 Okay, we are here at Intel Forecast 2012. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE 4 Special, the CUBE SiliconANGLE Conversation. We've been kept, thanks for coming by and sharing your opinions with us. We had dinner last night and we were talking about a lot of things but I wanted to talk to you about the business of cloud. Cloud is hot right now. I was just talking with James out in the hallway from in Stratas, we saw George last night from those guys and their pipeline is pretty massive. They have huge customer-based building, huge demand for consultancy right now which is advice. How do I do stuff? So we were talking last night technology conversation or business conversation. We're a bit of both. So what's your perspective on that? Yeah, the interesting thing is that in terms of, you know, you caught out in Stratas and I used them as an example as well because they're doing something really that every large legacy vendor should be doing but almost every large legacy vendor has difficulty doing because, you know, there's still all this stuff trying to kind of discount the cloud as a delivery mechanism whereas in Stratas, they've jumped in boot to null and so they're delivering upon it. You know, I think fundamentally, you know, it's this hope box I stand on all the time. Fundamentally, for me, cloud is a bunch of stuff that kind of existed before, you know, virtualization existed before, you know, outsourcing existed before. The difference is tying it all together and the business model. So the whole subscription thing, the whole agility, the whole consumerization and democratization and for me, that's the exciting thing about cloud. So data center alliance, which is the main thrust behind this event here, it's kind of an industry consortium. Everyone's kind of, you know, rah rah, you know, cheering each other, you know, as they kind of jump through hoops and try to, you know, disrupt the data center. But the data center has traditionally been a server centric mindset, very infrastructure specific. Standardize the servers, take care of all this business, you know, commoditize and get standardized. With cloud, it brings in the app side, which is a new dimension to IT. So no one's really kind of looking at that. And Chris was on earlier talking about apps and big data. He's got an interesting angle perspective around paths. So talk about your view about how the application mindset is changing some of these. And I'm globalizing around servers, but most IT guys are infrastructure related mindset. I mean, right, the fact of the matter is, is that infrastructure is becoming commoditized more and more. And the reality is that as a market becomes commoditized and people try and move up the value chain. And so, you know, my, you know, putting on my sort of crystal ball hat, that's a mixed metaphor, but putting on my, looking at my crystal ball, I think that over time, that commoditization is going to increase and people are going to move up the stack. And so we've already seen things like VMware with Cloud Foundry really moving actively into the past space. And at the end of the day, the reason for that is partly because of commoditization. But at the end of the day, we're talking about business results. Well, servers aren't a business result. You know, applications, custom applications, social applications, you know, line of business stuff, that's actually a business result. And for that reason, you know, I really, I really welcome this, this moving up the stack and commoditization of IT because it's actually making people focus on what is important, which is delivering outcomes for business. So let's talk about, you're an analyst, you're out there, you look at the landscape. Let's talk about some of the players on the track. You've got VMware, you've got some of the Citrix just backed out of OpenStack, which was kind of a black eye for OpenStack. But OpenStack has then brought HP in. You have all these different cloud, public cloud guys kind of jockeying, all kind of with this developer angle. What do you take away from that? How do you share to your customers when you talk to your clients around, I say, hey Ben, what's going on in this cloud space? They got Amazon out there doing stuff. You got Rackspace, you got OpenStack, you got HP, Citrix, what's happening? So I think it makes sense of that. There's really two messages. One is a conceptual message, one's an actual message. So from a conceptual perspective, absolutely the developer angle, moving to pass, absolutely correct. In terms of when clients come to me and say, hey, I just saw this partnership announced between X and Y. I say, it's very early days in this market, everyone's jockeying for position. Everyone's partnering with everybody and in a year's time, the landscape's going to look completely different. So I advise people to look at the very conceptual level, look at the strategic level and make their decisions not based on some sort of ephemeral partnership that's announced today. But deliverables, they have to deliver something, right? Exactly, yeah. Okay, so with that in mind, how are you seeing the use cases of cloud on the business side? So business cases drive cloud from some of the business model applications. What are the core use cases that you're seeing out there right now that are real good examples of cutting edge, bleeding edge and reliable cloud deployments? So I guess, for anyone that's new to the cloud, I always talk about the onion and that you should peel an onion later at a time. And so clearly, move your email to the cloud, move your enterprise collaboration to the cloud, your office productivity, those sorts of things. In terms of what's exciting, there's some pretty exciting stuff happening at the past level. People building a lot of social apps. So you've got all the organizations where they're really tying together their back office, CRM functionality with some sort of social facing stuff. So that stuff's pretty exciting. But I think the big, I mean, that's the opportunity for today and tomorrow. The big opportunity for a year ahead is the whole big data thing. And I know big data, I hate the buzzword. But for me, what is exciting is- We love the buzzword, by the way. I bet you did. It creates so much controversy. It's good for the media business. But what I did, I take a step back from that. And what's exciting to me is drawing some insight. And when we've got every device in the world connected, points of data from everywhere, then we are gonna have vast, huge quantities of data. And so, deriving some insight from that. And so last week, a few of us went and visited the supernaps, which is data center in Vegas, the biggest data center in the world. And we saw there a 50,000 node Hadoop cluster that eBay's using to just crunch their historical data to drive some insights from it. And so that sort of stuff is really exciting, their analysis and providing value from crunching those numbers. Yeah, we have our Hadoop cluster of five nodes next to the Cloudera cages in level 43 and Mountain View, it's impressive. Big data, I mean, when I say I love the hype, I mean, I just love that it's hype-ish. But I truly think big data is one of those things that has rapidly come to the forefront that actually is changing a lot because the role of data, and Chris and I were talking about this, the role of data now in the system because it spans everything. Data center, data, I was talking with HP and HP Discover around using machine data, using probes and rolling that data up. Social data, you got personal data. So the data revolution is really about insights in real time. So I think that that is going to change the game because that affects the storage paradigm, that affects the compute paradigm. So the ability to get and use data fundamentally challenges data warehouse, business intelligence, which we're operating under like really long SLA. Give me a report, maybe five weeks. Now it has to be five days. Now it's five minutes to five seconds. Well, it does, it closes the loop and the whole move towards self-learning and continuous improvement. Big data is able to deliver upon that. So that's really exciting. Yeah, and for me, I'm also on the fact that as an infrastructure geek and also a software geek, for the first time in the history of our business world life of the world, you can actually instrument a business end-to-end with data. How you require your raw materials, build products, hire people, sell, service and do more. Every aspect of the value chain for a business can be instrumented. And continuously, it's right. Yeah, so that's why I think you guys have a good angle on this whole business outcome in Chris's past vision. So let's talk about past for a second. So platform as a service, I'm always talking about the challenge between race to zero and differentiation. You know, past market, some will say, hey, if you're gonna go host or mentality, it's a race to zero. Jam it down, one, two winners, everyone loses. Total commodity, total no margins. And then the other side, which is differentiation, which is always where the value is. Pretty much people agree, don't want to be a race to zero business model. They want to have value. Where are you seeing the most value at on platform as a service? It's really interesting because it's so early, everyone's following each other. And so, I mean, I remember two or three years ago when Christian and I started talking about past and you had Engine Yard and you had Heroku and they were all kind of Ruby passes. And then all of a sudden, everyone's gone polyglot and everyone follows suit. So I think we aren't at the point where people are starting to really deliver, you know, that added value. And part of the reason for that is that in the enterprise, they're still not, they don't even know what pass is. And so it is very early days. I mean, I do think that the early wins are gonna come from those social things. And I know Heroku's having a lot of success with Facebook applications and that sort of thing. And so I think those will be the early wins, but I'm really excited about Cloud Foundry because I think this move to an open, you know, an open source product and the amount of innovation that can happen around that is pretty exciting. Do you see the different approaches on that front? This is kind of just a tangent question on that. There's two philosophies, purpose built, solution built, pass, or more general purpose. I mean, it comes back down to, anyway, Oracle kind of model versus, you know, I want to build the best pass for this app, this use case, or more general purpose. Well, I think Cloud Foundry seems to be more general purpose. I think what's gonna happen is we're gonna see the rise of the, you know, custom built passes, or so the ability to modularize your particular pass to your particular workload. So I think what we'll see, and probably built on top of Cloud Foundry, is a situation where, you know, I'm an app developer, I'm doing, you know, this kind of application, this kind of workload, this kind of, you know, geographic spread or whatever, and I'll sort of plug and play different modules. I think that is where the exciting developments will come going forward. Question for you around just more industry, kind of inside baseball observational kind of views from you about, obviously, you know, the data center, IT, they're slow, right? I mean, it's always been, I was excited, the HP event was, you know, yeah, can you speed up the dial a little bit? I mean, it's just like tortoises in the air, right? The app market is going crazy. Everyone's running fast again, big data, all that stuff. IT's still slow as hell. What do you think about the speed game on IT? And in particular, have you seen open source play a role in that? Because now, even at this event, I'm seeing Cloudera here, trying to be more IT-ish on the Hadoop side. So you're seeing some patterns emerge, right? People have to make money. Yeah, a little, but what I would say is that, you know, I've written some papers for some management papers I did years and years ago and talked about sort of the new look enterprise and the organic enterprise and the death of the corporates. And I think it really comes to a down to a point where very soon we're going to get to a point where it's an innovative die. And so at the moment, you know, at the end of the day, enterprise can be a blocker, can be a barrier to innovation and they can use a bunch of different metrics to justify their blocking. But that has to stop soon. And so I think we're going to see over the next few years, we are going to see- Adapt or die basically, right? Innovator die. Absolutely. You can block all you want. That's what you want to do. But eventually your competitors are going to, whoever flinches first is going to win. And so I think we're going to see some flinching happening. And already, you know, I spent yesterday, spent a bit of time with our financial services company here in New York talking about the use of cloud. And I was just talking to them about, you know, their concerns, you know, the compliance, the risk aversion. And they're all in because they realize that in terms of delivering outcomes, in terms of, you know, speed to market, in terms of, you know, they're doing sort of a better analysis in terms of getting that out there quickly. Yeah. I'd love to talk to you about some of the compliance by the next, but we'll do that for another conversation. The conversation I want to talk now as we talked last night and Chris and I talked about earlier, agile, the word agile, agility, kind of kicked around the developer community, you know, agile programming, basically means do things very effective and teams, et cetera, et cetera. But with some of the things we talked about, the business outcomes you mentioned. The business drivers seem to be so much more in play now with IT. These be IT was this big resource, it had some infrastructure, management would give them budget. Yeah, we'd lob some requests in, the no team would say yes, maybe here in once in a while, it would get done a little slow. But now with real-time analytics and big data, the pressure at the seed level is saying, hey, we need to innovate or die, it's putting pressure on IT. How is that changing? Do you see a lot more of that in your conversations, in the field, in the trenches? How big is that? How real is that conversation? And what types of conversations? I absolutely do. And I think the main way we're seeing that is through shadow IT or rogue IT. And I actually don't have a huge issue with shadow IT because I fundamentally believe that developers are responsible people, they're professional when they're, and generally they're gonna do the right thing. And I think, you know, I've been involved in a bunch of different startups and a bunch of different projects. And I've seen big corporate IT for development projects and I've seen an agile approach to development projects. And it never ceases to amaze me just how slow the corporate IT is. So IT has itself to blame. And yes, I know they hold the keys to the castle and I know there's compliance issues and I know all that stuff. But fundamentally, I liken it to the conversation around social enterprise. And so corporates are really scared about giving social tools to their workers because what if they say something, what if they quote something outside an outside world? And, you know, at the end of the day, you pay your employees good money. You spend money training them. You know, you've got to trust them. Your bottom line has to be that your people will do the right thing. So don't block innovation. Same rules apply when they go to cocktail parties, right? If they spill the beans on corporate secrets, they get fired, right? Absolutely. So I think, I think, IT needs to trust their developers, yeah. What do you think about the DevOps movement? Obviously, no JS is hot. We cover that event at a silicon angle. The developer role within the ecosystem of IT is relevant. But, you know, Chris was saying, you know, constantly and controversially, he says, you know, it's BS because pass will extract away the ops, which makes total sense. But, you know, relative to the developer world, what Spring Source has shown with VMware is that, hey, we need to have these kind of frameworks and these new OSs. However, they're defined. And developers need more headroom for programming. I need to do more server stuff. I need to do more than just front-end work. There's a lot of passion around the DevOps-NoOps discussion. And to be honest, it's a discussion I'd try and avoid because I think this is all changing and the roles are changing. And, you know, fundamentally, there is still going to be a degree of operations. Whether you call that DevOps or whether you call it NoOps, yes, there's going to be a requirement to architect applications. You know, the developers will be much more an intrinsic part of delivering applications. I believe, yes, pass will abstract away a lot of that operational stuff, but there's still going to be a degree of operations. Yeah, I think I'd agree with you. I mean, we follow DevOps. We have a section called DevOps angle, but basically it's turning into big data angle because all those DevOps are more hyperscale questions or if they're in the cloud, it has to do with cloud conversations where the developer is a stakeholder. So I think your point about Shadow IT is a great indicator that cloud is formalizing Shadow IT, right? I mean, basically. Exactly, it's allowing people to do stuff. Okay, you've been doing Shadow IT, you either do Shadow IT and have compliance risk or create a vehicle to scale speed-wise. Well, and the other thing that you do, you allow Shadow IT to happen, but you put some stuff in place that there's some visibility, some cost visibility, those sorts of things you put in place, but you still let people do the things. Compliance, visibility, those sorts of things. Ben, final question before we end the conversation. Two points I'd like you to share with the audience. One is what you're thinking about this next 12 months, what are you going to be looking at? What are you going to be covering? Some of the things that's top of mind for you that you're going to be scouring the marketplace, investigating and kicking the tires on. And two, what you share with folks, customers and prospective enterprise clients and buyers, what the landscape's like. Sure, so in terms of what I'm looking for, I've been heartened, as I said, I met with this financial company in here in New York this week, and really heartened by that. I spent some time talking with a mining company in Australia a little while ago, and they're both using clouds. So I'm really heartened by seeing some traditional risk-averse industries go to clouds. I'm looking for more of that, and I'm keen to see those case studies. In terms of what I'm telling people, I guess I see two distinct classes of organization. I see the early adopters that are in Boots and All, and then I see the more risk-averse ones. The risk-averse ones, it's a lot of handholding, it's okay one step at a time, take it easy. Cross the bridge slowly. Yeah, but with the early adopters, it's very much about sort of envisaging what the future looks like, and that's convergence, big data analysis, mobile, all these things in a big melting pot. And when you start sort of drawing some pictures for people to what their organization might look like in two or three years, pretty clearly out of the bottom, that drops a technology direction. Ben, thanks for the conversation with diversity analysis. Thanks for coming by and sharing your perspective on SiliconANGLE's CUBE Conversations. We'll be right back with our next guest.