 Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE at OpenStack Summit Vancouver 2015. Brought to you by headline sponsors EMC and Joypling 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 here in Vancouver, British Columbia for OpenStack Summit. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Brian Gallagher who is the president of the Cloud Management Division at EMC. Cube alum, been on CrowdChat, asked Brian G few times. Welcome back to theCUBE. Great to be back, thanks for having me. So you've got the jeans on, open shirt, cloud foundry, t-shirt, and where's the hoodie? I mean, no hoodie, I mean. It's warmer than I thought it would be in Vancouver so the hoodie's back in the room. Great to see you, you've got a new role. Tell us what's going on with you. Obviously EMC, huge, huge splash on the pool here at OpenStack, cloud scaling acquisition, and then at EMC World, just that shift towards openness and software and open source with Randy Bias and others on your team. What's going on? And you've got the emerging group under CJ, a lot of melting pot of stuff happening. You're involved in all this, what's going on? Lot in that question, so I'm trying to break it down but I think if you kind of take it to the highest level this is in response to the secular shift that's occurring in IT. And Joe Tucci talks about it all the time. And it is different, I mean in every regard when we look at moving from client server into cloud computing and mobile access to IT and infrastructures and applications and data, everything's different. I mean from the way infrastructure's built to the way software is built to the whole process, completely different mindsets, completely different methodologies. A lot of the same problems are still being resolved again but it is a completely different world and the dress codes are also different. And so yeah, the jacket and tie are no longer part of it but the world is much more community oriented as we look at platform three. And open is a requirement. It's becoming fast, a purchasing requirement for customers that are building out their IT infrastructure. So there's a lot going on. So back to EMC for a minute. I'm spending time in the space of platform three and really working on making the intersection of platform as a service and infrastructure as a service work better together. Works pretty good right now. There's a lot you can do. You can get to innovation very quickly but there's some speed bumps. There's some things related to persistence with the 12 factor applications and how do we deal with those types of challenges? So there's a lot of problems to be solved but I'd say the community's at large you look at the two open source giants, OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, let's make them work better together. Yeah, we had Sam on from Cloud Foundry. Honestly, huge success. They've had great success. I mean, they get a lot of industry support, ubiquity from the big players. You had a great career at EMC building out data centers with drives and enabling the storage industry, right? And that created great value and customer customers at EMC made a lot of money on that. But now as you talk about this platform three, this emerging world, it's the confluence of cloud. You got big data in there, you got software and you got Isola and all this stuff in EMC and then you got Stream.io and the core group. It's Flash, probably more horsepower. So there's platform two and a half. So you're going to go recreate platform three and it's software, right? It's a little bit different than the hardware business. So what's your take on that? As someone who's seen the growth that gen one infrastructure, now you're looking at now gen three with platform three, what's your take? Software is the lead, right? I mean, honestly, that's key. And what lessons can you learn bringing that over? Yeah, great question. I think at EMC, we've got about 12,000 engineers and only 400 do hardware. So the core of what we do, even in the core technology group and the emerging technology group, the value really is in software. There's no proprietary hardware anymore, which is quite a shocking statement from back in the late nineties and beginning of this decade or this millennial. And so the value that customers see is in software, but I'd say the requirements from customer's perspective of, hey, we like this new model of open source. We like this new model of platform as a service, infrastructure as a service. What I heard in Paris in December at the OpenStack Summit was, hey, this is directionally correct. These are from customers. This is where we're going, right? But can you make it work like the other stuff did? Because I'm still getting my bonus checks based on availability, all the metrics, all the operational metrics of that. And I think that's where EMC has added a lot of value is to make sure that as we transition into the new world of OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, other platform as a service, ensuring that the customer's requirements are met from a governance risk and compliance. To get going, a lot of test and dev gets moved out to public clouds. But when people are starting to operate their business or saying, hey, hybrid is where it is, that's where I need to be. And can you make the hybrid approach work much more seamlessly? Brian, it's interesting. I was at EMC for 10 years, attended a lot of meetings with you. Some of those fundamentals shifts, we always never know how they're going to go. So when Symmetric switched over to an x86 architecture, I mean, there's tons of planning, really concerned, make sure that it's going to work for customers and went really smoothly. And it was almost like not a bump in the road. Some of the same transition going on with open source software, hot hardware. EMC brings some adult supervision to some of these and knows how to deliver the enterprise. What do you see as EMC's role in kind of the whole open stack environment here? And how does EMC take those experiences and bring them to this environment? I think, so this community gets the challenges around infrastructure. Clearly there's a lot of challenges at 10,000 feet, things look pretty simple. At the operational layer, if you're sitting in the sessions, it's all about how do we get to repeatability, consistency, can we get some better automation, make deployments a heck of a lot easier. So the industry as well as EMC will continue to invest in these areas. At the platform layer, it's a different world and applications are built differently as well as the infrastructure. There's a higher reliance on resiliency being built into the application, not necessarily in the infrastructure. I think where EMC can add a lot of value is bringing those concepts into platform as a service around resiliency, persistence, around things that protect information, things that allow businesses the ability to sleep well at night, knowing that if there's any problems, their business is protected. And those attributes are still important. I think where we have built our business on is gaining that trust in the data center with customers and now it's establishing that trust with new customers or same customer base, but new buyers if you will. And there's clearly a lot of areas that we can add value in. Yeah, I mean, you hit on a key point there. If I look at the application space, I mean customers are reticent to change. That's how what I run my business on and trying something new is a challenge. Can you talk a little bit about, there's a dojo that you guys are going to have in Cambridge. How is that going to help span that gap, get customers comfortable with the platform three stuff and help move them along that move to the new kind of cloud-native type applications? So I must bow to start this conversation. Yeah. No splits today though, right? It's funny, some people don't, I know what a dojo is, because I trained in karate for many, many years and some people are like, what does it mean? Development ops, join ops, is it an acronym? And it's like, no, so for those that, and most of this community knows about dojo because of how software is developed, but the translation is the place of the way. And if you, the analogy being with karate, it's where you went to learn from the masters, you went to learn the way. Nothing was really written down, right? When you look at it. A lot of books on martial arts, but not necessarily on the technique. And the only way to do that is hands-on training, you know, being physically there and doing the work. And so EMC in March 19th, we announced the first Cloud Foundry dojo. And it is a six-week training program. And it's modeled after the original dojo that was started in San Francisco. And it is a program that will teach developers about Cloud Foundry. They'll train them in open source. Out of it, they will become contributors to the open source community. And they also learn about paired programming, test-driven development. And the overall methodology of Agile that's deployed within this community. And I think it's really great. I think we've got a guy going through that training right now, he's in the third week. There's a lot of benefits to that. As development, as open source development communities scale to large scale, I think the concept of dojo should be, you know, kind of osmosis across all open source projects. There's a lot of benefits to it. It's very community-driven too. It is systematic, but it's not, you know, there's not a lot of governance on it. You're not going to find a lot of documentation about it, but it is hands-on training with committers rotating through and where EMC's going to focus our developers on open source contribution is the bottom layer of Cloud Foundry, Bosch, which does the cloud management and deployment of applications. And we're going to start working on some problems around, you know, data, data security, persistence, things of that nature. Yeah, kind of bridging that platform two to three, which is EMC's thing. And David Goulden's like a platform two and a half, which is kind of like just saying, extreme IO basically is going to drive that. A lot of performance going on in the hardware, in this servers, in the storage, at the same time this new software model lays on top of it. Right. You got to shift that mindset. And how do you get that going? I mean, EMC, we were at EMC World Commenting to Jeremy Burton and John and Martin and Guy. Like EMC has never been known for having a big community that's always had great customer service, great sales centric, great innovator, but they didn't really need a community because they were rolling out drives and storage. But now in the past five years that software focus you mentioned has been big. So, you know, what's your take on that community initiative? You think EMC's got the right stuff? You think they're going to throw money at it? They're going to, what are they going to do? How do you get the community going? Yeah, great question. I think part of it, clearly in client server, we had great brand recognition, mainframe great brand recognition. And I think it's the same thing here, which is EMC's value proposition in the new world of platform three. And it is, it's about software, it's about the assets that we have. But more importantly, it's taking a lot of the learned concepts and applying them in different ways. You know, we've got great technology across the product lines, from our core technologies division or emerging technologies division. And I think in the world of platform three is how do we leverage that value in a different way? For example, DSSD, you've heard a lot about DSSD. You know, great opportunity to accelerate applications. What if in the software defined world we knew the infrastructure had that capability, could we do a better job at deploying Redis or other in-memory databases, no SQL type data stores in memory on DSSD? Having that knowledge up so we could broker the application workload to the right infrastructure. I got to ask you, your senior executive been a huge EMC executive running a big part of the business, which means P&L, gun to the head, make the numbers, to now a creative role, you know, and I quote the old Steve Jobs when he had one of the most creative periods, when he had a lot of stuff he can get his hands on, get a little roll up his sleeves. You're kind of in this new role, but you're bringing that history of EMC in. What's your mindset? I mean, as someone who used to study karate, obviously the dojo kind of concept's happening. What's your mindset? How are you approaching this new challenge from a Brian Gallagher executive and personal standpoint? Because it is a role your sleeves up. It's get down and dirty. It's how to have some fun, new transformation. You're in the future build out of EMC. It's like you are part of the future creation. What's your mindset? How are you attacking this new job and how are you recruiting people? How are you getting people motivated? So I'm a big fan of the trilogy, The Matrix. We got VMAX named for a reason, right? Virtual Matrix, so my answer to that is in October I took the red pill, right? So if you remember Morpheus saying, you know, you can take the red or blue, blue, you just go back to life as you know it, red will see how deep the rabbit hole goes. So in October I took the red pill and it was a, not that I wasn't familiar with it but became much more intimate with what's happening in the space. The innovation, the ability to accelerate innovation is huge and I think this whole notion of DevOps, right? On platform as a service built on infrastructure as a service is compelling because you don't have to write everything over and over and over again. You can deploy microservices and you can publish without having to worry about hey, is this only going to work on this cloud? I've got cross cloud portability of my applications and content. So after the initial reaction I tried to stick my finger down my throat and throw the red pill up. But I, you know, haven't jumped in with two feet. The other thing is, you know, back to the movie, The Matrix is, you know, you got to free your mind. And if you remember the jump scene, you know, when they jumped the buildings and the first time you will fail. You might hit the bottom, you know, but you'll bounce back up. But I think, you know, taking those lessons and then applying it to the new world has been very helpful. I mean, you got a creative canvas now. I mean, you got some, I don't want to say latitude but I mean, it's a mandate but certainly this platform three is still not fully defined. We heard that at EMC world and you can see here at OpenStack, it's maturing, it's not a mature market. So, I mean, you got to get kind of intoxicated a little bit on the fact that, you know, there's some unknown challenge, the opportunity. Right. Cool. And who's your team? Explain some of the things going on with the team that you have working with you? Yep. And what's going on in the organization? So we're building a great team. We've got Edith Levine from our CTO office. She's been doing a great job, you know, kind of knocking through some of the projects and then lining up things that we're going to be doing next. Brian Roach just joined us. He's going to be running the engineering focus in the Dojo in Cambridge. Guy came on board, great asset. He's working with the pivotal folks in San Francisco. Luke, I can barely pronounce or spell, I can spell his last name but he's a great guy working over at, on Howard Street with the pivotal team. We've got new members coming on board over the next three to four weeks. A lot of kids right out of school that have no preconceived notion of how stuff should be done and coming in with great questions, great ideas, great suggestions. So it's a mix of internal folks, external hires, college students, you know, getting a really good list. And I'll say, we run them through an interview process from the Cloud Foundry team and a lot of the folks that have come through have scored very high off the charts in their interview process. So we're getting, you know, building a really capable team in this space. Yeah, Brian, so, you know, wondering if you could share how your team is interacting with kind of the rest of EMC because I know Tucci, you know, heard feedback loud and clear from the customers, you know, open source is a big piece of what you guys need to be doing. There's people inside EMC. I mean, you yourself are going through some changes here. How much is it your team leading the way? How much will it be kind of antibody sweeping through and adjusting the current workforce and how much is going to shift? Yeah, so I think you'll hear more probably later this summer, you know, beginning of the fall, you know, we're working together, you know, with our partners across the functions at EMC and identifying, you know, key projects. There's a lot of what you heard a lot of it at EMC world. You know, what are the things that are going to be contributed? Stay tuned. There's going to be more, you know, what we announced with Copperhead was just a start. You'll see more and more of that. And then the model is really about value, right? In terms of where does, you know, there's a lot of things that we're contributing that has a lot of value into open source, but there's other areas that, you know, have even greater value, you know, that will be, you know, kind of core part of our portfolio moving forward. So I would say, you know, roughly late summer beginning a fall timeframe and, you know, we're already making contributions both in the OpenStack community and in the Cloud Foundry community. So those are ongoing. Our first project that we did with the team was helped to provide UAA, you know, authentication to Bosch. And so that works on going down. Team's been doing a really good job. And you get the bi-coastal situation. This is nice, right? That's going to be key. It's kind of like the wiki-bond silicon angle teams. Yeah, yeah. And we'll be able to also do paired programming between the coasts as well. Great, any events planned? I mean, or is there... We're going to have a series of meetups in Cambridge. So we'll be kind of getting those out in the social world, you know, focused on specific topic areas that are near and dear to our hearts. And then we're talking about other related events, you know, things like hackathons and other that we might want to sponsor. Oh, the dojo will be creating that, enabling that mindset. You know, the hackathons will come out of that when people start getting going on the coding. Yep. All right, well, anything else you'd like to share with the crowd here? We're big fans of what you're working on, great role, super excited for you. Obviously, there's so much work going on, build out is happening, sessions are packed, and people literally sitting on the floors getting into some of these sessions. So it's been, it's an engineering build out mode right now, so anything you'd like to share? Yeah, last closing comments, the level of excitement is huge, right? So last week at the Cloud Foundry Summit, this week at the OpenStack Summit, and energy levels are high, the excitement level is high. I always show the face of excitement. That's me, but I am super excited about what's going on here, and also in the other open source communities. You got a great opportunity, green field in front of you in a way, so a lot of good stuff happening at EMC as well in the Federation. So you got a lot of stuff to play with, the toy box is full of goodies, and there's some new stuff coming out, certainly Agile and Cloud, certainly Dynamic. This is theCUBE, we'll be right back to Brian Gallagher, the president of the EMC Cloud Management Division. This is theCUBE, we'll be right back. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman, right after this short break.