 Hello, excuse me, great. How you doing? Doing well today, thanks. Dave Vellante. Hi, nice to meet you in person. Nice to meet you. So thanks for coming on. We're excited to have somebody from Red Hat here. Your name has come up many, many times, your company's name in cube discussions that we've had. Okay, great. Stock market's nasty today, I don't know if you saw. Big drop, what'd Red Hat do today? Do you pay attention to those things? I do. I think everybody else, you're down a market sentiment. Tough day. Tough day, what are you going to do? But Red Hat, generally, good company, market cap almost $8 billion, on open source. Yeah, nice to get here a little bit. Oh, sure, absolutely. Amazing, so Jason, tell us what you do at Red Hat and we'll talk about what's going on here at the event and we'll get your opinion on some of the stuff that's going on in application development. Sure, so my role at Red Hat is on the, oops, is that okay? I'm the director of product line management, which means that I am effectively responsible for bringing the different application products to market. So that's the application server. They are our biggest product and J-Bus is the application platform. And then I also have responsibility for some of the other products. OpenShift. OpenShift, we work with the OpenShift team. So we actually just put the application server community project out on OpenShift about a month, about two months ago now, which is a really exciting project. And then I have some of the tooling stuff, some of the management stuff, as well as the portal platform and the upcoming, we announced recently the data grid. So our new kind of big data offering, elastic cache type of offering that we're bringing out based on the really exciting Intinus Man project that we've had out in the community now for a little over two years now. As a matter of fact. So I want to talk about all those. So that's a lot of territory there. It's a large chunk of the portfolio. Yes, so the way we've recently architected it within J-Bus is we now have an applications group which covers the products I mentioned. And then that's shared between myself and a gentleman named Rich Sharples who's the director of product management. So we kind of cover both bases. And then we also have an integration business which has been getting a lot of attention lately and I'm probably well for the next couple of months. They're about to do a major shipment for our solar products. So integration, ESB, its solar platform rules, data virtualization falls under integration for us. So that's a product update of services. So yeah, so that's the other group but mostly I focus on the app scheme. So what's happening at the event? You're really spending most of your time at Java one, I presume. At Java one, yeah. So thanks for coming across the street here. No problem. What's the vibe over there? Well, the vibe is really exciting. It's kind of funny because there's a lot of people, they're jammed into a really small space. I mean, you look around here. Are they feeling neglected? No, I think they're feeling it. They're getting that kind of cozy, intimate club scene vibe. Shmozing. That's what they're going for. But we're getting huge traction at the booth because we're doing something like 14 different mini-sessions the mini-theater thing. We just, I just walked away from the one on Infinispan and Data Grid. So that was really well attended. So we were excited about that. And I think we've got something like 20 other sessions going on. So Jason, the conversation is all about big data analytics, open source, obviously a big part. You guys are actually coming up on our radar a lot. We have our own monitoring tool that we instrument our audience through our social networks. And with OpenShift, with platform as a service, you guys are no stranger to open source and innovation. So the question I have is, what's your view of the current situation? I know there's some JBoss DNA over there at Benchmark and just invested in. Hortonworks, new company, spun out of Yahoo, doing the Hadoop thing. You got Cloudera, who's trying to be the red hat of Hadoop, right? That's a, they're actually kind of informal positioning. Whatever, right? So we just had EMC on, talking about their appliance, Oracle's got an appliance, big data's everywhere. Kind of a land grab. People are still playing nicely in the sandbox. What's your view on all this? I mean, at Red Hat, you guys have a certain orientation of the marketplace. But how do you make sense of all this? Well, it's funny you mentioned the orientation, right? Because I think there's this perception out there that Red Hat, in particular, is a company that kind of is a follower, right? It's like somebody comes along, establish a marketplace, and then we kind of work our way into it within, by not only being open source, but also being a really big contributor to whatever the standards are. Be that at the operating system level, or Java, or whatever. That's not really happening. This pattern isn't kind of going that way right now with some of the data and cloud stuff. We're starting to see some really interesting standards come up in cloud. Can you give me an example of that? That's not really happening. So some of the, so we haven't seen kind of a massive... Around MapReduce, for example, or is it? Well, I think there's a lot of little companies working right now, right? And they're all kind of staking out their claims, and they're all providing, well, hopefully they're all providing some level of uniqueness and market value to that space. And if they do, they will continue to grow, right? I think what our approach is a little bit different is that we started to really look at, with JBoss in particular, we look at the developer first. And with OpenShift, we look at the developer first. And when we start to think about the developer, we start to solve their problems. Kind of like Sun, which said, here's software, we're calling it open source. You guys are developing from the ground up. No, we come up from the ground up. And if you look at what we did with Infinispan, which is our elastic cash stuff, that particular project, we went out and said, let's make this part of the spec. We came along, it got some great traction, immediately made it part of the spec, and we're trying to work within the EE community to get that ratified as its own JSR. So we basically came out swinging, right? We said, you know what? We think this is important. We think this is important for Java. Let's try to put it in there. Now it's up to the Java community to come back and make sure that that's kosher. And there's probably some players in there who have a vest engine just maybe not making that happen. But at the same time, we think it's really important so we're working on it. When it comes to solving the developer problem, we saw with DataGrid was effectively, how do we bring these applications into the cloud? Because that's, you just can't pick them up and drop them in. You don't get the benefit out of it. All right, so. So, and not Jingron at IBM, and I had a conversation at Hadoop Summit, which was Yahoo's version, this past session, a couple months ago, and what I had for breakfast one month that was, I think it was June May. And he had a great presentation. We talked about the founding fathers, the originators of open source, and then that next wave where you got the commercialization players coming in. And his whole thesis was play nicely, nurture, and that in the standards process, which you're alluding to here, there needs to be some responsibility to the betterment of the community, where there's the tension should be there, but it shouldn't be a war between the originators of standards and open source. And the people to take it to the next level doesn't mean that they replace them. He says that dynamic is really, really fragile. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. And did you talk about that? And because we're seeing, like you said, a lot of little companies working on things, and we're trying to get an editorial focus on this for the people out there around that there's a sandbox out there, and you have people who are originated code and approaches, and then you have people jumping in and venture back to the EMCs, and it needs to grow together. What about that dynamic and your experience with that, and what's the formula that really needs to take place? Well, my experience with it is that there's a, I think with open source, when it was kind of a big movement before, and it had a lot more momentum, five, 10 years ago, I think what was, I think there was a lot of smaller companies that jumped into it just because it was open source. It was kind of a, it's like there's a lot of companies out there right now who are looking for venture funding, and they're trying to make it cloudy, right? Oh yeah. And I think that an open source had a share of that in the beginning. Can we say big data washing, Dave? I mean, I mean, that's a cloud washing. Data washing, yeah. Yesterday's news, it's big data washing, or analytics washing. But I think that at its core, open source still provides a lot of value, and what the other thing that open source does is it does provide a ability for people to, you know, level the playing field, play nice together, and provide that environment. But at the end of the day- And it helps things in terms of security, right? I mean, people don't like security, right? But at the end of the day, depending on the open source project, and to broad brush them is kind of difficult, but at the end of the day with an open source project, it's going to really require three different communities to kind of come together for it to be successful. I mean, first of course, is the community that builds the code, right? And that can be multiple vendors or players or individual contributors, whatever that may be. The second thing is the vendors themselves have to get involved and agree that this is the right set of technologies to kind of bring forward, okay? And the last piece is ultimately the customers, right? The people who consume it. Customer not in the sense of just somebody who buys a subscription and gets support from a vendor, but somebody who actually uses it because they're the ones who drive the requirements. I mean, I worked in closed source software for a long time before coming to open source three years ago. And the thing is is that what makes it so much more palatable is how customer-centric it really is. And the problem that we've seen in some projects is that when they think customer, they might put too much attention on the guys with the paycheck or they might put too much attention on the guys who are just responding to the Wiki saying, oh, you guys are so cool. I love your work, right? And that the key for us is always finding that balance. Yeah, it sounds like your old school programmer back in the day when Vice was programming, you had the development kits, you know, you had the MSDN from Microsoft and you had then, you know, the Linux stuff hit the scene hard. What is the developer mindset today? Because we're seeing a robust developer environment, you know, Jboss, you got frameworks, you got infrastructure conversion networking, all accelerating, I'm going to be at the open flow symposium coming up in a few weeks. It's crazy, crazy good for developers. What's happening in the mindset of the developer community right now in terms of tools, platforms, approaches, frameworks, all of the above? Is there any common theme that you could share with the folks out there around just the general trend in the developer community? Because Oracle does present a big market for Oracle and they're a big power broker with 800 pound gorilla. Consolidation's happening. That's not always good, but it depends, you need distribution. So, tease out the high level trends. It's simple, it's really simple with developers. We've been talking about this a ton lately, especially with all the work going on with E6 and, you know, us picking up E6. It's productivity, it's simple. One word, get the job done. And I think the framework's got the job done in one way. Cloud is now bringing a new way to get the job done faster. I don't need a server, you know. I can get, I can abstract certain things and make it easier for me to, you know, develop the code. What we'll see, I think, come along even further. And the reason that things like even Salesforce and some of the SaaS plays are getting some traction in this space is because of the componentization of various things. So that's all big deals. Those are all things that are kind of coming together. And all it boils down to is how quickly can somebody build an app? What's the time to market and how quickly can we get the job done? So, our goal is to help facilitate that. There's a thousand people watching right now so you're getting good traction with the developers out there. What's your advice? Bill Schmarzo was on from EMC and he's a great guy, good friend, lived in the same town of Palo Alto, but he's old school, he's old data warehousing guy. He's seen the movie before. And I asked him and he had some good advice for the young folks out there, the new developers. What advice would you share with them? And, you know, he had some of the things that said, and learn from the past and embrace the future was this kind of core message. What could you share to the developers out there? Because this guy's out there, he said, who's going to power up a cloud? Who's going to roll out some code? It may not be perfectly scalable, but it doesn't cost a lot of money to get a proper concept out there. There's a lot of cool stuff going on. What's your advice to the developers out there? Building companies and or in the enterprise trying to bring analytics or doing stuff at the speed of business, as we say out there, it's going to be a pure creative exercise. So, advice to them, would you share? Yeah, sure. The first one is pretty simple, keep an open mind. I think if you go look at some of the movements out there, I'll just pick on Spring for a second, right? Spring got really great adoption and great proliferation. Everybody kind of bought into that religion for a long time, but then you have more modern things coming along, like EE6. So, you know, when you have those new technologies come out, don't just go, oh, I'm not going to look at EE because EE5 wasn't as cool as I wanted it to be. So, the second thing is, look for the, you know, kind of try to keep your options hoping down the road, right? Don't get buttoned into one thing, because there's always going to be some new cool framework. There's always going to be some new cool thing to work on, but at the end of it, you're going to have to maintain. What are you saying? Be open. Be open-minded. Be open, kick the tires on new stuff. Absolutely. You might be surprised. Yeah, we have a lot of customers who come to us today. Can you give an example of some things that surprises that like, hey, that was not cool a year ago, or all of a sudden hits the scene, pops? Oh, sure, look at mobile, right? I mean, a year ago everybody had, everything had to be native. Now it feels like there's been a pendulum swing the other way where native's terrible because there's so many platforms out there. But then if you look at the different options for developers in mobile, you know, there are advantages and disadvantages to both. So, you know, don't just buy into one thing and go down that path blindly, you know, kind of keep your eye on what's going on out there. Well, obviously I'm a huge proponent of open source. There's one thing that I was critical of over the past couple months, and really pointing at, say, OpenStack, for example, because it's been super hyped up. It's a whole nother discussion in itself, but I was using them as an example. And that is, is that some conversations we had even here about Larry's keynote, comparing himself to Apple. People look at Apple as, hey, I can integrate in, basically make special purpose stuff proprietary, make it look closed, maybe a little faster game. So the question that's on the table for open source is, with the collaborative diversity, things are slower. Can open source move at the speed that it needs to move to meet the solution demand in the marketplace, in cloud, in mobile? So, yeah, that's a rhetorical question. So what I want to ask you is, what's the dynamic that's changing in open source to make things go faster? Is there anything happening? Can you share your opinion, your comments on that? I think the main thing that helps it go faster is just the constant demand for more solutions and more solutions to be interpreted a different way. The other thing that's, frankly, driving it, too, is that, I mean, look at, look how quick, let's just go back to mobile for a second. Look how quick Android grew. Look how absolutely fast it grew. That was a product of community pieces, right? And it just, you know, Apple looked like they're indestructible with the iPhone, right? I mean, for a long time, and then Android just came out of nowhere, right? Now, there's a lot going on with, you know, it- Yeah, unlimited budget from Google, that's one thing. I mean, Ruben had unlimited bank account. But at the same time, think about Android versus Apple versus Linux versus Windows. Yes, yes. Right, it's the same thing. Linux was a small crawl compared to Android. Community of people came along and they realized that, you know what? There's opportunity for everybody if we team up. And that's what happened. And Android, look, you know, you mentioned the Google factor, but the other factor was is that somebody had to build the apps. The phone, the handset makers realized, oh geez, I got to pick up this technology because, so it's the same thing all over again except for maybe it just doesn't have that open source wrapper on it. That's the one thing I disowned Oracle is that one thing about open source that's so phenomenal is that you have barriers to entry that are almost zero. You can jump into a community, you can get code out there. If they have a proprietary approach like Oracle, you might be locked into their mafia, their constraints. So, you know. But it's more than that, because I'll take you one step further. First off, there's Darwinism that comes out of the community. If something doesn't work, the project doesn't go. Right, it just doesn't get the legs. Killer be killed. Right, and then the other thing that happens is that you have a lot more business freedom. I mean, look, I run the go to market on JBoss and I'll tell you, the difference between where I used to work and where I work today is you have a lot more freedom in the sense of. It's fun. Well, it's fun, but it's also the sense that you don't have the legacy of trying to, oh boy, I can't do that because the hardware guys are going to be pissed at me. Or I don't want to do that because. Oh, I have a licensing deal with XYZ company. Because my main stream is X, so I can't, you know, let's not deliver that innovation into the product. Let's deliver it as part of an add-on product because that way I can kind of hit them up twice. You don't do that in open source, because guess what? If they like it, you have to find the right kind of balance with the customer so they'll pay for it. If you keep adding more products than a mix, guess what? They stop paying, right? So you have to find that. Well, that's the balance of open source. You've got diversity, which is a little bit slower, but you have that quality. And that thing, you know, Dave and I have been commenting, we've been at theCUBE, we've been to all the big tech events. EMC World, VM World, Sapphire, Citrix Synergy. You didn't come to Red Hat Summit at JBoss World. You guys are kind of in snowy age. You got to come next June. You got to get theCUBE over there. You got to get the invite. But we talk to the smartest people in those events, you know, independently. It comes down to the same thing. Security's a do-over. And unequivocally, everyone errs on the side, open source is better for security. Hands down. Because the argument is, it's not because it's out there. That's what some people are saying. Timbo's saying, well, because it's out there, we all know what's bad guys see. Everyone's seeing the same code. So that's kind of, so this is where the debate is. So love to get your perspective on that. Maybe follow up on that after the show, but you know, that's something that we're continuing to pound, is this mobile security angle and mobile data. So any insight on what's happening with mobile, mobile security, mobile data in particular? Well, I think there's a, I think there's, it's kind of following a similar pattern in the open source world, where we're starting with the developers and we're working our way through. I mean, so my perspective is, is that there are, there's some players out there doing a good job, certainly with mobile. And we're, I think the community's starting to eyeball it and starting to build some interesting, innovative things. And right now where we are, is what the community side of it is, is that we're starting with the developer, like we tend to do. And so it's coming along. Well, my final question, because I've been hogging the entire interview, is what do you see in the future of big data in particular and open sources role in it? Because, or let me rephrase it this way, what do you like right now? What do you see growing really fast? I mean, open source is kind of a mob mentality. There is Darwinism. What has traction right now? You can point to it and saying, you know, that project's got momentum. I'll see you.