 Live from London, England, it's theCUBE. Covering Discover 2016 London. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante and Paul Gillis. Welcome back to the docks of London, everybody. This is theCUBE, the Worldwide Leader in Live. Tech coverage, I'm here with Paul Gillin, my co-host. This is day two of HPE Discover. Bobby Patrick is here, he's the CMO of HPE. Cloud, software defined, you know, you guys are now sort of blending those together, so welcome back, it's good to see you again, Brian Gartner, who's a technical director at SUSE is here. Brian, good to see you, thanks for coming on. Bobby, what's happening? Yeah, well, we had a pretty big announcement today, really excited about this part, kind of fits in our overall software shift to the new stack, and that is we announced with SUSE that they're going to acquire our Helion OpenStack distro and our Helion Staccato distro. They were the first really distro in OpenStack back in 2012, amazing technical team. They were not investing in Cloud Foundry, now they're going to invest in Cloud Foundry. Essentially, we're shifting from code contributor over the last few years of kind of cropping up OpenStack to Market Maker. So we're hiring and customer-facing engineering and implementations and support, and then we're going to partner and let SUSE do the kind of deep work with the code. So when you decide to do a distro early on, you get a seat at the table, you commit coders, and you heavily can influence the direction, the technical direction. What's happened? You've completed that task and now you're saying, okay, let's turn it over to the guys that really want to maintain this. But we need to get OpenStack to a state where you're beyond the rocket scientists, who deploy it, right? And so we were building out a number of the projects. We were consistently number one or number two in code contributions, and we realized about nine months ago that it was an inflection point. While not quite mainstream, it's now broadly deployed across retailers and telecom and others. The use cases now are very real, the returns are real. We realized our biggest challenge now in the worldwide kind of in the field is helping customers integrate in their data centers, right? The uniqueness in putting feet on the street, having a really strong technical support staff, and now with the community as large as it is, we're on the 15th release coming up with Okada. You know, we said, you know what? It's not us to build the code anymore. It's us to take it to market, help customers deploy it in traditional enterprises, and help them get to cloud faster. So how does this make life better for OpenStack customers? I think, well, because we focus on the hardest part, which is getting it implemented in their environment, training their staff, helping them shift even to culture, right? We're like, we're becoming culture warriors. How do we help them shift to continuous delivery? This is really what HPE's role is about. Plus, we'll then match it to the right infrastructure, right? So we put cloud system, which is built on OpenStack on Synergy, announced it here at Discover as well. You can run OpenStack across our scale out servers with a cloud line and with ProLiant. And so we're going to bundle those up. We're going to test it. We're going to put the resources in the market and help get adoption to the next level. I mean, together, what we're really saying is we want to accelerate the adoption of OpenStack. All right, you guys have an OpenStack distro that you're going to merge with? Yeah, we've had an OpenStack distribution since 2012. So you'll bring those two together? Yeah, we're bringing the technology and also the talent over to our side too to help us grow that and take advantage of all the business cases that he's talking about, all that learned knowledge to improve OpenStack even further and make the distribution even more enterprise-appealable. What does that mean to your existing OpenStack customers? I'm sorry? What does that mean to your existing OpenStack customers as you merge these two distros? I think initially there's going to be a little bit of worry, what things are happening, but clearly we've both talked about this and the release even talks about that SUSE OpenStack Cloud will remain. It's as infrastructure as a service. We're acquiring that infrastructure of the service component from Helion and also the platform as a service as well. So will you have a migration path for customers? I mean, will the Helion OpenStack become your only distro or will you maintain two? Do you want to take that? Yeah, I think the plan is to put a roadmap together over time with our customers involved, right? Roadmaps existed whether we're going to SUSE or not and I think that's what you've got over the next two years, roll that out and make sense, but we have significant OpenStack customer base, big banks and telcos and others. I'm certain SUSE wants to make sure they're happy and we want to make sure they're happy so it'll be a good joint collaboration I think. Yeah, I'm very much echoing the same thing. We have large customers using OpenStack as well so we're going to have to give them that migration and that's always been one of our goals with the distribution is to have a steady roadmap that's appealing to an enterprise with regular update cycles and teacher requests and all of that. And long-term, I mean, it's goodness that you consolidate the distros, right? I mean, you don't want Unix all over again. Yeah, I mean, we don't need to have 30 distros in the market now, right? The projects are getting very mature. We want a quality preferred vendor that's going to maintain it and test it, but we're going to focus on getting it adopted in the market, getting it adopted in on-premises and data center, 74%, actually 79% of all workloads in Europe over the next two years are going private cloud. There's really only one real option when it comes to a private cloud platform for IaaS and that's OpenStack, right? It is definitely the de facto standard. Yeah, I would hazard a guess that a lot of people don't know what Suze's position is in the market. They know you're a Linux company but they don't really know what your forte is. Can you just define that? Sure, I mean, we've been around for 24 years ourselves, we've been doing Enterprise Linux for that entire scheme, the entire span of time. Our forte is really about, and we have a small size of our company, we automate ourselves out of the jobs that don't make sense, so we really focus on Enterprise Linux, doing the testing, doing the QA, doing the support, and then we expanded to do that with OpenStack as well and we do that with all of our products. We make sure that those Enterprise products are Enterprise-grade, whether it's security updates, in fact, that's what the first thing we did in OpenStack was go fix a lot of the security issues that existed in the code base. That was job number one for us because we did want to ship something insecure. Let's start, go ahead, please. Well, can you distinguish yourself from Red Hat? Sure, you know, one of the things that I always say when I get that question is we tend to provide technology sooner. So again, OpenStack was a classic example but we've done that with file systems, we've done that with hypervisors. We adopt the kernel versions faster than anybody else. So that's one of our distinguishing factors. And of course, when we do that, again, we focus on making an Enterprise ready. Whether it's a file system, we know how important that is. Data can't go away, there's got to be integrity there. So we make sure that the matrix of capabilities that we promote are Enterprise-grade. So Bobby, let's talk about the stack you put out a tweet, I responded to it. It was the new stack and all these cool logos on it. I mean, you know, the stack used to be, you know, VMware. Right, right. And now we're here. It used to be, exactly, good question. So for you, Spear, we're seeing a docker at this show. We've got new programming languages, Chef and Puppet, Ansible, et cetera, et cetera. Talk about what your intention was with that tweet and that picture that you drew and what's behind it. Yeah, so first of all, I want to give you a limited edition, it's a multi-cow world. Think of it as a pats and cattle, actually. But it's actually really multi-cloud, you're welcome to, let me thank you for that. There you go. Which kind of defines our strategy a little bit. It's a gift tier. There always is a t-shirt. Discover a multi-cow world, right? With the pats and cattle analogy, right? Multi-cloud, yeah. So, you know, we see a new stack evolving now. You know, our shift of our software, largely proprietary software to micro-focus is part of this. We have an ability now to offer our partners and customers a much broader expansion of offerings. In the case of the new stack, we think we're going to pick from the winners. We're going to pick the winners, like Chef that we've invested in, right? Important works or Mesosphere and our Docker-ready servers. And we're going to build these stacks on top of synergy and our infrastructure. And we're going to support the ecosystem, you know, like OpenStack with funding and in the market. We're going to have higher support and services. And our partners and our customers are saying, tell us which ones to go with. This is a really important part of our strategy. So you're going to see over time, us picking the winners. You know, the database layer, you've got, you know, React for Key Value and Cassandra for Columner and MongoDB for Master Slave and Neo4j for Graph. And, you know, before we only had Vertica. And so we pushed just Vertica. So Vertica is a really important option, but there are many more. So we see this open, kind of open source new stack taking it, so there's really three stacks in there. There's the open source new stack we're just going to win. There's the VMware stack, which, you know, over the next two years, I think we'll go smaller and smaller and smaller. It's proprietary, you're locked in expensive. I mean, then there's the Azure stack that's emerging. And I think Azure stack's interesting. It can really open up a private cloud option and kind of the Azure, you know, .NET shop, VisualSea, Visual Studio's kind of shop. So we're committed to all three, but I think this new stack one is pretty compelling. Excellent. So, you know, we were talking about Azure before. Couple of things we talked about. And Bobby, you and I have been speaking now for several years in the queue. We saw the sort of brief attempt for public cloud. You guys chose that said that's not the right option for us. And that opens up a whole new set of options. We saw Microsoft on stage yesterday. Talk about that relationship a little bit, what it means and how it fits into the strategy. Yeah, I mean, we do have as part of our strategy, we want to power public clouds, right? So whether it's, you know, our infrastructure help powering Azure, it's part of our partnership or Dropbox, we announced the last discover, if you remember going off AWS, that's a big part of the strategy. But, you know, really what we see is every company, every government wants to move to their own right mix of cloud. Everybody has their own unique right mix, right? A bit of private and a bit of public. We think certain workloads like email make sense in public, right? Certain workloads that are more mission critical with sensitive data belong in private clouds. And, you know, there's really three then options that we see. Microsoft side's very interesting to us because Azure has had tremendous momentum in the last two years. You've seen it right. Since Satya took over, the focus of that company's been unbelievable, right? And the execution there is huge. But they want a private cloud option as well. And note, Microsoft on stage talking about the right mix of Azure and endorsing hybrid, recognizing don't exit your data centers. You know, AWS is the ultimate and vendor lock-in. You are locked in on the entire stack, right? And there is no private option. Now we do support nine of their core services through our Eucalyptus product within Helium. But I think Microsoft's vision is very different, much more like ours around hybrid cloud. So we're doing joint engineering. We're hiring out our Azure centers of excellence. We're putting feet in the street to get up to deploy it. And Azure Stack, you know, we're targeting next summer for version one. Got, you know, close to 100 companies now who are testing and deploying Azure Stack right now across a wide variety of industries. And for us, it opens up a much bigger part of the private cloud opportunity, grows the market. But I think for those shops that are really, really focused on Microsoft, these dotnet shops just gives them a real option to go to cloud and have both private and public. How about the developer strategy? Does HPE need to own developers? No, we don't. In fact, what we need to help is we need to help CIOs help own their developers, right? Take back their developers, you've kind of gone around them, give the developers that same experience, but give them that on a private cloud, right? That abstracted infrastructure, you know, the instant provisioning, the APIs and the self-service, that's what we're doing. We're helping CIOs remain relevant, transform from ops efficiency to value creator and cultural warrior. We're doing that with our technology and services so that they can enable their developers. Our customers tell us, you know, CIOs are transformational, say, I'm 80% ops today and 20% dev. In two years, I've got to be flipped that. I've got to be 80% dev and 20% ops. That's what our portfolio and our strategy delivers on. Brian, does this acquisition change the rules for SUSE at all? Does this portend new directions for your company? Actually, no. I mean, everything that he just described is the same thing we've been observing, right? With the public cloud, the private cloud, the hybrid cloud and models that everybody's moving to. And even internally within our own organization, we've moved to a dev ops even for our development and for all of our testing, our CICD kinds of things. As we develop products, we do exactly that thing. And we're getting exactly the same things you are as far as the customers wanting to move that way. In fact, when we started doing OpenStack Cloud, the IT groups would come to us and say, we want to be a service provider to our internal customers. Right, and they wanted to manage that infrastructure so that their developers could do exactly what they needed to do. I think we have very shared interests, you know? I think what I was really excited about with our discussion with SUSE over the last few months has been their willingness to, I ask this, engineers want more than I ask, right? And that's where PASS comes in and Cloud Foundry became a really good expansive option for your portfolio. And I think this is good for the Cloud Foundry or a foundation as well. And like I said, we're going to continue to invest in those ecosystems, but on the customer-facing side, they're going to invest in the distros. How about the micro-focus acquisition of HPE software? I mean, micro-focus, if I understand it, largely runs a portfolio of companies. Do you see that changing or do you see opportunities to now collaborate across those sets of companies or do you expect it's going to be largely sort of independent? Honestly, I think a lot of collaboration, right? When I've talked with a lot of the folks that are probably heading towards micro-focus, they're very anxious to start working and doing that collaboration. Yes. Is that different than the way you guys operate today or, I mean, just smaller scale? Now it's going to be substantially larger. And how about the developer question? Same developer question for Susie and micro-focus. Do you need to own the developers? Actually, we do because we're part of the open-source community, right? And open-source is in our blood, right? It's our heritage, and that's a passion that we have within the company. I mean, everything we ship is open-source, which means we have to collaborate with the community, which means we have to develop there. We have to contribute, we have to collaborate. Those are two core values. What are you guys doing specifically around developer outreach today? About developer. About developer outreach? Well, certainly, we're growing considerably. And not just through the acquisitions like this, but organically as well. We're hiring lots of folks. And honestly, when we hire folks, we look for the cultural aspect. Do they understand open-source well enough? Because we know we can teach the skills. And if they have the skills, that's a bonus coming in, right? Like our talent that we acquired. There's some real bonuses too. Like, ArcSight's an amazing product, right? For threat detection, right? Every hybrid cloud should have ArcSight in it. We create, for example, like DreamWorks, who rave about having that threat detection across their hybrid cloud, right? And I think, so I think there's important pieces that are needed in their portfolio that'll be important parts of our recommendation. So you become an ArcSight reseller. That's right, that's right. I mean, Microfocus becomes, I think, the sixth largest software company in the world. I might be off by one, but it's a big company in software. So with some great assets. Vertica is an amazing database. It's great for big data, it's distributed, it fits well on OpenStack. We're going to push that. The only difference here is we're going to also push other options. We're going to have the more use case specific, right? Being able to match the right kind of database, the right kind of technologies. You know, in some cases, I ask the answer, and you may just need Docker on bare metal or container on bare metal. Great, and so we're, we want to expand the number of options. And our partners, once they understand and see that, like the slide you mentioned, right? With all the logos on it. You know, they go, wow, this is great, I'm really excited. But they want to know, tell me which ones. I can't invest in everything out there. Pick the winners. We're picking the winners. And just to kind of jump on that too, I mean, SUSE is very partner centric, right? And a lot of things that we do in that space. So like the ArchEye thing, what security, you know, as we go through OpenStack deployment, they'll ask for exactly those extra features up and beyond. So we're going to use that. And we're going to leverage all of our partners to get those pieces in too. And, you know, if you have recommendations, awesome. So as being part of MicroFocus, give you access to resources that you did not have prior to the acquisition or the pending acquisition of the HPE software portfolio? Yes, that acquisition has been really important for us at the MicroFocus level and also the one for the SUSE one. Both of those give us access to those resources that were hard to engage before, right? Once they've freed up and become kind of software entities on their own, they're much more willing to work with folks like SUSE, okay? Or other partners that we have. So how might that affect your roadmap going forward? I'm sorry? How might that affect your roadmap going forward? So the beauty of our roadmap is it's partner and customer driven anyway, right? So as we get requests from partners like HPE, we put in a feature request that drives our roadmap. We mesh that together and prioritize that for what we're going to contribute upstream. Because again, we've got to have it open source. So all of these inputs are valuable to us and we prioritize them and we have a regular cadence for all of our products. Is everything you do open source? Yes, absolutely. Everything we ship is open source. And their business structure is interesting, right? And the smart, right? They kept that like wholly owned group, right? It's got its own, and I think that's important. So you're part of this kind of mothership but you've got that real autonomy, right? So to engage a community differently. Well, the winds are changing, the winds are shifting. Bob, we'll give you the last word. Yeah, no, I'm excited. I think, you know, I'll pull a plug in for a site called Prepare for Billions we launched today. I think, you know, when you match up these cloud platforms and technologies and technology synergy with the Internet of Things and this disruption, I read today that the GDP for global will go from 4.1 trillion in 2016 in nine years to 11.1 trillion. That's all driven by IoT. I'm really excited about the fact that these technologies we're building are designed to help customers take, you know, actually capitalize on that. And I think you'll see more there PrepareForBillions.com, check it out. PrepareForBillions.com. PrepareForBillions. Floral, okay, cool. Gentlemen, thank you very much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to see you. Thank you. All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. We're live from Excel London. This is theCUBE, HPE Discover 2016. Right back.