 On the Ground, presented by theCUBE. Here's your host, John Furrier. Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We are On the Ground in Seattle for IBM's Open Computing Architecture Summit. And here at Kim Banner with Blue Box, acquired by IBM. Welcome to our On the Ground, so I'm good to see you. Hey, good to see you too. So obviously we've been big fans of Blue Box. Prior to the IBM acquisition, because Jesse and you guys done such a great job and very relevant now, what's the update? Now that you're inside IBM, are you been accepted in? Have you been blue washed? Are you operating separately? How is it working? Explain to the folks watching what the update is. So I've known Jesse for a couple years and because of the IBM acquisition, it was an interesting thing for me to join. And so things have been great. We did transfer visits in May. Not sure if I'm allowed to say that, I'm sure I am. And now we're at IBM Blue Box, so we're in product inside of IBM Cloud. And so a lot of what we're building on top of that is going to have Blue Box underneath it, which is fantastic. And so dedicated in a local option. So truly a lot of good times going on. So integration in terms of teams, what does that mean? Does it mean now you're in all the systems? Is it product integration across different groups? What specifically? Earlier this year, so we did two big releases back in November. And then right after that, we got to work in January of re-aligning all of our groups of Blue Box inside of IBM. And so we're truly all reporting through to other great people inside of IBM Cloud and get a lot done. So you just had a big, you had a big presence at DockerCon, which we were just broadcasting live to. How does Blue Box and IBM fit into that context? Because there was conversations between IBM as a unified message, but what does Blue Box fit in there? So Blue Box is really the underpinnings of a lot of the IBM Cloud strategy. And that's what got me excited to join IBM. And Blue Box, obviously. So we are the IaaS based on OpenStack. And so I'm a huge proponent of open source and enterprise customers are also a huge passion for me that's my background. So it fit really nicely. And so what are some things you're working on right now at Blue Box and IBM? So we're working on a lot of customer POCs, which have gone fantastic. And our advocate team is great about that. Truly hands-on, getting in front of customers. We're also speaking at a lot of conferences. So if you see anybody on my team, nine times out of 10, they're not going to be in their home city. So talk about for a minute, I want to share the kind of engagements that you guys have with customers because with the open source component, it isn't your normal corporate kind of supplier relationship. There's a lot of collaboration involved. How do you guys support? How do you engage with the customers and how do ultimately they get the solutions to market? Gotcha. So we're integrated pretty well and we work really closely with our offering management, our product teams inside of IBM. But we really go out there and listen and bring back and we are the customer advocate our team is to bring back the types of things they want to see in the roadmap or the types of things they'd love to be able to play with and do. And so we try to help them with that. And head count in terms of team growth, I guess that's some growth there. Yeah, I mean, when Blue Box was acquired, I think we were right at 60 and now we're way over 120 now and still growing. So it's pretty exciting. So talk about this open compute architecture summit here that's here at IBM 7. What is this all about? Oh gosh, we wanted to bring in some of the greatest minds in the community to really have a conversation with our customers and have it be less of a product pitch about IBM, but more about how invested we are into open source. And I tell you, John, I wouldn't be here if we weren't fully in. And it's a great time to be at IBM, I have to say. Angel's fantastic, I just interviewed him and we've been following that, and I'm cloud outside you guys as well as. It's exciting because it's a new generation of delivery, but also technologies there. And there's a huge tsunami of new opportunities like IoT, mobile, and certainly Docker brings the application piece to it. So that's cool, but still, stuff has to run under the hood and it's still going to be done in the open. So what are you finding from customers as they scratch their head and saying, okay, I buy open source. I know IBM's had a lot of presence there, but I still want to be agile, but I don't want stuff to break. I still got to operate this stuff. I'm not going to reduce my SLAs. So I want good SLAs, I want good operations. What are they asking for? What are you here? Perfect questions for that. So Blue Box, as you know, is private cloud as a service. So it's based on OpenStack. We've had so many customers try to work with OpenStack and in OpenStack and they failed, right? It's not very easy to manage at scale in some of these larger customers. So they come to us and say, we love the agility, we love to be able to scale it. Can you help us with that? And so that's where we fit. So it's a perfect fit. Can you give an example of someone who's helped or you don't have to name companies, but like the situation and where it worked for them? Yeah. So gosh, who do I want to pick? Pick your favorite. Yeah, so a gaming company as an example. They really wanted the speed and the ease of use and speed and they didn't want to manage it themselves and they had data that they needed to make sure that it didn't get out to the general public. And so Private Cloud was something that they had messed around with a little bit in the past and it didn't really work that well. And so they came to Blue Box and said, hey, can you help us with this? And so they wanted to be in OpenStack without having to be a cloud company. And so they're really focused on what they can do. I was talking with Mariana Tessa last night who was the now running strategy at Docker. She was VP of engineering. We were talking about the choices now out there for developers, certainly all kinds of young and old school guys like me. But the reality is there's so much stuff. How do you talk about that with people and saying, what's groups to join? How do they engage? How does someone figure out where to play in the open source community? Is there best practices in terms of looking for things? Like do I want to join that group? Should I join OpenStack? What about this? I love this whisk thing, but people might need some navigation. What's your thoughts? What I'm finding is, so I've been running technical user groups for years and we run Cloud Foundry and I love that IBM was involved in Cloud Foundry and obviously OpenStack as well. I always tell folks, come to a meetup, we'll go with you, get to know the community, that kind of thing. And that's the best way to really learn. A lot of people don't learn by reading release notes or reading GitHub notes instead of an open repository. I think that you've got to talk to other people who are using it and that's the best way. And get a feel for who's in the community. Absolutely. That's where the meetups give you an immersion. And you have people, right? It's not just faceless, user names instead of GitHub, right? So that's what I always tell people. Okay, so I got to ask a final question. What are you most excited about right now in the industry and open source in general? What is really... I'm excited about everything. Is there a top three favorite child? I mean, come on, you have to... I really love what we're doing with the IBM Container Engine. I learned more about it this week at AccraCon that I'd ever known before and so I'm really curious to see what our customers think, so. Kim, thanks so much for sharing some time with us here in Cube on the Ground. This is Cube on the Ground. I'm John Furrier here in Seattle with IBM's Open Compute Architecture Summit. Thanks for watching.