 from 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. Welcome back to OpenStack Summit 2016 in Austin. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. We go out to all the big shows, help extract the signal from the noise. Day one of three here at the event. Sixth year of the show. Our fourth year doing the event. Happy to have on two guests from Red Hat who have been on our program before. We've got Tim Eaton who's the SVP of Infrastructure Business Group and Radesh Balakrishnan, who's the general manager of OpenStack. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. All right, so what we were saying, boy, coming back to Austin, it's come full circle from 75 people kind of sitting around the corner here, talking about what they're building in code to 7,500 people, very different feel. Maybe, Tim, give us a little bit of your thoughts as to, how Red Hat thinks of this and what's going on with OpenStack? Well, it's almost a metaphor for what's happened in the market over the last several years. You look at, it's origins of 75 people here, just kicking around, technology ideas, that rack space and NASA had started, to now being 7,500 people, lots and lots of customers in production telling their stories at scale. We've got now with the verizers of the world, the largest, and a V implementation based on OpenStack, many others, so it's gone from its infancy to full production scale, and so is the show. So it's a really interesting parallel. All right, so Redesh, you're the GM of a group that's got OpenStack. So a lot of people looked, is there business in OpenStack? How will people make money? There were a whole lot of startups that came in and said we're going to topple this company or do that, stop in AWS or stop paying to VMware. How do you guys look at this as a business? At two levels, first is clearly there is a demand from customers for a standard distribution that has got a stable set of APIs with a vibrant partner ecosystem. So that's what we did for Linux and we're doing the same thing for OpenStack as well. To me, the even more exciting aspect is that customers are now realizing OpenStack is an ingredient to the end destination that they want to get to, and we are blessed with having a broad portfolio from storage to cloud management to platform as a service offering that can layer on top and around OpenStack so the customers can get to the, if you are a Gartner believer, a Mode2 or if you're an IDC believer, third platform or a pragmatic customer, a far more agile end destination. So to me, you got to look at the success of OpenStack from both the levels, how it unlocks the possibilities from getting to an agile infrastructure as well as just OpenStack distro itself. And on both counts, we've been very, very excited about the journey that has taken us this far and we are very bullish, continue to be bullish about OpenStack. Yeah, I think it speaks a lot to the maturity. Of course, in the early days, it's kind of this distro versus that distro because we're building the maturity. So we kind of get needed to get to a certain level but to now, it's really impressive to hear the discussion of this part of the overall solution. It's not about that tool, it's about the suites, it's about the platforms, it's about how you pull everything together. And a new use case as well, 18 months ago, I don't believe anybody was talking about NFE and Telco but now look at us. We just announced Verizon is one of the largest deployment from an NFE perspective. There are carriers across the globe by default looking at OpenStack as the way to power their infrastructure when it comes to NFE, right? So any which way you look at it, customer adoption, partner momentum or community growth, it's been a phenomenal journey so far. Yeah, when this first got started, there was obviously with any new technology innovation, a lot of bravado, there's talk of, OpenStack is the Linux of the cloud. It's, you know, and it was interesting, Jonathan Bryce today in the keynote said, look, you know, OpenStack, while it's getting into multiple use cases, like you mentioned, really, it sort of has its place. It's a piece of this innovation, it's a piece of this disruption. What do you, what do your customers tell you they want OpenStack to be in that? How do they look at it? You know, we tend to look at it as it's got a certain place in a cloud stack, but how do you, what do your customers sort of tell you about OpenStack or what do they want it to be? Sure, so I think it starts with customers thinking about, you know, what applications they're trying to stand up, you know, net new and what infrastructure is required to enable that. So I think, you know, as we were talking about before, they're taking a much more holistic view in terms of, you know, I'm going to be hybrid. I think most of the analysts today will tell you that 90% of large IT organizations expect to be hybrid with on-prem infrastructure and public cloud infrastructure and all variants in between. OpenStack, of course, I think as Radesh was alluding to, you know, serves a couple of key roles in that. One, it is the, you know, private cloud infrastructure of choice for most large organizations, whether they're all the way to production or not. I mean, the statistics that we see here every six months, just bear that out that OpenStack is the bet for private cloud infrastructure. And as Radesh was saying, it's also the bet that the world's, you know, telco industry is moving toward as they go to software to find. So you've got half of the public cloud on this infrastructure as a scale out technology. Most of the private clouds and large enterprises being based on that. And then what they're looking to do is, okay, how do I turn that into a dynamic hybrid cloud environment? What do I have to add in terms of management? What I have to add in terms of higher level services, in our case, things like OpenShift. So the conversations we're having with customers now are much more holistically around OpenStack as an element to defining their next generation of hybrid cloud architecture. Yeah, one of the things, obviously, Red Hat's done, we talked about it earlier with Chris Wright, Red Hat's done, you know, not only, you know, one of the biggest contributors to OpenStack and a number of projects, but a number of acquisitions, everything from Ansible to SEF and a whole bunch in between. How much, beyond just the technology stack, how much does it help Red Hat to have always been an open source company? You know, we see a lot of other vendors who are trying to go, well, I'm going to adopt it, but they're struggling from a business model perspective. How much does that help you guys to go, I don't really have to think about any change, I'm just delivering technology and solutions. Well, I think it's, you know, you almost can't overstate its significance. So you think about just OpenStack and the evolution here in the last couple of years. You know, you know, Chris of course, you know, epitomizes community development, but there are some things that are tough for communities to do, right? They don't think about, you know, fit and finish around installation and day two management. It's not part of the innovation cycle. User experience, you know, upgradeability and those sorts of things. So, you know, most of the communities are centered around innovation. You know, being an open source company from the get go, we knew that there were going to be challenges in terms of how one would engender life cycle into a platform that's delivering new innovation every six months and never looking back, right? And it comes to, you know, there's certainly been bravado about who does the most commits and all that kind of stuff. And that's not ever been interesting to us. Our strategy is we want development expertise on every single OpenStack module, so we know how fixes that we make in productizing it are going to make it back upstream, how to backport features and bug fixes from, you know, L and M and beyond, back to those that we have in production three years prior. I think those are all things that come very naturally for us. And if you look at OpenStack as a community, there were some stumbles among those trying to productize OpenStack early on that I think we're all getting better at. But for us, we had 15 years of learning on how to do that. Yeah, so, Tim, I'm wondering if we could talk about a little bit more on the customers. We always come to these events and say, okay, how many of them are actually running into production? You know, how are they making their decisions? So, you know, there's general, generally people say, oh, well, you know, Red Hat, you know, has customers that are using Linux and they've got their support licenses. So natural progression to move over at OpenStack. How many customers is it just kind of that natural progression? How many are looking at OpenStack and end up in one of the various solutions that you guys offer? And, you know, maybe there are any insight you can talk as to kind of the mindset as to how customers, you know, are they coming to OpenStack or is that just part of the overall picture? Sure, I'll start. So in case I say something that gets us in trouble, you'll be able to talk to Redesh in six months. So, you know, I think one of the things that we've seen, you know, quite evident in the last six to 12 months of the business is acceleration and growth. And, you know, we're on a scale. We've, you know, said this publicly of several hundred production customers and in our case, unlike others, a production customer is one who's bought a subscription for production deployment. So, you know, we don't have, you know, our services capabilities around OpenStack are very focused to successful production deployment. So we don't handcraft, you know, snowflakes. So when we say we have, you know, two or two to three X more than any of the next largest reported provider, it's of real production configuration. So, and I think that the fact that we're seeing scale and we're seeing acceleration and growth are the things that make us incredibly optimistic about the business. Just to add to that, right? So we're kind of seeing three entry points. One is the classic Alas Expected. We've got RHEL, you know, either in the physical or physical as well as virtual. We want to get to private cloud and public cloud. So that's an obvious journey. Another intersect point is they are interested in hybrid cloud management and or, you know, storage, software defined storage solution or software defined networking with our partner solution. So that becomes a, you know, that's a fundamental retooling of the infrastructure itself. And a third and an emerging driver or a calling card that we've been getting is around containers, right? So clearly there's a lot of excitement around it and that's more from the application layer impacting decisions of the infrastructure layer as well. So those tend to be a mix of fair mix of existing customers as well as new customers. Hopefully that gave you the flavor you were looking for. So Radesh, I'm wondering if you can help us dig in one area, you talked about hybrid cloud. So one of the things, of course, for Red Hat is, you know, not only do you have your open stack solution, but you know, you guys are in Azure, you're in AWS, you know, so, you know, how do you guys position that, you know, you have customers that are spanning all of those environments, you know, we tend to find customers have a multi-cloud view of things and Red Hat plays into that nicely, so. Absolutely, I mean, for the past three, four years our value proposition to the customer has been open hybrid cloud, open because of who we are and hybrid cloud because we long recognize that taking either a private cloud camp or a public cloud camp is to kind of narrow minded view of the world, right? We all know that there are workload specific requirements, organizational specific requirements that will decide the choice in terms of whether you're going one way or other. What we've been focused on is actually making sure that our entire portfolio is geared towards enabling that hybrid experience. Let's take storage, for example, where you can run, you know, SAF on-prem or you can run it on a public cloud environment or you take cloud management as an area, cloud forms, which is our solution, which will help customers bridge, let's say, legacy investments in VMware implementation all the way up to, you know, newer public cloud implementation as well. So it's been a systematic focus on enabling at all levels of the layer the reality and of the power of hybrid cloud. That's been our focus, Tim, do you want to add to that? Yeah, so Stu, first of all it's a great question. I think it's something that we've seen evolve over the last year. I would say a year ago when I would talk to customers, they were just thinking about what this would look like as you expanded it out to the public cloud. Today, what you hear is exactly what you said, which is most big customers I talk to, the public cloud of their hybrid strategy is going to be multi-cloud, for all the reasons that you'd expect. But in order to do that effectively, and you can build a hybrid cloud with workloads on public cloud in a couple of ways. One is very statically. So I make a choice to move a workload, or build a workload on AWS. I use all the native AWS services. It's fairly static. Once it's there, it's not going anywhere because those services on it replicated elsewhere. So what customers have been talking about more and more and more is what abstraction layers can we create for them that make it easier to have a more dynamic hybrid cloud with choice among the public cloud providers? So the first level of abstraction is real guests themselves. You've got a consistent operating environment on each of those platforms, but its limitation is you've got to stay true to the native APIs and Java APIs and so forth. The next level of abstraction winds up becoming containerization itself because now you've got much more flexibility to make the applications of itself more frying grain, share different components. But I think the most highest level of abstraction is OpenShift itself managed by cloud forms because now I can have a full on dev and dev ops and deployment environment where all the services are exposed by that platform. You don't necessarily need to use native services of any of those public clouds. And now I've got workloads that could be dynamically moved back on-prem or among those public clouds depending on what you don't want it to find by policy. And in our particular case, the same management framework that enables that is also the one that can manage your traditional infrastructure. So it's more than just hybrid cloud. In our case, it's really hybrid IT having the existing applications be relevant in the new fabric. So, as a general manager, you're running the business but you've got to sort of always have your crystal ball in front of you. We heard in the keynote today, you have JPL as a customer, they're trying to figure out how to put life on Mars. You've got Verizon as a customer who's trying to manage a billion new phones getting turned on every day. And then you had Gartner talking about, hey, we're going to have to help customers move their SAP and Oracle. How do you think about those very distinct things? Do you feel like over time we're going to have carrier grade open stack and man on the moon open stack and enterprise apps open stack? Or is it flexible enough that people can go, okay, I'm just betting on open stack and it'll work itself out? How do you think about that? So we're going to do everything within our power to make sure that the forking and application specific variants of open stack doesn't happen. Let's look at what we did in the last 18 months around telco NFE itself. There were other players in the market who took the approach of assembling a carrier grade solution with a mix of proprietary as well as open technologies. What we desired from day one was the best thing we can do is to make sure that we make open stack carrier grade rather than try to get to a carrier grade open stack. So hopefully that gives you the flavor of how we think about it. And that's not something that we have to struggle hard to do because our philosophy always has been upstream first, right? Anything that we do is upstream first. So there is no shadow code tree, there is no modes that we're going to build by having a specific workload specific requirements. Now that said, there are going to be unique requirements for each of the use cases that we identify prioritize and drive upstream as well as partner with industry specific partners to make sure that we round out our solution, right? So that's our game plan. So forward-looking, just like what we've done with telco, any new use cases, we're going to take exactly the same approach and make sure that we are not killing the golden goose, if you will. Yeah, that's true. So, you know, build the best open stack possible, work with the community and partner where it makes sense to get into those areas that are sort of unique and differentiated. Very good. And if you think about them, there's certainly the NFE specific elements that are going to be unique to the telco market. But a lot of where there's interest now is actually universally applicable. So a lot of the work around high availability, predictability and real time, those have their applications beyond just the vertical that's driving those requirements today. So we feel very confident that the model's going to hold well in an open stack context. Right, all right. So I always call this time of year kind of our open source tour. So we were at the Open Compute Summit, we're here. By the time we get to the end of the spring tour, we're going to be at Red Hat Summit. So I want to give you guys each a chance, kind of last word here, either something cool going out the show or something to look forward to at the Red Hat Summit. Tim, you want to start? I'll start and I'll turn it over to Rajesh. So I think, you know, because our Red Hat Summit, you know, closely follows the open stack summit, you know, we always, you know, we want to provide enough news here so people can see, you know, what's happening, what's changing, but the amount of news and new introductions that's going to be piled up for Red Hat Summit I think is unprecedented, you know, in this space, in adjacent spaces, but I think it's all, you know, with an eye toward how customers are moving to real production cloud environments. Here we talked about a number of ours that are open stack centric, but you know, when we get to the summit, you know, it'll be times 10 in terms of the amount of new customers, the amount of, you know, new product announcements. But I think even what we did here this week, we introduced a lot of really, you know, OSPA, the cloud suite, I think those are important indicators of where we're going, and we had a huge number of production customers that we wanted to, you know, have the world know about to see that this really is real and accelerating. So personally, I'm excited about the fact that the founders of open stack, Rackspace, as well as NASA, have given ringing endorsement of the value that Red Hat can bring to the table. So to add to what Tim was saying, our focus in making sure that more and more customers across multiple verticals can continue to see the power and realize the benefit of open stack, you know, be it Betfair in the UK, or Air France, or BBVA, Santander Bank, the list keeps increasing. And what we've also seen in the last year is that the scale of deployments also have gone from tens to hundreds, and now we're talking thousands in terms of deployment. So clearly the best and exciting time to be in the open stack space, as well as the cloud infrastructure space, from my perspective. Great. Well, Redesh and Tim, thank you so much for joining us on this segment. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from OpenStack 2016 in Austin, Texas. You're watching theCUBE.