 on the ground. Presented by theCUBE, here's your host, John Furrier. Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE's On the Ground. I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE. We're here with Todd Moore, Vice President of Open Technologies at IBM, Cloud IBM. Good to see you again, CUBE alumni. Hey, good morning. We're on the ground here. We're just getting the low down on the open, computing architecture, some of you guys are having the day after DockerCon, very good timing. Great to kind of sister up against that great event. Yes, absolutely. We have a lot of folks who decided to stay over just for the fact that they were able to come here and participate. And it's something that we've done a number of cities across the U.S., always well received and we have a lot of fun doing it. We bring in leaders from the industry and have them come and share with us. We've chatted on theCUBE before at a couple IBM events and I got to ask you, do you feel like a kid in a candy store now is the hair standing on the back of your neck with Docker, just the excitement of open source and the excitement of all the openness that's going on around. Real deployments of applications, not just feel like you're pushing excitement but in general it's mainstream. Huge difference, it's mainstream. We've seen this shift in enterprises that was dramatic here. It's not the days before where we use your open source if you indemnify us and help us and do these things. It's now we want to be out there participating with you. Yes, we're using it and oh by the way, it's in production and now come partner with us, help us, help us get further with it. And what other organizations are you starting and how can we join in and be part of that? In the old days you go talk to a customer, you find out what their needs are, build a solution, deliver it, charge for it. That's a nice business model in the old days. Now you guys are lowering the surface area to engage with customers. Certainly collaborating with open source is now a vehicle, not just on a pre-sales basis but in needs analysis. How has that impacted IBM's configuration of the tech teams, the go to markets? How has that changed? Well, we've taken a very open source approach to how we go and develop as well too. We have our own processes that we actually take out and people once they started getting into this said, well gee, how do you do it? And so we started sharing, right? And our processes are out there through things called Blue Mix Garages. But so it's greatly impacted how we do our development inside. But from a go to market perspective and the work that we do, everything I do in open source is always tied to a business need and a strategy and a business to go after a market and build a market. And we see these things as the centers of gravity that then go and build large marketplaces around it and partnerships. And it makes for an explosive growth experience and it sort of hang on and go with it. It's something amazing. The new, the old demand gen lead gen programs we're marketing now is open source. It's the coders themselves. That's the demand gen because you're out there collaborating with customers before you even pitch them on anything. Absolutely. And some of these things that we do, OpenWisk is a project that we just put out in open source. OpenWisk is a serverless environment, some Lambda-like kind of thing and vent driven. We did the project out in the open before we even started working on the product inside that's now part of Bluemix. Big fan of OpenWisk, real potential with IoT for sure. Yeah, absolutely. And containers. And we just added in some neat things to make that even simpler, some support in Node-RED that we wanted to do as well as an MPM module now library to help you go and connect things up. For the folks out there, check out Wisk from IBM OpenWisk, really, really phenomenal. Developable works open, yeah, that's the site. I want to ask you about the cloud native computing foundation called CNCF, a fairly new organization, cloud native computing foundation. What is this about? This seems to be getting a lot of momentum organically. I know there's some big vendors in their suppliers, but it's not just a foundation where people are just high-fiving each other, there's some real work going on. Yeah, absolutely. I think I'm going to explain what that, this organization is. So we put this together with other big heavy weights like Google and ourselves and RedHats and the world because there's this gap in where cloud native computing is going. We all see that we can create the plumbing together and that there's good plumbing that is being reached in places and overlapping. And to do that just isn't something that we have to do. So what we're doing is working together now to define where we think the best practices and those things can be to foster projects that can be the next generation of where we take cloud native and to use the best of what's out there. So we actually brought together organizations like the cloud foundry organization and their service broker work with the cloud native computing foundation folks. And we're looking at that as being the service broker that we then work on together and promote and go and build. So it's things like that. We've brought the OpenStack foundation together with a cloud native computing foundation. So is the catalyst more interoperability? Interoperability, building out a fragmented, less fragmented, reduce duplication, use the best of what we have and build a vision out that customers and all the rest of the industry can get behind so that we move it quicker, faster, more interoperable, less vendor walking. What gap were you talking about? You said they fill in that gap. Is it just standardization or what specifically? Yeah, they become de facto standards, right? I think that's the important thing is it becomes de facto standards that happen. And you get that choice by getting feedback from the users who tell you what they like and what they want to see and the things that they pick. So how we're doing this is inviting in the users as well too to be part of this. We want folks to come join the CNCF and give us good feedback. Todd, I want to ask you about choice because this always comes up and we love talking about multi-vendor back in the old days. Now, that is ultimately the number one thing about that customers are looking for is they're not, they're kind of afraid to lock in kind of an older definition. But now you have a lot of stuff being developed by multiple vendors and they all have their own engine. They got to make money. They have a business model. But the choice is a big thing. How is the choice word for customers changed and how does things like the CNCF change? The choice, does it enable more choice and how is, are you guys fostering it? I think it enables more choice. Let's start with right there because I think that as we create interoperability between these various projects we then can see a container come from one environment, move into another as an example seamlessly without having to do anything. So I think those things are important. So choice, very important. But they're also looking for who's out and engaged in these organizations. Who can they partner with to go effectively then create the things, the functions, the features that they need or help them with problems that they have or help them stand things up. So that's become a big part of the actual picking who you work with and what you go and do and whose products you then actually use because much of this is a very large integration task and the early days of Linux you would go out and you would pick up the piece parts and create your own little internal distribution and maintain it. Well, you think about that replicated across all these different projects that now come together to build your platform. It's almost impossible to say on top of that. So finding someone who can help you go and do that that's really key. And that's why oftentimes IBM is chosen. So frankly, that's why we're in it. Well, you guys have such a great track record and open source and people who actually know you guys know you guys have a deep bench historically over the years but now heavily in cloud. So the final question I want to ask you is relative to customers, they love this new architecture of the cloud but speed is a big factor. It's going faster. How do you guys balance that? Because open obviously, it means everything's out in the open. Some would argue that open means slower. I would say maybe Foster's Agile, you guys are addressing this piece. Talk about that. I'll give you a really specific example. I'll use Node.js as an example. So here was an organization that fractured, we brought it back together. Part of the issue there was speed. We had folks who wanted to get their latest features and functions into something to get them out, get feedback on them, see it going on. At the same time, we were trying to protect the user base with what it was needed, right? So what we came up with was a strategy called long-term stable release structure. So we alternate releases where we have, the release where everything can be in there and the kitchen sink. And then we, after a short period of time, we create the long-term stable release. And we have a very predictable cycle so that those who get on board and want to be part of this can either be on the stable side or they can play on the wild side and be there with what's the latest. They can walk on the wild side. No, but people would do that. They want to be agile. They want to push the envelope. Yes, and it makes the developers have a home for that outlet of wanting to push the envelope as well too. So that's how you do it. That's one of the best examples I've seen of being able to blend the two together. Well, certainly you guys done a great job with stability also, enabling the wild side and developers. And it's an application market. Todd, thanks for sharing insight on the ground. John Furrier on the ground. Thanks for watching.