 Welcome back, we're here live at the OpenStack Enterprise Forum in Silicon Valley. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We're here for our big event, getting all the action on the Enterprise at OpenStack. Ken Pepple, CTO, Selenia, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, John. So the Enterprise story here is interesting because normally people talk about public, how private, David and I were just talking about the difference between the two. What is all the hubbub about around enterprise and OpenStack, from your perspective? So I think it's one of the things that has started to emerge over probably just the last six months to a year. Really the story from 2010 to 2000, probably mid-2012, was really about how can I go compete with Amazon as a public cloud, probably. And that was mostly the service provider market. And the service provider market is a beast of its own. It has very peculiar requirements and has a very different use case. And what we found though is over the last probably six to 12 months, we've hit a maturity in OpenStack where it's actually ready that people who are especially either on the leading edge or have leading edge use cases have started to be able to actually go out there and actually use this and kind of bend it to their needs, not just a public cloud name. So are they trying to essentially replicate the capabilities of a public cloud like Amazon in their own data centers? Is that what you're trying to see and can OpenStack be that vehicle? So I think what we're seeing is actually two things, which is they're not necessarily trying to replicate what you see in an Amazon web services or even internet or some of the other public service providers out there. They're really tailoring it to exactly what they need. And so if they're looking at big data, they're playing and looking to put how much utilization or CPU can I put against how much storage. And it may not be as much actually concentrating on, say, pass level services that you might find at Amazon web services or even networking side. And they're able to do that because OpenStack's, because it's open source, it's a framework. I can deploy what I need and I can choose not to deploy other things that I don't need out there. And what we're finding is a lot of people don't need the 29 different services or 35 different services you see at Amazon web services. Okay, fair enough. But so let me follow up with that because you talked to a lot of senior executives, I'm sure. So let's role play for a minute. I'm a CEO in the corner office. I really don't know much about technology, but I do know this, I spend a lot on it. And I want my IT to be just like Google on the weekend and Facebook on the weekend and what I read about on Amazon. Can I replicate that with, can you help me replicate that in my environment? Not necessarily all the services, but the agility and the simplicity in it. I'm just sick of all the complaints. Help me, Ken, can I do that? So really what we tend to get involved in at an entry point is really it's usually a CTO or a chief innovation officer or maybe even your chief marketing officer is coming and saying, I think we can do things faster. I think we might be able to do things more efficiently with this new model of the cloud. And it's not about private cloud or public cloud or DevOps, it's about, I think we can do things better for these particular or they want to enable something they've never been able to do before. And a lot of that tends to be big data today. And today, yes, you can certainly start down that path of getting to a place where I can put in a cloud, I can have some of that agility and perhaps some of that cost savings. I can tailor it to the particular workloads that I might be able to try or want to introduce into my actual enterprise. I can do it all on my terms. I can mix to the public or the private cloud. I can go in and start looking about what kind of governance I need to change or what kind of security policies I need to change to take effect to that. And I can do it all on my pace. I don't have to go to the public cloud and either take it or leave it. So you mentioned big data on the panel. You mentioned it a couple of times. What's the big data stack look like in OpenStack? And why is it so economically attractive? Maybe you can unpack that a little bit for our audience. Sure. So part of it, it starts with data and it's the efficient storage of huge amounts of data. And that's really an object store. And so a lot of people today are using Swift as that's where I'm going to actually accumulate all of my large data. And then I'll take it out of that and perhaps use something like SolidFire as the operational data store for that. As I apply something like say Hadoop or any one of the other big data analytics packages on that to actually find intelligence out of that data. And where it really starts to add either lower cost or greater efficiency is the ability to use all of this in OpenSource to be able to tailor my infrastructure for actually what I'm trying to actually find answers on. And also I'm not paying markup for a public cloud of transiting my data in and out of that cloud. Also when you turn around and look against a proprietary solution, TerraData or any of the more established players, you're looking at OpenSource economics against proprietary economics. And there's truthfully just no question about which one's going to be better for you. There was a, go ahead John. I can keep going if you want. No, I wanted to ask Ken about really the service provider side of it. So one of the things we've been watching is the success of St. Marantis, right? They've had some good success. Hey, back that truck up and give me some open stack. Pretty much that's what they're doing. I'm oversimplifying me. Don't get offended guys. I'm sorry to, I'm not over-trivializing, but that's pretty much what it is. They know the innards, they're pushing the buttons, they kind of know the inside baseball. They're deploying a lot of open stack. But that seems to be the demand. Give me some of that open stack. The challenge on that is scale. What do you guys see on the scale side to automate away? So that's not so much labor intensive. Meaning, I don't need to know the inside buttons and instrumentation. A lot of optimization going on to make it work, wire it together. As we say, the behind the curtain that no one sees, you know, Wizard of Oz kind of thing. But to make scale, there's some things that get done. What's your take on where we are going from labor intensive professional services to fully automated or simpler? Absolutely. And that has been a major hurdle for people, especially say, before the Havana release. You did need a lot of skills and a lot of very deep skills to be able to do that. And what I've seen over time is, and I kind of talked about it on stage, is you know, some people are taking an approach of I will make it an appliance for you. And that's how I simplify it. And I'll sell you hardware there. Others have been much more around. It's a software play. I'll package up the bits. I think what we're starting to see is people starting to converge and say, this is really a product. It's not just I'm going to package up bits for you, but I'm going to provide you specialized tools to manage it. I'm going to have an installer for you. All the things you would see in a Linux distribution or a database distribution. So it's tooling, the normal, kind of the normal evolution. It is, it is. And I think we're starting to, since we've gotten to a place where people have gotten some best practices around the key choices, there's not so many choices. Yes, there's 700 configuration options. There's really like a hundred, which are really important to you. And then the rest of them are kind of outliers for you if you have some very specialized installation. And as we get towards more of a best practice there, or two or three of them, it becomes much easier to create a product around it. Well, Ken, we're on tight on time. I'm going to give you a final word. Share the folks out there. Kind of the bottom line, you know, someone says, hey, just simplify it for me. What's the big aha around OpenStack right now, next 12 months? What's the critical path for the community, for the technologies, the white spaces? Obviously it's momentum. I'm not going to say it's crashing and burning at all. It's certainly not. There's demand. What's simplified where it's at? So what I think you're going to see over the next 12 months is you're going to see a simplification and a prodication of the OpenStack core pieces. And you're going to see a consensus of the best practices of how to roll this out. And it's going to get to a place where your vendors are going to be able to roll it out for you very quickly. I think on the code side, though, you're going to start to see more and more services around the edges of what was core IAS as it moves into either PAS or some other areas there. And you'll see continued growth around those edges. But I think you'll see a solidification of the core around products there. And there is where you're going to find that enterprises and your normal IT will be able to consume it much more rapidly. Ken, that's awesome. That kind of validates some of the things that we were touching on, the professional services. Good to see that active right now. And Miranda, shout out to you guys. And it means to kind of over-trivialize your product. But I think that's kind of why you're so successful because you've done a good job. This is OpenStack for the enterprise. Breaking out in the enterprise. We'll be right back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We go out to roll the actions. We'll be right back after this short break.