 Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE, covering OpenStack Summit 2016, brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation and headline sponsors Red Hat and Cisco. Now here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and Brian Graceley. 2016 in Austin, Texas, happy to have back on the program Margaret Dawson, who is now the Senior Director of Global Product Marketing of Platforms and Solutions with Red Hat. Margaret, last time we had you on was before you would join Red Hat. It's about 10 months you're here. So first of all, welcome back and tell us what brought you to Red Hat? What are you working on to support your team? So I think you know I've talked about cloud computing now for what, I don't know. It makes us sound old, because you've been doing it at the same time. So it's been six years, seven years and I've been involved with OpenStack for probably five of those. And when I thought about who is really getting this open source movement, who really gets OpenStack, who could actually deliver it at scale and I looked across kind of the ecosystem and started talking to Red Hat and it just seemed like the perfect match. Not only because what they're doing at the cloud level but really the entire stack. I think a lot of people think of Red Hat as Linux. But when you look at what we've built out over the last four or five years, we actually have a complete portfolio now all the way up through a unified management platform, middleware with JBoss. And culturally it's a great fit. It's all about doing the best you can and really making a difference in changing the world and that's why we're here. So it's pretty well documented how much contribution Red Hat has made, not only OpenStack but Kubernetes, everything going on in the open source space. Red Hat's always towards the top of the pile there. We've talked a lot about the NFV solution here at the conference. Why don't you fill us in some of the other activities going on, announcements, we talked about some of the training in the innovation lab but help us fill out the rest of what Red Hat did this week. Yeah, so it's been a crazy, busy week. You know what we're really focused on is showing how OpenStack has proven now in the enterprise. I would put telco with that in the whole NFV movement but I think where it's important is that there's a lot of questions still on the market is, can OpenStack scale? Is it proven? Is it in production? And the answer is yes and I think we're proving that with our announcements this week. You looked at NASA Jet Propulsion Labs. We looked at University of Cambridge. There's been a lot of announcements from key customers and that builds on the hundreds, and I mean hundreds, of production deployments that we already have in Private Cloud using OpenStack, as well as other solutions around that obviously. And that's what it's all about is customers are looking us to drive critical workloads and are looking beyond just the infrastructure level and really how OpenStack fits into that broader, very heterogeneous agility movement to try to move faster and to be more relevant in the market. Yeah, you just mentioned Private Clouds. Yeah. For a while there was this sort of misnomer Private Clouds sort of virtualization. Like, give us a sense what's driving, you know. You just hit one of my biggest big mix in the world. It's like virtualization. We sort of call it true Private Cloud. We got some people got upset at us because it was like, it was not just virtualization. It's got to be self-service. It's got to be automated driven. What's driving OpenStack to be more the right fit for that than what had happened before? Yeah, and I think to do that you've got to look at why they were looking at virtualization first. It's understandable, right? They have it, well, I actually don't know if I would agree with that. I think they were looking at it because it was heavily deployed already. People knew it, they trusted it. If you look at just VMware's footprint, it's heavy, but what was happening is they needed to not just scale up, they needed to scale out, and they needed to have a lot more flexibility in new workloads, not just their legacy stuff. And so what OpenStack is providing is that agility and that really, highly massively scalable infrastructure that works well with the PAS layer, that works well across the management layer, integrates well with software defined storage and a lot of the networking plugins that we're looking at. And so it became a very cost effective or economical. I won't say cheaper because I wish everyone would stop associating cheap with cloud because I think that we're all over that that's not the main benefit. But we had to move beyond just virtualization to get that scalability, economics, and really agility that we need to do as we're really looking at these new cloud native and mobile workloads. Yeah, one of the things that was highlighted throughout a bunch of the keynotes was OpenStack needs to be collaborative. There's an understanding that, containers play a role in this and a lot of other things play a role. Let's talk a little bit about sort of stack there, right? So that collaboration thing kind of implies, hey, OpenStack has a place, but other things have a place. But we've also heard over and over, hey, deploying clouds is hard, operationally it's hard. Regardless of what technology used, how important are you guys finding Red Hat's approach to sort of building a stack, right? PAS integration, SDS integration, OpenStack integration. What do you hear from customers in terms of that shortening the operation cycle and so forth? I think there's two ways to look at that. One is that OpenStack fundamentally, you need to have a stable, reliable, supported distribution, let's put it. One of the reasons that we integrated that with Red Hat Enterprise Linux is because that is the most stable OS. It's the most deployed Enterprise Linux in the enterprise ecosystem. And our customers are looking at us to have that same level of stability and support and validity and quality and security, by the way, is vital, which is why those two go hand in hand. So I would kind of take those separate from the entire stack. But the important thing to remember is that everything that we do and that I think true OpenStack open clouds are doing is those open APIs are the same. So you start looking at how OpenStack interacts with other solutions. As long as they're staying true to those open APIs and not corrupting those, staying close to trunk, you're going to have that rich ecosystem of interoperability. So what paths you plug into, what management you plug into, and how you work within the existing heterogeneous environment. To me, that's just the bar. So I want to be really clear that while there are things that we do that say, sure, if you want to use Red Hat for that entire stack, we've obviously optimized for that and those work great together. We also work very, very well with everyone else. That's open source. And we stay true to those open APIs. The APIs that we give to you as a partner are exactly the same ones our own product people have to use for integration among our stack. So it's not a, you can't say that this stack is closed or whatever, when it's all open source, it's all the same interfaces. And it's about the customer choosing what works for them and then us providing the stability and the security and that guarantee that we are known for in the enterprise. Well, there was a great, we were, you know, Stu and I, we were all talking before about how all the events are coming along. And there was a great quote last year we were at DockerCon. And I think it was Scott Johnson, one of the Docker product managers saying, Hey, look, we're really excited. We're going to extend out our support for whatever release it was six months. You know, we're going to go six months. I think a week later, we were at OpenStack Summit, our Red Hat Summit. And you guys were saying, look, we support things for 10 years. And you have to put some of that in perspective when you talk about the enterprise because, you know, traditionally, there are a couple of releases behind whatever is GA. Their cycles of upgrading are a year, you know, like you've got to figure out how to manage that thing between agile development and real life. And this is the difference between DIY or working with some of the more raw open source distributions and working with an enterprise-grade open source product, right? I mean, the whole reason that we built this business model and why we're a $2 billion company is because enterprises know that they get the agility and that kind of innovation from open source, but they do it in a way that is safe because they cannot compromise that. I mean, every piece of research that I've seen in every conversation I have with every customer or prospect is security is still number one. And if anything, it's become even more important. And you guys know, I mean, the cybersecurity just environment has become more dangerous than ever before. So we can say, oh, you know, getting stuff straight from the community is great. And yeah, if you have a team that can handle that, but just the life cycle management, just the security updates alone makes out a huge challenge. And you can't put that at risk. Yeah, so Margaret, you know, you bring up security is a great point to poke at because, you know, in kind of our talks with customers, surveys we've done over the last few years, people that like haven't done cloud, security's like the number one issue. People that have dipped their toe in and started to play with it, it was like, oh wait, the security's probably better than what I had before. Governance and appliance are really important, but not security. What else are you seeing out there? What are the things that customers kind of have that hesitancy or that inertia that are stopping them from moving forward that once they jump in or talk to their peers, that they're ready to be a little bit more open to it? And I think there's two things that I would say to that. One is the conversation I'm always having with customers is network security is cloud security. Like you're not fundamentally changing your policies and your processes when you start to go to cloud, whether it's private, public, hybrid, whatever it is. It's like you have to make sure that your fundamental access controls and policies and compliance regulations, everything that you're doing today in your data center and your network continues. So the question is not what new security things do you need to do, but how do you extend that to the cloud or to your mobile? So you've kind of got that foundation. The other thing is that as you know, everyone is just overwhelmed with data. My favorite thing to ask to a group of CIOs is, who knows where all their data is? And literally, if someone raises their hands, everyone mocks them for a good five minutes, because they don't. And so you kind of put those two things together. So how do they move to the future? How do they kind of become more relevant to the business and provide that cloud native, accelerate the service delivery, the self-service, better customer experience? By the way, doing it well, you have to cut costs and improve operational efficiencies, that doesn't go away. And cloud is how they do that, but it's helping them understand how to extend those policies, extend those access controls, whether it's to the public cloud or the private. And I think that's where private starts to really come in, right? Because they know they've got the economics and the agility with public cloud, but can they keep their architectures and their policies and kind of that overall process control within a public cloud? And so they're looking for some workloads to do that, but really critical workloads, they're going to keep close to their chest. I was talking with some financial analysts a couple of weeks ago and was telling them, hey, we're going to be at OpenStack Summit. And they said, why are you going there? The game's over, the public clouds are winning. And I think part of that comes from, they've starting to become a little more transparent. Here's how much money we're actually making and so forth. And there's a certain belief when you see numbers versus maybe you don't see numbers that, hey, maybe this is winning. How do you guys look at trying to educate the market about, like you said, hundreds of customers, how do you educate them on what the momentum looks like, the types of use cases, so that there isn't this sort of skewed view that, hey, everything's going to the public cloud? I mean, first you look at data, right? The number I always like to use is if you look at enterprise utilization of public cloud, about 6% of enterprise workloads today are in the public cloud. That means there's a whole lot of workloads, both existing and new, that are not yet even cloud. On top of that, you talk to companies, there's somewhere around 25%, still don't even have a clear cloud strategy. So absolutely, you've got developers using public cloud, you've got a lot of startups using public cloud, but if you look at enterprise critical workloads, it's still a very small number. And some of that's because they haven't gone to cloud at all at any kind of momentum. And so, I think there is still huge upside. I mean, the numbers I look at is that the open stack market alone is a 2.5 billion, $3 billion market in the next couple of years, right? And if you think about the growth pattern of that, when it's still very early, I mean, really it's only been two years where open stack has really taken off from a pure production standpoint. And I think this year has really shown that inflection point of going into scalable production using critical workloads. So, it's still early days. A lot of enterprises are still trying to figure this out. I think we still have a lot of ad hoc cloud, but people don't quite have it looking at from a comprehensive kind of unified management, unified policy, and that's where we're moving. And I mean, every company I talk to, they're like, we just need help. Like, we haven't figured this out yet, but I know I've got to get control because I don't want to be the next one that's in the headlines. Yeah, absolutely. So, you've had some, Red Hat has some really good customers, you said you've got hundreds of customers running open stack in production. Great interview I did last year with FICO, talking about how they're using containers and everything there. We've got an Irish gambling company coming on a little bit later that you guys brought us. You have any other customer stories you can share, give some concrete examples? Yeah, we've had so many. I mean, I think the cool one is, the ones we announced this week, the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab and how they're using this part of their exploratory work on Mars. So really, I mean, taking open stack to space, that's kind of fun. But I think the key that you stepped on, which is it's not just open stack as infrastructure, and I think that's what's important is that a lot of us forget that it's not talking about the infrastructure, that's the enabler. But we love talking from technology up. But really what we need to focus on and where I think there's a lot of excitement is, why are they using this to enable a certain application or a certain workload or whatever it is that they're trying to solve. And increasingly, it's becoming critical workloads like this. I mean, actually doing something in space and what you're doing from exploratory, it's doing customer-facing applications. And so when I think about the hundreds of customers that we have using open stack today, it's literally across the board. And they're not just using open stack in a vacuum. They're using it with a application development platform. They're getting their developers involved. But it's still an abstraction layer, right? At the end of the day, it's infrastructure. And so we need to be careful not to start there and move up. It's really what problem are they trying to solve? And then is this the infrastructure that provides that elasticity or the security or whatever it is that they need to deliver that application to either their customers, their employees, or their developers? It's interesting to put it in perspective. We've done a lot of perspective this week because we're back in Austin. You know, you think about, you couldn't go to an open stack presentation without having a rack space in NASA. That's where it started. And you think about it now when you're talking to rack space, they deliver rack space cloud powered by Red Hat. We've got NASA powered by Red Hat. Thank you for pointing out that there's two founders of OpenStack right now. It does speak to this idea that as OpenStack becomes more enterprise enabled, it's going to sort of move towards the companies that are going to drive that enterprise way of adopting things. I think that's right. Any upstream community has a healthy combination of that, right? You need the kind of scrappy startup, individual contributors, companies that are really at the edge of trying to push the boundaries of that. And then you need the people that are going to move that into the enterprise and make it credible and make it part of that ecosystem. And so I think everything is needed. I mean, the one thing that I push back on a lot when someone says, oh, you know, so-and-so just one this customer or whatever, it's like, good. Like this is not about a one pony horse race, right? I mean, you can't have one company that is pushing a technology, especially from an open source perspective, to make it enterprise worthy. We all need to be working towards that. And we're all going to find our own competitive niche. I'm confident in ours, but everyone's going to find the way that they're going to help this community and this technology grow and be more valid in the enterprise and for telcos and for other service providers. So one of the things we've been asking people that have been part since early days is, you know, is this where you thought OpenStack would be? Or are you impressed? Or are you, you know, a little disappointed? And, you know, one else I'll give you the last word for the interview is, you know, what key takeaways do you have from this week? Okay. I think, I mean, OpenStack is the fastest growing open source project ever. So I think we've got to keep that in mind. So there's two perspectives. One is, you know, is it still early days in cloud? For those of us that have been involved for a long time, it feels slow, but if you put it in the perspective of most CIOs or IT guys, it's still very early. And we are growing like crazy. If you were a company and you went from 75 to 7,500 in two years or three years, whatever it's been, you'd be pretty happy. So I think that it's amazing. Like when you walk around here and you go to the keynotes, you're just like, holy cow, like when did this happen? Cause every time there's like a thousand more people at these OpenStack summits. So the energy here is what gets me excited. And that's why I've loved being part of it. I love being part of Red Hat for that reason. Cause I think that energy translates into what we're doing and the customers we talk to. And there's still challenges. You know, let's, I mean, let's be honest. There's still things that are needed improving, but that's the power of the community as well. Cause we're going to tackle those problems and figure out how best to move forward. And some of us are going to focus on different things, which is the other good thing about this community. Right. For us, it may be, you know, day two management, someone else it may be, you know, install someone else, it may be a networking plugins, you know, and then together we figure out how to make that work for all of us. And in terms of takeaways, I would just go back to, it's proven, it's working, you know, public cloud has not won. I think OpenStack is going to be just a thriving private cloud and public cloud ecosystem. If you look what's happening from not only a managed service, a rack space is doing that, I think you're going to see a lot of things from other partners of ours, Cisco, Dell, Intel, you know, what HP is doing, you know, everyone is finding a way to make this work for their customers and partners, and that's what it's all about. Well, Margaret Dawson, really appreciate you bringing some of the energy from the show here on day three. And as a reminder actually, theCUBE will be coming to Red Hat Summit at the end of June, I believe it's the 12th year of Red Hat Summit, it's our third year doing the event, always love doing it, kind of some of the bookends of some of the open source activities that theCUBE is happy to bring to our community. So we'll be right back with lots more coverage here from the Austin Convention Center, you're watching theCUBE.