everyone wants to know, what is the top conversation that you're having as the CTO and Executive Vice President of Red Hat? What are the top conversations that you're having here, both in the public and also with customers and partners? Yeah, well, I mean, the top conversation's actually getting kind of boring, to be honest, because it's always about open stack. So I think that, you know, so it's nice to mix it up once in a while, but the reality is. Okay, we'll put open stack up there, it's one, okay? It's a good problem to have, right? So I mean, that's the top topic, but that's the destination that most in the industry say, that's our path forward, because it's about cloud, but Amazon's not exactly sharing their intellectual property. So I think everybody is saying that open stack is a way for us to have an Amazon-like model and how do we do that? It's from enterprise to even the telco market, you know, it's the top, it's the topic. How do you guys look at the open stack market? It's a CTO, there's a lot of architectural things going on, there's a lot of discussions, infrastructure as a service, obviously pretty stable. We kind of know what's going on there. Platform as a service seems to be the battleground on the cloud, but the customers on the enterprise side want an enterprise-grade cloud. That's the number one thing we hear, and they want to look under the hood. That's a key choir. What's that OS look like? We're glad that they want to look under the hood. We're glad that they care about what the components are, right? We've built our business on the components and given them the flexibility to put it into the IT fabric. So one thing I've learned is that no two customers agree, right? And so they all have their ability and their recipes on how to combine things. And that's, to be honest, is why Linux has been so successful. You know, I mean, 13 years ago, to be honest, we were making it up. We were out ahead of our skis, we were saying Linux was ready for the enterprise, working with Oracle and others, and we were investing those dollars back into the business. Now, some 12 years later, we're wasting it neatly on our skis. So we got that model, we got the investment inside. So OpenStack to us is just this natural extension of 80% of what we're already doing, which is, you know, Linux at the core. So the question that we get a lot, Stu and I were talking about earlier, is OpenStack baked out? What is going on in the stack? And, you know, people want Amazon's like approach where they see things like Kinesis, elastic beanstalk, these integrated stack services that provide some really nice greatness for a DevOps-oriented developer. Now, the other issue is that it's Amazon's stack, but the idea of an integrated stack is very interesting to customers, it reduces headcount, and a lot of people focus on other things. So is OpenStack ready for that, in your opinion, and what do they need to do if not? There's a couple of questions in there, isn't there? Big one, big one. We'll start, is OpenStack ready? We'll do the right next one, we'll do the right next one first. So the reality is that Open Source is this different model, right? Where you get to see, you know, that sausage being made every day. And so the problem is, you know, the challenge of that is like, even an internal organization is writing their own code, you always have the head of your development, and then at some point you get it, you know, hardened and you deploy. OpenStack's the exact same way. So you still have to have the ability to know what to deploy, when to deploy, and how to sustain it. It's really no different, but from a technology maturation, it's absolutely in the early days, right? I mean, there's a lot of great things happening. Look, the number of projects in OpenStack I think went from the original two, which were just computing storage. Now I think it's on the order of 10 or 12. We stopped tracking, because it's just every release a couple more things get adding. So it's getting sort of both this breadth, as well as maturity and it's core happening at the same time. So when you ask the question around sort of readiness, you almost have to ask the next question about which part are you talking about? Yeah, well the enterprise grade one is one that's important. You can't really rush that. Yeah, and that's, you know, I mean, honest, you have a partner, it's not that hard, right? It's just that because you just need to guidance on what went and how, and you don't really necessarily have to pay the new ground here, you just want to follow what everybody else is doing. What about the integrated stack component? Because Amazon does have a nice approach and that's why startups love Amazon because they just jump in there, they have no legacy, it's a green field for them. They can then, and they got auto-scaling, all this greatness going on there. Now, with OpenStack, is that going to be something that we're going to see? I think it remains to be seen. I mean, it's only us vendors that like to classify stuff, you know? I mean, customers don't really classify their products and categories the way the vendors do and the way we do with foundations and we line up and build consortiums, it's really still kind of broken, right? So, I'm a big believer in exactly what you just said is that, and I talked about this morning, is that the whole infrastructure category and platform service category are going to get completely obliterated. It's going to become one. I mean, you could name a million services that Amazon has, right? Are the infrastructure services or platform services, who the hell cares? It all needs to be one. And we see the same thing with Paz. The overlap between Paz and infrastructure clouds is heavy right now, right? So, where does Amazon stop and beanstalk begin? You don't really know. So, we're going to drive that convergence because you end up with a better result. We're going to drive, in that case for us, it's open shift, but we're going to drive the convergence of that with open stack. And you end up with a better mousetrap. Yeah, so Brian, you've been talking about that merging of infrastructure and platform and absolutely, if you look at something like Amazon, that line is greatly blurred. One thing we've seen from Amazon is when they release something, it's a tool that customers can take and they've had lots of solutions that are getting huge adoption pretty fast, things like Redshift, taking off. When are we going to have that killer app on the open stack side then? Yeah, well, that's the difference between, because they're in a different business, right? So, because they're basically looking at, so how do we create interesting services to drive demand? Makes sense. So, they need the killer app to drive the platform. Where we are, our customers have all of their apps. And they may not consider them killer apps, but man, that's their business, is running infrastructure underneath their apps and managing it. And they just got a broken platform underneath that on which to do it. So, where we're coming is we're not saying, you know what, write a whole new set of apps and start over and what is it good for? Our answer is everything, because the core of everything around open stack is that runtime of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The apps are already there with managing 22% of infrastructure, you know, from Red Hat. The apps are already on the platform. And also we're doing an open stack is we're wrapping it better, architecture and operational model around Linux and everything. You know, fundamentally that's a little tougher. We've got to basically lift the foundation and move everything that I've got, so. But we don't have to. So that's the whole thing is that you can actually bring open stack in with your apps already up and running, right? Because the stack from virtualization with KBM through the Linux OS, all the way through the app stays the same. What open stacks really change is sort of like, it's all the control mechanism for provisioning from managing virtual machines, from managing storage, bringing in new monitoring capabilities and new security architecture. But all that is really in the control plane of the data center and not at all in sort of the application runtime. Only when you start to get to past does that start to get a little bit easier. So I want to get your take. I know you got a tight schedule and you got some other things to do. Quickly, big data has been enraged. Now data layers have been certainly being discussed at certain parts of the architecture. We heard data virtualization being a hot button here. People see that as the next big trend. As a CTO in Red Hat, where do you see the data coming in? Dataware is part of the actual code base, meaning not just some data warehousing thing where it's fundamental to the business model of the company, seeing the Facebooks of the world. I want to be more like Facebook. I want to be more like Amazon. So there's a lot of these web scale companies who have proven that DevOps can actually work in scale. So the data equation becomes interesting. Where does that fit into all this? The data thing, I mean, it's certainly one of the hottest areas, but I think that there hasn't been this exact recipe or science on that. I mean, if you have to have a data scientist, the fact of how well not understood it is. But I think what the web scale companies have done better than anybody else is, they have a rich supply of data on a daily basis. They want to react to it and change their business. And I think in the traditional part, traditional corporations are still in sort of that BI phase. And so what they're really looking to do is saying, like, how do I actually store, secure and scale up data and really analyze it? And I think the industry is absolutely moving there. I mean, our work with Hadoop is saying, how do we take Hadoop, what's happening in Hadoop, but connect it in with the existing data storage solutions that IT wants to use? Final question for me is the community of open source. Okay, you're seeing open source now move from a cheap alternative to an absolute tier one, commercial grade, opportunity and innovation engine. And there's a lot of marketing tactics from competition and a lot of people elbowing their way into the sandbox, so to speak, where the community is a real fragile and proven business model. So what do you see about the future of the open source communities? Yeah, the business model seems to be going well, tried and true methods, but what's going on at the community level and what should we be paying attention to? Is it the poisoning of the well? Are there proprietary tactics? What's your view on that? Well, you know, every participant has a different sort of motivation and that's understandable. But the most fundamental thing that's happened that we think is interesting is that I think in the very beginning, people thought open source and Linux were synonymous. And we always felt that open source wasn't about technology, it was about a development model that allowed a shared industry involvement outside of standardization of consortiums. And so now we've seen that. I think OpenSec, Hadoop, those are the first two major new categories that are being led by open source. And so that's sort of the breakout. So I think the industry is still figuring out how to actually work together. I mean, for us, it's like, you know, falling out of bed because we've been doing it for so long, but as new companies come in to get involved in open source, you know, that's where the learning has to happen to realize, you know what, you don't own it anymore. You're participating. It's not fragile, it's pretty solid in your mind. No, I mean, I think it's actually more solid by the day. You look at sort of the contributions on the side of OpenSec, it's just growing by. So I got to ask you about the how LAMP stack has evolved to be a massive innovation, but now people are talking about multiple stacks. I not just LAMP stack, I have other things I'm programming in, it's all converging together. Integrated stacks, what's your opinion of the integrated stacks? I think integrated stacks are a great thing. I think as long as you don't take the IT flexibility and choice away, I think there's actually whole companies out there that are masterful at providing value add around driving integration for select markets and opportunities. So Brian, so many companies these days are looking to find innovation by reaching outside of the walls of their own company. Red Hat has always been there by working with communities. Can you speak of what you see the state of innovation out there and what excites you the most? You know, I mean, what excites me most of what's happening now is innovation's actually starting in open source. So I have trouble thinking of a whole category of innovation that is starting in proprietary or owned by one company. So just sort of that general model that's happening and then that innovation's reaching customers quicker because it's not owned by any one company. You know, the stuff that's got me the most excited to be honest is everything that's happening around containerization. It's funny that it's been technology that's been around forever, but it's just sort of that awareness that's happening now that just happened overnight is making people realize, you know, there's another model out there. So to me, that's something that's happened. Timing's everything. Something happened. Timing and brand awareness. Timing is everything. We are here with Brian Stevens, Executive Vice President CTO. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. You knew you were super busy, but I want to get you the final word. Put the bumper sticker on the car that's leaving this event. What does it say on that bumper sticker? Four-day weekend. Sorry. No, I mean, I think it's just great to show. I mean, a lot of this is really, as you said, it's not a technology problem, it's an awareness. And so I think this is just a great way to put open source on the road and reach a whole new set of people to get them involved. This is theCUBE. We're live in San Francisco at the Red Hat Summit with the CTO talking tech, talking about innovations. It's a great time to be in computer science, writing code, and certainly rolling out operating systems in open source. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.