 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 the British Columbia in Vancouver for OpenStack Summit. Live three days of coverage. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE. This is our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angles. I'm John McCoast, Stu Miniman with the wikibon.com. He's the chief analyst of Cloud Infrastructure at our next-guessify shop, Parwala. SVP at Cisco for Cloud Services. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Great to see the Cisco presence here. Obviously everyone has Cisco. Everyone has a little bit of this and that in the enterprise and service provider market. Huge opportunity with Cloud. Okay, and you guys are ubiquitous in the install base out there. What are your customers telling you around Cloud and what are they looking for from Cisco and how does OpenStack fit in all this? It's a great question. I mean, for us, I'll just make a headline which we're betting quite heavily on OpenStack and the most important reason for that being open, right? Just as we bet on IP when I started back at Cisco in 92, right, because it was open, right? So we want to make sure that it's peripherates across the board and that it's not about the world of many ecosystems, but an open ecosystem and that's why OpenStack. So as it relates to Cisco's focus, clearly we have been in the Cloud business for a long time. We've been enabling Clouds both on-prem. We make data center equipment, right? We make networking equipment and we've been, of course, enabling service providers to build their Clouds. So, and if you think about the customer pain point and the problem statement today, it's the easiest way for me, the way I think about it is our customers are going to live in the world of many Clouds, right? It's not going to be about any one Cloud. It's not going to be a Google Cloud or an Amazon Cloud or an on-prem Cloud. It's going to be a world of many Clouds and different Clouds are going to serve up different application, different needs. So the question becomes for a customer, how do I navigate between what I have to do on-prem for specific reasons? It could be for compliance reasons, it could be for performance reasons, or if I have to run certain things from the Cloud because it makes sense, an Azure Cloud because I'm using Microsoft apps or AWS for other reasons, or Cisco Cloud for the other reasons. And then I may be also consuming SaaS, right? So how do I navigate between the world of these many Clouds? And so for us, the focus is around hybrid Cloud and it's really about enabling customers to be able to navigate workloads from on-prem to in the Cloud and to be able to consume services from the Cloud in a very unified, simple manner. So OpenStack is the underlying kind of platform that goes between both Clouds, right? But again, we support every other Cloud through our technologies, right? And then on top of that, we want to provide a kind of a single pane of glass. Yeah, so Fias, first of all, you got to be careful, single pane of glass, my friends always say that it's called P-A-I-N. And management is one of those things that, we haven't spoken a ton about this week at the show, but it's really one of the pain points we hear from users. Even in virtualization environments, they say, really what I need is better management. Can you talk about Cisco's kind of evolution in this space? We've had a number of acquisitions over the years. I remember it was Newscale and Topspin and others. Metacloud was the big OpenStack one. We interviewed Tom Lynch last year at the program here. So you've been at Cisco for many years. What's the evolution from Cisco's standpoint and what's Cisco's role in helping the Cloud management platform? It's a great question. Look, again, if you look at Cisco's heritage, for us, firstly, it's always about customer choice. So even on-prem, while we are really pushing OpenStack significantly, we support other stacks as well. We just announced recently the Azure stack on-prem with Microsoft. We've been supporting VMware for a long time. It's a customer choice. But as customers deploy multiple stacks on-prem and they will continue to do so and also want to consume stuff from the Cloud, the question becomes, do I have six panes of glass or can I at least have a catalog, one catalog, or Eastwood, through which I can serve all these things up, right? And for us, that's a big focus and the evolution of some of the acquisitions you mentioned is now a product called Prime Services Catalog, which sits above that layer of the various orchestrations and provides, I would call it more of a catalog that customers can put, at the end of the day, it's really about services. What services can you consume as an end user on-prem, whether they happen to be running on-prem or in the Cloud or they are a SaaS? So that's how we're looking at the problem. Yeah, I absolutely love the catalog. Of course, there's big announcement here at OpenStack about how does it make it easier for community apps to be consumed on there. One of the things Cisco's been highlighting this week is the partnership with Red Hat. So you talked about a couple of the partners and choice that you're doing. What's special about the Cisco-Red Hat partnership? Look, I mean, and I'm working very closely with Paul, who's my peer on the Red Hat side. And it's very, very important. If you think about the journey map of Red Hat, I mean, the journey map started with OpenStack with customers, right? Everybody's looking at OpenStack for various reasons. It makes sense, right? But it's really about accelerating the journey because OpenStack is not a distro that you can go buy and deploy out of a CD, right? It's a set of tools and then you still have to come up with the right deployment architecture. So for us, if you think about who the leaders in the space are, clearly, we are an infrastructure, right? Red Hat is in Linux, OpenStack. How do we work together to accelerate customers from having a robust stack that they can deploy very rapidly and quickly, right? And then we have the right services to stand behind it from a kind of an industrial strength perspective, right? So that they don't have to worry about open source tinkering, but they can be running production workloads, right? And you have Cisco and Red Hat standing behind it. And the support behind it. There's a lot of SLA requirements and on the Red Hat, you guys have great experience there. Absolutely, and they have a great presence already in the enterprise. We have great presence in the enterprise. You know, there was a power of the two. So Fred, I got to ask you the question that's coming up on theCUBE here and through the sessions, as we're seeing packed sessions, people sitting on the floors, a lot of engineers here across the board and there's a lot of new in migration, new people coming in, they're builders and they're engineers. They're software engineers, also, you know, network engineers, ops engineers, all kind of coming together. So there's a real emphasis on architecture. The conversations here this year is not about will OpenStack be successful, it's how it will be successful. So there's a lot of architectural discussion. So what's your vision? How do you see all this coming together? You're obviously having industrial grade, OpenStack, tooling and capabilities and services. What's the vision? Because it's a systems architecture or services architecture model. How do you guys look at that and how do you talk to your customers around the architects outfit? Because that's where the action is right now. The architects are digging in. Excellent, and I think, you know, I'll talk at the macro level as opposed to the specifics and the technology, but as I look at the problem statement across the board and, you know, MetaCloud has been a good acquisition for us and the reason we acquired MetaCloud was specifically around making, again, making OpenStack easy for customers to consume. So their model is, it's sort of a SaaS model for OpenStack, so it's OpenStack as a service, right? So now think about customer segments. When you think about commercial, enterprise, service provider, they have different needs, different deployment models and different scale required for OpenStack, right? So service provider customers will need neutron, other things, you know, enterprise or commercial customers will not need that kind of technologies that underline technology. They just want something to work and, you know, get it up and running in the ease. So how do we really take OpenStack from where it's at where it's a bunch of great technologies and then, you know, it's like tools in the toolkit that you have to draw from and then you build architectures on the fly, right? To coming up with a specific set of architectures around customer segments and use cases that you can bring to better scale, right? So I think that's how we're looking at the problem, that's how we're working with Red Hat and of course we're driving, you know, our architecture that's Lou and the rest of the team. Really think from that perspective, so we can bring these to, you know. So you see reference architectures as being a big part of the next year of rollouts where you guys can bring your expertise and saying, I'm not sure we've heard a lot of a policy base, that's a Cisco kind of, you know, bumper sticker, all internally in the company, everything's policy based. You got automation orchestration now with Kubernetes and containers and whatnot. So you have this policy based infrastructure that needs to be programmable, aka DevOps. So this is a big thing. So what reference architectures do you see emerging and where do you see the hotspots? Where do you see the work being done? Where's the action? So, you know, I mean, there's action, I think across the stack or open stack. I think I'll tell you what we're focused on is really around, you talked about, we're a network company, right? So we're clearly focused around the networking area. So we're putting a lot of focus in Lou, as you talked about in his team, and my team's working on it, around driving neutron, NFV, you know, policy and orchestration, security. The things that matter when you think about a hybrid cloud world, when you take a workload and move it from on-prem to power cloud. How do you securely move that, right? And how do you do it with policy? Which is, you know, we've talked, we've launched something called ACI or application centric infrastructure, right? So you can translate policies across multiple clouds. So for us, it's really about around that whole network-enabled policy that we can bring through open stack, right? And through APIs and maybe even through dashboards, but, you know, for developers, they care about APIs. So a big focus for us there. Great, and any examples of some customers you can highlight that you guys worked with here to enable that kind of awesome opportunity? Oh, yeah, I mean, you know, look, we've got lots of customers here. I'm just putting a spot on which one's the referenceable or not. But clearly we've announced, on the social side, I mean Telstra was a big inter-cloud launch, so I can speak to that and there's many more behind it. But it is traction, there's a long list. Tremendous amount of traction. And then if you think about all the stuff with Metaclub, I mean that has been just amazing acquisition policy. We look at the loaded list of customers from, you know, Tableau, software to Disney, and the list goes on and on, but it's quite important. So I've got to ask you kind of the social media question, not so much social media, but the conversation. There are people who want to join the conversation, so obviously we're putting out as much content as we can to increase the conversation velocity, but what conversations are you involved in with customers and internally at Cisco or within the industry? What are the top three high-level conversations that you're having? What are those top conversations? Share some metadata. Yeah, so you know, if you're, so again, I'll speak into the segments, right? So if you're an enterprise customer, they clearly want to go to its open, open stack and the conversation there is make it easy, make it simple, make it hybrid cloud ready, and secure, right? Secure, because compliance is a big issue in the cloud, you've got to be secure. So Cisco, Red Hat, hopefully you guys can make that simple. You're talking service providers, it's really about differentiation in the cloud, right? Some of those things on the other side have to come true for service providers because they're providing services to the enterprise, but how do you do this at scale, mid-security in a multi-dimensional cloud, with policy, NFV, and those things come into play, right? So that's a big focus for us. So I think those are the two or three, and then the third piece really is around, which you asked me the question, you called it a pain point or PA&E pain point, but how do you manage and orchestrate all this simplicity? How do you do metering and billing across all these multiple hybrid clouds, right? And so there's been a lot of early work that's been done by many startups in this space, and I think we're putting a lot of focus to how to drive that at scale, and I think that's a big question. So those are the three things I would talk about. Talk about certification, big theme here this year, obviously the federated identity among others, but the certification seems to be laid to the party in open stack and the folks are saying, foundation, yeah, we should have gotten on that earlier. So you guys have certification, Cisco's been doing it for years, it's been a great business model, and also an abler for people to have the skill sets. As open stack kind of moves as architectural, reference architectural push, what is your vision on certification? Where should people be focused on right now? Also given all this build out going on, and what's your take on certification in general around open stack? Yes, sir. So it opens that reminds me when I was started, Cisco back in 92 and we were doing IP, right? When we, we were just growing like crazy, and the cases were just coming in and we couldn't keep up with the growth that we were having. And we said, how do we make customers smarter so they can do more self-help, right? Was this, and that's when we came up with the whole certification program around CCI. So, you know, it's, it was really- It's been great for Cisco, you guys really enabled huge explosion. Absolutely, and it's been fantastic. You know, we've got now overall two million certified people, not CCI, but all the other certifications we have out there. So similarly, when you think about now, fast forward, you know, we're here with open stack and you see the kind of traction that the community is getting, right? I heard it was 1,000 to 1,500 people last year and the 6,000 people this year, so it's exponential, right? And I suspect next year will be, who knows, 15,000 people. So for us, we are looking at putting certifications together around open stack, so it will be, you know, from training to the levels of certification from, you know, basic to intermediate to high level. And we have a, I mean, our learning organization is actually looking at that. So for us, we want to proliferate this in a big way, drive certifications, you know, incentivize people to take on open stack. I think there's a huge amount of interest. I mean, even in our company, people want to learn open stack, they want to get ahead of it. You see the presence that we have here, this year has been massive because across the board, everybody wants to get on open stack. So certification is a great way of enabling that. And your partners, we've already had, they also have a similar experience as well with Linux. And this is where your customers want that different conversation. And so she or more about that. I'm a customer, I walk in, I want some open stack, just back the truck up and just drop it off, or how does it work? I mean, take us through the customer conversation because they want open stack at high quality with security, multiple clouds. What's that? What do they want? What's the language of the customer? They want metacloud. That's why we acquired metacloud. I mean, it's really about, look, I mean, it's metacloud. It's the Cisco, Red Hat relationship. It's really about the two things that are happening. Clearly, the skill set in open stack is still very hard to find, and hard to find at scale. And so customers clearly want to build it, are looking for it, but it's not easy to attract. So in the meantime, how do you make it easy for them to at least deploy open stack? So we can do that as a service model. So we just, it's really about, we bring the truck in, we'll deploy it, we'll manage it, update it, upgrade it. You don't have to worry about it. You just drop your application and go there. And as they do that, they're going to start building more and more expertise and experience right on the platform. And then we'll have certification programs and things that we bring to bear. So my hope is that in the next year or two, you're going to start seeing this community get very prolific. So Fias, I wonder if you can give us a little bit of your personal insight. You've been at Cisco since 92. John Chambers is stepping down as CEO after 20 years. We've talked about open a bunch on this event. I've been a networking my entire career. And for years it was, look, Cisco was so heavily involved in standards. Cisco would help get it work and then bring it to the standards body and work it through. Open's very different. It happens faster. There's many more people involved. How does that shift of kind of management and a new more open, collaborative partnership world? How does that filter into life at Cisco? I mean, look, I'll use analogy to say this because for me, why this has been so exciting and it's exciting early in the journey is exactly like when we started back in 92. When I started at Cisco, we were a small company. We came up with this multi-protocol router and it allowed us to connect various protocols from Decnet to Apple Talk to SNA to XNS. I remember I have this T-shirt. I still have it. No token ring? Token ring. Okay, that's token rings. And I have that T-shirt which says, others talk about it and we do it all in the back and we had like 25 protocols listed, right? But the focus was really around, of course bridging that divide so that everybody could communicate between each other seamlessly. But then getting them all to an open standards, which is IP. And eventually we got everybody there and then if you remember in the 90s, this company called Netscape came along with a browser. So the internet started brewing with IP and everybody could connect and send emails and then we had Netscape come along and that became the window to the internet and then the whole e-commerce economy sprouted. And it completely opened up the TAM and everything, the world changed as we knew it. So now fast forward and apply that today to what we're doing with Open and why we focus so much on OpenStack. We live in this world of many clouds. If you go to AWS, it's one protocol, you go to Azure, it's one protocol, you go to Google, it's one protocol. How do we proliferate the world of Open, OpenStack being that, so that everybody can play in this new world. And we can connect the world of many clouds because today we've created, there are many, many clouds out there but they're all connected into hybrid cloud fashion, right? So how do you connect this world of many clouds? And why is that important to customers? Because if you're able to do that, then you unlock a tremendous amount of value and TAM that is locked up in all these silos, right? Through an Open ecosystem. Suddenly the TAM becomes huge and you got more partners who can play, can bring more value to cloud in terms of services that matter on top. Hopefully more startups with more technologies. So I think for us it's really about unlocking that TAM. So my hope is that this doesn't become a world of three clouds like we had three or four companies at a time in the 90s but it's a world of many, many clouds that are ubiquitous and are connected by an Open ecosystem which is hopefully OpenStack. I think Open, the Open model is actually kind of the benchmark against the gland grabbing of those three clouds and then people want to have to kind of at least custom, I'll say purpose built clouds, whatever you want to call it, there's going to be solutions, workloads, they'll drive and the bursting, we hear about bursting and cross clouds. It's been great. So I got to, I want to ask you again, a personal question off Stu's question on Cisco is that, you know, TCPIP was a huge enabler and you mentioned all the different protocols like DECNAT back in the day, SNA, DECNAT, what goes on and on. I just remembered just a minute. We're old enough, we're old dogs. Twitter lighting up at the Token Ring mansion. Token Ring, you know, two megabits, what a state of the art. But if you look at what that inflection point did, that client server, you know, the whole OSI model stack back in the day when I was a computer science student growing up and really TCPIP really was the linchpin that really enabled massive wealth creation and innovation three comps as Cisco goes on and on. You guys were a big part of that. What do you see today as that disruptive enabler? TCPIP, what that was for networking and interoperability and which spawn certification, OSI, Cisco's massive rise to dominance and value creation. What is it today? What can you point to out there, folks that are new to the industry? What's the disruptive enabler? What's the equivalent TCPIP? Or is there an analog to that? Because we are in a really great inflection point right now. I mean, there's a lot of things coming together. What's your vision on that? I mean, again, I think it's, you know, OpenStack is protocols underlying like TCPIP. So think about what was the problem that we were solving back in the 90s? It was really about connecting disparate lands or lands through a multi-protocol router, right? So it was really about creating a local area network or a wide area network. What are we doing today? We're connecting the world of many clouds and they're calling it a cloud area network, right? And how do we do that and do it in a seamless fashion with protocols? OpenStack, think about it. OpenStack is that open protocol that allows you to seamlessly move workloads. Clearly, a lot of this dream has to be realized and we're very early in this journey. And there's containers on top and other things that will allow us to move things seamlessly, right? But for us, it's really about unlocking that value and my hope is that as more and more people see that and they're going to see what is the value that we need to create in this stack, whether it's within OpenStack, whether it's under policy and security, which becomes a very, very important piece of the puzzle because you're going multi-cloud when you're crossing country lines, the data sovereignty is a big, big issue. How do you solve for these problems in a cloud environment, right? So there are very interesting problems to solve over there, some of which we're solving, of course, as a network company. And then as you move further up the stack, within OpenStack, as you move further up the stack into containers that we talked about and then into the management, or what is that cloud market that's going to look like? What is that Netscape for cloud? It hasn't come yet. It's coming. It's coming. But we need something, right? If you build this cloud-air network, how do you expose all these services? And we're taking a push at it by building our own marketplace to expose all these services, but, you know. You want to enable. You want to enable. You want to enable that next generation. The cloud is that enabling. Cloud is that enabling. And building that cloud-air network. And if you're successful, the time is massive. It's massive, right? Where we're playing. All right, thanks for coming on the queue. Really appreciate it. I'll give you the final word. You're bullish in OpenStack. What's your vision for OpenStack? How does this evolve over the next five years? Should the arrow forward? What's the next five years look like? So, you know, my hope is that OpenStack has got to go from being something that customers want to dabble in, that it's very interesting. We want to bring it in, check it out, right? And now I think we're making that, crossing that line because we're seeing more and more production workloads. You know, the next couple of years, it's really got to be more and more mainstream, both on-prem and also through cloud providers. And then in five years, we really have to see this vision of the cloud area network through an open ecosystem play out with the appropriate marketplace on top, where now, you know, like when Netscape came and opened up the e-commerce economy, we opened up this whole cloud economy with an open fashion and it's a massive, massive time. And then when we have this next conversation, it's about, you know, I don't know what those billions might... Get the protocol, enable some growth and then stuff magically happens on top, cloud area networks. I mean, inter-networking was a buzzword. Now inter-clouding might be the buzzword, right? So, inter-clouding with networks, apps, cloud, just theCUBE. Sharing the insights from Cisco. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate it. A lot of opportunities out there. We'll share more with you. We're at the short break. We'll be right back. Day three coverage of OpenStack Summit Live in Vancouver, British Columbia. I'm John Furrier. It was Do Minimum. We'll be right back.