 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Interconnect 2017, brought to you by IBM. Hey, welcome back everyone. We are live in Las Vegas where IBM Interconnect 2017. This is theCUBE's coverage of IBM's Cloud Show, Cloud and Data Show. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Abby Currant's executive director of Cloud Foundry Foundation. Welcome to theCUBE. Welcome. Thank you. Thanks for joining us. I'm new as the executive role Sam had moved on to Microsoft. So Google, I'm sorry, Google. He was formerly a Microsoft, formal Microsoft employee, but at Google, Google Cloud Next was a recent show. So you're new to the reins, but you're not new in the community. I've been in the part of the community for several years. Prior to joining the foundation a year ago, I was at Pivotal for a couple of years. So I've been part of the Cloud Foundry community for several years and it's a technology that's dear and dear to my heart and it's a community that I'm very passionate about. And the emergence of Cloud Foundry, I think about it, has really kind of changed the game. It's really lifted all the boats, if you will, rising tide, floats all boats. IBM uses it, you got a lot of customers. Just go down the list of the notable folks working with Cloud Foundry. Well, I look no further than those that are on our board and those that represent the strategic vision around the Cloud Foundry. So IBM, Pivotal, but Dell EMC and Cisco and SAP and VMware and Allianz and Swisscom and of course Pivotal. And I think all of them really bring such a broad perspective to the table, but then broadening beyond that community. Our community has grown so much since. So a lot of people don't realize that Cloud Foundry has only been an open source project for just a little over two years. So January 2015 marked when it became an official open source project. Prior to that, it was part of Pivotal. And in that two, a little over two years we've grown to nearly 70 members in our community and are just excited to continue to grow and bring more perspectives to the table. So what has been the differences? A lot of people have been taking a different approach for Blue Mix, for instance, they have good core Cloud Foundry. Is it going the way you guys had thought as a community that this was the plan all along? Because you see people really kind of making some good stuff out of the Cloud Foundry. Was that part of the plan, this open direction? Well, I think part of the plan was really coalescing around the single vision of that abstraction. And what's the whole vision of Cloud Foundry? It's to allow developers to create code faster. And whatever realm that takes. And our industry is evolving and it's evolving so quickly and exciting. All of these organizations, these enterprise organizations that are becoming software companies. And how exciting is that? And as we think about the abstraction that Cloud Foundry can provide for them and the automation it can provide and allows them to focus on one thing and one thing only. Creating code that changes their business. And so we're really focused myopically on ensuring that developers have the ability to quickly and easily create code and innovate quickly as an organization. So on the development side, sometimes standards can go fall down by forcing syntax or forcing certain things. You guys had a different approach. What was the, looking back now, what were the key things that were critical for Cloud Foundry to maintain its momentum? I think a couple of things, obviously it's a complex distributed system but is put together amazingly well. Quality was first and foremost part of its origins. And it's continued to adhere to that quality and that control around the development process and around the release process. So Cloud Foundry is an open source project is very much a governance by contribution. So we look for those in the organizations in different communities to be part of it and contribute. And so we have the full-time committers that are basically doing this all day, every day. And then we have the contributors that are also part of the community providing feedback and value. And there was a big testimony with American Airlines on stage. That's a big win. Yes, it is a big win. Give some color on that deal. I can't give you any details on the deal that IBM has. That's a Cloud Foundry IBM. But it is Cloud Foundry, yes. You guys are part of the blue mix thing. Yes. And American Airlines is a company that I have a lot of history with. They were a customer of mine for many years in the early 2000s. So I'm thrilled to see them innovating and taking advantage of a platform. So help us unpack this conversation that's going on around Paz, right? Some people say, oh, Paz is Pase, but this is development tools and it's programming. And it's a platform that you've created. So what do you make of that conversation? What is it, what implications does it have to your strategy and your ecosystem strategy? Well, I for one don't like trim Paz, anyways. So I'm happy to say. It's Pase. Because I do think it's evolved. So when I talk about Cloud Foundry, I talk about it as a cloud application platform. Because at the end of the day, our goal is to help organizations create code faster. The high degrees of automation, the abstraction that the platform brings to the table isn't just a platform, it's an enabler for that development. So we think about what that means. It's can I create applications faster and do I have proliferation of services to your ecosystem point that enable those applications to grow and to scale and to change the way that organization works. Because it's a technology enabled business transformation for many of these organizations. It's app driven too, that's the key to success. It's app driven. Which is why we talk so much about developers is because that's the key. If I'm going to become a software company, what does that mean? I'm writing code and that code is changing the way I think about my business and my consumers. And the app landscape has certainly changed with UX creativity. But now you've got IoT. There's a real functional integration going on with the analog world going digital. It's like, whoa, I got all this stuff that's now instrumented connected to the internet. IoT, internet of things. That's going to be interesting. Cloud has the power of that. I think it does because what is IoT reliant on? Applications that take advantage of that data. I mean, that's what you're looking to gain. You're looking to have small applications streaming large amounts of data from sensors, be it from cars or be it from a manufacturing plant if you're thinking industrial IoT. So Cloud Foundry provides the platform for many of these applications to be developed, created and scaled at the level that companies like GE and Siemens and others are looking to build out and tackle that IoT space. And it's open. I mean, we can all agree that Cloud Foundry is the most open platform to develop applications on. But developers have choices. You're seeing infrastructure as a service. Plus, you're seeing SaaS kind of minus emerge. How should we be thinking about the evolution? You said it earlier and it evolved. Where is it evolving to? I mean, obviously you bet on open. Good bet, right? Other, more propriety. I don't even know what open is anymore sometimes, but we can agree that Cloud Foundry's open. But how should we be thinking about the evolution going forward? Well, that's the beauty of open, right? What is open source? Open source brings together diverse set of perspectives and background to innovate faster. And that's where we are. We're seeing a lot of technology evolve. I mean, just think about all the things that evolved in the last two years where we've had technologies come up, some go down. But there's so much happening right now because the time is now. For these companies that are trying to develop more applications and are trying to figure out ways to not only develop these applications, but develop them at scale and really grow those out and build those. And IOT, you're getting more data and we're capturing those data and operationalizing that data. And it comes back to one thing, applications that can take advantage of that. And so I think there's the potential as we build out and innovate both the ecosystem but the platform will naturally evolve and take advantage of those wins from these organizations that are driving this scale. So scale is the linchpin, right? And if you think about traditional PAS environments, if I could use that term, they're limited in scale and obviously simplicity. Is that another way to think about it? Well, I think of the platform, I think about it this way, the platform enables you to run fast. You're not running fast with scissors. You want to be able to run fast safely. And so it provides that abstraction in those guard rails so you can quickly iterate and develop and deploy code. If I look at what, let's see, HCSE is a company. They went from developing an application. It took them 35 people in nine months to create an app, right? And now with Cloud Foundry, they're able to do it with four people in six weeks. It changes the way you work as an organization. Yeah, just imagine as you scale that out, what that means. And imagine the changes that can bring in your organization when you're software centric and your customer first and you're bringing that feedback loop back. And you guys do a lot of heavy lifting from the behalf of the customer but you're not hardening it. Hardening it to the point where they can't mold it and shape it to what they want. It's kind of what the, what I'm saying. No, we want to give, we want to abstract away and automate as much as possible for things you care about. Resiliency, auto-scaling, the ability to do security and compliance because those are things you care about as an enterprise but let's get that, let's make that happen for you but then give the control to the developer to self-provision, to scale, to quickly deploy and iterate, do continuous delivery. All of those things that allow you to go from developing an app one to year to developing an app and iterating on that app constantly all the time. So Abby, I want to ask you to kind of take a step back and look at the community trends right now. You see OpenStack as trajectory. It's becoming more of an infrastructure as a service kind of settling in there. That's gone through a lot of changes. Seeing a lot of growth in IoT, which we talked about. You start to see some movement in the open source community. CNCF has got traction, the Linux Foundation, CloudNative, you got Kubernetes. I call it the Cold War for orchestration you know, going on right now. And so it's a really interesting time. Microservices are booming. This is the holy grail for developers for the next gen. It's going to be awesome. Machine learning, everyone's getting intoxicated on that these days. So super cool things coming down the pike. What's going on in the communities? Is there any movement? Is there trends and is there a sentiment among the developer communities that you see that you could, any patterns developing around what people are gravitating to? I think developers want the freedom to create. They want the ability to create applications and see those come to fruition. And I think a lot of things that were new and innovative a couple of years ago and even now are becoming table stakes. For example, five years ago, having a mobile app as a bank was new and interesting and kind of fun. Now it's table stakes. Are you going to go bank with a bank that doesn't have one? Are you going to bank with a bank that doesn't have it? It becomes table stakes or who doesn't, if you don't have fraud detection, which is basically event driven responses, right? And so you think about what table stakes are and as you think about the abstraction moving up, that's really where it's going to get interesting. Yeah, but open source communities are going to move to these new ground. What I'm trying to get at is to see what's happening. What's the trend in the developer community? What's hot? What's fashionable? Is there new projects popping up that you could share that you think is cool and interesting? Well, they're all cool and interesting. You'd rather not comment. I think they're all cool and interesting. I think CNCF is a sister organization underneath the Linux foundation. They kind of inherited that from KubeCon, though. KubeNet is con. Yeah, I think they're doing interesting things. I think any organization that's promoting cloud native application architecture and the value of that, we all deserve to be part of the same conversation because to your point earlier, rising tide lifts all boat. And if every organization is doing cloud native application architectures and cloud native solutions, it's going to be very interesting. I mean, we certainly were just at strata. We ran our own event last week called Big Data SV and it's very clear to us that the big data world, industry and cloud are coming together and the forcing function is machine learning, IOT and then AI is the, you know, appeal. You know, that's the big trend that's kind of put some mental model around it. But IOT is driving this data and the cloud horsepower is forcing this to move faster. It seems to be very accelerating. But it also enables so much. I mean, if you can operationalize this data that you're aggregating and turn it into actionable apps that do things for your business, save money, improve logistics, reach your users better and faster, you start to see the change in the shift that that can bring. You have the data, married with the apps, married with the endpoint sensors and all of a sudden this gets to be a really interesting evolution of technology. All right, so what's your 100 day plan? Well, you're already into 100 day plan already. So what's your plan for this year? As new executive director for Cloud Foundry, what's on the agenda? What's your top three things you're going to chip away at this year for objectives? Developers, developers, developers. Does that count as top three? More, more, more. Increase the developer count. Just really reaching out to developers and ensuring that they're able to be successful in Cloud Foundry. So I think you'll hear more from us in the next couple of weeks about that. But ensuring- The proof points, basically. But just ensuring they can be successful, ensuring that scale is applicable for them. And then really, our summits are even changing. We've actually added developer tracks to our summit to make them a place not only where you can learn about Cloud Foundry, but also where you can work with other developers and learn from them and learn about specific languages, but also how to enable those into cloud native application architectures. And I think our goal this year is to really enrich that development community and build that pipeline and help fill those gaps. And celebrate the wins like American Airlines of the world and as IBM and others successful. Then it gets to be less, you don't want to have cognitive dissonance as a developer, that's the worst thing that developers want to make sure they're on a good bus to, you know, look good people. You've got, you've obviously got some technology titans behind you, IBM, the most prominent, I would say, but obviously guys like VMware and Cisco and others. But you've also got a lot of other organizations. Guys like Allianz, W, Allstate, I think was early on in the program. JPMC, Citibank. Yeah, I don't want to, I shouldn't have started because I know I'd leave some out. You're the executive director, so you have to fill in the gaps. But so, that's somewhat unique in a consortium like this, somewhat, but that many is somewhat unique. Is there more traction there? What's their motivation? As a user? Well, to your other point, we're an open source, right? And what's the value? If me, if I'm an enterprise and I'm looking to take advantage of a platform, but also an open source platform, open source allows me to be part of that conversation. I can be a contributor, I can be part of the direction, I can influence where it's going. And I think that is a powerful sentiment for many of these organizations that are looking to evolve and become more software centric. And this is a good way for them to give back and be part of that momentum. And clouds exploding more open sources needed. It's just a great, great mission. Congratulations on the new job and good luck this year. We'll keep in touch. Thank you. And certainly see at the Cloud Foundry Summit that's in San Francisco again this year. Santa Clara. Santa Clara, okay. June 13th through 15th. So every year you guys always have the fire code problem. Well, I think, and I'm going to go on record now, officially say this, this will be our last year there, which I think everyone's excited about because I think we're all over Santa Clara right now. All right, well we'll see you there. Abby Kearns, executive director of Cloud Foundry Foundation, here inside theCUBE, powering the cloud. This is theCUBE's coverage of IBM Interconnect 2017. Stay with us, more coverage after this short break.