 from the Computer History Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley. It's theCUBE, covering OpenStack Silicon Valley 2016. Brought to you by Morantis. Now, here are your hosts. John Furrier and Lisa Martin. Welcome back everyone. We are here live in Silicon Valley for the OpenStack SV, or OpenStack Silicon Valley, hashtag O-S-S-V-16. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE Media. This is theCUBE, our flagship program, where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm joined by co-host Lisa Martin, next two days, Walter Walcott, which our next guest is Lisa K. Woods, Director of Ecosystem Development for the Open Daylight Project. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much for having me. So the Linux Foundation's got all these different events. SDN, Open Daylight, really not a lot of hype. It's all down and dirty right now. Reality is there. The rubber's hitting the road. Absolutely. Some say it's boring. Boring in needs is good, right? I mean, this is kind of what? You know, it's not boring though. I mean, so I formally joined the Linux Foundation about a month ago. And I've been doing the rounds with the community with our members, with people on the user side, and just understanding what they're working on and what they're doing. And there's some neat stuff coming up. One of the things that I was most excited about, and I've been talking about this for several years, was, you know, SDN is a tool. It's not a goal, it's a tool. It's how you get to bigger, larger goals. And one of the calls, the early calls I had with one of our Silver members, who is a systems integrator, they said that exact same thing to me, and they said, you know, Open Daylight is at the core of one of our solutions. But that's not what we're selling people. What we're selling people is IoT solutions. We're working on smart city initiatives. We're working on, you know, things for energy companies, things like this. And, you know, that was just music to my ears. You know, I'm tongue-in-cheek when I say boring. In fact, when we first started doing the Cube in 2010, it was EMC World, at least you could appreciate this. I met Dave Vellante and I called storage, Snorage. That's what they used to call it. It was very boring, but it wasn't boring because boring was the beginning now where we're on a wave of massive storage innovation. But I want to bring that back because this kind of tongue-in-cheek, Open Daylight doesn't get the fanfare as a project, vis-a-vis other projects, because of, you know, the things that are always shifting in the market. But the early adopters have had success there. And I want you to take a minute to talk about what that means. Because, again, it is reality that some good things are happening. Real proof points for early adopters. Could you share, take a minute to share that aspect of what that means and what it is? Yeah, so there's been sort of fairly predictable wave of adoption. The first, the really earlier adopters tended to be telcos for a variety of reasons. And, you know, the real reason for people to go to the trouble of adopting SDN very early in its maturation cycle is if it's really, if the network is really critical to their business, for carriers it obviously is. And they are under tremendous competitive pressures in terms of, you know, web 2.0 companies coming in from one side, you know, new business models coming in from cloud providers and so forth. And so they really have needed to get, you know, agile quickly and SDN has been something that they have very readily embraced. The telco market in particular has really been very excited about open source. And they've been, AT&T has, you know, never loses an opportunity to tell people that they are going the open source route. They can do that because they have to have a lot of developers on staff. What's been really interesting, especially with the upcoming release for Open Daylight is that many of the projects within the upcoming release were actually proposed by user organizations, mostly telcos. They were working on, they were working with Open Daylight in tests, in some cases moving things into production and started to see new opportunities for features that they needed, tooling that they were interested in having, that they wanted to build not just necessarily with themselves. So catalysts and new opportunities. Catalysts to new opportunities. Some, in some cases they built up, you know, sort of within themselves and kept out for themselves because it was competitive advantage. Other things like, you know, you can find this on the Wiki, AT&T has proposed the Yang sort of developer kit and they're sharing it with the community so that everybody can, you know, sort of take their own Yang models and build from there. So there's this whole ecosystem that's starting to emerge based on all of that early work and early innovation within the user community. Speaking of user communities, Open Daylight, you've got a community with 27 different user groups, 2,500 members, 600 strong developer community. Talk to us a little bit more, extrapolate or expand on collaboration. That was one of the themes of the keynote this morning was one of the keys to being successful for users of Open Cloud is collaboration. Talk to us a little bit more about this sort of feedback loop that you just mentioned with AT&T going to be featured at your event at the end of September. Talk to us about how that feedback loop happens and how quickly that information is taken in in terms of agility to be utilized and shared to enable other, even non-tell codes to be successful. Yeah, so one of the things that Open Daylight did early on, which I thought was really important was they set up a user advisory group. And that was important because early on a lot of the users were sort of in weight and consume mode. They were waiting for the developers to actually put stuff together that they could use. They weren't necessarily getting directly involved in getting their hands dirty themselves, but they wanted to have input. And because it's an open source project, there was an obvious opportunity to do that. So we bring the advisory group together, we put them together with the project leads within the community. And it's just a very, very open session. All the sessions are open to the public. And so anybody can go and look at the minutes, look at the call. And so that feedback loop is not just within those particular group of individuals, it's not stuff that's happening behind closed doors, but it's out in the community, it's out in the open, it's out in public. And that can help spur further ideas in the broader world at large. Absolutely, kind of going along another theme of this morning's keynote, which was innovation. Can you talk to us about service providers and enterprises using OpenDailite to solve key network challenges that are related to automated service delivery, network resource optimization. What's some of the impact that OpenDailite is having in that community? So on the telco side again, it has been a lot about, speeding up service delivery, saving on WAN costs has been a big motivator for a lot of people. Interdata Center Connect, DCI. So tying together a lot of their operations in a logically, or practically decentralized, but logically centralized manner, so that they can manage their whole operation but in a much more flexible way. So I want to ask you about OpenCloud and OpenSTN, because this is where STN has kind of been a very geeky in the trenches kind of technology. So the success cases of NFV, we've seen telcos with the pressure not only for over the top business model but real scale on the innovation side have kind of come down to the plumbing, which is STN lives. But I want you to share with us your view of the value as you collect the proof points as you guys go to the next level with OpenDailite. What is the value of an OpenSTN vis-a-vis closed STN or is there a closed STN or can you just parse that out for us and help us understand that? Yeah, so I would look at it from a couple of different lenses. One is acquisition model and that's sort of the obverse of the different approaches to STN in the market. There is, shall we call it, hardware-defined STN that is locked, well, I mean, so there's STN that is packaged within sheet metal, and you have to buy a big switch in order to get the software capabilities. So that's one model. The other is purely software, but proprietary software, and it's been packaged with other whole software stack that goes along with that. That runs on certain hardware. The mirror mirror runs on certain hardware. You know, open source in general and OpenDailite in particular because it was intended to be a general platform, a general purpose platform, sort of cut, you know, what's the difference between those things? It's because it's purely software, it's something that is completely platform agnostic. OpenDailite was intended to be multi-vendor. It was intended to solve the interoperability problems with multi-vendor networks. And so it's, you know, there's value just at that level. But then on top of that, it's do I have to rebuild my entire network architecture because I need to go buy this new sheet metal? No, I don't. Do I need to buy this entire software stack and, you know, re-architect my entire management stack? No, I don't. I can buy piece parts. I can buy, you know, a solution from a particular provider that solves a particular need. It happens to have OpenDailite in the core, but I don't need to care about that. Or if I want to, if I really want to get into the nitty-gritty because I have a specific need or a specific feature that I want to have and I don't happen to have a vendor who's willing to do that for me, I can go do it for myself. We were talking about collaboration earlier, but also John and I were talking about use cases. We just had Walmart labs on. At the summit that's coming up, the ODL summit in just about six or so weeks at the end of September, are you going to have use cases, proof points that align to what you just talked about? You can do this, you can do that. It's not a this only, that only. Talk to us about some of the use cases that attendees can expect to hear and see at the summit coming up. Yeah so we have, I want to say six or so keynote speakers mostly from user organizations who are going to be sharing more of what they do. AT&T started with one project and they've now sort of moved on to multiple different projects. One of the things that I think was actually really interesting is they started with their sort of their own internal plumbing and they have now moved towards using it as the basis of service offerings to their end user customers. So really driving, using it as a monetization engine as opposed to just something that is a purely operational type of thing. The other thing that as I say has been really exciting to me is to start seeing the channel ecosystem build out around open daylight. I have always said that SDN is a tremendous opportunity for the channel who are especially those who have been really squeezed with hardware margins and things like this because it's an entirely new revenue stream. Right, what is the value for the channel with SDN? It is, as I say, it's an entirely new revenue stream. It's with, when you're talking about open source software, the opportunity is taking piece parts and building either customized solutions or specific solutions around specific use cases for specific verticals. One of the little app developers I was working with really early on had focused on the K through 12 market and they realized that every school district is completely strapped for cash. They have almost no IT staff because that's not what they're in the business of doing and they had no way of managing the onsite network stuff from a central office and SDN was the obvious solution for that. And so they worked from an operational perspective but they also developed an app that put the power of the network in the hands of teachers. So teachers could drop connections for certain students who are engaged in online learning. They could monitor the online activities of various students and map that to outcomes. They could have a report that said, Johnny was goofing off and going to these sites when he was supposed to be doing these other things and so when Donnie's parents come in and say, why are you giving my child a C? He's an A student. There's the report. That apparently was really, really popular feature. But you know, I mean, truly the possibilities here are almost endless and we're really kind of just starting to scratch the surface. And I love that you're talking about SDN and a human connection. I think that's one of the most exciting things about technology from any sector. Yeah. So about the ecosystem as we wrap up here, what's you guys see happening? Give us a prediction or insight into what you guys see happening, what you expect to happen, what you hope to happen. Obviously there's reality, there's some real value. Hellcoast is seeing the value with NFE, I think China, Telecom and Comcast are big advocates of it, bridging that open stack NFE. IoT around the corner, I mean is there other things I can imagine? IoT definitely is coming up. I mentioned my SI friends who are, that's kind of what they're building their business around at this point. As I say, telcos were early adopters, but we're starting to see them more and more in larger enterprise, in transportation, in financials. K through 12 was, I mentioned that one particular app but before I joined the Linux Foundation, that was probably a third of the people I talked to about SDN was K through 12 school districts. Totally unexpected but there was a very clear and specific need there. So I think that we will start seeing more and more verticals join the fray and fortunately the ecosystem is already starting to build itself around. It's interesting too, when I've seen these shifts in my career, the cream rises to the top and it's not so much the hype, it's the reality of the value and we were talking in our intro before Walmart came on, jet.com wasn't even around three years ago, sold for three billion dollars but they had a unique value proposition that was different, that catapulted them down into a digital business model that was worth billions. So I always get asked like, where can I make money? As a developer it's always as it, it was the action. And so Open Daylight, actually one of the conversations I said was, in the plumbing of the SDN world there are unique tech opportunities to apply some of the game changing enablers down there that could create new opportunities. Do you guys see that happening too as well? And you mentioned these use cases are kind of seem orthogonal, education to finance, I mean, motel goes. Is that something that you guys see happening? Is that something that's being talked about in your community that there's real innovation opportunities? Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, as they say, what that looks like and what that means is different and different verticals, right? Yeah. I mean, it's obviously K through 12 school districts that are not in the business of making money but they have different metrics and requirements and results that they are required to provide. And so it's measured differently, it's not measured in money, but the opportunity for innovation is there even so. On the telco side it's much more about how do I deliver services quickly? How do I monetize those services quickly? The enterprise that's somewhere in between, it may or may not be central to the business but at a minimum it's about saving operational cost and improving service to the business. I mean, this is the benefit of open software. An entrepreneur could come in, get their hands dirty, work up something, magic happens, or enterprise could use it to shift their business model. I mean, this seems to be the common pattern that we're seeing on theCUBE. Yeah, and it will stress again for the channel, it's an amazing new opportunity. An amazing new opportunity that they have not had. And channeling the SIs and value-added resellers and so forth, and it's an opportunity they haven't had in years. Because they can customize. Because they can customize, they can build services around it, they can build, you know, custom solutions around it, consulting that goes along. Well, that's consistent with SAP, we saw SAP Sapphire, sorry to interrupt, but the SIs are all kind of fun in their own unique swim lanes. EY is doing their thing, Accenture, PWC, but they're not actually competing, they're picking a differentiation and building core IP around it. Yeah. And I think there's a breadth of use cases that you mentioned that can facilitate that collaboration. It's kind of like what Jonathan talked about this morning, it's the verses now becoming the and that we're seeing this trend, and I think that you've touched it a little bit. Lisa, thanks for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Give me the final word. For the folks watching who aren't here, what's it all about this year in Silicon Valley compared to the summit and other events here last year? What's the big story this year? Here in the Valley? Here at OpenStack SV. Oh, here at OpenStack SV. You know, OpenStack, I mean, open source is real and it's providing value and there are monetization opportunities all across the ecosystem for it. And it's healthy. It is healthy. It's very healthy. Okay, Lisa thanks for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it. I'm John Furrier, Lisa Martin here in Mountain View in Silicon Valley. You're watching theCUBE, you're right back after this short break.