 Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE at OpenStack Summit Vancouver 2015. Brought to you by headline sponsors EMC and jointly by Red Hat and Cisco with additional sponsorship by Brocade and HP. And now your host, John Furrier. Hey, welcome back everyone. We are live in Vancouver, British Columbia for OpenStack Summit. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angle. My next guest is friend of theCUBE, Sand Greenblatt, industry executive, former debt executive, former HP CTO, former industry lumina. Sam, I don't know how many places you've been. I mean, you're a rock star. You've been involved in engineering, development, biz dev, I mean, you're getting your hands in a lot of pies right now. You just recently left out freelancing around, touching a lot of fingers in a lot of pies, doing some investments, being an analyst, just playing the field, having some fun. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So, love having chats with you because we get to talk about kind of what's going on and take a historical perspective, looking at the cycles of innovation over the many decades we've been seeing them and compare and contrast that to now with the perfect storm of innovation and opportunity and also chaos, right? Infrastructure. Can we talk about that with Brocade guys down at the network level? We got virtualization. You got cloud and you got new startups out there and the big guys are being, you know, threatened by this shift and inflection point. IBM's making some big moves, HP's making moves, Red Hat, I'll see you doing great in their business model. What's going on? What's your take? What's the high level Sam view of what's happening today? Well, it's very simple. It's all about the application and coming down from the application. You just had Sam on from the Cloud Foundry from the Linux Foundation. The PaaS layer is being blurred with the IaaS layer and they use all these acronyms, also the SaaS layer, but it doesn't matter. It's all a bunch of services that are being put into a bus structure to deliver the solution to a customer. Nobody who has either an Apple phone, a Dell computer, an HP computer, worries about what's underneath. What they worry about is who can run their application the best, the most distributed and around basically distributed around the industry. So I just tweeted on the crowd page, headline sand, green blood on the cube, breaking down the big trends in tech. Let's talk about the technology trends. What's going on in the platform? Okay, having unified platform, you and I were just talking about the article you written around the Amazon with OpenShift. You got a red hat out there. We had Cloud Foundry on earlier trying to create a scale of PaaS layer. Developers obviously focused on applications. No doubt about that. But there's a lot of stuff going on in storage, networking. I mean, a lot of the core engine of innovation that powers moving packets around, storing them, making them low latency from whether it's self-defined networking to flash, extreme IO and DMC to whatever. It's a lot of stuff going on. Well, what's really happening is the platform is, for lack of better words, being democratized. Which means everybody tried to build a platform and that was the platform you ran on. Now we're looking at pools of technology. Compute is nothing more than another pool. Storage is nothing more than another pool. And so is the networking. And how they interconnect, you know, we used to think everything was gonna interconnect with good old fiber optics and it was gonna be silicone photonics. We're now doing it with 25 gig ethernet and actually finding it to be optimal. It surprised the heck out of Intel and the 25 gig, I always thought ethernet would die over time, but it's living. And we've gotten up to 100 gig and 200 gig. And it's getting in storage. We go to flash, we go- That sound you're hearing, if you can hear it, that is the sound of the carnival legend that I'm staring at right here. We are in Vancouver right on the ocean, Sam. What do I think of this venue? It means pretty awesome. It's beautiful. Great town, clean, little puffy clouds out there, cloud conference, but blue skies. Not a bad venue. No, it's not, John. Not a bad venue. It's a great venue. It's a pain in the rear to get to, but it's a great venue. Not from California. Two hour flight, piece of cake, but then again, that's me. I'm good. Back to you, back to us. Yes. So our conversation. The conversations that you're having, talk about what they are. What are the top three conversations you're having these days? The topics. And around what topics and what's the key thing about it? The first thing I'm working with is a company right here in Vancouver on energy harvesting. And right now, batteries are the most toxic thing you can have. You look at the Apple Watch and how long you have to charge it and everything else. Wouldn't it be nice to use the energy that you have on your body and that are in the ambient environment to be able to charge an internet of things concept? So I'm working on that. Also smart packaging. Smart packaging where you can put a chip in the label and that chip will interact with something else. And you can avoid things like peanut allergies. As you know, that's a big thing. So that's number one I'm talking about. Number two I'm talking about to most people is how do you develop an application that can go ubiquitous? That can go to a mobile application, to a server, all the way down to basically a phone. When I say mobile, I'm talking about a tablet. So that is an area that we're all looking at very seriously. I'm working with three major software companies on that. And the last one is infrastructures changing dramatically. And that's why I'm working with Nysenta, Software Defined Storage. I believe they're, I'm working, I do a lot of work with my friends at VMware on Software Defined Data Center. And I'm doing a lot of work with Red Hat on their concept of Software Defined. So I'm having a lot of fun watching everybody's concepts and eventually we're going to have to distill it to what's easier for the customer. All right, let's connect the dots. So you get your fingers in a lot of pies. What's going on in the industry? What's the ideal outcome? Do you see evolving? How does the industry roll forward? Given kind of what you see happening now, what do you think the preferred fugitive is going to look like from when all the stuff shakes out? Who does what? Who builds what? Well, the hardware platform has to be optimized so that it can run whatever environment you want it to run. Whether it's a storage environment, whether it's a network environment, whether it's a compute environment. And it's got to be scale out. Scale out is really interesting, but scaling out is what you need for this new concept of sensors. I hate the word internet of things, but if you work that way, that's the big trouble. Or edge of the network. I mean, whatever you want to call it, wearables. I mean, at the edge of the network, the edge and endpoint has data. That's why. IP connection. That's why I went back to the power in the beginning when I was talking about energy harvesting. You've got to be able to take the energy to the closest point without creating a problem. Look, if I put energy on your body and you're in a hospital, I would have nightmares with the EKG machine, with anything else is there. You got to be able to create energy, and move these things to make them doable. If you're the CEO of a big company, if you're the CEO of HP, and you were advising, or say you were hired by Meg Whitman to come in and say, Sam, I'll give you the clean sheet of paper. What do you do? Well, I've often thought about that since, as you know, I did work at HP and with Meg. What I would do is start to reanalyze how I do the platform and not make it a 100% hardware play. I would go up the stack into the software and differentiate in the software. And what I would also do is really go by use case. One of the things HP's always tried to get away from is creating sectors. What you need to do is when they did services, they did sector-based, they got to create more of a sector orientation in their product lines, and do it so that it translates down to the bottom of the stack, as well as at the top of the stack. So certification and federated identity is stealing the show here at OpenStack. What do you think of that trend? Do you think it's relevant? They waited too long? Is it the right timing? I'll get myself probably shot for my answer. I think that ship is sailing and everybody's running the catch up with it. The ability to create, here's the problem. We all, just as you had so many passwords to get in the crowd chat, to get in the Facebook to get in, you want trust federated so that it flows across platforms. A lot of companies have worked on it. Trust Exchange is probably the most important thing. I'm impressed here. I've been using a card with the chip and it basically has all my information encoded and I get trust as soon as I walk into any merchant up here. That's the way the future's going to go and it's got to be two-factor. You're not going to get away with single-factor authentication into the future. What do you think about IBM's moves now? Obviously, they have big deep pockets as well like HP. Yes. What do you think about their moves? Well, I don't want to be controversial. I know, that's strange for me. Had lunch with some of the IBM Cloud players and I asked them how their business was going. And the one thing that became very obvious to me is their cloud play is exactly what I started to talk about. You got to do it by sector, by application and then go down to it. You mean vertical? Vertical. And there it was. Yes. Yeah, financial services, health care, oil and gas. Exactly, and I call those sectors. Sectors, yeah, okay, yeah. That's fair. That's the same thing, whatever you want to call it. But you know, so sectors, but they have different requirements. Is that what your meaning go in? Yes, absolutely. If you're in a health care, hip environment, the security, the sectorization, or the verticals, whatever you want to call it, is much different than you would have if you were basically in a financial sector and if you're in the manufacturing, it sure is heck different. And one of the problems, there was a guy last night who claimed on CNN that he hacked in through the entertainment system to the airplane. Yep. Which turned out to be totally false. Those kind of things have to really be factored in if you're dealing with the airline industry. How do you secure it? How do you make sure it's totally... Okay, so I got to actually wrap up the segment. What do you think about OpenStack? What's your vision? What needs to happen? What's going on? Where's the hotspots? Where are the skirmishes? Where's the friendly fire? Where's the goodness? Where's the evil? Well, it's almost like Linux was 10 years ago. I love the fact that they are finally going to a core definition. And Rob Hershfield, who I worked with at Dell, is deeply involved in it. What is OpenStack will be defined by the core definition? I think where OpenStack is having trouble is there's too many adjacent projects. You have to work on the core infrastructure. You've got to move it up the stack to the other services and then finally reach the SaaS layer. I think we're still in the early inning. If this was a nine inning game, we're in the second inning. This is not a fifth or seventh inning. So you need to funnel up to consolidate the projects to core and emerging. Right. That's how EMC just reorganized their company. Which actually is actually brilliant. I love what they did there. Would you agree? You think that's a good move? I think Joe did a great job with that. Yeah, it's very clean core guy, even Extreme IOs in there, and emerging with CJ Design. I was surprised to see Extreme IO in there, but it's... No, it's a sales engine. I mean, it's going to kick some serious ass, locomotive. I mean, it's sales are already looking great for Q4. So, you know, I'm bullish on Extreme IO. However, Icelon is in the emerging group. CJ... That surprises me. Well, it hangs it together. Right. It really is their big data product. I mean, they have... You need a very fast file system. I mean, you talk to anyone out of the hyperscalers, it's like, that is the big data. Well... I mean, store all... I think you're going to see object stores come from other companies that will compete against it. I think ZFS competes against it very well. So... Well, Sam, final outlook. What's your prediction in the industry five years from now? What's our world going to look like? Give us the same vision. Um... That's a hard one. Uh, it's... Hopefully it's not going to be like Mad Men, where I'm going to be on a beach going home. But, uh, what will happen? Maybe I will be. I think both of us will be. I think the industry is going to keep involving to a decentralized model where... But even software at that time will be commoditized. There'll be a common layer for hardware, a common layer for software, and a common layer for networking and storage. And when that happens, then we can truly democratize all applications to really do... And software is the center of the universe. I believe that. All right, thank you. But independent industry executive, former Dell executive, former HPE, former executive at a lot of places, out doing a lot of different cool work, touching a lot of stuff, having some fun, having some fun or what? What's going on? I'm having fun. Some people call me the Don Draper of software, but that's okay. Okay, you can get a cigarette in a Scotch and have some creative ideas. You got your... You certainly know a lot, a lot of experience. I've been around a long time. All right. Don Draper of the tech industry here, inside the cubes in Greenblatt. And we'll be right back. We meet the dean of Big Data, which is Bill Schmarzo, you're the Don Draper of tech. This is theCUBE. I don't know what I am. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE. We'll be right back after this short break. Thank you.