 Okay. It's now noon. Good afternoon. My name is Tim LaBelle. I'm with Hewlett-Packard. I'm a senior product manager in the HP Cloud Group working on the Helion product. So that's our Helion OpenStack distribution, as well as our Helion development platform product. And today we're going to be talking about competitive advantage using OpenStack. One of my responsibilities at HP is to work with customers and help those customers articulate what they're doing, bring that information back in and help us build better products over time. So brought a couple of customers with me today. I have Orlando Bader from Ormuko and Kevin Fluth from Intralinks. And we'll talk a little bit with what they're doing. Ormuko is a service provider located in Montreal. And Orlando, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and the company? Yeah, perfect. So I am the CEO for Ormuko. We're a cloud delivery platform for service providers and enterprise in which we provide hybrid cloud, private and public and wide-leveling offer for our clients. So I founded the company in 2008. So I leave the transition from a telecommunication carrier, from a system integrator to a cloud provider. And we build these to comply with data sovereignty across the world. And one of our goals right now is to go and select partners in each country in which we can empower with our solution. And we have offices in North America and in the end. Great. Now, Orlando has an open-stack cloud running for quite some time now. We grabbed a little video that you sent over that we'll look here in terms of, let's take a little bit of a look at the product and you can talk through a little bit about what's going on. There you go. So basically it took us 24 months of developing R&D to make a cloud that simple. We're building an open-stack for the great work the community have done. And we try to accomplish all the items that open-stack wasn't able to do. So we were able to provide hybrid cloud, private and public into one platform and have a completely wide-leveling offer for anybody that want to have it in a turnkey solution. So we can have a wide-leveling solution less than 24 hours for our enterprise customer or service providers. We have all the functionalities of open-stack and we basically use the APIs to build all the other technology that open-stack currently do know how. So all this is we build all the security, log, compliance and the beauty is you can have private and managed cloud into one platform. We're just going to do a little audio work here. Yours didn't have audio but Kevin's does. So I'll just kind of get in the head here on that one. Great. Thank you, Orlando. So we're going to sit down and we're going to do a little interview style here in a second. We're going to walk it through their solution a little bit more. And I'll also let you guys ask some questions as well. So Kevin, I've got you up here, is with Intralinks. Intralinks is, I don't know, I've heard of it as the enterprise version of Dropbox. I'm sure there's different ways to say that. But you guys have enterprise customers and an amazing way to store data and move it around. Tell us a little bit about yourself and Intralinks. Sure. Thanks. I'm a cloud architect at Intralinks. One thing it's interesting when you hear about, you know, the Dropbox for the enterprise, the truth is, is that, yes, we have brought to market a similar type of enterprise file sync and share and collaboration tool. But really, we've been in business since 1996. And around 2000 brought virtual data rooms to the market. So large financial organizations can collaborate both on the buy and sell side in a very, very, very secure, auditable environment online. And so that collaboration functionality goes back all the way to 2000. And so it's kind of, you know, we're 99% of the global Fortune 1000 companies use Intralinks from a platform perspective for those virtual data rooms. And so we're building on top of that success and that platform to go into the new space of online file sync and share and really collaboration. Great. Yeah. In fact, when you sent me your video over, I got it as a Intralinks package through a virtual room. So I was able to go grab this very quickly off of the web and bring that down. We'll take a quick look at the stuff here. Unitex new marketing manager. Sam's first project was to deliver a global marketing campaign. She was surprised to find some Unitex employees were using unsecure, unsanctioned file sharing tools to collaborate with partners, vendors and clients. Giving the company little control over its most valuable asset, its intellectual property. Sam worked with Intralinks via at her previous job. So she was confident it was just what Unitex needed to get the job done. Sam had an Intralinks via account set up. She created workspaces and invited the right stakeholders from both sides of the corporate firewall and presto. Before you could say protect my information, Sam's team was up and running with a safe, secure and flexible collaboration solution. Unitex marketing department loved the intuitive interface that made it easy to get work done. Their partners appreciated that they could work and share with complete confidence from anywhere online or off. And Unitex IT department was happy with unsurpassed security of Intralinks via. Soon, other Unitex teams adopted Intralinks via too. Legal, finance and R&D. Enabling secure, efficient collaboration across the enterprise. Awesome. So let's have a seat guys. We'll talk a little bit. I always enjoy finding out what solutions are being built on top of this OpenStack technology. And you guys both have very different approaches, but very innovative in what you've done. So Kevin, tell us a little bit about some of the challenges in building this type of a solution. You obviously have to go at scale. But what are some of the challenges we're looking at OpenStack as a basis for this solution? I think scalability was one of the main reasons and drivers to go with OpenStack. So we're building a new platform. That platform needs to scale and needs to scale globally. And so we have a hybrid cloud solution that both takes account in public cloud as well as building private cloud infrastructure. We're a SaaS company, so it's important for our data centers to scale and also for us to be able to populate new data centers. And so when I look at your solution, you guys have built a very, some would say purpose built cloud, specifically for this SaaS offering that you create. Yeah, it's very purpose built. Our existing platform, if you think about where we started, 1996, we have a very monolithic app. It's a big monolithic beast. And so when we look at building a new platform, we really wanted to make a, you know, a divergent path here. You know, it is the, you know, the day and age now where you have microservices, you had cloud workloads. And so in order to take advantage of that, we really wanted to make sure that we had, you know, cloud platforms that we could develop on top of, but then also move into production. Okay. Orlando, with your use of OpenStack, you've been multiple years now and you are in production with an OpenStack based cloud. So what are some of the challenges that you found in terms of keeping that cloud up and running at scale? So, so basically, as everyone knows, we started 24 months OpenStack wasn't ready out there. So we needed to have a solution that take us to market quickly, have the features that many competitors have. And then we decided to have an R&D team of 40 to 50 people to build all the features on top of OpenStack. So we build a cloud in multiple data centers, Montreal, Sunnyvale Dallas and London, UK. We have in many data centers, we have more than 1,400 physical servers. So running these scale cloud, it wasn't an easy way to build it. It took us, you know, 24 months of R&D. But one of the good things that we did is we have our R&D team working with the features of OpenStack roadmap. So we kind of kind of overcome all the challenges that OpenStack were having at the time. So for example, we don't have any limitation in the number of CPU and compute nodes that most of the people that install OpenStack have because we were, we launched the cloud with Federation. So we can go, you know, if an OpenStack installation support 1,000 nodes, that's okay. We put Federation and we can just put five of them, right? So we are not limited by OpenStack itself, we can connect to each of them. And the same we did for storage and network and so on. So we can connect our data centers. And we base most of the innovation was for the private cloud which hybrid cloud offering that OpenStack didn't have back then. And some would say you've been out early. You made your decision a couple of years ago to go with OpenStack as your basis. Tell us what you think about the current momentum that you see here at the conference. I saw you at the last one as well. But as well as here, the momentum seems to be growing and growing. And how do you feel as a service provider who's creating these tools on top of OpenStack? So basically, for people that wasn't here before, OpenStack was like, you know, conference were like 50, 100, 300 people back then. Now it's like 6,000, 7,000. So knowing that we chose the right platform to work on, that's a big achievement for us. So OpenStack is growing. And one of the main goal of OpenStack is to make it easier. And make it easier for anybody to consume it and install it and configure it. But I just don't see it happening anytime soon. Because with all the projects to catch up with what is out there and all the innovation, it's not going to happen. So you either have to choose a provider that helped you build it or a provider that helped you manage it, or you need to have developers to do it there. So, but it is great to see how the project have advanced and it have more functionalities than most of the biggest public clouds out there, which should help for us to provide services to the service providers out there. Cool. And Kevin, you made the decision more recently to build your next gen version of your SaaS offering on top of OpenStack. When you look at the momentum here, when you look at the open source community, what's important to you? I mean, why did you make this choice? Obviously, you knew it's open source. You knew it had a strong community. You knew the momentum behind it. Did that play a role in your decision? The decision really happened about two years ago. And so, you know, I think over the last two years, we've continually evaluated, you know, are we are we making the right choice? Have we made the right choice? And I think we continually are validated that yes, we are. In fact, when we go to talk to some of our largest customers, you know, we're a SaaS application, we're a SaaS company, but a lot of our new platform is going to have the ability to be very specific about where customers' data might be, including on their, you know, in their enterprise, in their data center. And so, they're building out, you know, cloud infrastructure. They're providing infrastructure as a service. And so, it really lines up to what we're doing. And I think we continually are validated that we're on the right track. Okay, very good. And Orlando, you and I talked a while ago, and I remember you made a comment to me. You said that, you know, we at our Mucco, you said, we built this cloud. I've got some great developers. You have some great developers. You've done some wonderful things. But you said some people are made to build the cloud and some are made to just consume the cloud. So what did you mean when you said that? Yeah, so, so, so if you're in a, if you're trying to build a cloud right now, you're asking the question is what is the best way that I should do this? My advice to you is you need to see what kind of consumer or what kind of enterprise are you going to become. If you are enterprise that have a high R&D team and have plenty of time to build a customized cloud for you, then you should go build your own, customize it for your own needs. If you're looking for a fast track to have OpenStack with a lot of functionality, not necessarily customized for you, you can go for a private managed provider. If you want to have a compatibility OpenStack, you want to go with a service provider that is public that can offer you that. So, so you have to decide whether you want to start with a public cloud or a private managed cloud or a private cloud because your strategy will depend on that. If you want to go with a private cloud, you go with somebody to the HP, they help you with the OpenStack distribution with all the patch, liabilities and they help you with the hardware. If you want to get a fast track, you go with a private managed cloud that can burst into a public cloud and then you can either decide to build it later on. But the main advantage I say is get starting as soon as possible so you can start learning and you can have your engineers and your team working with the roadmap that is coming ahead so that you don't have to catch up, you're already ahead of everyone else. Yeah, I want to comment on that a little bit because I think it's a really good point, you know, what type of a consumer you are. For us, you know, we have enterprise level data centers, we're a SaaS company, you know, we thought we had data centers down. But the truth is, is OpenStack really is a new animal and it is a very different, you know, beast to bring in from an operations perspective. And so for us, the choice really wasn't, you know, yes, we have a hybrid approach, right, we have a public cloud, you know, component, we have a private cloud component, but we can't get away from the private cloud. The security for us and having that within our data center with having that, you know, potentially even within a customer data center requires that we have, you know, a cloud on-prem. And so, you know, I will say that it has been a journey for us and going from, you know, a SaaS company with large, you know, data centers and managing that to bringing in OpenStack and bringing that to being ready for production. Another area that your product or your architecture works in is you also build innovative applications on top of this that your customers are going to consume. How has the move to the cloud changed that? Do you build applications differently now? You can talk a little maybe about you have an application that needs to scale out when multiple people are editing a document, for instance. Yeah, absolutely. So, again, we talked about, you know, this big monolithic app that we had and still have and will continue to have. But the plan and where we're at right now is building out a new platform that that's built on top of cloud technologies. The first app to really port over and consume that platform is our VA application. But over time, our other applications will port over and they'll run on top of this cloud application or cloud, you know, we'll provide infrastructure service, but then also all the deployment and capability that we need in a microservice architecture that scales. So everything that we do is highly automated scales based on load and demand. And it's just a very, very different approach to what we've been doing in the past. And we have a lot of talk at this conference about the technology itself and the developers get together and do a lot of work here as well. But there's another aspect to moving this all forward for yourself and for others that can build clouds. What did you have to do internally, organizationally, to move to this? Did you have to change the developer's mindset on how they build apps? We still have to change. We're not there yet. You know, I think I was in a conference, I was in a meeting the other day and I stood up and I said, you know, I can go out and I got, you know, over 200 plus people who can program Java. But, you know, I can't go out there and tell me who can help me write infrastructure code. You know, there's just a very different mindset from a development standpoint. So we are making the transition to that DevOps mindset, building these teams that are, you know, very much have the same skill sets across the different organizations, but really have, you know, different focuses or different functions, but collaborate in a whole new way. Yeah. So one of the things that I wanted to say is there was the biggest transformation of IT of our time is happening right now. Companies are converting from buying from traditional hardware and buying the infrastructure to get a SaaS or a YASO frame. Services, people just buy services. They don't want to build it their own. Now, with so many apps coming to the market right now, the development have increased in any organization. Before they go to the IT department, they say you can have a VM and it take like, you know, two weeks because of all the paperwork you need to do, the firewall you need to open, you didn't have APIs, you need to build a database. So it was a very complex time to build an application. That's why there were not many out there. So the biggest transformation from a company is adopting the cloud, accelerate the process of being more agile, more flexible to go to market. Because now they can forget about the infrastructure piece. They can concentrate on the business, build the app and then take it to production. And that's one of the biggest advantage of going to a cloud. Great. But I also think it's important, you know, going to a cloud, those are the advantages. For us, the difficulty was signing up to actually become an infrastructure as a service provider ourselves internally. I think that was the big challenge. And I think one of the things, you know, is the vendor approach or the distribution approach, I think is a very valid way to take a look at that. But I do think it's important to go into that with your eyes pretty wide open, which is, yes, you want to consume this distribution. Enterprises like to consume it from, you know, large vendors. There's a certain safety net there. But I think it's also important to understand that operationally, you will need to change and evolve. And I think that's one thing that, you know, I think is a very important thing for me to share. Let's jump into the application itself. Talk a little bit about how you've structured things. I'll start with you, Kevin. Your application requires some very specific things. For one, it's companies documents you're storing. Therefore, security becomes a very large issue. And secondly, we've got laws and regulations in certain countries where data sovereignty becomes an issue. My understanding is you have some pretty complex environments around the way you set up subnets and lands and so forth. How does that work with your application? What was the challenges in doing that with OpenStack or looking at doing that with the next gen? Yeah, it's actually a benefit of OpenStack is you really are able to do a lot of, I don't know, belt and suspenders approaches when it comes to security, right? You can do a lot of things as far as isolations of tenants and environments and what have you. So I think, you know, OpenStack allowed us to do that as well as, you know, working with the public cloud, but a good thing to kind of segue on there as far as the data privacy. That's one of the main reasons from a competitive advantage standpoint. We went with OpenStack is it allows us to deploy our application in multiple areas and multiple geographies, which is very important when you look at an organization. So going back to the dropbox for the enterprise, right? It's very important for enterprises today to comply with data sovereignty laws, right? So that's a very, very evolving and changing fast paced, you know, landscape. And we are betting a lot on the ability to, you know, give that to to an enterprise. And that feature and functionality is going to be incredibly important. Awesome. Thanks, Orlando. You may have some make decisions on what parts of OpenStack you're going to use. I do know you guys use Ceph. I've seen a lot of people here interested in Ceph. Could you talk a little bit about why you chose to implement Ceph as along with the other storage mechanism? So basically, when you choose every component of OpenStack, you need to know which one is the best fit for your company or for the scale that you're going to have. So you can decide to go for Swift and Cinder and have two different solutions for your cloud. We just decided to go Ceph because it allows us to give us both into one. So easier to manage, easier to scale. You can have a group of experts on Ceph rather than have a group of experts on Swift and Cinder and the different applications. Or we want to go with OpenStandr. So we didn't go to a third party company that provides storage. We look at that. So the same with E4 for Neutron and other services, we analyze it and we see what is the best path forward compared with the roadmap that it's coming ahead. So when you look at the roadmap and you see what's coming ahead for OpenStack, Kevin, what are you seeing in terms of cool projects down the line that you might be taking advantage of? Or do you normally come to these conferences about getting core in the areas that you guys focus on? I mean, I think one of the things I've taken away from the conference is really, you know, all the talk around Docker, managing Docker, as we look at our application, we are, you know, a microservice application, but we're not completely Dockerized yet. So it's good to get that perspective. The management piece of it all, I think, is very important. And I think that's one area where the community needs to do probably a little bit more work as far as providing that level of manageability. And so, you know, whether it's Manaska that HP is kind of helping to spearhead or other management tools, I think from an operation standpoint, that's really where I'd like to see, you know, more happening and it looks like that's happening. It is. In fact, we're just setting up now to get you the new version of Helion Open Stack, which just, I believe came out yesterday. And we have incorporated Manaska in there and including an ops console that allows for visualization on top of a number of the alerts. So we've taken a really good first stab at the Manaska stuff and love to get your feedback on that when you get that started. So basically, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Like, you need to put your hands in open stack as soon as possible and work on the roadmap. We implemented containers and Docker around, you know, 12 months ago. And just because we knew it was going and now we application portability was really a strategic for us. So we wanted to plan ahead. And now, eventually, the community will have a release, right? You know, they have Magnum and they have all these different solutions that you can just use. But now, do you need it now? Or do you need it 24 months for now? You need it 12 months for now? Can you wait until become reliable or not? What you don't want to do is you don't want to modify anything on open stack to make it compatible because then it's easy to, it's very hard to upgrade, very hard to maintain. You want to keep it as it is and build everything on the API layer on top of open stack rather than modifying and sell the code. And one of the other things that work in this community is whatever you take, you have to get back to the community in order to be able to grow it. Now, we, this was, talk was around competitive advantage. And so you each have your own business that you're, you play in. And in that business, you want to win. And you've chosen a specific technology which is a core of what you're offering is. So what is it that open stack does or why did you choose open stack that gives you that competitive advantage over others in the market that you're competing with? For you specifically on your solution? I think for us, again, we talked about data sovereignty and being able to deploy our application and where our customer data is be very, you know, specific about where that where that happens and also fire all off where where that, you know, can transition. I think the other thing is just velocity, just being able to speed up bringing that that feature functionality to market. How about you, Orlando? So so basically, as I say previously, we saw what was out there in the cloud. And you say, what is the best path forward to catch up and to build the functionalities we need to have? And we realize that open stack already have a lot of in incubation that we're not ready yet. But we say by the time we start building our platform on top of open stack, we're going to have a lot of functionalities that will take us years to build and to be able to mature them. We realize is we end up finalizing before open stack in the roadmap and we needed to kind of give to the community back a lot of the functionalities we have because it was open stack become evolving with the release cycle every six months. So they keep adding new functionalities but choosing open stack allows us to go to market faster, allows us to have not only 50 developers but to have like 5,000 developers collaborating together and building it. And most important, aligned with our business model in building what it is right for our enterprise customer rather than what the community thing is good for the community itself because the community can be can be good for everyone but building a while labeling offer platform that allow you to have workloads from public to private into one solution is something that is not in open stack yet. And the while labeling with building with ready to go easy to use it is not there. So we concentrate on that we let the community handle the parts that they have been working the last 36 months. I got one more thing I wanted to add because I forgot about it. One thing is that our customers we have some very, very, very large customers. They all have some sort of open stack project going on internally. They are all building some sort of infrastructure as a service platform as a service internally. And a lot of them don't have internal customers yet for them. And so for us. Yes, we're a SAS company but they also like to consume especially those large companies they like to consume them themselves internally inside their firewall help to manage it. And so strategically we're aligned there strategically we've kind of leapfrogged a little bit and now have something that when those customers have that completely ready to go our application what we've built goes on to their platform and scales again those large customers what they really want in the first thing that they talk about is how does your application scale because I've got you know a Gajillion people that are in this is because in most of your I don't know if it's all or but most of your installations it goes on prem with the customer is that correct on Prem is is a is a roadmap item. You know I think we've got to we've got to you know solve it first internally bring it to production in our data centers and and then we'll be able to you know put that globally around things get really interesting for us when our when our when our platform becomes and it's already global today but the new platform becomes global when a customer can say hey my data stays within you know the EU or it stays within the US and provide that level of business logic around there. But then ultimately yes the ability to have a customer consume our application on prem and at scale. So it's interesting you're kind of saying that your SAS offering because it's built on OpenStack and built as cloud native app and with a bunch of new technologies that scene as a very positive thing by people buying that solution because they're doing that themselves internally. Yeah absolutely you know and I think they're not there yet. I've talked to some very very large banking customers big banks and you know some of them have cloud you know ready to go but they have non mission critical customers internally not saying OpenStack what they actually some of its OpenStack some of its other but but cloud technologies but all of them have a have a have a play going. So that's the important thing of the competitive advantage of OpenStack is the APIs of OpenStack are widely used and compatible with a lot of SAS companies. So it's a SAS company is growing up. They're going to be building and compatible with not only public cloud provider but with OpenStack itself. So if you are built and based in OpenStack and your core is that then any application that is OpenStack compatible should work in your private cloud as long as you choose OpenStack which is which is great. So for example if Kevin is building his solution and he already have an OpenStack cloud internally then he said hey I'm compatible with your cloud as long as you didn't modify the code of OpenStack it should work and that's one of the main advantage of choosing a technology that you know is not fork and is like that. Yeah great. Now when I've done customer panels in the past I always like to you guys have been in the code for a while I'd like you to give words of wisdom stuff that you have learned or if you were going into a new company and they were saying hey we're thinking of doing OpenStack what's the first couple of things you tell them. Really take a look at your organization going back to what you said what kind of a consumer am I you know am I consuming a public cloud provider for a you know dev ops you know platform what is it really going to take to go to production and look at your organization your operations and then you know really be strategic in the way you partner. And just to follow up on that a bit a lot of times when you're going into build a cloud how much prep work do you do up front versus once you get into it what kinds of things do you need to do on the front end. We did a lot of we did a lot of prep work we have a very custom not custom built a purpose built I think is a better term right our cloud is very purpose built it has one consumer one application to run on top of it. It's you know we've got multiple tenants but they're each significant either they're each separate environments from dev test all the way up it's really a late enabled us to be very rapid in the way that we develop. But we really purpose built it so we look at you know object storage was a main component for us really understand what your workload is model that and then come up with a really good testing strategy so that your proof of concepts really do match what your use cases are. So so basically. The important what I say before is what do you want opening stock to do for your business and how do you want opening stock or any cloud to transfer your business and based on that what is your timeline and what opening stock has that you don't have and based on that you can decide a technology but also the business out of it. So I had discussion with a lot of service providers that when I still is in you know Asia Europe and we have many many partners that we empower with our solution and they they want to build it their self a lot of them. And we always say to them is like look if you want to use us you can start with this. You can see how the market your local market work with this and then you can decide to build it yourself. If it does the path you can have like a fast track. What I notice is they know how hard is to operate it manage it and maintain it and they say my business model is better fulfilled taking care of my needs of my enterprise maybe sales marketing rather than managing these but you know having 40 50 people in R&D working on this and managing it and hire early. I think that's been the joke of the conference right. We're hiring we're hiring we are hiring at interlinks. Orlando are you hiring everyone is hiring right. I think we are like 12 people to 15 people a month growing all the time you get the right people on board early that can help you with the with the process both partners and internal talent. And obviously with having you go both on stage here with us at HP you are both HP customers. You've chosen to work with the distribution from from HP and possibly others as well. But tell just a little bit about why why go with a commercial distribution like like HP's healing on product. So so basically you have a you invest like one billion dollar over 24 months and you have a lot of R&D so that kind of allows us to have a really good conversation of the road maps what you're working on and from from a technical perspective what have worked with different customers. What is the challenge of opening stack and the good thing about HP is you don't modify the the trunk you use exactly what everyone else out there but you have the guidance and they have great tool in the management to help us manage it and operate it easily. So from from a business perspective we can align because we target is the same type of customer and we can have a go to market beneficial for for the companies as well. Appreciate that. Anything to add Kevin or. Yeah I mean one thing I would say is you know we we partnered with HP for number of reasons there was some you know cross selling opportunities as well but but from an open stack perspective it really came down to we didn't necessarily know all the different things that we were going to need along the way from an operation standpoint we consume a certain amount of managed services today you know what distributions out there provide that level of managed services HP had a lot of the the components right the you know from a managed services organization to hardware to software to a public not not the public cloud but again the expertise is there and I think one of the things was it was in a way you know for us on this journey to make sure that we partner with someone that had the breadth and depth across the organization to help us accomplish what we want to accomplish the other thing is in terms of liability I mean like there's a lot of open source in open stock and in term of legal aspect having a unlimited liability for the code we use of HP that's a great asset for us right well I want to thank both of you for being customers as well as I really enjoyed both working with both of you and look forward to more of that thanks for your time today I remember and talking to Orlando ahead of time and Kevin as well they're both willing to talk to you about what they've done and how they've done it and Orlando's like come on up to Montreal and we'll show you what we're doing if you have questions just come on up and have a chat with these guys and thanks again for sharing thank you thank you