 From Seattle, Washington, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE on the ground at LinuxCon North America 2015. Now, here's your host, Jeff Frick. Hi, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are on the ground in Seattle, Washington at the LinuxCon North America 2015 conference. We wanted to come up, get a feel for what's going on, really at the granddaddy of all open source projects in the enterprise, which is Linux and LinuxCon. And we're really excited to be joined by our next guest, Michael Miller, VP Alliance and Product Management at SUSE, welcome. Thanks, glad to be here. Absolutely. First off, thanks for sponsoring theCUBE. It's without sponsors like you guys who wouldn't be able to go out and really bring the signal back to the people that weren't able to make it to Seattle. So thank you very much for that. And for the people that aren't familiar with SUSE, I want to give them kind of the overview of what you guys are all about. Sure, so at SUSE we do enterprise Linux and open source solutions. So we've been in the Linux industry now for 20 some years. And we've also have our own open stack distribution, which has been in market now several years. And our newest venture is into software-defined distributed storage. And across all of those different solutions, we really focus on the enterprise. Enterprise quality, scalability, reliability is our hallmark as a brand. So these are great times for you guys because we're open source, maybe wasn't such an enterprise standard. I'm sure it wasn't 22 years ago. It was tough. Now open source is everywhere, right? It is, you know, and it's funny. It's, you know, in a way, way back in the day, the early days, open source was kind of a different way to do things compared to a standard. Today, really, open source is becoming how people innovate. It's becoming the norm versus the other way. And it's really come a long ways and just in the last decade. Yeah, it's amazing. It's really tough to compete on an innovation cycle with an engaged community of tackling problems together. Yeah, I mean, the pace and the scale of innovation that can be achieved in an open source model is just simply unmatched by anything else. But then as always, right, what is old is new again. And one of the announcements I think you guys made here at the show was all around IBM and their system Z mainframe. So I wonder if you can give us an update on there. We were actually at the system Z event earlier this year. And again, it's innovation on IBM's part, taking this old system, the mainframe, and really repurposing it for a lot of modern day applications. What's your guys play there? So what we've done, we actually were the first to bring Linux to the mainframe 15 years ago, working engineer to engineer with IBM. We were the first distribution running on the mainframe. And then we've maintained that collaboration, that deeply rooted engineering collaboration with IBM ever since. And so what we're announcing this week is working together with them on KVM, which is really strong growing standard of virtualization. There's so many engineers and administrators and developers that know KVM and then bringing that technology to the mainframe that can bring all those application developers and administrators with it is what we're announcing today. So right now we are the only distribution supporting IBM's new KVM for IBM Z systems on the mainframe. Now, is that driven by application needs? Is it something where you just kind of know it's there or is that kind of market driven? What was kind of the motivation behind making that move? So there's a real, I think a real pent up demand for real scale-up technology, which of course the mainframe is the ideal scale-up machine. And then there's this huge wave of new development, application development going on that could benefit from a scale-up platform. So using KVM as the platform allows all of the developers developing all this great new stuff to leverage that scale-up capability. If they didn't have that familiar virtualization platform to work on, it would be much harder to adopt the mainframe platform. So this lowers that bar. And then it's ironic, right? What's old is now new, but then what's new is new as well. So a couple of weeks ago we were at DockerCon, right? All the rage is containers now. DockerCon, DockerCon containers, really kind of a manifestation of this consumerization of IT where let the app developers develop, it doesn't matter what they're deploying on and move it from their laptop to their AWS test and dev instance to production cloud on OpenStack. So talk a bit about what you guys are doing on the container side. Sure, so containers are really exciting. I mean, this creates a level of application portability and speed of development and deployment. That's just absolutely amazing. To me, this is a paradigm shift. And what's really interesting about this is how the old world of build it, deploy it, manage it, maintain it, and then upgrade it in place, it changes all of that, right? So it creates, driven by this culture of development and DevOps, it brings all of what used to be way out there in this sort of maintenance mode back into the development place. So you develop and deploy and manage all in one place. And so the speed and the pace at which you can bring new services to market for your customers is amazing. And it's really interesting to me how Agile is a software methodology to do that, really now translates into Agile as a way to go to market, run your business, don't try to figure it out exactly, get a minimum viable product up, get it out, listen to the marketplace and continue to iterate and iterate. Yeah, it's that iterative process, I think that makes, takes a development, the iteration and the agility of the development methodology now allows an agility of the business methodology. So it's really interesting to see that surface in the business behavior we can now bring to market. Right, and then too, just the expected, the expected ability to do that, right? And no one has the patience, no one is ever going to wait weeks and weeks for someone to purchase some servers and get them spun up and this and that. So it's really changed the way people think. I wonder if you could talk about from the customer perspective, because you guys are in the solution space, how are you seeing this kind of manifest itself within your customer base? How they adopt these technologies, change or go to market, change your product strategy, change kind of what they're doing. So for containerization, you know, it's still very early days, which is why we need to form groups like the Open Container Initiative project to standardize what is a container, how do you deploy a container, how do you find those applications that are in containers? And I think we need to get some of those standards developed before we're going to see the mass enterprise adoption that we all want. So our focus right now is to help build those standards while we move the technology forward. That said, there's a lot of very sophisticated, early adopters, both solution partners and customers that are experimenting with containers in seeing that agility benefit already. You've got an interesting title because you've got alliances and product management both in your title. So talk about how being so involved in open source and using kind of open source as an anchor, if you will, it's kind of a level set, enables you to have better alliances, build products with partners and go to market in a way that you couldn't if you're just kind of doing a Barney deal and trying to kind of connect two different technologies. Right. So, you know, one as an operating system vendor and a platform vendor, open stack storage, it's in our DNA to partner. And it's the open source methodology as well. So there's a real logic for us around building things that provide both our partners and our customers with choice. Whether that's at the hypervisor level, the hardware level or at a platform level, it's just, it's what we do. It's how we do business. So you've got a conference coming up. Give us a little bit of plug. Your conference is in a really horrible place to go visit, right? Amsterdam. Amsterdam. So what is your conference? How many people are going to be there? Why should people come? So, SuzyCon, the very first week of November in Amsterdam. So. Bring a sweater. Bring a sweater. And it's going to be fantastic. We're going to cover obviously Suzy technologies, everything from Linux to open stack to Seth storage, but also a whole range of other open source topics. We'll be talking about public cloud, hybrid cloud, containers, Docker, and we'll have a lot of our partners there with us as well, representing as sponsors and presenters. And if you're interested in development, if you're a hands on user of these technologies in the enterprise, this is a conference for you. There are fantastic educational sessions, hands on labs, certification classes, all of that stuff happening in that one place over three or four days. So as you went through all those open source projects, I can't help but think I always go back to the CIO that's working at a big Fortune 500, trying to sort all this stuff out from that side of the table. So what advice do you give to your customers on solutions that are seeing this plethora of open source opportunities and these new things like Docker and Spark, and they're just trying to kind of keep a handle on it. What do you tell them? How do they keep on top of it? Obviously you guys do it for a living, but how do you help your customers kind of navigate the seas here? Well, they need partners. They need vendors like Suza and our partners that really understand the enterprise, because there are so many things popping up all the time that are exciting and everybody wants to jump in there and do them, right? But as an enterprise, CIO or IT organization, you can't be on your own trying to experiment with every upstream project that pops up. So working with Suza, we're happy to help our customers kind of find their path through that chaos of innovation and align with their business goals and give them the enterprise quality services that they need. Yeah. Well, that's a great wrap, Michael. Thanks for stopping by. My pleasure. Exciting times in open source. Certainly a whole different world than it was 22 years ago. That is for sure. All right. So we are here at LinuxCon in Seattle, Washington. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. We'll see you next time.