 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, Stu Miniman and Brian Graceley. Welcome back to theCUBE. Here in the Austin Convention Center, this is OpenStack 2016 in Austin, Texas. I'm Stu Miniman joined by Brian Graceley. Happy to have back on the program. It's been a little while. Ken Pepple, who is CTO and co-founder of Solenia. Ken, thank you for joining us. Thank you, Stuart. All right, so last time we caught up with you was a small event in the valley talking about OpenStack. So of course, OpenStack's courtier business, but for people that don't know, tell us a little bit about Solenia and give us kind of the company update. Sure. So Solenia was started in 2013 with a group of founders who had come out of early OpenStack ecosystem companies. I used to run the cloud at internet, which was an early OpenStack public cloud provider. My co-founder, Francesco, came out of cloud scaling and run the professional services organization there. And what we really had seen was, while OpenStack had really been packaged for a lot of web scale type customers, especially in the valley, we didn't really see anybody helping adoption for the enterprise. And with our background in the enterprise, we really wanted to help them kind of unleash and empower OpenStack within their environments. We started out mostly doing consulting and we still have a fairly large consulting as well as training arm that helps clients one-on-one actually put and integrate OpenStack into their environment. But we also now provide some software, a product called Goldstone, which actually helps them with the overall operations and management kind of ongoing for OpenStack. Yeah, definitely. I mean, it's been an ongoing theme for at least the last couple of years is, OpenStack today is still not simple. And therefore, what are the consumption models? Things are changing. You have companies like Rackspace, having various consumption models. What are you seeing? How are things changed in the last year or so? What are the popular consumption models? And how's the skill set out there in the customer base? Yeah. So I think skills are still somewhat of a concern, especially in the enterprise space. However, I think a lot of people have figured out what the consumption models are. And we see very strong pickup among customers that have their own engineering. So for example, they actually have a service that is core to their business, whether they be in broadcast, data analytics or something like that, where computers are their business. They've really found OpenStack is the open platform. They can really power that with the flexibility and customization that they need. Having said that, there are skills issues. And some of those can be addressed by training and such. Others, we've really looked at, how could we de-skill the need for OpenStack with other tools that are out there? And that's where we focus Goldstone these days. Yeah, what, how do you define the enterprise? I think a lot of people sometimes, around the tech community want to say enterprises, their Oracle application, their back end SAP application. How do you guys define enterprise? Or more importantly, when you say an enterprise customer, what are the kind of things they're putting on top of OpenStack for their business? Yeah. Well, I think you see different kinds of enterprises out there. They're not just every large company that's out there. But what we tend to find is that, they have an IT side of the house where they have systems of record. They're the SAPs and the Oracle applications you've seen that have always been there. However, most of them also write their own applications, whether it's either for engineering or it's for some other process they provide there. OpenStack's really taken hold on the engineering side for people that actually write their own applications. I've seen less of it perhaps on the IT side where you're running pre-packaged applications. So it's much more in that sort of digital side of their business, if you will. It really is. And increasingly though, almost every company is a digital company, no matter whether they're doing broadcast or even doing financial stuff these days, everything's really digital for them. And it's really appealed to that side of the company for them. Talk about, you come from an operations background, at least, like you said, ran internet app. Coldstone, you guys announced sort of what you're calling an enterprise offering. Not so much a distribution, but the things that help operators, help us understand what are those types of tools, what was the need for them as opposed to maybe what was freely available in the community. Fill us in on what the gap was that you guys are filling in there. Yeah, so we saw kind of two or three gaps that were out there. You know, the first thing was, most of the distro companies really focus all their time on installation. And for a large installation, whether it's OpenStack or anything else, you've got a bad two months ahead of you where you kind of bet everything in and get everything running. But having run OpenStack and having run it pretty early in 2011, I really found actually, it's the year and a half after that, there's actually a lot more trying because you didn't have a whole lot of tools that you're perhaps used to in other environments. You also had a more difficult problem because of the large scale of your problem. And so what we really looked at there was, how can we automate some of the things which are easy and basically routine so that they're almost a push button for you? How could we get better visibility into your environment? Because one of the things that we found at internet was, really finding where the problem was, was 80% of the battle. And then the last thing was, we looked and said, a lot of the early adopters were service providers, they have fundamentally different needs than an enterprise does. I spent a lot of time at internet writing a billing system. That's not a big deal for a lot of enterprises. On the other hand, regulatory compliance issues are a huge deal for them. It stops them putting more applications on there. And so for Goldstone, we really looked at how could we take some of the things that they already have, for example, in their virtualization environments, some of those kind of features that they're used to there. How could we also look at what public features around regulatory compliance, they're in public clouds. How could we bring those to open stack? And that's what we've really built into Goldstone Enterprise as some of the added value features. So Ken, one of the discussions here has always been the use cases. NFVs popped up as one that surprised a lot of people and certain classic customers that need that. What can you share about certain, what are early great use cases or specific applications even that we're seeing customers have success? And are there any pieces that you're saying, hey, you might want to stay away from this as a first application and tackle down the road? Yeah, so I think one of the things that people need to look at for that first application, and we do a lot of work with clients looking at their overall application portfolio, to find out what should be your first application, what's your next application, what are applications that may never go to the cloud, which is an important part there also. And really what we want to look at is you want something meaningful, you want something you control your own destiny on, hopefully that you actually develop it so that if you need to make changes to it, you can, instead of trying to force fit something in there. But also you need something meaningful that people will actually resonate. Just moving some trivial lap on there, really isn't going to get you the business value that you need for the investments you have with OpenStack. Yeah, I think that's something that the folks in the know tend to talk about. Essentially, a lot of people want to say, well, it's new technology, go find some low-hanging fruit. I think what I hear over and over again is people go, no, no, no, that's almost completely the wrong approach. Take something that, if it falls down, if it fails, you're going to feel like you've got some skin in the game. Go take something that's going to impact the business. It doesn't have to be a huge application, but the business is going to see the impact of you doing it better, faster, less expensive, and own it from that perspective. And that's why I think what you're probably seeing is that becomes a great fit for having programmable infrastructure, API-driven infrastructure, trying to do agile development and so forth. I think the one thing that you see with low-hanging fruit is a lot of them, even if you create something really good on the infrastructure side for them, you're going to get five or 10% for it. Whereas, for example, we have a customer that has a very seasonal lap, but it's an incredibly seasonal lap. It happens on, basically, 16 Sundays in the fall, where they have zero from Monday through Thursday, and they have hundreds of millions of people on it from Thursday through Sunday night. That's something that shows real business value, and that's something that, as we brought in an investment for OpenStack, they could actually show the payback for. Yeah, we've been doing a bunch of research on the Wikibon side of around digital business, digital application, really trying to sort of the difference between what IT does, their mindset, and this is, and it sort of falls into five buckets. Tell us if this makes what you're seeing, right? First one is, the product now becomes an API. It's not a UI, the product's an API. Operations has got to be really managed around, almost as a cost of good. It's optimized around that. It can be an advantage. You can take costs out of it. These digital feedback loops that you're getting from the product, from the market, are going to influence it on a regular basis, and hence, you've got to be able to develop quickly. You've got to have great CI systems. Are you seeing those types of building blocks as being core to what's different from IT systems to sort of business-facing systems? I completely agree there. And I think this is where you've seen the difference between past conferences with OpenStack, where you saw a lot of POCs and things, to where we're seeing today, which is, there's a lot less of a, should we do OpenStack, is OpenStack ready? There's much more of a discussion of, how can I really provide value about OpenStack? How can I get that CI CD on top of OpenStack? How can I shorten my development cycles for that? Yeah, and I think that's sort of critical for anybody who's looking at OpenStack is, it's not, you know, it got positioned to sort of maybe free VMware, but I think if you think about VMware, VMware is always about, how do I reduce costs out of IT? This is about helping the top line of the business move faster. It is. I think great examples. Just, you talked about the one company who's delivering, you know, the weekend service, which everybody loves. Any others that maybe, you know, more businesses horizontally can relate to? You know, I think no matter what service and what business you're in today, the ability to actually deliver your applications with higher quality, being able to deliver them more often, all of those things will resonate with almost any company out there. Because every one of your companies out there, if you're a fairly large company today, you have some small nimble competitor that keeps you up at night. And it's looking to disrupt you by moving faster. Not necessarily being better, not necessarily having more market share, but being faster to the puck, basically. And that's where I think a lot of people are looking at OpenStack today. All right, well, Ken Pepple, really appreciate you coming to share the, how the users are deploying, you know, some of the good examples of OpenStack rolling out there, what to look out for. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from OpenStack 2015 in Austin, Texas. You're watching theCUBE.