 Good afternoon. This is the stalwart few. You have hung out through the entire conference and you still want more. I'm very proud of you. Give yourselves a round of applause. So John Rose is not just the global CTO for EMC Dell. He's also an old friend of mine and one of the key people who commits me to take the job running the Cloud Foundry Foundation. I think it might be becoming something of a tradition but towards the end of the year we end up doing these fireside chats in public and sometimes I get part of my annual review. So pay close attention and something funny might drop. We'll see. So John, exciting times for you. The Dell Technologies merger has just completed. I know your hair was full of that. You're operating Dell EMC. You're still working with VMware and Pivotal and all the other assets but I want to take your brain out of that for a minute and put you solidly in Cloud Foundry. I totally appreciate that. The last 10 months putting together an 80 billion dollar company, it's nice to be here not doing integration and sorting out where things land and how to build the company but good news is we're through that. We're now a real company. Dell Technologies onward and upward. So thanks for the vacation. Awesome. So we were catching up earlier about the patterns that we're starting to see in the industry and this big trend towards application modernization. There's a kind of a lens of what's happening with Cloud Foundry 4. A while ago people thought this is only for green field applications. Now we're starting to see that it's affecting the structure of application workloads and data that's been sitting resident in enterprises for years. So I thought we'd all benefit from getting some of your thoughts on what's happening in app modernization as a pattern with Cloud Foundry. Yeah. I think when we formed the Cloud Foundry Foundation two years ago, I guess it was. Yeah, I think formally signed the agreement in August of 14. Yeah. You gave me my job January 21st of 2015. There we go. Okay. So two years, you rewind back two years ago. By the way, who was involved in Cloud Foundry two years ago? Raise your hand. Two years ago, most of us kind of looked at this platform and thought that what we were really about was building the next kind of newly composed, innovative, disruptive application, which, by the way, hopefully we're still doing a lot of that. Last year when we got together, we started to see patterns where not only were the bleeding edge using these technologies, but we were seeing very strong patterns in large enterprises and service providers that had actually gone beyond just testing and started to put it into practice. And we're using it as the underpinnings of a next generation infrastructure, if you will. Over the last year, two things have happened that I think are pretty exciting. The first is we're seeing Cloud Foundry specifically start to become a foundation under, let's call it modernization of an entire legacy ecosystem or many legacy ecosystems. And the big ones for me are we're starting to see the real time communication world become a consumer of cloud native. And that seems strange because most of us are familiar with 12 factor apps and stateless. And we don't really think about real time communication in that concept. But if you look at what things like Cisco is doing with Spark, clearly we see, you know, the adoption in this platform works well in that environment. Yeah, Spark's going to break out performance for them. WebEx is part of that part of that. And they've actually contributed a lot of ideas towards Cloud Foundry as a result. Absolutely. And it's putting pressure on the system to basically say, hey, this is this is for more than just that next generation modern stateless app. It's actually for new applications and existing customers and now applications across entire ecosystems, even the document management world, one of these stodgy old worlds, we had a we have a business called Documentum that we're we're now selling off to Open Text. And we got a pretty good price for it. It's a great business. And one of the reasons why it's valuable, even though documentum has been around for a long time is about three years ago, we began a journey to completely rearchitect the document management ecosystem by using Cloud Foundry as the basis underneath it. So things as, you know, relatively state as storing and managing documents inside of a large scale enterprise are now being delivered across Cloud Foundry type foundations. And it's not just happening in single instances, it's entire industries. So real time, industrial document management, these things that we really didn't contemplate two years ago as the mainstream use of this technology are now becoming mainstream uses of it. So it's pretty exciting to see the evolution. I think it's putting pressure on the development community because every time we bring one of these new ecosystems to bear, suddenly there's a new set of requirements. Suddenly we need runtime persistence. We need the ability to handle real time data streams. We need new protocol support. All of this stuff, you know, is goodness, by the way, because it keeps us all busy. But it's also an indication of adoption of the technology, not as a component within an isolated stack, but as a foundational technology in a very large, broad, diverse set of ecosystems. Well, the great thing about the Documentum case was that it was it pragmatically broke a bunch of, you know, a bunch of previously sacred rules. So anybody who is involved in Cloud Foundry two years ago knows push code only, never talk about containers. It's like fight club. Don't don't talk about containers. And for sure, nothing special about containers, no float, snowflakes, no, no persistence. So you couldn't attach a volume to a container inside Cloud Foundry. But in order to take Documentum, which is a pretty epic ISV, right, with with like, I mean, I don't even know how many petabytes of information under management globally and different customers for Documentum. In order for them to move forward, they had to have access to the volumes that they managed. So EMC and IBM collaborated on the Persistence Project, affectionately codenamed Percy. That's included in Diego, which Chip Childers talked about yesterday. It's the latest and greatest industrial strength scheduler. So these things are pushing us forward in a really, it's in a beautifully pragmatic way. We still support the code model, and that's always going to be important, but we have to support ISVs if we're going to build the right future for Cloud Foundry as a platform. The test is, can you have certified packaged applications that people just buy? They might even not know Cloud Foundry's insight. And that was part of the open text interest, right, the transformation of the Documentum business on-premises assess. Yeah, three or four years ago, the dialogue might have been about consolidating an industry. What they're actually picking up is an extraordinarily modern agile platform and architecture to go forward. And sometimes changing your platform to make it modern actually has unintended consequences that are quite good. We didn't predict an open text acquisition, moving that piece of technology over there, but I think it definitely helped. You can ask their opinion, but I think they'll be pretty positive on the overall effort. Yeah, and we see, you know, in a way, we see SAP is going through a massive modernization process, talk about an existing estate, and then how to cloud platform is a way to be able to get back into all of that existing data and value and bring it forward. One of the things you mentioned that put stress on the development community, but I want to flip from, we used to talk about the development community as being the contributors and committers to Cloud Foundry itself. But I want to flip that around and look at the global developer audience. One of the things that we keep hearing about Cloud Foundry is this is amazing technology. Where do I find the developers who can build on it? Because now I've done my pilot. I've got 12 developers who can build on it. I actually need a thousand. Where do I go find a thousand developers? So it's something that we've been talking a lot about on the board as a sort of what do we do to enable the Cloud Foundry economy? Yeah, so maybe the first part of your performance review. You know, good job on the first piece. We have a nice platform. A lot more work to do on the second piece. We have a growing community of literate people who can develop cloud native applications, understand these platforms, and can even, in many cases, do contributions to them. But we are nowhere near where we need to be. Here's a statistic. In the United States, for instance, there's roughly two million software developers employed in the United States. That number 20 years ago was roughly two million software developers. It hasn't really grown dramatically. Now that's great if you're a software developer because you're highly employable. But what it means is that we have a somewhat captive fixed set of people who, for the last decade, when software wasn't eating the world, maybe we're doing less interesting things. As we go into this next decade where original software development is absolutely critical to every enterprise in the world. You will not be competitive in your market if you cannot originally create IPR and technology in the software world to transform your industry. And so we have to help quite frankly create either a bigger pool, which I think is going to be difficult to be perfectly honest. I think we should definitely be investing in training and education and trying to bring more people into the software developing world. But over the last 20 years, we've been saying that and it hasn't really changed much. So we have to look at two things. One, reskilling. Giving people an opportunity to play with this technology, to experiment with it in a friendly environment. And that requires, you know, we have the dojo model, which is one approach, but there's many other models that we have to pursue because, you know, most software developers are intellectually curious about new technology, but busy. And so giving them an easy way to experiment and learn and quite frankly figure out how to use the technology on their own terms is useful. The second though is that we have to look at efficiency. You know, some of the wish list that came up in the presentations talked about the fact that, you know, we really want the system to understand that we have a finite amount of time to develop our application and deliver it. And even though we're using some of the most modern development tools and methodologies in the world, in most of the Cloud Foundry deployments, we still have to do better. We have to basically look for friction anywhere. We have to make it much simpler to test the behavior of the system when you're developing an application. We have to just ask ourselves any cycle that a software developer is spending doing something that isn't about the creation of something useful is something we need to automate in the platform. We need to move down into the stack and take it away from them. I think we're the gold standard today, I think, but we're not where we need to be because we have this problem of a finite amount of software development capability and an infinite amount of work that we have to do across our industries. But, Sam, that's your next adventure is we got to go solve this problem. 2017 performance review will be based on that. Any ideas what you're going to commit to? Yeah, there's a couple of comments you made that remind me of a few things in the past. So I once saw the Olympic sprinter, Michael Johnson, speak. And he held the fastest man in the world record, I think, for 10 years running. So once he set the first world record, he had kind of a challenge. How does he set the second and the third? So I think we are the gold standard for usability, but that is not enough. You can't stand still. You have to compete with yourself. One of the things I'd like to see this community do is to be as forward and forthright as Rakuten was to say, Dear Santa, here are the things that are kind of not as wonderful as I'd like them to be, or the things that are actually totally broken and making me miserable. Because then we can start to fix those. A great example of that is cloud foundries frequently deployed on top of OpenStack. OpenStacks are all quite different, but Marco Volts from SAP and a team of engineers working on Cloud Foundry built an automatic OpenStack valider. An automatic OpenStack valider is fantastic. A lot of friction to take away. You can say, am I Cloud Foundry ready? How weird is my OpenStack configuration? What do I need to do to remedy it? That's an example of the kind of friction we can solve. I really like the term that you used reskilling. Like one of the things we try to make an emphasis on in the Cloud Foundry community is human centricity and empathy. So if you think about a typical modern enterprise anywhere from a thousand to ten thousand engineers, they're fully employed building and maintaining legacy systems. They've got very good skills building on web logic and web sphere or main frames, right? Or whatever. Some range of technologies. They're not bad people. They're not dumb people. They're not lazy people. They want to be as relevant as anybody else. And we've just seen from Brexit and we're seeing from American politics what happens when you announce the great transformation and you leave a whole bunch of people behind. So we have an enormous responsibility to reskill engineers to help them come through and build cloud native apps. We've done a couple of things this year. So we're far from solved. We've open sourced a bunch of training, things that used to get charged for from many of our member companies, including Pivotal. That's available for free. It's not enough. We need to follow that up with certification. And it's going to take the industry to help us. We think there's a great opportunity in selling training and bringing that along with consulting services and aligning that to certification. So we can create, you know, modest goal. Let's let's go create a couple hundred thousand certified cloud founder developers over the next few years. That's probably going to get us a lot closer to meeting the kind of global demand that we see. Last thought on this, Liam Maxwell was here, the CTO of the UK. One of his top issues was we need to massively reskill the United Kingdom in order to participate in the digital economy. So these aren't just corporate issues. These are actually national level issues that we can start to serve. By the way, you know, as the, you know, putting my chairman of the Cloud Foundry Foundation had on, you know, one thing to think about any of you who are, you know, entrepreneurs who are thinking about your next great adventure, you know, generally, if you did software development, you're thinking about building the next software product. What we've discovered is in the first ring round of, let's call it consolidations around Cloud Foundry, where the big players started to absorb some of the ecosystem. We definitely accumulated a lot of great technology and got a great people into these ecosystems. But the one thing we lost is we lost the scale of independent organizations that can actually help a company independent of the distribution, independent of the vendor they're using move forward. And I think there's still some of that. And obviously the primary vendors do it in many cases, but there is a bit of a void right now where, you know, we really want to encourage people to think about the fact that their participation in the ecosystem as an entrepreneur might not be about building a widget. It might be about intellectual capacity to help other people build their widgets. And we actually think there's almost an untapped demand for that. You know, we've seen, you know, I can just speak for ourselves in the Dell Technologies ecosystem, you know, pivotal labs is oversubscribed, you know, full stop. We have a lot of activity going on. We can't keep up, to be perfectly honest. But there are other dimensions that we don't even address that that service side that independent expertise is actually going to be highly valuable for a fairly long time as we move through this transition. So, you know, the shameless ask for the ecosystem and the industry is, you know, the smart people in this room are thinking about doing something new don't necessarily bias exclusively towards building a piece of code or a technology. There might actually be a much higher value proposition. It might have a bigger impact actually building up more of a services function that can actually help other people develop their technologies and their enterprises. I think you heard that from any customer that stood up here said their biggest challenge was they got started and then they usually chose some technology suppliers and then they tried to find expertise. A lot of it was to hire them, but in many cases they will just leverage those expertise. So there's definitely demand out there. And we definitely feel like that. And I don't think it's a weak link because I think we have sufficient scale, but it's a huge opportunity for people to participate. If the market's as big as we believe it's growing and as you watch the announcements from the major vendors of Cloud Foundry, they are bringing a lot of marketing to the table. So there's a lot of awareness of it. So just to offer a few names of recently, created companies. You've got resilient scale. You've got engineer better. You've got Armacuni. You've got our stalwarts like Stark and Wayne and Altorus. They're all building good businesses. We want them to be incredible businesses and we think there are room for dozens more. So let us help you. Let us know what you need and let us tell you a little bit about the assets that we're trying to bring to bear to help you build a business and to support the global demand for Cloud Foundry expertise. So it kind of brings me to where the expertise is being driven. Some of the demands are coming from. There's been a lot of successful product launches on Cloud Foundry this year. You know particularly a lot of the ones in networking and telecommunications. Kind of surprising. So if you can walk us through a few. Well, I mean, the big one for us was obviously launching Leap and the document on the Enterprise Content Division. I mean, that was a huge update. What's interesting is it didn't just replatform the system. It allowed us to completely re-vector towards being able to feel comfortable that we could enter vertical markets extremely quickly. You know, one of the reasons why most companies don't go vertical is that, you know, if you have to build it from scratch and it's operating as a silo and all the infrastructure is independent. If that vertical doesn't work out, you may have a problem. But if you're building it on a cloud-native environment and you're actually able to quite frankly compose your solution for that vertical. And most of it is reusable and most of it is very flexible. Your ability to go explore new verticals and to move very quickly into them and potentially scale them up and down as businesses because the technology scales up and down and is leverageable becomes, you know, much more probable. And so LEAP was, that's a big deal. Obviously, I mentioned, you know, the culmination of that is the combination of our Enterprise Content Division and Open Text. And we're really excited about that. We think that's going to be a great, you know, powerhouse in the content development or content management ecosystem. Obviously, Cisco continues to do great work around, you know, their collaboration, unified communications and other services. The Spark Launch, I think, was just, you know, they've gotten great traction here. It's interesting how few people realize how modern the underlying infrastructure is on those systems. It's nothing against Cisco. I think they're doing fantastic work, but they're not really viewed as a software company in many cases. And when people start to realize that they're using the most modern of modern and they're actually leading the adoption of these technologies in real-time communication, it actually creates a very, very positive perception of that company and their leadership in the collaboration space. Yeah, I think the establishment of Cloud Foundry as the standard has really contributed to that. You mentioned that industrials are typically very slow to move, but then look at what we've seen this week. Zeeman's Mindsphere. GE predicts launch this year, both doing extremely well. We see a movement within heavy industry towards what we might think is brand new, but they perceive it as a standard solving this fairly interesting problem. Well, if any of you have ever dealt with industrial companies, and I love my industrial customers, they aren't the fastest moving because industrial is big, heavy, complex environments. And I've been dealing with SCADA infrastructure and technologies like Modbus and ModTCP and these underlying technologies that anybody who's developed a modern protocol would be scratching their head about these things. But they have to last 20, 30 years in place. They have to run power grids. And the slowness in which those industries typically had moved was staggering. I mean, I think 15 years ago I was helping two of the big industrial companies kind of modernize their view of networking. And I remember having this discussion with literally two, one big Japanese, one big US, like major companies. And I was introducing to them this concept called Wi-Fi. Now, Wi-Fi had been in the home for five years by then. And they looked at it and said, it seems way out there. That's really complex. I don't know if I want to deal with this. It's not really proven. I mean, this is mainstream everywhere. Every mobile device, every home had this technology. Internet over the years, science fiction. Well, and it was just there's a natural conservatism in that industry because they're building infrastructure that runs countries and the world. I mean, it has a very, very long duration. I am really, given that context, I am just amazed and excited about the shift because it's the industrial companies that are actually the biggest early adopters in some cases of technologies like Cloud Foundry. And it's good for two reasons. One, I think they're going to get huge value both to themselves and to the world because if we modernize our infrastructure, the physical infrastructure, that has huge implications on quality of life and geopolitical ramifications in a positive way. The other is, talk about an endorsement of a technology when the people who are arguably the most conservative and long term thinkers in all industries are jumping head first into this and more importantly, being successful, making the technology work and demonstrating significant value to their customers and their businesses by using this technology. So that one is an odd one, but very exciting. Yeah, and poised for new opportunities. So QIO is a startup that launched this year also on Cloud Foundry. And they build heavy industry solutions for private clouds. They'll put it in the converged device, put it on a ship, put it in a factory. So amazing stuff. We're out of time, but I wanted to get any last thoughts you have on 2017. Both my performance review, of course, I'm personally interested in other things that you want the community to think about as we have them assembled. Well, so performance review, you know, Sam, I think we've all said it, you know, we're thrilled that you're in this role. I mean, you know, you're a friend, we've worked together a long time, different boards, different engagements. You know, this ecosystem only works if we have a community. And you know, I think the foundation's purpose is to be the center of that community, but not to be the community. Its job is to facilitate it. You know, I look at the adoption of the technology as the thing that we really want to measure. And that's just been spectacular. I look at the involvement from the end users, the developer community, the industry. You know, this is arguably with maybe the exception of kind of Linux, probably the largest, you know, adopted open source initiative going on in the world right now. I mean, we're seeing, you know, upwards of half of the cloud native applications at scale being deployed on Cloud Foundry now, which is a pretty exciting thing. No pressure, but but given the fact that you know, we're now two years into this and we started from, you know, a decent starting point, but at the beginning, last year was a great year. I think this year was an exceptional year. You've done a fantastic job. But you're in front of us. We have to make sure we don't screw it up. So I'll try not to screw it up. But good job. So anyway, please thank you. Thanks, John Rose. John, thank you so much.