 Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are at the Open Compute Project Summit. It's a mouthful, they call it OCP for short. 2017 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. Really excited to have a very special guest. We've had him on every year since we've been coming to the show. And he is the original founding, now former executive director of Open Compute Project. But now he's been doing his own thing for a couple years. Cole Crawford, now the founder and CEO of Vapor. I know Cole, always great to see you. Hey, thanks for the invite. Absolutely, and of course, if you haven't followed Cole on Twitter, you'd have the best Twitter header photo of anybody that I've ever seen. Oh, sure, it's literal. It's literal. We won't tell you what it is, go check it out. Go check it out. All right, so first off, impressions of the show. You obviously set this thing up at the beginning. It's growing, vibrant community, a lot of big brains walking around that really are the brains that power the technology behind the cloud. Yep, awesome. I mean, I think this is really a community coming into its skin. It's nice to see the innovation happening across industries now. So Open Compute, when it started, was a rack and a server and some storage. And now we've got Telco. We've got sort of TIP being born out of that project. You've got the ARM ecosystem. You've got companies like Microsoft having lots of supporters for their Olympus project. It's really good to see the innovation, the collaboration, and just the community that's growing up. It's really interesting how open source and community drive innovation and what a different model that was than the old model, which was all proprietary, all in-house. I just had to have the smartest guys in the room. That has completely turned on its head. It's not even possible anymore. I mean, the smartest companies on the planet now have to look beyond their four walls. You know, I spent 25 years in this industry and it used to be that you could go into a data center and do everything. And now the technical complexity of everything that exists out there, that you're not going to find the smartest people within your four walls, so you have to go out to community. Right. So great story and congratulations to you and the team for getting it started. And I'm sure you're like a proud papa watching it, you know, kind of run up, not necessarily under your tutelage anymore, but grow up and mature and really be so vibrant. I think there's a lot of proud people. I mean, certainly the companies that started this initiative, obviously Facebook and Rackspace and Intel, just really fantastic vision that those companies had in seeding something that I don't think that we expected this. I remember when the nonprofit, when we launched it, before it was even really a nonprofit, Mark Zuckerberg, the cleaning ladies were cleaning up trays in the Facebook cafeteria. And here we are. And here we are, that's great. All right, so now we shift gears. Now you're running Vapor.io. So I remember last year you were getting still pretty new into it when we talked at the show. Give us an update on what's going on with Vapor. Yeah, I mean, we're taking a lot of the technology that gets built and we've contributed to a lot of the technology that's been built into OCP. Some of our co-founders have participated in the hackathons here and have done well in those hackathons to the point of I think being banned from those hackathons. But we're big fans of what OpenCompute can do both from a sort of centralized data center standpoint, but also, we're at Mobile World Congress last week and obviously there's a big need for solving sort of the 40 zettabytes. I mean, it was funny. I remember Frank Frankowski, the founding chairman of OpenCompute being on stage years ago saying 20, 20, 40 zettabytes. And we're probably out accelerating that expected growth curve for data. And we're going to have to solve this stuff not just in our big core data centers and not just our sort of regional data lakes and exchanges, but out at the last mile edge. We've found a really nice niche in that space at the edge. So let's unpack that a little bit. So the first thing, it's a huge topic at Mobile World Congress, another giant show, 100,000 plus people, 5G, a lot of talk about 5G. And it's cool and it's cool handsets and everybody had their new handsets. But what we thought was mainly exciting was the IoT enabler of 5G and with autonomous vehicles and all this edge computing. Your take on that opportunity to really be a game changer for the IoT space? Yeah, I mean, look, forget the amount of data stored, think about the amount of data created. And IoT with wearables and like you said, autonomous vehicles from cars to drones to low latency applications to cloud ingest applications. There are some very complex things that are going on right now. And I think infrastructure and software running on that infrastructure in an open way are going to be driving forces which will enable that world to maybe one day look a lot like this world. It'll be really fun to see how TIP potentially commoditizes what was once a proprietary server for a server vendor. That base station now looks very much like a proprietary server that's primed for disruption. Right. And software is such a key piece of it. We've had a lot of conversation with folks at GE and you talk about kind of how do you optimize? Well, what are you optimizing for, say, in a windmill farm? Are you optimizing for that windmill? Are you optimizing for that hill? Are you optimizing for the whole farm? Are you optimizing for the grid and the decisions you make and the control actions that you take are widely differentiated based on what your objective is based on the priority? That's right, that's right. And I think that really, you know, a lot of people use the term software defined data center. And I don't think that's actually technically correct. A lot of this stuff can't be pure software, but you can have data-driven data centers. And at the edge, you don't have a bunch of racks sitting next to you that you can fail over to if one fails. The entire data center at the edge has to be intelligent and has to solve for QOS and service level agreements and writing policies that has to be done in software. You can't have that done in hardware. Not to mention things like dirt and environmental conditions and vibration and all the things that you don't have at the beautiful pristine data center. That's exactly right. They're rugged environments and building to withstand the elements, building to withstand the harsh connectivity issues that you have out there. You don't have sort of these closets and these core environments that allow you to walk into, it's funny, there's that saying, there's two types of jobs, jobs that you shower before work and jobs where you shower after work. If you work at the data center, you might be doing both and certainly out at the edge. That's great. So, I'll let you have the last word. What should we be looking for from you and from Vapor in 2017? I'd say look for us to be disrupting potentially some 5G telemetry and really this world of true disaggregated edge cloud. All right, well, Cole, once again, congratulations on everything you helped create and build, I know you didn't do it by yourself, but you're certainly a huge driving force and congratulations on what you got going on with Vapor. Thanks so much. Glad to be here. Thanks for the invite. He's Cole Crawford. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from Open Compute Project Summit 2017 in Santa Clara, California. Thanks for watching.