 Live from the FIA Barcelona Gran Vía Compensator in Barcelona, Spain, it's The Cube. At HP Discover Barcelona 2014, brought to you by headline sponsor HP. Back to Barcelona, we just heard the keynotes, Meg Whitman, Antonio Neary, Bill Vecti, and some other folks. We're back live with The Cube, we're here today, tomorrow, and Thursday, going wall to wall coverage. Sarwar Raza is here, he is with HP's networking group, he's a cloud, SDN, open source expert. Sarwar, thanks very much for coming on The Cube. Thank you for having me. So open networking, for decades, it's been an oxymoron. Finally, we're seeing this rush of open source and open innovation. What's happening? Why open? Why now? So I think if you go back a couple of years, the SDN movement really catalyzed what I like to call the democratization of networking. So we're looking at moving away from a single vendor chokehold and vertically locked in solutions to solutions that offer interoperability across the architecture. And SDN was one of the catalysts for it, but now we're seeing projects all across the networking domain, whether it's hardware, operating systems, cloud operating systems like OpenStack, SDN controllers like Open Daylight, really this thirst for open from customers, and that's really who it's being driven by. It's a customer drive for open interoperable solutions that is pushing vendors in that direction. I mean, obviously there's been a lot of events going on in the networking business, but several in the last half a decade, obviously HP's acquisition of 3Com was a big deal. VMware's acquisition of NYSERA sort of opened up some eyes. And as you say, this whole open source movement, I would even say I would even look at movements like Hadoop as part of that catalyst, and they sort of coincided with all these other open innovations that you've talked about. So having said all that, Open is in the eyes of the beholder. I mean, it used to be Unix was open, I couldn't say. So how do you look at Open? How does HP define Open? What is Open to you? Well, so there's really three components to Openness, right? There's Open Ecosystem, there's Open Standards, and then there's Open Source. When you look at ecosystems, I think without exception, you can look around and everyone's got their NASCAR slide, right? A slide full of logos of partners and everyone is claiming some level of interoperability with everyone else. I think the value that an Open Ecosystem brings is really to be able to bring your partners along in your success and also offer customers best of great choices. Open Standards is an area where bodies like IETF, IEEE, ONF, I mean, they've been doing work for good work for many, many years. In fact, many of the fundamental innovations that led to the Internet came out of those bodies. Open Source has been around for decades, but has really changed from what used to be a bunch of hobbyists and people who are really passionate about putting out solutions, free solutions, into really a way of doing business. Most Open Source projects now have major corporate backers, which is not in itself a bad thing. What's actually happening is Open Source is becoming more and more mainstream because, like I said, customers are demanding that Openness and their solutions. Vendors are realizing that the benefits of interoperability and the leverage that Open Source gives them. Here we are, the collective brain trust of Linux kernel developers from Red Hat and HP and IBM called collaborating. The same goes for OpenStack, where you have the brains at HP working with our various partners and even some of our competitors. The same is coming to networking now. So the effect of that is one, accelerated development, better collaboration amongst competitors, which actually leads to customer value. What can we learn from the Linux example? That's a good one, right? You said Red Hat, IBM, HP. You remember the days of Linux versus Unix. Linux is nowhere near and all of a sudden, boom. Almost overnight. So go ahead. So I think the lesson to be learned there is Open Source by itself is fantastic. And we have a lot of very mature communities out there that are putting out absolutely fantastic product, fantastic code that can be turned into product. But Linux took some curation and it needed maturity, right? And several vendors stepped up to help it along. So HP was the first major vendor that actually indemnified its customers from all the thud around Linux back in the day. And that was a huge step in its adoption by the enterprise. Yeah, because it G-risked it for the customer. Absolutely. We'll take on that risk. Yeah. And you take a look at billion-dollar businesses that have been built around Linux distributions. And so Open Source, we get this question a lot. People say, hey, you're dabbling in Open Source at the SDN controller side, on the OpenStack Neutron side. What's in it for you, just giving away product? And I always tell people there is a lot of value to be built around Open Source solutions. The value of Open Source, like I said, is the leverage, the interoperability, the common core, and being able to leverage that brain trust and to be able to build partnerships in the community. But at the end of the day, you will see differentiated solutions built on top of Open Source course. That's what HP Helion OpenStack is about. That's what our cloud networking solution is around as well. Yeah, I was going to say you're clearly seeing that in OpenStack. Now, so how should we look at something like OpenStack? Because you've got this open standard, but you've got different distros, right? And people question the interoperability, but they're closer. How do you see that playing out over time? Is this going to be a world where we see stovepipes of clouds that maybe work a little bit better together? There's some level of interoperability, or do you envision, particularly with OpenStack, that there's going to be a lot more interoperability than in the store? Well, so I think what OpenStack has going for it really is that interoperability story, right? The ability for providers to take, you know, maybe slightly different versions of an OpenStack cloud, but as long as, you know, you have the right versions of the APIs, right, and those contracts between those clouds, those technical contracts, you should be able to burst from one to the other. And that's especially true when you're going from a private environment to a public environment, where, you know, if we're able to enable our customers to say, yes, you can go from an HP private cloud to, you know, an HP Helion cloud instance, but Mr. Customer, because of our interoperability and Open Mist promise, you can also burst to a competitor cloud, right, that uses the same standard APIs, right? That's the kind of choice that customers are, they value, but, you know, they may never get to use it, but they value that when they're making their purchasing decisions. They have some sleep at night, but at the same time, you hear things like, well, vendor A is not going to certify, you know, maybe not exactly what you just described, but we're not going to certify this R product and this configuration. So the interoperability is not as complete as the vision would have you believe. Will that change over time in your opinion? I hope so, right? I think, you know, there are always competitive forces of play, right, and there will be, you know, even an open source, there will be competing distributions of the same product. So, you know, how that plays out over time, I think remains to be seen. I mean, you go through sort of, you know, in any sort of transformation like this, you will see, you know, a large number of folks standing up solutions and then eventually you'll see some consolidation among, you know, the smaller players and, you know, the strongest would survive. Let's talk about more about HP's networking strategy in particular how it relates to Helion and your cloud strategy. I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit more. Sure, so HP networking has, you know, we're providing the underlying cloud networking infrastructure inside our HP Helion OpenStack distribution and that actually, that solution comprises, you know, a lot of value add that we put in for HP customers as well as a very, very large component of stuff that we just upstream into the community. So, one of the projects that we took on in the last year or so was really fortifying, scaling and hardening that neutron core. So, neutron is the networking subsystem inside of OpenStack and, you know, it had, it wasn't necessarily scaling or performing to the level we needed. So, you know, we let loose a small army of folks. We're now the number one committer on that project and the result is for the community as a whole. Anyone now consuming OpenStack now gets that scalable performant hardened version of OpenStack networking. So, on the cloud side, we have, you know, we have what we call our virtual cloud networking solution, VCN, which is essentially open stack, curated open stack mix. We also have, you know, two other solutions and, you know, each solution gets us to a slightly different market. We have our distributed cloud networking solution targeted mostly at sort of service provider and large environments which uses BGP and MPLS for federation. And then we have a partnership with VMware where customers who choose to use a VMware NSX solution are able to federate with our physical tablet controller and they get unified physical, virtual visibility and management. It's such an interesting dynamic, right? Because, I mean, you're talking about neutron, it's essentially a software-defined networking for OpenStack which is what NSX is for VMware. And then in the same sentence, you're talking about the partnership with VMware. So you've got this interesting competing, cooperating, partnering, and I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. Well, we serve a lot of different markets, right? We're the largest IT vendor in the world, the second largest networking vendor. And so, you know, we have our mix of customers who, you know, want a service provider scale solution that uses technology protocols that they're comfortable with. And then you have a set of customers, you know, especially in the enterprise, who are heavily invested in VMware virtual infrastructure. So for them, it absolutely makes sense, right? The next part in their evolution towards, you know, automation and SDN is to use their platform. So, you know, we're there to support them. And, you know, where there are gaps between some of those native solutions. You know, we partner, we federate, and provide, you know, an end-to-end solution. So, openness is a strategy, and it's a profitable strategy, right? For you guys, you guys have shown that, I mean, years ago, decade ago, plus the HP basically made the decision to go open and stop fighting head-to-head in all the operating system wars and you've proven that you can make money at that. So, I'll give you the last word. Thoughts on the future of the networking business, the impact of software-defined and HP's role? So, you know, software-defined isn't a point product, isn't a family of products. You know, you see some of our competitors rolling out a whole new line of switch infrastructure with controllers and a new API and a policy language and calling it SDN. And that always leads me kind of scratching my head because that's not the point. SDN washing. Yeah, the point of SDN is really to be able to offer customers openness at every layer in the stack, right? Whether it's the infrastructure, the controller, or the app layer. So, you know, I think that openness in general is a very, very strong movement in the networking industry. You know, we are taking a very leading position here. So, our leadership in open stack, well-known, right? We have nine project leads, including the lead for the networking project, who is nowadays networking. We are founding members of Open Daylight and a Platinum member there as well. And most recently, we are Platinum founding members of OP NFV, which is the open platform for network function virtualization. Again, all very, very important strategic areas for us. And, you know, we hope to do very well there. So, I want to add to your earlier definition. You talked earlier about open ecosystems, open standards, and open support. And you added to that just now, infrastructure, the controller, the application layer, also have to have open entries, exits, potentially even open source components, I guess, right? Yeah, yeah. And, you know, we, you know, open source, like I said, it gives all vendors great leverage, right? And provides customers, you know, the flexibility and the openness that they require. All right, Sarah, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE and sharing your open vision. Thank you so much. All right, keep right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live from HP Discover in Barcelona. We'll be right back.