 Everybody we're back, this is Dave Vellante I'm with Wikibon.org and this is the Cube Silicon Angles production of VMworld 2013. This is our fourth year here at VMworld. Two years, 2010 and this year at the Moscone Center we got this great setup that VMwear provided for us. It's just awesome. We go from wall to wall, three days. Looks like we might even be going tomorrow. So if you're around, you couldn't get on the Cube during the first three days. I think we're going to be here and add an extra day. Sean Weedage is here. Sean is the CTO of the Global Enterprise Solutions Business at Rackspace. He's been on the Cube before. Sean, good to see you again. Dave, great to be back. So last time we talked to you was May. We had you on, at EMC World actually. And so I know you've been doing a lot of traveling since but give us the update, what's new since we last talked? Man, there is a lot going on. So obviously, continuing to build momentum around OpenStack, the community. We've had some great new partners jump on board there. Have some really impressive customer wins in terms of helping customers be able to deploy OpenStack. So that's been big. We're out here at VMworld this week really talking about what we're doing on our VMworld platform. So even though OpenStack is a big piece of our business, we still have a huge installation of VMworld infrastructure for customers. So it's a split message. Different workloads pick the right solution for the workloads but both of those are really going strong for us right now. You guys have always been driven by what the customer wants, right? So if customers say, okay, this is really the infrastructure that we want to go with, you've been receptive to that anyway. Absolutely, certain applications need the capabilities that VMworld brings to the table. Certain applications are much better inclined to be using the OpenStack product set. So we have that flexibility, we have the hybrid model still that we're able to fit the right solution to the customer's infrastructure needs. It's interesting right now to see the shifts that are going on in the industry, right? I mean, four years ago when we started here, it was VMware, VMware all the time, how much virtualization can you get to? The real imperative to drive adoption. Now you're seeing other hypervisors, make some good inroads technically, right? In terms of playing catch up, probably clearly still not where VMware is, they had quite a leap. But then you have this OpenStack phenomenon come in. It's interesting to hear some of the positioning that VMware has that embracing OpenStack, positive to OpenStack, we love OpenStack. There's a but. And the but is, but it's just the framework, it's kind of not ready for prime time. And in all full disclosure, I've written, I wrote a couple of years ago, OpenStack's not ready for prime time, but the OpenStack summit began, it was a milestone, it started to change our view of how ready OpenStack was. So is OpenStack just the framework? No, OpenStack is not just a framework, and OpenStack is actually ready for prime time. You know, the initial conferences we had, you know, the first conference up in Austin, very small group, but you know, we've gotten some great partners, some great momentum, HP, Red Hat's contributing a lot of code, and this thing is really starting to pick up a lot of traction with customers. We're seeing customers using it for content delivery, seeing customers use it for big data solutions. We had the big announcement with CERN, 15,000 hosts that are going to be managed with OpenStack, so you know, it's easy to dismiss in the, because it is still a relatively new product, but with the capabilities that we continue to add the ever increasing number of sponsors, the increasing amount of code that's going into the product, it's far moving beyond the framework. You just did a study, and we had one of these sort of, I'll call it conditioned response questions, and it was sort of a generic question about their philosophy. We asked customers, are you willing to essentially trade the risk of lock-in for simplicity, and you know, single vendor, and you know, that it's all going to work, you know, nobody ever got fired for buying an IBM type of thing. To the other end of the spectrum is, we're seeing stuff like OpenStack, and we're not doing business with guys that aren't, you know, dogmatic about OpenSystem, and then couple in between, and not surprising, we found about 15% of the people were on that, we're going OpenStack, you know, route. So the early adopters, which you would expect, and about half the audience said, you know, we're willing to risk that lock-in, because it's safe, and won't get fired, essentially, is what we interpreted that as, and then you had the in between. Does that sound about right to you? I think you're spot on, you know, there are the organizations and individuals that are more progressive in terms of their technology adoption. I mean, you know, when we started Rackspace, we started off Linux centric, and very much open source centric, and there were fewer customers, but over time, Linux has supplanted Microsoft as our largest operating system for our customers. So, you know, the early adopters are where the activity is at now, but we continue to see more and more interactions, more and more interest from more corporate mainstream IT decision makers. So, what's your take on some of the discourse around OpenStack embracing AWS APIs? You know, you've followed that a little bit, you know. Some have come out and been very vocal about it, others have said, hey, that's not the right strategy, you know, because essentially, then we're relying on Amazon to drive the API strategy. What's the Rackspace, you know, formal take on that? Yeah, you know, it's a great conversation, and what I really like about the conversation above anything else is it's really the community trying to figure this out, figure out which direction to go in, and that was really the intent was on OpenStack, make it open source and let the community dictate where the development went. You know, I'm still at the belief that we should not lock ourselves in, we should not adopt someone else's APIs. You know, we've then become tied to Amazon very closely. I don't think we need to do that. With the increased emergence of public clouds based on OpenStack, you're going to have a federated capabilities regardless, so stick with the API that we can control, that the community owns, and not lock into someone else's standards that might limit your flexibility down the road. Now how about, obviously, OpenStack, when you, in the OpenStack, some of you had some really good customer examples, a lot of those were in cloud service provider space, so that's good to get early traction there, that's, on the one hand, it's great validation, as well, you're getting a very sophisticated audience and a distribution channel that's built right in, so that's all goodness. You know, at the same time people say, okay, what about mainstream enterprises? So, what we're hearing at VMworld is a lot about hybrid cloud, hybrid cloud is an imperative, and really the computing model, and Pat Gelsing was on earlier, and John called the hybrid cloud, I think he called it John, a stepping stone or something, and it was really funny. Halfway house. And Pat went nuts, halfway house. I was like, what are you talking about? It's not halfway, it's the end game. And then John clarified that a little bit, but that still went a little, mini ballistic as much as Pat ever does, but what are you seeing as far as hybrid cloud, hybrid cloud adoption into the enterprise, generally and then specifically with OpenStack, is that the model that you guys are locking into? Yeah, so we're seeing it. We're seeing the demand from customers, so you're exactly right. Initially it was service provider focused, service providers looking for ways to create cloud computing delivery mechanisms for their customers. What we're seeing now is we're seeing corporate IT saying, I need to become more agile. I need to be able to be just as flexible, just as responsive to our customers as a public cloud provider. So they are actively looking at OpenStack as being the framework to be able to deploy that. There's a lot of expertise out there, it is open source, there's a lot of customization. We have all the big name vendors that have joined the organization and are contributing code. So we're seeing more and more it moving from service providers to the corporate IT groups trying to figure out how do we leverage this to give us more flexibility, but at the same time lower our cost to be able to serve our customers. So it's a big shift. Now the hybrid capability, the idea that we can have federated clouds and you have workload portability and so I'll choose a medical cloud for one application. I'll choose a, if I want a high touch provider like a rack space, I'll use that for other applications. That vision is still very early, but that's what we see this going. We see where you'll be able to choose, pick and choose your cloud. If it's price that you're making a decision on to test dev, they'll be cloud to do that. If it's really a service component availability where you want a rack space and our expertise, you'll be able to choose rack space. So the hybrid capability continues to expand and the model's continuing to evolve, but we see that as no one solution is going to meet every customer's needs. And so we continue to invest in the ability to do public and private workloads on OpenStack. And in terms of how you think about the private cloud, if I infer correctly, you're saying that federated application is a ways off. So today it's a lot of DR and the like, but that is the vision that you see over time taking hold, that federated application. Absolutely, federated applications and use of different providers for different types of workloads. So we continue to have strong interest, particularly international right now with some of the telecoms around, can you help us become a provider and then at some point, how do we start linking its clouds together to allow customers to be able to serve content in the countries they need, keep data in countries that may have regulatory requirements that say data has to stay in country. So the federated cloud is going, is coming. And our goal is that it speaks OpenStack. Sean, I got to ask you about the developer angle. Obviously, one of the things that we talk about in the cube here is developers and rack space is so pro developer. We heard that earlier from Rick Jackson and the new CMO came from VMware. They're the lifeblood of the cloud right now, the communities that OpenStack in particular. You know, what is going on? Cause it's an application-centric world, work dimension, workloads, that's the new focus and developers don't want to deal with the underlying hardware. So yeah, okay, make a cloud, but what technically is going on that's going to accelerate the onboarding of developers? Yes, it's a great question. And glad you had a chance to meet Rick, really excited about him coming and joining us from VMware and taking the opportunity with rack space. So I think he brings a lot to the leadership team. So developers are critical. We have a number of outreach programs that are going on with developers right now, new SDKs, we have a DevOps blog and capability. So really spending a lot of time in terms of developer outreach because they're really fueling the continued expansion of OpenStack. So we can't reach out to developers often enough. We have a lot of open houses here. We've now got our San Francisco office just there this morning. We've got a hundred plus people there and it's heavily developer-centric and heavy on the outreach to the developer community. So we will continue to those grassroots type efforts. What we're seeing is the last OpenStack summit we, as a company, sent over 200 people out there and the bulk of those were on the development side of the house. And so the attendee list was massive somewhere in the area of 2,500 people. So it's getting traction with that developer community. The ability to be able to continue to interact with OpenStack will get easier but you'll still have that flexibility that comes with it being an open source project. Yeah, we'll get to the DevOps question but I'm looking up some stats that we put together kind of our own little leaderboard based on market data. Looks like Red Hat leads the commits totally on the OpenStack side. Rackspace number two and then IBM there. But commits don't always tell the story in terms of being number. You guys founded it and have a huge halo effect from OpenStack and I think it's transparent about that. It's not like you're trying to land-grab OpenStack to promote your own agenda although there is interest. So OpenStack's been very successful. The community that has driven a lot of the cloud early on officially for you guys is DevOps. And I like to say that DevOps is the guys who are eating glass, breaking things and just kicking ass and taking names and ultimately that's a unique individual kind of a profile. The early pioneers that have done the DevOps we know them, Joi and Facebook and Haruku and all these guys that did cloud early, they had to build it all. There wasn't general purpose software building. You guys did your own with your own cloud. But when you go to mainstream IT in Iowa, some guy in Iowa, IT shop, they have development needs too but they want to be DevOps like. So we kind of came to the conclusion that's a mindset. So with that mindset, what is the new DevOps culture look like for the guys that want to be a DevOps in the DevOps style and develop and just do stuff? It's funny because we had to make that same transformation ourselves, right? Very much an infrastructure company originally taking things off the shelf. The idea and delivering high level of service, the idea of having to create tools and create products the developer centric was very foreign to us. So we're actively in a transformation right now with our internal systems to embrace DevOps and we're re-skilling a lot of our people so that they've traditionally infrastructure we're finding ways to be able to re-skill them so that as we adopt the DevOps mentality and the cloud infrastructure for applications they don't get left behind. So what we're seeing from that is because we've had these successes, companies are coming to us and saying can you show us how you did that? Can you come and meet with our people? Can you tell us your lessons learned? Can you accelerate our path to being DevOps centric and leveraging these types of technology? So we've actually deployed, we actually have some capabilities now with our professional services team. We're able to go out and talk to customers, help them through this transformation as well as being able to bring in some of our valued partners to be able to assist in that process. So it's an area that corporate traditional IT is struggling with, they see it coming and they're looking to us as one of the leaders in that area to be able to come in and assist them. Yeah, it's interesting that new developers have this cloud style, we call it yesterday the cloud style. Doing a cloud style and DevOps style is kind of the same mindset, right? So with that, it's like, okay, what is the cloud style? I mean, we had Rick Jackson compare and contrast the VMware culture to Rackspaces. Like, you know, we used to have quarterly reviews and it didn't say slow, if I use the word slow, but Rackspace, boom, boom, new releases. Scott Sanchez was telling us they were releasing code every day. It's like raining code and just like, a lot of iterations, that's the agile program on iterate, iterate, iterate. That's a fast cycle. And that's not always easy for an enterprise. How do you bottle that up and give it to the enterprise? I mean, can you, is it possible? Are you doing it? You know, it's funny that you mentioned how fast the things are moving. I took eight weeks off this summer, we had this great sabbatical program and I came back and I had to relearn everything from scratch. It was amazing how much code they were able to push product enhancements. I mean, it was, it took me three weeks once I got back, I felt like I should have been in a rookie training class to learn what we had done over that time period. So it's a very different mentality and the enterprises are grasping it more on a team by team approach. So take an application, take a small team, start small and we see that as their successes continue to grow and they're seeing the benefits of that high-paced continuous improvement, continuous development. It catches traction with other people throughout the organization that go, we want our team to move that quickly. There's business value in being able to push code out more quickly and it starts to ignite. So what we've seen is a lot of these places have been more grassroots efforts. Now we're starting to see the CTO come in and say, how can you help us do this on a more formal basis? You know, the change you mentioned is intoxicating at one level. It's opportunity for smart people, but also if you make a misstep, you can get blown away. I mean, just an example if you go on a vacation, you know, there's a moving train as we've been saying on theCUBE. So with that, I want to ask you kind of a more of a personal and industry question kind of intersected together. And that is, for the folks that have been successful, the winners that you've worked with in the cloud past five years, that have tripped and fallen and gotten up and have been done things. I see that OpenStack's got some successes now. You guys have said, what's the winning persona look like? What are the things that winners do that you can point to that others can learn from? Yeah, the biggest thing is not to be afraid to fail. You know, we have running the public cloud that we've had, we've learned a lot of lessons along the way. We've struggled with capabilities, with feature sets, with availability in the early days. You know, that's what led us to go down the path of creating OpenStack and putting it out there. So, you know, the type of people we're looking for now are you have to bring knowledge, experience, but also be willing to dive into the culture and not be afraid to make a mistake. You know, we've had full disclosure. We've, sometimes it's a bitness. You know, in the, we pushed the code release out here a couple weeks ago that impacted one of our critical internal systems. We're able to recover quickly, but we feel that we felt the challenges that come with not just the benefits, but also some of the downside that may come with pushing code that frequently. Of course, the system in question, it was a great reminder of how far we've come and how quickly we've come once it wasn't available. But, you know, there's some challenges in there. You know, enterprises can't tolerate downtime and certainly you guys have run your business in the clouds, so you obviously have to recover quickly. You know, it reminds me of the Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg phrase break stuff. And it's easy to say, but you know, in an ops-centric, you know, high availability mindset, you've got, it's just not an option. So, but that's the difference between a developer and an ops guy. A developer has to push the envelope and recover quickly versus no until you can show me. It's not always that easy to say, show me. And you got to have a lot of faith in your test plan. All right, so we're doing continuous automated testing of our code before they roll out. That's the only way that you're going to be able to do this. We have, you know, was working with a customer recently, they're spinning up and spinning down 15,000 VMs a day on OpenStack, just doing testing of code before it goes into production. So, you know, the platform itself gives you that flexibility to end the, it's a bit of a safety net as best you can have in order to, as you're pushing this code through. So, I just have one last question, John, when you went on that eight week sabbatical, did you take a sabbatical from email? You know, it was a yes, it was a forced email sabbatical. So, the company gives this great benefit and they went to, there you go, they shut off your email. Now, I might have been able to pull some strings and get another week or two of access, but at that point in time, it died. That's awesome. So, I had to disconnect. You're back on Gmail. Send me forward to me. Yeah, at that point, they didn't want to talk to me. So, I tried to keep away from it, but I was really excited to get back and get back to you. Just to highlight the massive change. We had Josh McKinney on earlier, the CEO of OpenStack participant. He was saying, just this morning there's a massive threat on containerization going on, and as an example, just this morning, these are big community conversations. This isn't like, you know, fight over a pixel here or there, it's like, it's not, this is serious architecture being done, the engine, the next cylinder, as soon as six cylinder, eight cylinder engine, use the car analogy are being discussed. So, you know, the best time to get in is now. Is that accurate? We're always looking for more people. So, you know, it's a great time to be in there. There's a lot going on if you want to make an impact and have your voice heard and really shape where this thing goes. Absolutely, jump on board. Okay, so fine, I'll give you the final word here. Give us an update on, for folks out there that might not be in the know that having looked at Rackspace in a couple of weeks, maybe eight weeks or more, a lot of change. What's new, what should they know about what's going on with Rackspace right now? Yeah, so great things are going on. Continue to focus on OpenStack or public cloud capabilities, have some great new enhancements that are coming. We've got some great betas that are going on. Spend a lot of time talking to customers about that roadmap. We've also made a significant reinvestment in our VM. We're offering for customers some more self-service, more DR capabilities, you know, more control for customers. So, really, we continue to work towards a unified capability making the consumption of IT infrastructure easy for customers and we'll continue to invest in those areas around self-service and the hybrid capabilities. Clouds continuing to push along, software-defined enterprises, cloud everything's happening, Rackspace leader, you guys continue to innovate. What a great journey, watching you guys bolt on that cloud almost seven years ago and just start building your own and bringing OpenStack huge success. I mean, again, I'm such a big fan of what Jim Curry, Lou Mormon, the whole team has done, how they got OpenStack up and running, just great timing and everything. And certainly, it's well received, congratulations. Now, this is theCUBE, we'll be right back with our next guest of the short break. Stay tuned, day three coverage continues after the short break. Going to Disneyland. Going to Disneyland. Yeah, I mean, these guys are great. I think this is a revolutionary forum. Up till a few years ago, I'd never seen this in my entire career. These guys are great interviewers. They're spot on, they're sharp, they're funny to work with and they just ask great questions so it's a real pleasure to be on theCUBE. It's really great, what's so neat about it is it's like real time discussions and also just being able to have people share their views simultaneously. So I love it, I think it's really fun. It's a great way to get the message out and to have a dialogue.