 Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE at OpenStack Summit Vancouver 2015. Brought to you by headline sponsors EMC and jointly by Red Hat and Cisco with additional sponsorship by Brocade and HP. And now your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in Vancouver for OpenStack Summit. This is theCUBE's Silicon Angles flagship program. We go out to the events to extract the seamless noise. It's so, the future's so bright here. We're all wearing shades. We've got the sun, it's going to be shifting but we've got a great spot on the floor. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Stu Miniman. Our next guest, CUBE alumni, Randy Beyes, been on many times. Now Vice President of Technology at EMC Enterprise at the Emerging Technologies with ETD, Emerging Technology Division. We're going for CJ over there. And congratulations on moving over and being acquired by EMC. Certainly you've changed the game at EMC. Congratulations. Welcome back to theCUBE. Thanks John. So this is your home turf here. All your actions here. We've done many debates. The Randy Beyes great API debate two years ago. Neutron, what's going on? What's going on in the platform? Are things hardening? Is it an opportunity? You're seeing EMC here. You're seeing HP. You're seeing all the big guys in here because there's some action going on with OpenStack. Are you happy with it? Are you just hardening? What's the Randy Beyes take on all this? It's definitely hardening. It's getting more robust. It's getting closer to where it needs to be. I think there's still a fundamental disconnect though between expectations. People expect it to be a complete system or a complete operating system. And it's really more like parts that you can use to assemble it. So if you go to the vendors and you get OpenStack then you have a lot better ride usually because they've got an opinionated system and all makes sense. But then you have the sort of phone long problem which is that those systems are all a little bit different. People are thinking about solving the problem in different ways. And so you run into interoperability issues if that's something that's important to you. Is the interoperability issue a governance organizational issue or is it technical or both? It is a result of the explosive growth we've had. I mean, the challenge has been that we've got a lot of people around the table and run really fast over five years and all of that action has resulted in and also kind of a big tent attitude from the perspective of the board. We've wanted more people around the table because everybody looked at Linux to sort of like the gold standard for like an open source community. And in Linux, nobody gets the door shut on them. So I hope it's been the same. And the downside has been that there are after effects of growing so fast. One of them is interoperability is hard. There's too many chefs in the kitchen trying to take the project too many different ways. There's too much focus on adding new features to solve a certain kind of edge case, right? It's like that, you know, adage that they would say that, you know, people, everybody would use kind of 10% of Microsoft Word but a different 10%, it's that kind of problem. So, you know, I actually think it's okay if it's like that. But when people come into the community and they expect it to be, you know, like the Microsoft operating system or the Linux operating system, that kind of experience, it's just, it's nothing like that. So it's really body parts. You put it together, Lego blocks, if you will, putting it all together. And we're seeing that. Now, let's talk about the consumption side. The buyers want stuff now. And at EMC, one of the things that struck me talking to CJ Desai was and talking to the, and Joe Tucci and all the execs is that, you know, EMC's got this whole platform 2.5, platform three, which is IDC's words for saying three's the next generation. I get that. 2.5 is really like upgrading today. You take a snapshot of the customer environment. It's data centers, they want to get to the cloud. They got a tool up on some existing before they can rotate into the future. And that's, I think it's a smart move by EMC. So I want to get your take on that, on that 2.5 platform. What is that? I mean, it's customers in a data center saying what? I need to move to the cloud. Is it private, hybrid? I mean, what's your take on that? You've seen now, you know, the grassroots side organic and now you're at the big company. Yeah, so platform 2.5 in my mind is really easy. There are elements of platform three that can move back down into platform two. Like it's not, those things are not, you know, they're fundamentally different approaches, but you can take elements of the approaches and you can move one way or another. Another example is moving the other direction. You can actually go from platform two to platform three. So if you look at certain technology like DSSD, which is our, you know, kind of like all flash, you know, in memory, PCI interconnected, next generation flash array. You know, that system is really designed actually for the web scale players, even though it's fundamentally a scale up approach that's focused on hardware in the very traditional EMC mold. But you know, we expect that we're going to get more traction in the web scale guys who have need for like very hot, large data sets that do in real time analytics than we will in a lot of traditional enterprises. So, you know, it's a blurry line. It's not a hard line and we think that helping customers be able to, you know, transition is important. One of the things I'm impressed with you over the years, we've chatted many times, certainly we had some fun, but also on a serious note, you know, open source is infiltrating the corporate America in terms of as a viable business model for R&D and or operationalizing the platform three or whatever technology. So you've been in both, right? You've been an entrepreneur, you had grown a company, you sold it and you're now working at EMC and you've been involved in the community. What is the take of your take on open source in the large corporation? Both as a vendor builder of solutions like EMC or an IBM or the whatnot, two actual companies who have to go out and deploy and stand up and open stack and or hybrid cloud like environment. What is, you know, what's changed and what's going on in open source and that's new and modern that you can share? Well, I mean, I think it sort of comes back to sort of my foundational statements about what I think cloud computing is, right? I think of cloud computing as being a new IT paradigm that largely comes from the web scout players. Like the way that the Google, Amazon's, Facebook's, Twitter's think about the world as now bleeding into the mainstream and that's cloud computing. It's not VMs on demand, it's not self-service, it's not APIs, it's new techniques. If you go and you look at the Facebook, Google, Amazon data centers, they don't look anything like a traditional enterprise yet at the same time they have very highly overlapping patterns. And so one of the keys there is that they all use open source. So Randy, can you give us the update as to, you know, EMC's role in the whole open stack community? Last year, cloud scaling had a bigger presence than EMC did. VMware's obviously had a long presence in this community. What's the EMC role in the community and what do you guys have going on this week? EMC's going to be very, so we have a bunch of announcements that are coming up. We have a whole bunch of drivers we've updated across our product lines. So people who want to deploy open stack with any of our products can be successful. That's obvious, right? It's just table stakes. And then second, you know, we're starting to talk to people about Project Caspian which is where cloud scaling wound up sitting which is our next generation hyper-converged, converged infrastructure that's really designed to meet customers' requests for being open source and COTS hardware. And that's sort of a general phenomenon that's happening across EMC. And then of course, you saw the announcement of Project Copperhead, our open source and Viper Controller. That's the first of many. I've already got pressure on me to get rolling on the next set of them. So you can expect to see more of that. EMC is really changing into becoming more of a software company. And then on Wednesday, make sure you come to my status stack version four where I'm going to talk about your first question today which was, you know, how do we get to the other side? What's going well? What's going wrong with OpenStack? And more specifically, how do we get through the trophid disillusionment? Because I think right now we're about hitting peak OpenStack. Yeah, so Randy, I mean, it's got to be a little bit of a culture shift for some of EMC is to, you know, usually product development, you know, it's inside. You have kind of your internal dead light. You kind of give a little bit of guidance outside with open source though. It's, you know, you make some promises to community expect you to meet up to them. And you've also got, you know, other people involved in it. Well, give us a little bit of insight. What's going on inside? How's that shift to building more open future inside of EMC? Well, it's happening. It's a process, right? I mean, we're not there yet. And that's why I gave the marketing people a little bit of grief about using the verb building. And we're sort of at the very beginning of laying the foundations. We're understanding the legal ramifications of doing open source. I mean, EMC is late to the game, right? And we're understanding what the process and procedures are. And if you look at Project Copperhead, we can't currently provide commercial support like Red Hat does around the open source. You have to buy our enterprise license on Viper Controller. And that was because we're not really in the place to do that yet mechanistically. Like big businesses are used to selling and generating revenue in certain ways and changing that is actually a longer process. So just trying to make it all happen. All right, so Randy, you know, we had at EMC world, we talked a little bit about kind of how you build the stack and don't want to get into the convergence piece. But where do you think EMC sits? I mean, you've got a lot of good pieces inside EMC and the Federation. Obviously you've got a market leadership position with the folks at VCE. So why is EMC set up to succeed in this open stack marketplace and kind of the future of that part of IT? It's really simple. So we really drove sort of the thinking around software defined. And while some of the hyper-converged folks will talk about being software defined, infrastructure and these kinds of things, the reality of the situation is that we've driven a lot of the initial thinking around that. And if you look at things like Project Caspian, they're 100% software defined infrastructure and that's the footprint, the beginning footprint of a software defined data center. And we think that that's really important for enterprises because they're not only going to be web scale players but they want to get web scale leverage. They want to use open source software. They want to use COTS hardware. They want to have building blocks so that they can build their clouds in a small size and then scale them up. They want those clouds to have a number of different services, block storage, object storage, compute on demand, containers on demand and so on. And so we have all those pieces we're building up. And then the other thing I'd say there is that EMC, even though it's traditionally selling as a hardware company, I mean, it has a huge vast number of software folks who basically have been creating the software that goes on that hardware and it has a very deep software culture. And you can see that inside now where you have a scrum and agile development methodology that's behind Project Caspian. What's your outlook for EMC's open source? Obviously you're involved in driving at friction, frictionless halfway between the two. I mean, obviously EMC is changing. It had Jeremy Burton on the Cube. We had CJ, the Psy, talk about it. Their inside out change culture going on with EMC, which that's not how they used to do things. I mean, what's your, give us some color. What's going on inside EMC? Well, it starts all the way at the top. I mean, Joe Tucci got on stage at the January EMC leadership summit and said, customers are asking us for four things. And of those four things, one was open source software, the other was COTS hardware. So, you know, all the way at the very top, at the board level, they understand that EMC needs to change as a business. You know, and then it's trickling down those senior leadership, the SVPs. You know, I was funny. I was talking to Guy Churchward who runs core technologies division, sort of what the part of EMC that has the VMAX and VNX, the ETD is supposed to disrupt. And guys like, I know you're disrupting me. It's great. You guys should keep on doing that. My job is to keep the lights on in the old legacy business. So EMC is doing the right thing. You can't shut down your old business. You can't shut down those customers, but you have to skate to the future, right? So EMC is doing the right thing in terms of continuing to like, make sure it's legacy business goes on, but also investing appropriately in sort of the future and really trying to, you know, make the curve. Okay, Randy Bias here inside the Cube live in Vancouver for OpenStack Summit, breaking it down. Big part of the community now part of EMC. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. I'll be right back after this short break. This is theCUBE live at OpenStack Summit. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We'll be right back.