 from Austin, Texas. It's theCUBE, covering OpenStack Summit 2016, brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation and headline sponsors Red Hat and Cisco. Now here are your hosts, Brian Grace Lee and John Walls. And welcome back to Austin, Texas here at the OpenStack Summit 2016. Our continuing coverage here on theCUBE along with Brian Grace Lee, I'm John Walls and we've heard a lot about diversity as being a really key value proposition that OpenStack brings to the enterprise. And I think diversity within the OpenStack community itself is a point we're talking about and what we're going to talk about here with Allison Randall, who is the distinguished technologist at HPE and Allison, thanks for joining us. We appreciate that. Specifically, the women in OpenStack. I know you're a member of that group and looking to bring perhaps a different flavor if you will to the OpenStack community and why women in OpenStack, what's the key motivation of the mission behind that group and how well are you doing right now you think to accomplishing what you're setting out to do? I mean, I think when you think about diversity, it's important to put it in the perspective of if your community is not diverse, you're only getting about half or even a quarter or less of the potential contributors you could get. And it's not just about number of contributors, it's about unique perspectives, unique value that different people can bring to the table. If you have a community that's sort of monocultural, you'll tend to get stuck in a rut, of one way of thinking of things or one way of doing of things, whereas if you could bring in that diversity, and we talk a lot about women in OpenStack, but I really think diversity is also about cultural diversity as well and country of origin and all of these factors and diversity of skills. If you can bring in those more diverse aspects, you end up with a much richer, much stronger project. When I look at what you're attempting to do, or at least some of those discussions that you're having, it's multifaceted, the ways you could go about it. Education a piece of that, mentoring a piece of that, community discussion a piece of that. I mean, how do you pull all of those areas together and I guess what's the value in addressing all of those as a means to an end? I mean, I suppose it's like any campaign. You can't just focus on one set of troops in the corner. You have to look over the whole piece to get the whole strategy coming together. There's some more pieces as well to it. One of them is recognizing the contributions of non-technical contributors. That's one area we're working on this cycle. You have ATCs who are the technical contributors, but creating a new category that's like active community contributors, or we don't have the name exactly yet, so that people who organize working groups or bring together user group meetings that they get recognized for their contributions as well. And another thing is metrics. So it's very easy to measure lines of code or number of commits, but it's harder to measure people who contribute in ways that don't have a digital footprint. So finding the ways to actually measure the work that people are doing, the diverse ways that people are contributing to OpenStack. Yeah. We're seeing more and more. It's always an interesting thing in terms of diversity. We're seeing, you know, HPE run by Meg Whitman. We see IBM. So some of the largest technology companies now have women leading the company. We see that happening in Ford Motor and a number. What do you find as you're running the programs, as you're talking to people? What motivates them sometimes as you're talking to university people to say, that's my inspiration. Does it need to be women at the top? Does it need to be women that have background like yourself that have run really interesting engineering projects? Is there, I doubt there's one single formula, but do you find as you talk to people, they go, that inspires me more than that inspires me? I mean, I think the most important piece is something they can identify with. So for whoever they are, wherever they're headed, if they can't see anyone in that community that seems a little bit like them, they can't find any place to hook in where they feel comfortable, then that will tend to drive them away. So it is about examples, and it's kind of about examples in all different spaces. Sure, sure, that makes sense, that makes sense. You've got a long background in open source. You were used to run OSCON when it was here, it's coming back, it's coming back to Austin for the first time, and you're now at HPE, which while they are involved with open source, you wouldn't think of them traditionally as an open source company, like a Canonical, like a Red Hat. Talk about just how you're trying to bring diversity in terms of just understanding open source as a business model, as a strategy to a company that hadn't done that traditionally. Yeah, so it's interesting, so HPE had a history of open source in Linux, but it was sort of a subset, it was kind of focused on the hardware, and I think open stock really was a gateway drug in a sense for open source at HPE, realizing, so the way open source is changing is like from about 2010 to 2015, or actually if you go all the way back to 2010, you went to about 50% corporate adoption, and then up to 2015 you go up to like about 78% open source adoption, and the shift that's happened is now open source innovation is actually driving technology innovation, and it's kind of in this game if your competitors are using open source and you're not, you're left out. And I think more and more companies are realizing this, and now they're coming to the table and they're like, okay, first of all, what open source projects should we be delivering to customers, but then also how should we make strategic investments into those open source projects? Because you can't just sort of sit back and expect everything to grow in a way that's helpful. There are always areas where resources are lacking, and if you can help out, you can make sure that the project moves more quickly in a healthy direction. Yeah, yeah. So what's the message that you're bringing in your role as distinguished technologist, which again, I mentioned that earlier, it's a title we all would love to have. So kudos for that, but what is the message that you're taking out into the various business partners and clients with whom you deal in terms of trying to help them develop their new strategies, perhaps change their way of thinking, and some of these are really deep-seated fundamental changes that you have to try and bring about, I would say. So the customers come in at different levels, so the very first level is always, if you aren't using open source, you're missing out. So if you're too afraid to use it, your competitors, I guarantee, are using it and you're missing out. But once you get past that stage, the next stage is effective engagement. So historically, there was a problem with companies who would get into open source and they would just kind of like trample all over it, or they'd pour a lot of money into something that's really entirely useless. So being involved and listening and really understanding how the open source projects work, and then contributing in ways that are beneficial to the projects and beneficial to the company. A metaphor I use is it's like sustainable forests. So trees are completely free. Anyone can go cut them down and they can build a business model on selling furniture or house frames or whatever from the trees. But if you just cut them down and you don't think about sustainability, the trees will just dry up and go away. So you have to think about the sustainability of the forests that you're building your businesses on. I know, what about the receptivity then to the message? Because I would assume, again, you run across the whole gamut. You have people who are all ears and eyes and they get it and then you probably run into a bit of resistance, a little stone wall that says, no, I like the way things are going now. Although if I heard from you the point you just made, if you don't like it, that's fine. Your competitors do. That'd get my attention. But what is the gamut of reception you're getting? I, so one of the things that surprised me when I went to HP was how incredibly receptive they were to the message. Because if you think about it, it's a 75-year-old company, right? You would expect them to be sort of traditionalists and they are in many ways. But they totally get that the next generation of pretty much every aspect of software at HPE is going to be touched by open source in one way or another. And the hardware too, because it has to run open source. Well, I think you can probably tell we're almost a closing time here. You hear some of the banging, so we apologize for that, for the audio in the background there, but that's just the way that the case it is right now. If we go back to the women in OpenStack, just for a moment, one of the aspects that I found to be interesting is the mentoring program that's going on. You've got the Nome Outreach program. And then how it's looking to route down as low as the elementary level in terms of trying to educate and get young women, young ladies interested in the technology is that really they're going to guide us here in the future. I mean, how do you reach down to that level and inspire that kind of thinking? I think it is incredibly important to start young because the hard thing is it's often in high school that women get the idea that they can't do technology. Little kids, like they have no preconceptions about what they can or can't do. And I know for me, my dad started me programming when I was about six, seven, eight. And that just left me with a whole life of no hesitation whatsoever. So I think the more we can push it down to that level, the better off we'll be. Part of it is parents. So parents who are technologists who are willing to work with their kids, that's a huge influence. But another part of it is the school system, getting technology to that level. I know, I see that with my daughters. I mean, their school has a partnership with Lego and it's about building things and it's sort of engineering without it feeling like it's engineering, it's creativity. It's think about a problem, try and be creative. There are now programming languages like Scratch where you don't really think you're programming. You're just kind of making fun things happen. And you're right, you have to get them to be excited about problem solving, excited about being creative and again, build confidence. That to me is the biggest thing, is give them confidence, give them examples, get them started early, let them feel like they can be creative, let them feel like they're independent. Yeah, it's a paintbrush. Yeah, and those skills are going to help them in a whole lot of different ways. That's fantastic. So this is a pretty rich, diverse community in terms of technology. You've got a rich technology background. What here kind of is scratching that technology itch for you that you're kind of looking at, wanting to dig a little bit deeper in or has your fancy right now? Yeah, I think one of the most interesting things about OpenStack is, and I sometimes use the metaphor, it's like the Linux kernel. It's an integration layer for drivers underneath the user space. But the user space is no longer a single compute instance. The user space is thousands or hundreds of thousands of compute instances. So it really, it's a step up in abstraction in computing. And that opens up a lot of very interesting application areas. My background is DevOps, so CICD is enormously interesting for me, especially at the scale of doing the testing for OpenStack as a development project, but also for customers doing massive scale deployments. You need massive scale testing to go with it. Right, you think about what Monty Taylor and his whole, I mean they do an amazing job. Exactly. And he doesn't get enough credit and kudos for what his team pulls together every six months or every few days actually. So that's fantastic. What's your sort of takeaway from how big this has gotten? How do you look at something that's grown this big from something this small? How do you look at it and say it's just the natural part of technology it's going to continue to get big? Or is there something unique that you sort of see in this community versus others you've been involved with? Yeah, I mean it's certainly not guaranteed. There's plenty of small projects that go nowhere. I think the reason is because it is specifically a commons. OpenStack is a commons in somewhat the same way as the Linux kernel. It's an open doorway for so many different things to come together. And that makes it really exciting for vendors to talk to each other. It makes it a really exciting place for customers to talk to vendors and to talk to developers. And I think it is that very nature. Like you'd never get, oh say a very small, like a proprietary project. You wouldn't get this kind of dynamic activity around one proprietary project. It's about access and it's about innovation. Yeah, that's great. Well Allison, we want to thank you for taking time to be with us today. I believe this is the first time on theCUBE, is that correct? Yeah. First timer, and I know for sure the first time we've had a research linguist with a specialty in East Africa. So congratulations on that front too. Probably a first and only if I'm not mistaken. Thank you again for the time and best of luck in the Women in OpenStack initiative. Thanks. We appreciate that. So Allison Randall from HPE we'll be back with some final thoughts here from OpenStack Summit 2016 and just a bit from Austin. Live from Austin, Texas.