 Okay, we're back here inside theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, my co-host for this segment is Stu Miniman, wikibon.org, and we have returning CUBE alumni, Ben Kaps. Welcome back to theCUBE, diversity limited. You're flying back and forth in New Zealand. All these shows, you're in the power circuit. Yeah, kind of, the way I look at it, I've got the best of both worlds. I live in paradise and I get to work in this industry. And so, I was, interesting, we follow you around, because we bump into each other all the time with theCUBE and we're just at OpenStack, and now we're here at EMC World, two different worlds colliding on the same collision course, all going to, essentially, a software-led, open-source-based software, cloud, small bowl, big data, trust, I'll throw a trust in there, because that's EMC's new slogan for the week. Yeah, totally, collision course. Some would suggest that there's a train wreck going on, and that train wreck's being caused by some new vendors on the tracks, but either way, there's some big stuff happening. So, compare and contrast OpenStack, what's going on here and there. I'll see, the commonalities are cloud. Enterprise grade, like I want enterprise cloud. Sure, I mean, what's your take? You know, fundamentally, the question is, can legacy slash traditional vendors change what they do? Vendors that are used to selling big ticket stuff, recurring revenue in terms of licensing and maintenance, can they change the way they work, the way they act to live in a world that fundamentally is different? You know, the whole move to services, the whole move to software to find everything, really challenges kind of the structures of traditional organizations with their sales structures and things like that. So, there's some big stuff happening and we're seeing a real paradigm shift. Ben, can I just want to follow up on that question if I could, you know, one of the biggest challenges is, you know, that transition of applications, kind of the traditional applications, living in a Microsoft centric world, living in VMware versus the more modern scale out, hyper scale environment. You know, what are you seeing in the marketplace? Are customers moving there? Are they, you know, kicking and screaming? You know, what's your take? So, totally, it's really polarized and on the one hand, you have the, you know, cloud evangelists that say everything's moving to the cloud, everything's changing, all applications are becoming nimble and agile and it's all changing. Then you've got, on the other hand, you've got those that are very traditional, say nothing's going to the cloud. The reality is much more nuanced than that. The fact of the matter is that traditional applications primarily are staying where they are because why would you reinvent something that, you know, that works where it is? And that new, you know, new applications are being built in a more sort of agile, cloudy sort of a way. So, more and more, the future is very heterogeneous, not just in terms of a hypervisor or infrastructure, it's heterogeneous in terms of the way it looks. And that's a real challenge for organizations. Yeah, so speaking in some of those cloud evangelists, there was some news that hit the wire this morning. Dell made an acquisition of some folks we know well from in Stratus. So first of all, congratulations to both the Dell and Stratus people. So, how's that fit? Why Dell? And what does that mean for Dell's cloud going forward? Sure, so I'd say that, first I'd like to say, congratulations to those guys. The guys in Stratus have been, you know, friends of the cloud for a long time. They are absolutely thought leaders and they really deserve an exit. You know, George Reese is a fantastic guy and, you know, personally I'm really proud of them and happy for them. What does it mean for Dell? You know, clearly Dell's world is changing. It's no longer a hardware business and in the future will be less and less so and it's moving more towards software. You know, as you move towards a software world, you have to recognize and acknowledge the fact that your customers are going to be using lots and lots of different kit and the best way to deliver upon that is to both provide broad sort of platforms, broad fabrics that cover a lot of different use cases, a lot of different scenarios that your customers will have. And I think that's what Stratus does for them. You know, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what kit you use, it doesn't matter what cloud operating system you use, it doesn't matter what stack you use and Stratus straddles all of that and so it's a really smart play. You know, Dell's not completely out of the woods yet. Clearly it's a very challenging time to be a traditional vendor and we've seen obviously Dell's trying to go private and this morning BMC announced that they've gone private. You're seeing some big, big organizations fundamentally change what they do but you know, we'll see whether they survive. Let's talk about the cloud migration. So we just had Service Mesh on and they're talking a great message and they picked up on the radar when Sean Douglas went over there from EMC Ventures, which got our attention and you got here, you got two founders, self-funded who essentially made a bet. They basically made a bet that web services and service-oriented architectures would be the future. I mean, if you're in the industry in 2001, that's not, you know, it's pretty obvious but it just never progressed. You saw Vishal Sikha made that bet early on with SAP and again, it took like five years we slogged through to the point where you had some infrastructure so I want to get your take on that. I mean, obviously, I mean, it's not 100% mathable back to 2001, it's changed a lot. Some things have grown. What do you think about that vision and their product, their offering, the team and what their value proposition is? So I think fundamentally there's some stuff going on and that is that those of us that spend all our time looking at this world, kind of sometimes forget just how long it takes for change to happen. And so, you know, I'm actually really sympathetic and empathetic, I guess, to the traditional vendors who hear us advocates and evangelists bash on about how the world's changing super fast and yet they're sitting there day in, day out talking to large enterprise customers whose world isn't changing particularly fast and so they need to kind of temper... The shiny new toy, as they say, right? It's hard to roll out. They need to temper their message to not scare off traditional customers and so I think that's the interesting kind of combination of interesting balancing act that they need to face and I think that it's very easy for those of us here to kind of criticize these traditional guys and say that they're not moving fast enough, they're not sufficiently agile, they're not doing what they need to do to survive in this new world, but there is a hell of a lot of money being spent in the old world and there will continue to be a hell of a lot of money spent in the old world and so I'm not writing off any of that. Well, Eric from Service Match basically said, hey, it's legacy. You can't ignore it and the application mindset is got to go cloud and know who's thinking about all the nuances around compliance. Does it? I mean, like shadow IT is great and all, but hey, no one's endorsing it. They're letting it go for a little while but I mean. Sure, because at the end of the day, there's a lot of sort of critical applications still running on cranky old mainframes. You know, the fact of the matter is they're going to continue to do so for a long time and so the future is more and more kind of going to be very heterogeneous and the key opportunity or the key requirement is to balance those two worlds. You do a lot of work like Wikibon. You have a boutique research firm. You talk to a lot of upstarts and startups as well as the big companies and give them a lot of advice. We know because you sent out some of our way to do some SiliconANGLE interviews and we've talked to a bunch of them and it's great, but I want to get your perspective. As you dance between the lenses that you look through, looking through and also you have a global perspective, right? So adding that to the mix. Startups and the big companies, what are you seeing? What's the big trends that are on your radar right now that you're saying, hey, you know, this is for tracking this is still early, but it's going to be something that we're going to water ski behind for a while. So clearly as is always the case in technology, there's all the buzzwords and clearly every time that big vendors, big data, social analytics, yada yada, a kitten somewhere dies or at least a seen kitten somewhere die, hopefully. But at the end of the day, that stuff is important and clearly big data is an way overused term but fundamentally there is a deluge of information there and we need to work out how to take advantage and make insights from that data actionable. So that stuff is happening, but at the same time we're seeing this amazing emergence of startups that are doing incredible stuff and we need to see some rationalization and consolidation. It's just too crazy. Everyone is doing everything. The startup space is just crazy. We are in another, you know, I wouldn't say we're in another bubble, but I would say that there's very much a lot of enterprise fluffiness going on. And so I'm thinking that I don't think there's going to be a bubble bursting, but I think we're going to see some rationalization and consolidation as well. Well, bubble behavior is an indicator of investment, right? So frothyness means, and we've been covering the cues, the million wasn't sexy. So clearly there is investment in IT. I mean, and cloud. So it's not like they're cutting to the bone. They're trying to figure it out. Yeah, they're trying to figure it out. I mean, unfortunately it doesn't help that we have CEOs and high-level execs from large vendors standing up on stage and saying, literally, we will help you leverage the social analytic, big data, cloud ecosystem opportunity. Bingo. What does that actually mean? You know, it's BS, and at the end of the day, yes. Some of these vendors have some really good solutions to help harness big data, but simply putting a big data name on top of an existing solution doesn't all of a sudden make it big data. And you know, the idealistic part of me would like that to be resolved. Still chime in. Yeah, so Ben, I want to follow up with a question on this. But yeah, I totally agree. I think we've seen customers that are adopting big data, and we've been really trying to talk about some of the use cases and proof points of customers doing it. So Jeff Kelly, our lead big data guy, has been laying out some of the pieces. One of the kind of the next kind of steps that we've been kind of tracking and like to get your input on is kind of the internet of things or the industrial, you know, internet. Kind of as the next phase, the machine to machine data for big data. What's your take on that? Will that be a real wave or? Sure, so I've been really excited lately to see what GE's doing. Yeah. And clearly GE just invested $100 million, which is not much money for them, but it's a reasonable amount of money on the scale of things into the Pivotal Ministry or Pivotal One. And so they're doing some amazing things around the internet of things. And so too is Bechtel with my friend Christian Riley, who's doing some incredible stuff, you know, putting sensors in wet concrete so they can kind of, you know, rather than having to take samples, they can actually sense what the concrete's doing in a massive industrial project. You know, the internet of things is something that hasn't yet broken out into the sort of mainstream hype. And clearly it eventually will, but it truly is incredible. You know, when you have, and I've seen some estimates recently that say that, you know, in a year or two there's going to be 20 billion connected devices, when you start having that and you start to kind of mix that with some sort of analytics and harness that aggregate data, that's incredible. You see some amazing things coming then. Okay, so final prediction, EMC World, what's the core message going to be coming out of this show? What's your take on this? So, you know, I'm sitting inside the EMC events, so far from me to criticize EMC because they'd probably shoot me. We are in Vegas after all. I didn't say criticize EMC, I said, what did you think the key message is going to be? Yeah, sure, but go ahead, feel free. I think the key message- This is the cube, it's a free zone to say whatever you want. I mean, at the end of the day, they are trying, you know, I would argue that they are trying to slow innovation because innovation threatens them. And so they are trying to create a message that ensures that customers move at a steady pace that doesn't outpace their ability to move. Whether or not they succeed, or whether customers get with the picture soon as an EMC can move, we'll wait to see. Well, we got three minutes, so I'll just trill back to some open stuff, and then I want to get Stu's perspective on what he sees. Well, I wanted to see if we can get Ben's opinion. The developer community, John, we've been talking about is, you know, a really hot place. EMC does not have a great tradition in the open space community, or with developers, which is kind of why Pivotal is pulling the pieces together. You know, who's doing a good job with developers, in your mind, from the big standpoint. Sure, so I mean, obviously Pivotal, you know, Dell was doing some really interesting stuff with developers. You know, they've obviously taken on Kote and they're doing a lot of stuff around the whole DevOps world. So, you know, I wouldn't write Dell off because they are really understanding that developers are the new kingmakers. Clearly IBM's doing a lot of work there. It's about building a vibrant ecosystem of developers and this bottom up approach towards transforming IT. Okay, so I want to ask you about OpenStack. So, OpenStack, obviously, in the research that we're doing and I've been poking at some CIOs in our network, they like OpenStack because it gives them a comfort, security blanket. It gives them a feeling that, hey, you know what? I don't have to go with Amazon, which could be the Roach Motel for me and they're real nervous. I'm not saying that, that's the case, but I'm just saying, that's the perception, right? So, we heard UBS basically saying, we're not going to put any data in the cloud, they're going to do hybrid, they're going to do some cool things. OpenStack gives that comfort, hey, it's layered, it's software based, it's open source. That gives it a lot of comfort to the enterprise guys because it's still early and they can tool it. What is your take on it? Obviously, cloud scaling, some say it's faster to roll out because it's already more viable, but OpenStack's got a better message for the enterprise. What's your take on that? So, it's early days for OpenStack. It's only been a couple of years and clearly there's a lot of tension with a lot of different vendors trying to do their own kind of versions of OpenStack. Having said that, I think when OpenStack matures, it is going to be incredibly compelling for those very reasons that you point out. I'm really excited by it. I think it's a great counter or a great foil to the risks of one vendor being AWS. I think two years down the track, we're going to have some amazing communities around OpenStack like we did with Linux. I love the comparisons of OpenStack versus Amazon and then even Pivotal with cloud foundries comparing themselves to AWS. I think that might be a paper tiger. Some are saying, including myself, that cloud foundry mostly competes with OpenStack versus Amazon. Would you agree with that or disagree with that? I mean, cloud foundry is very, it's an unknown quantity. Pass generally is an unknown quantity. So, I'm yet to really get a good idea of where the future is going to lie for pass. Platform as a service, infrastructure as a service, all happening, the cloud, trust and big data. CEMC's big themes. Ben Kepps here from New Zealand, diversity. Great job. Great to see you again. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.