 And we have many, many more of these super users. They're here this week. I hope that you can find some and meet them and get to know them. But I'm excited to have a couple who are here alive and in person and who are going to be talking with us today and telling us a little bit more about what they do. And in the past, we've done some kind of rapid fire presentations with these users. But today what we're going to do is we're going to sit down and we're going to have a little bit more of a conversation with a couple of users. So first of all, I'd like for you to help me welcome to the stage the head of Private Cloud Enablement at Wells Fargo Bank, Glenn Ferguson. Don't call it a dream. Love the music. Ben Horowitz would be proud of that. I love Cool J. These shows have gotten so much more polished. I mean, did you see that? I walked over there and all of a sudden, bam, chairs on the stage. So, Glenn, thank you for joining us. Yeah, glad to be here. Could you tell us a little bit about your background? I know you've been involved in infrastructure for quite a while. Sure. History repeats itself. It's kind of a common term. If I rewind 15 years ago, I was probably like a lot of the contributors here in OpenStack, except I worked for a small startup called LoudCloud, where we were trying to automate operations. At the time, it was data center storage cooling. But we really had a different approach in how we wanted to automate operations. And to your point about the super user, being an engineer, we would sit down with our network operation staff and say, show us what you do. How do you build machines? How do you monitor machines? How do you configure these machines? And it was our job to automate what they did. 15 years ago, VM virtual machines weren't as prevalent. They were kind of in a test dev mode. And XML standards were kind of the open source of the day. The big focus is on we tried starting DCML, which is data center market language, which was our version of open source of trying to get everyone who played in the data center space a common way to describe infrastructure so we could perform that level of integration. So I picked up a lot of experience there, carried that through, spent some time at Netflix, director of cloud engineering, spent some time at HP Cloud Services. And what really attracted me to HP Cloud Services was their adoption of OpenStack. It reminded me of the early years in loud cloud and opsware and what we tried to accomplish. So I've had quite a bit of experience in this industry, and I'm looking forward to continue to be involved in it. Yeah, that's great. So you are a bank, obviously. Yes, we are. You're working there. And why do you think that the financial services industry and other organizations like yours are taking advantage of OpenStack? Yeah, well, I think you touched upon it a lot in the presentation. Your infrastructure has to keep speed with software. Without that, to your point, that the software isn't good. So there's nothing specific to the banks that a lot of other people aren't driving for it, except I would say compliance and risk. I'm a Facebook user. I use Twitter. For me, signing up is fairly simple. I give an email address. I give some voluntary information, and then I'm on my way. When you look at the financial institutions and what they do for the economy and the government as a whole, know your customer, the amount of information we must collect, tying someone's financial instruments to a financial system. There's just a different amount of risk that's involved with that, a different amount of focus. If you look at what's going on in the world today and what the president is doing with Russia and trying to put some sanctions on them, a lot of that is financial driven. So there's a lot of focus on compliance and risk mitigation in that environment. So for those reasons, I think having control of kind of below the line in what we do below that cloud has an effect to ensure that we're always compliant. Things are always backed up. They're securely stored, et cetera. So that might be the one difference from a financial services perspective. But the other drivers, why wouldn't you manage infrastructure this way? It's a better way of doing things. It's the consumerization of IT. Outside of work, these developers can use Amazon. They can use these public clouds. They're much more efficient with it. But yet when they come into this enterprise environment, they're just kind of bogged down and baffled as to why they can't get that same level of efficiency. Right. Yeah, so there's still the desire for that same level of kind of control and flexibility. But how do you balance that with the needs that you were talking about for compliance and the regulations? And where does OpenStack fit into bridging that divide? Yeah, OpenStack is a cornerstone. I mentioned the line. What I mean by the line is the API. Above the line is where the developers are interacting and managing infrastructure through software and tools that they use today. But below that line is where the cloud operator plays. Below the line is where you define your quality of service, your racks of hardware, targeting workloads. But that's also where we build in compliance. We are fundamentally different than a public cloud provider. And I can say that because I've played in both worlds. Public cloud providers, I can give you a VM and you're on your way. Here's what you need to do. In a highly compliant environment, it's much more than that. It's patching, it's auditing, it's reporting, it's compliance. So using OpenStack below the line to enforce some of these best practices and securities is great for us. The developers work above the line. They're using web services. They're managing infrastructure through software. But yet below the line is where we build in and bake in the compliance that's needed in this environment. So how has OpenStack, you talk about above the line and below the line, how has it changed your vendor interactions and how you sort of have vendor relationships and drive those decisions about that technology below the line? We certainly let our vendors know that we are deploying OpenStack. This is kind of our cloud operating platform for lack of a better term. And our desire for these vendors to fully embrace and support that. So I would say if I had to sum it up, that's probably the way that we engage our vendors is being upfront, let them know where we're going, how we're using OpenStack, why we're using OpenStack. And that's the area that we want to drive forward. Right. Now, we know that there are financial services organizations that are using OpenStack, but you are the first one to actually join us from a major bank and talk about what you're doing. Why are you doing that? Why are you here today? I mean, I'm glad you are, but... Yeah, I know. I'm glad. And I think it gets back to the previous question. This is a community. I was hired by Wells to run a business and bring the best solution forward. And it's in my best interest to be at these conferences and let the community know that this is what we're using, put our use cases out there. Everything that happens in parallel with Wells Fargo could happen in parallel with many other engagements and companies. So it's the collective mass of the community that everyone benefits from. I'm not a developer anymore. I couldn't have stood up earlier when it contributed to Ice House or anything. So this is my form of contribution. Letting the community know this is very valuable. Letting the community know what our use cases are. And we're trying to run a serious business on this technology. So that's the primary reason that I'm here. So my last question, as we look at this shift that's happening in the industry, do you feel like inside of Wells Fargo, the infrastructure, the back end systems, this technology stack that we're talking about is really becoming something that has strategic value to the larger organization? Most definitely. The agility, the speed, really allowing the developers to modify that software in lockstep with the infrastructure, speed to market. We have competitors. We're a large bank. We have targets on our back. There's disruption happening everywhere. We're doing our best to stay competitive on all levels. And this is certainly technology is a key component of any business, certainly financial services. So this is something we have to do to remain competitive and be flexible and agile in this environment. Great. Well, thank you very much, Glenn, for joining us. All right. Thank you. Appreciate it. Good to talk. Thanks, everyone.