 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering OpenStack Summit 2017, brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation, Red Hat, and additional ecosystem support. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, joined by my co-host this week, John Troyer, here at the OpenStack Summit in Boston, Massachusetts. Happy to welcome back to the program, Lee Doyle, who's principal analyst with Doyle Research. Lee, nice to see you. Nice to see you, thanks for having me. All right, so, networking's your main space. We talked about networking for a bunch of years here at the show. Last year, I mean, telecommunication, NFV, this year, it seems like half the people on the main stage worked for some big telco and NFV, buzz on the edge. Before we get into some of the initial piece, what's your take on the OpenStack community in general and the show? We're getting towards the end, so what's your take been this week? It's always great to have the show in Boston, my hometown. So, OpenStack and Telecom have been going to get hand-in-hand since the beginning of OpenStack, really, and a lot of contributions and use from some of the big service providers who are here, you know, AT&T, Verizon, some others. So, it's really becoming, OpenStack's really becoming a good platform for their NFV and virtualization, modernization efforts. Yeah, before we get into some of the cool new stuff, core networking, I mean, Neutron's one of those things we've been banging on for years. It seems like it's matured to a bit, but always the one, I mean, networking's never done, right? We're always cranking on it, doing new things. Anything from some of the, what do you hear about the stability, you know, what the community hears, is the networking thriving good, you know, any feedback you've had? Sure, no, always a good question, and always a question that I ask, you know, folks, I think we've seen significant maturity in Neutron, it's stable, it performs, it does a lot of things, you know, we expect networks to do, but there are still our third-party network solutions. If you look at a big switch or a Cumulus or others, say, you don't want to use Neutron or you want to enhance it, you know, feel free to work with us to provide even better networking. Yeah, in a broad trend, companies, you mentioned, they're software companies. Absolutely. Networking, you know, is like boxes and cabling, and you know, things like that. How is that, you know, software eating the world, you know, stack up when it comes to the network space? I mean, I think the majority of the value in networking, as in, you know, IT is in software, right? The majority of the revenue is in boxes, which are hardware and software integrated. So we're, you know, from a technology standpoint, it's very software-driven, from a market standpoint, it's still box-driven, we're in between those two, and that's what makes this a very interesting point in time. Maybe you could tease apart for us a little bit. For people on the enterprise side, they're used to hearing the letters SDM, right? Here, if you're talking to telecom NFV, slightly different takes on some similar problems about service management and delivery. In OpenStack, are the same bits, are the same, is Neutron used by the enterprise or SDN, is the same way it's used at the network core by the service providers, or are these really two different planes that are developing? Right, and it's a bit of a complex question. I mean, at Doyle Research, what I've done to simplify is talking about software-based networking. So that includes SDN, that includes NFV, those things overlap, and if you'll get very hung up, like, what does SDN mean at separation control and data plane? What does network virtualization, network function virtualization means? Well, that's an Etsy telecom standard for taking boxes in the telecom network and turning them into software. So I try to get away from that and move towards, okay, what is it that we're trying to accomplish? Well, with OpenStack, we're trying to deliver networking. It's going to be in software. There still might be, and probably is, some form of ethernet switch or other boxes moving the bits, right? So I think that a lot of the way I think about it is some of the SDN products that I mentioned, like a Cumulus or Big Switch, would be enhancements to something that's a core function of OpenStack, which I wouldn't traditionally call SDN, but that's my view. We, speak to us, what have you heard about Edge? It was one of those things we heard kind of the buzz coming in. There's a couple of different definitions. Telecommunications, people have a very, that's the edge of our network. When I talk to enterprise people, oh, it's kind of IoT and sensors. So what are you hearing about Edge? How does network play across all of those? Edge is very much how you define it or which environment you're talking about, right? So traditionally in the telecom world, you've got your core of your network and you hear Edge in a network, and how that's defined in between because you have network capabilities all throughout the environment. So SD-WAN has by far been the hottest technology, not just in terms of buzz, but in terms of actual deployment, both an enterprise and service provider. In the service provider space that sort of blurs into what the VCPE offerings are, so that you hear Verizon, Telefonica, just made an announcement with Nuage on that and so you can go through all the major service providers, either they're incorporating SD-WAN functionality into the VCPE or they're announcing SD-WAN functionality separately. Is there any connection between the SD-WAN stuff and OpenStack? I hadn't heard it talked about, of course, hot technology. We covered Riverbed's announcements last year but Tele has been on the Cuba number of times, just acquired by Cisco. Where do you see SD-WAN playing out? Is this the year that it just becomes a feature? Does it still stay as a distinct market segment? Yeah, so on the OpenStack question, OpenStack traditionally is sort of a cloud-based, a bigger data center thing. And there are elements, of course, that you can use and leverage from OpenStack at the Edge. So in terms of SD-WAN, we're at the hockey stick phase. Market's going straight up, starting to see a wide-scale deployments across a large number of verticals, usually the verticals that have lots of branches. So you look at financial services, you look at retail, but you can extend to government and healthcare and anywhere where you're trying to do a lot of connectivity between distributed environments. And the real change is that previously you do a hub and spoke network. You get MPLS, you take the information from the branch and you move it to your corporate data center or data centers. Well now, cloud, SaaS, the information doesn't need to go to the data center. In fact, if it goes to the data center, you add a lot of latency. So SD-WAN is adding the intelligence, the traffic steering, the ability to manage multiple networks. And to move away from MPLS and towards more cost-effective internet connectivity. So that is still 25, Vip Pella was the biggest company taking out recently, but there's still 24 other solutions and probably more being announced over the next six months. About 24, huh? At least, yeah. Yeah, I'm curious. We talk about hybrid cloud and multi-cloud. And of course, networking's one of the things that has to tie all of that together. How do things like Kubernetes and just the public to private piece, how's that shaking out in the network space? Well, networks have to support multi-cloud environments. So they need to support what's happening privately, publicly, VMware, Red Hat, OpenStack, obviously, and soon to be containers. Each of those are a little bit different. And so can you have a network solution that spans all of that? I mean, one of the things that VMware is very public about talking about and was talking about at this show is their ability to do the hybrid, public, private. And Red Hat talks about that and I spent a lot of time last week on that topic as well, so. As you're talking with network engineers, both, I guess, both as service providers and out at the enterprise. We've talked about all this change with hybrid cloud. We're now switching from maybe a hardware-centric model to more software-defined, literally. Are you seeing new skill sets needed for these network engineers, automation? It does the job change as we go forward. And absolutely it changes. So when you look at traditional CCIE, which is Cisco certified, that's about Cisco APIs, it's about Cisco boxes in a world where there's a lot of other software elements and you've got a tie to different orchestration, different management, public, private cloud. There are absolutely these different skill sets and there needs to be an evolution and it's one of the challenges of the networking industry because there simply aren't enough people who are familiar with building sort of the new style software-driven networks as there need to be. With all this acceleration and change, how are you seeing people, say, at the management layer, the management layer by people, the CXO layer, how are they dealing with all this change? New technologies, emerging technologies, things are not slowing down. No, and there's a lot of, so AT&T has a large-scale public training program to try to get its people skilled up to the new technologies. I know a lot of the other telcos who have been less public about it are doing the same. If you go to a large network user groups like ONUG, they're talking about new skill sets and how to train there. There's also the organizations. Do you blend compute, storage, application and networking folks all on the same team? And I know you guys have talked about that previously, but how quickly do organizations do that or do they remain relatively traditional? The CIOs are thinking about that, they're reorganizing, but it's not going to be just snap your fingers and hey, everyone's ready for the new software-driven world. Yeah, I mean, it's a fascinating thing, of course. Networking industry tends to move a little bit slow, especially enterprise, and we've been talking about fast and agile for a lot of things, but that does not characterize that. That being said, it feels like things do move faster. What's the general attitude for you here from customers? Are they still reticent to move forward? Are they slow to move those processes? You kind of hear it's like things like security tend to realize I need to update more, I need to move forward. What are you here when you're talking to customers kind of today versus let's say only five years ago? Sure, so I mean, we're five years in on NFV and Etsy, and I think we're making significant progress. You hear a lot about this at the shows and where the telcos are in implementing NFV, but there's still, it's in the initial phases, and we've been talking about SDN and the enterprise for about the same amount of time, and mainstream enterprises, the hyperscale guys, Google, Amazon, Facebook, they're already there and they're very innovative, and people are following their example and leveraging that, but I think we're still early in the truly software-driven networking game. One of the questions I always have is what size company you are and what capability you have, what do you do internally versus do you just adopt a platform that's going to do all of that stuff for you? I think you and I talked about this years ago about network fabric type of topologies, all the different pieces that went out. There's certain size organization. You're going to just go to someone else that can do that. I hear some pieces, Kubernetes might be the same kind of things. Do you see that people just saying, hey, I'm just going to, it's not outsourcing anymore, but I'm going to be more strategic, focus on my business, my applications, and let somebody else handle the underlying stuff. If IT or the network or branch operations is not central to what you do, I think outsourcing it makes perfect sense, and that may be outsourcing it to a reseller or someone to manage it for you. It might still be on prem, but more and more the workloads are going to the cloud. And the reason I move away from outsourcing, the old outsourcing was my mess for last, and this is a more strategic, what piece of the stack do I own or what do I run versus someone else? And it's not, I told you, this is the exact configuration in something you run. It's, I'm buying X bandwidth, X performance, things like that, and it's something that's updated a little bit more frequently, and they manage that piece, and it's just further down the stack than I care to look at. Well, there's new managed service providers who look at your WAN and networks. So that comes into play. The leading telcos would certainly want to play a role here and beyond just providing the pipe. They want to take care of your networking challenges for you. So there's a lot of new options for folks who if they don't want to build and buy and sweat. Do you see a difference between what's going on inside the US and then in the rest of the world in terms of the telcos and services they're rolling out and ambitions and where they want to play? There are clearly geographic differences when you get into the telecom, but it's not a simple saying, X geography is doing that, you almost have to go operator by operator there. Anything that you've seen here at the show, this is your first summit, you've been following this obviously space for a very long time. Anything you've seen here, either sessions or vendors or users doing interesting things or anything that's excited you recently, that your areas that you're following are interested. Yeah, I mean obviously the passion here for OpenStack is undeniable and we've got a lot of people who are committed to the community and they're aware of the networking challenges and where we've cut the snicking strides we've made with OpenStack networking, but also where we need to go in the future. So it's exciting to be here and fun to see everyone. Last thing I want to ask Lee, is there anything that advice you want to give the community things that you heard of from users or you observed where we should mature over the next iteration of the solution set? Yeah, I think it's, as a technology driven community, it's always incumbent on the community to really explain the business benefits and talk about how this technology is really solving real world problems and it is, but it's making that translation sometimes is challenging. All right, well. Lee Doyle, great to catch up with you and like yourself, thrilled to be here in Boston for a technology show. Hope to have more of these here as always. It's our second week back to back here in Boston amongst all the other shows that we've been doing at SiliconANGLE Media, so stay tuned. John and I have a few more interviews left as we get to wrap up. Three days of programming here from the OpenStack Summit. Thanks for watching theCUBE.