 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 Gracely. Welcome back to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's flagship program. We're happy to be at OpenStack Summit here in Austin, Texas, 2016. We're actually at the midway point of three days of coverage, happy to have back on the program, Mark Interante, who's the SVP of cloud engineering at Hewlett Packard Enterprises Helian Group, or HPE Helian for short. Mark, thanks for joining us again. Thanks, it's really great to be here again. All right, so Mark, first, you know, there's a lot of, you know, reflection this year. Said, you know, there were 75 people at the original OpenStack Summit. Were you at that one? I was not at that one. All right, but there's 7,500 here. So, how long you've been coming here and, you know, you've been on the program a couple of times. What's your reflection as to kind of where we are with OpenStack? Got it, no, my teams were on that early summit and I just didn't go up that day for reasons that are unclear to me at this point in my memory. But when we look back at where we started with just a couple of handfuls of people at Rackspace and we had a lot of challenges. How do we inflate an entire cloud infrastructure, get teams organized, and how do we start to build that? It was a very daunting task. We weren't even sure how many people would be interested, actually, and as we started to light this up, I mean, our first kind of official summit was the one in San Antonio that fall and, you know, we had a couple hundred people there. We had people from all kinds of companies. Accenture showed up. They were like, hmm, this seems like a leading trend in modernizing IT and we had lots of people that were like, what is this thing and how is it really going to work? But as we rolled forward over the last year, there's been a surprising amount of interest in the NFE and the telecom space. If you'd ask me in the beginning, which industry is going to be revolutionized by OpenStack first? I probably would have listed 20 industries and I wouldn't have put that as number one. I'm not sure what I would have, but when you hear why they're doing it, it's like, okay, yeah, I totally get this. This is going to change the way they grow and deliver telecom services. The thing that I liked about this summit is that it's so much about companies adopting and using OpenStack in production and changing their business. Nothing makes me happier to see people going like, now we've got an entirely new infrastructure. Devs can go with your work done in a better and faster way. So Mark, a couple of years ago HP came in, was like, billion dollar investment. We've got 100 people here at the summit. I think 1,000 people working on it. Give us a level set. What's HP's role in OpenStack? How do you fit into the ecosystem? Where are you contributing? Where's kind of your sweet spot? Yeah, I think we came in really loud and every vocal investment, we've continued that. I think we've got a couple of hundred people here at the summit right now and over half of those are on my team and the kind of core engineering team. Our investments are quite significant. Our focus has been on getting the product and the projects all packaged and moving them forward to be much more enterprise capable. So rolling upgrades, making sure we're at the right level of security. Making sure that, I mean, we've led the security OpenStack group for many years. We got a lot of people in that group. I just figured out ways in which it needs to both scale, be more reliable, be more secure so that large scale enterprises like financial institutions can come and work with us. You know, I remember my first conversation in lower Manhattan when I was talking about OpenStack, somebody walked in and they said, here's our checklist for stuff that OpenStack needs to do and it was a multi hour session on a whiteboard and we didn't have a lot of check marks back then. It was back in 12 or 13. And now we've got those people saying, wow, we're able to use this in a way we never thought we'd be able to. Yeah. HP has always had a very strong leadership position in the foundation, number of PTLs and number of different things. How does the customer conversation with HP now change? You know, it used to be, like every vendor who was doing proprietary hardware and software or some combination, you know, long roadmap discussions, what would they like to see you do, how long will it take? How does it change when things are more open and they can see what's happening, they can see what you're doing? It changes in a couple of really interesting ways. One, they're knowledgeable, they've read up and they know about the projects and they know what the troubles and tribulations of any one of the projects. So our conversations are much less about trying to explain what these three words on a roadmap mean and much more about where do we, where's the community going? What kind of problems are we trying to solve more and more this quarter, next quarter, next year? And they want to know that we empathize with the pain they may be having. They may be, you scroll back a couple of years, there's a lot of pain in the neutron world. So as we, and I think we're all in a fantastically better shape over the last 18 to 24 months. Part of that was listening carefully, understanding what they needed to have and a networking solution and us committing and other people too, all committing to help fix that and make that better. So I think the conversations are more technical, they're richer and they care more about like, are we really focused around making sure the enterprise features happen versus the latest shiny feature that may not be a matter to them. So obviously the transparency piece is a big deal of it. They also can get their hands on bits early, which should never happen before. How does that change? You know, like they sort of are coming to you now with I've played with it some, how can you help me make it more stable, better? How does that change the dynamics? One, they want to understand what's kind of, how is a kind of pure open stack release different from what we offer. And we kind of walk them through both the QA processes we go through, the hardening, the lifecycle management that we've built in and also the fact that the release we have just today has not only liberty in it, but it also has select things from the Metaka release. So we curate the release to be as good as possible with as few bugs as possible to get it out there and be ready for the customer. And we'll do the same thing for our next release. It'll have some bits from the stuff we're still working on. And they're like, oh, I didn't realize that. We just like, you kind of just took up upstream bits, packaged it up and shipped it. It's like, oh wow, that would have been a lot easier if we'd just been able to do that. That's right. So Mark, you know, HPE is one of the companies that has, you know, the full spectrum of the solution. You know, kind of go up and down the stack, you know, all across. You know, you've got solutions and sometimes multiple solutions in some of those environments. Even on the application side, especially some of the analytics acquisitions you guys have made, you know, open stack, you know, discussion in the keynote this morning was, it was, you know, you've got to collaborate. So, you know, of course we've talked a lot about the openness, but can you talk some about some of the partnerships? What does HPE do? Where do you have to, you know, work with partners and how does that benefit? Well, I'll debate some concentric rings here. The first concentric ring is partnering and working more closely with the people inside HPE who have different software projects and products and making sure that they work well with us. So that's been kind of a good journey for us in the last six months. Then you kind of go outside of our ecosystem. You're going, what hardware, software, or product vendors can we collaborate with so that we can make our product work better with theirs or vice versa? Or how can we help them with the onboarding and adoption? So kind of our IHV and ISV programs really help people understand how they need to collaborate and adapt. Then the third cycle out is the other large open source projects out there. Anything from Linux to Kubernetes to Mezos to the Cloud Foundry, just you can kind of keep going. It's a wonderful ecosystem. We've had a lot of good talks about the different parts of the ecosystem. And I think it's healthy that now everybody's clear that OpenSack is one member of this large constellation of large scale open source projects. Some of the stuff that we do, for example, when we thought about kind of logging in analytics, we had some choices. We started an OpenSack project. Let's don't do that. Let's take the ELK stack and package that up in a way that we can have that as part of what we offer in our Healian distribution. It's a really great way to have a better connection into other value added applications that we have. So I think with the way containers and container ecosystems are evolving, I was really happy to see Collier, Alex, and a bunch of other folks talking about how OpenSack and containers can work well together. So I think there's a lot of interest in that both with our customers and also to what we're seeing here out in the conversations here at the summit. One of the discussion points we've been having this week is OpenSack, where it fits in the rest of the ecosystem. Maybe you can talk about the other clouds out there. I mean, HPE has strong partnership with Microsoft. How does Azure fit in? How does AWS fit in? What's that mix of kind of the on-premises where OpenSack has the most resonance versus some of the larger public clouds? We have a strong belief that it's a multi-cloud world. You talk to almost all of our customers. They have a couple of clouds that they're using. They have infrastructure inside their data centers and they need to interoperate and they need to go build the application that works well with them. And those applications sometimes have 10, 20, 100 subsystems in them. Some of them may be very well-suited to a public cloud. Some will be very well-suited to a bare metal or a virtualized infrastructure. So as we think about all the different clouds, we want to make sure that our stuff interoperates well, that we enable people to build hybrid applications, whether it's using our CSI or Cloud Suite Automation technology or operate at the Cloud Foundry or the OpenSack level. Because we know that's where they are and we want to meet customers where they are and help them on their journey. That's just a real part of, the customers that work with HPE have often worked with us for many years and we've been helping them evolve and move forward in their journey. And so we're not too preachy about that. The Helion brand covers a lot of things. It obviously covers OpenSack, it covers your variation of, or your Cloud Foundry implementation. It covers a way of sort of emulating an AWS instance with Eucalyptus. How do customers think about that? Because at a business level, you sort of say cloud, I want to go faster. And how do you help them understand where does the different pieces of that make sense? Who's in the room when you're talking about the Cloud Foundry piece versus the OpenSack piece? How is that evolving? Yeah, I think we use the Helion brand to really cover the core elements of cloud management, cloud software that we have. And customers that like the brand, they like the fact that if they're talking to the Helion team or folks that have a Helion team, they know they can have a good conversation around any of these levels. And then you kind of go like, what is your pro... I always start like, what's your... Walk me through what senior folks in your organization, your IT organization, what problems are you trying to solve? And having conversation just this morning our conversation went quickly from infrastructure to build automation and CI systems. And that was where their problems were. So we kind of pivoted the conversation to here's how infrastructure can help in this case. But boy, day one, stuff you can start this next few weeks would be more around build automation and reliability and things like that. So I think we end up trying to help go where the customer needs to go first and help them say, look, there's a lot of different ways to go for level two, level three. So to talk about cloud native, there's a lot of people that are moving towards containerized Docker oriented cloud native. But if you look at a very large bank or insurance company, thousands or tens of thousands of developers, we have a small fraction of the leading edge teams that are going to go, they want to be there. There's another big wave of the teams that want to have a better virtualized and API driven infrastructure. Okay, we're going to offer them open stack. And there's a lot of people that's still working through kind of classic automation of our bare metal machines. And there's other technologies that the company has to help there. Yeah. And do you feel like the market, do you feel like you're doing more educating of the market of, like you said, hey, your problem really is here in CI CD and build and automate, or is it, I get, I think I know what my problem is, how do I solve it? Where are we, what ending are we in in terms of that education? I think most people are not looking for a light education, they're already educated. They've got, oftentimes people have a problem and we can say, look, there's a tool that'll fix that problem, we're good with that. That conversation goes pretty well. But sometimes it's like, okay, once we do that, let's just pretend like that magically lands and on Monday morning gets fixed. Let's talk about the next three problems you're going to run up against. And let's have that conversation in the back half of the hour. And that's where there's always, hopefully some ah-has around, let's do a two phase kind of project here where we land whatever kind of infrastructure we're talking about, and then how do we help you rethink processes that need to be more agile or ways to do continuous delivery that will unlock that infrastructure. So I always like to go in both ways, kind of what's the immediate and then what do you want to do six to 18 months from now. Right, right, makes sense. I'm always an optimist, so I'm always like, we had to be able to first thing done pretty quickly. And then how are you going to unlock the major value for the CIO or the head of your organization? All right, Mark, seems like a great place to end the conversation for today. Look forward to picking it up. Probably see you at HPE Discover. Yes, see you Discover. Coming up shortly, and we'll be right back here with lots more coverage from OpenStack 2016, beautiful Austin, Texas. You're watching theCUBE.