 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2015. Brought to you by Red Hat. Now your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Welcome back to Boston, everybody. This is the Red Hat Summit, and this is theCUBE, Stu Miniman and Dave Vellante. We're going wall-to-wall coverage over the next day and a half. We'll be here for two days, so it's been great keynotes. Keynotes started last night. We had more keynotes this morning, more keynotes tomorrow. We've got all the guests coming on theCUBE. Jason Nash is here as the director of NextGen. Architecture is at Sirius Computer Solutions. Jason, welcome to theCUBE. Oh, thank you very much for having me. It's been a great event so far. Yeah, we love having guys like you on, CTO, helping customers really understand how to take technology and turn it into business advantage. So you mentioned the show. Give us the update on what you've seen so far. What's exciting you? So I think, you know, this is my first Red Hat Summit, and I'm kind of an old school Linux guy that kind of stepped out of it, went to the first Linux world, all this stuff, and it's great to watch this mature. And here at the show, what I'm seeing is that continuation, really being able to kind of extend that just out of an OS and kind of middleware type play up into real OpenStack, real public, hybrid, private clouds. We've seen a lot of good things that I think, honestly, that a lot of customers are missing. That, you know, we just had a great walkthrough with one of the engineers on cloud forums that I think most of my customers just overlook when they look at a lot of these products. So, you know, the announcements this morning, some of the container technologies are coming, kind of going along with DockerCon this week, right? Continue that advancement. And I think what we're seeing here is customers are starting to get a lot more comfortable with these technologies, with these projects, with these products, and they're starting to wrap their arms around it, start to figure out how they can utilize that and, you know, keep moving forward. So you mentioned you've been following Linux for a long time now, and you remember even before that, you had Unix World, right? You go to Unix World, you had RUnix, RUnix, RUnix, RUnix, they didn't really talk to each other. Linux sort of took that up a level, but in the early days of Linux, you know, sort of this version, that version, and that version, and Paul Cormier sort of put forth a little history lesson today, as he's, you know, prone to do, and was sort of trying to draw the analogy between the early days of Linux and the early days of OpenStack. Do you see it the same way? I do. You know, customers, these enterprise customers don't want to gamble anymore. And it's one thing to gamble on sort of an operating system platform. It's fairly easy to move between if you need it to, but it's what kind of hindered that early adoption curve of Linux back in the day. I think Red Hat kind of grabbed that. They took advantage of it, and they really made it the enterprise standard. And I think we're going to see that with OpenStack. When I have my briefings with customers, they're concerned about the instability, and maybe that's a bad word, but just things aren't solid enough for them to make that kind of investment. But now, given the credibility that Red Hat has in the industry as a whole, with their customers, with their partners, we're starting to see these things kind of firm up, and now they're starting to look at this as a real viable platform, not just for the Walmart to the world, the Target to the world, but you know, it's kind of like formula one racing. Everything gets built up there, and then it trickles down. We're starting to see this firm up and trickle down. So what happened in Linux that allowed the ascension of Red Hat and you've said you've seen a similar pattern, but you see Red Hat sort of emerging as the leading OpenStack distro, or the too early to tell? I don't think it's too early to tell. I think it's a little different these days than those days. Now I think they can become the standard because they've already got the credibility. They've built that up over the last 15 years or whatever. They've got the vendor relationships and the partners in place. Those things didn't exist in the early days of Linux because nobody was making money, nobody really had support and services until Red Hat kind of put that down. Now they've taken what they did, built this up, and if I'm a development team within a customer, I may not be 100% wanting to do Red Hat and pay Red Hat, but if I'm an executive, I'm a director and I've got to pin my name to something and I want to be able to have those support contracts, those go look at the road maps, see where things are going, and feel comfortable making this sort of an investment. I think that's where they went. I think that's where they jump ahead of a lot of the startups with their own distributions, and I think that's where they're going to really take off. So everybody's got a distro, right? I mean, because you've got some other big companies that are sort of coming to the fore. Jason, I wonder if I can poke at that because I kind of question if we'll have a big distribution market for OpenStack. So obviously Red Hat's made their place in the market with what they've done with Red Hat Linux, but OpenStack feels to me like it's a lot of different pieces and tools, and it's getting baked into a lot of solutions, so I might buy some cloud service and use it some OpenStack, but I might not even care about it, or I might need to build my next data center. I want virtualization, orchestration, all that wonderful stuff, but is it so much that I say I want OpenStack or I want a solution that fits my needs and it might be powered by OpenStack, and I'm even seeing some companies now that are using pieces of OpenStack that aren't even talking about it, and that's exciting to me, because some people, I talked in Vancouver and I've talked after, is we've almost moved past some of the OpenStack conversation, and that's where I'm even, I think Red Hat needs to evolve that. I think they can be, they're obviously a hugely important piece of it, but I don't know if saying we're going to just sell the same kind of model in OpenStack that we did for Linux is there, is your response on that? I think, first of all, you have to question who has moved past that conversation. I think that's important. I think sometimes we see the bleeding edge is where things are, and you and I have this conversation, and oftentimes we go back and forth because I go talk to a lot of organizations that haven't moved past that conversation, who, where OpenStack is a brand new, wow, that thing's a science experiment, and I mean, they're saying, you know what, three years ago it was, you got a box of things and you hoped it worked and you still had to bundle some stuff together, now you can actually deploy this in a supported model, and you know what, once your processes and your operations get mature, maybe you find out you don't need this pre-built thing, maybe you can go look at what you can put together, but I still think people want kind of that ecosystem. Who can build these other pieces? Who can build these orchestration engines? Who can put this all together without worrying about the fact that if I change one version of this component of OpenStack, because it is, it's a group of things, will it break everything else? And I think that's where the concern comes in. Yeah, Jason, you bring up a great point. I was having over dinner last night, we were talking about some OpenStack deployments and customers like, oh, I'm running Havana and I'm like, wait, Havana, we just released Juno, we're talking about Liberty, but customers, first of all, tend to install something and don't necessarily upgrade it, and that's a big challenge. And also, as you said, when they hear about something, they think about where it was two years ago, not what's getting released tomorrow. So walk us through, how often are you discussing OpenStack with your customers? Have they heard about this Docker thing yet? Where are they, what's the hot trouble spot? So absolutely, they have heard, they're discussing it. We're starting to see not a lot. I had dinner with two large customers I have up here in the Northeast just the other night. One of them is standing up an OpenStack environment right now, they're a large healthcare and they're using it for the right reasons. It's not to displace traditional virtualization or anything like that. They have a development group that needs that sort of agility, so they're standing it up here and they're continuing with the rest of their operations the way they have. So they get it and OpenStack discussions come up in every briefing pretty much that I do now and they like that. And you hit on a good point, which is people look at what things were two years ago because that's what they want to deploy. They never deploy the cutting edge. And I think that's one thing that someone like Red Hat has an advantage on is because a lot of times they'll make things easy before the community makes it easy and that's what a lot of customers want. And then for some of these other things, containers, Docker, that sort, customers are starting to look at it. Actually, if you, in my opinion, their development teams are, I've already looked at it and moved past that, but as far as kind of a standard, they're starting to consider it, but that is still very murky waters around security and how do we manage this and how do we operate that. And I think the biggest hindrance to any of these and a couple of customers that have not agreed is that it's about finding resources and people to manage and build this. It's one thing to talk, go to DockerCon or go to OpenStack Summit and you're surrounded by this. But to go hire people in Charlotte or Atlanta or Norfolk or somewhere and actually build and manage these things, they're not going to do that. They want to be able to lean back on Red Hat or someone else. Yeah, so I'm wondering if you can give us your viewpoint on the Red Hat portfolio, said we know we got lots of customers running in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but when you talk about virtualization, open shift, maybe CloudForms pulls it all together for a lot of customers, they like to get your viewpoint. So we're seeing some virtualization, not a lot. I mean, I think KVM itself is starting to get a lot more traction. I was just in Nutanix Conference, right? They released a crop list, but we're starting to see that in more places. You know, open shift. Can I just ask, you know, I mean, you and I have been in the VMware environment for a while. Why are customers shipping? What's shifting? What makes them kind of move in your opinion? I think some of it is that they just want options. I'm not convinced they're going to make a big change, but I think they want the ability to make a change. And I think as that bar and the hypervisor eventually becomes truly irrelevant once the features are really there, not just can I spin out VMs, but can I run those legacy apps and do HA? You'll see people want to make that change for, you know, licensing costs in the same old, same old. So I think that's one reason we'll see it. And then I think a lot of times a lot of these tools are getting more complex than they need to be. I read a blog post on this the other day where I said, I think some of these tools are, you know, customers want this much, the vendor wants to talk about this much. And once you get to that low bar, you know, your options open up greatly. I think, you know, CloudForms is a great, you mentioned that one. We were just having a discussion on the floor comparing that to vRealize Automation. And there's a lot of stuff in there that I think would meet the requirements for many customers in a simpler deployment model without all the extra baggage that it takes. Can you actually just give us the, you know, thumbnail sketch of what's in CloudForms? Yeah, so I mean, it is really a pretty good kind of self-servicing, provision, automation orchestration portal. It competes, you know, seemingly well with VRA. And it does allow you to deploy to VMware, you know, to OpenStack, to EC2, do kind of basic trending, reporting analysis. So there's a lot in there. And, you know, from what we've seen, the deployment is probably a little bit simpler. There's some third-party integrations and support that I have concerns about. And that's what we just talked about. We're seeing a lot more third-party supported plug-ins for VRA than we do for CloudForms. But I think it's a product that will continue to grow. And then that can help, they can leverage that for things like, you know, OpenShift, which I'm not seeing much of in a customer environment. So, what if we could talk about VMware a little bit? We heard comments this morning, you know, very clear dogma for proprietary Open. We had Pat Gelsinger on, Stu, a year ago May, May 2014. We asked him about containers. We asked him about Docker. And he said, well, VMware, I mean, we've got the best containers around. Right. And we were like, ah, I don't know. By August at VMworld, they had onstage Docker, Kubernetes, whole new story. What's going on there from the practitioner's perspective, from the CTO's perspective? How real is it? Is VMware, you know, serious? Are they just trying to freeze the market? You know, what do you think? I think it's a defensive move. I mean, we've seen those announcements, you know, we've seen Photon and those and we saw the announcements this week. And I think that, I think it's a bit of a defensive move. I think they had to make a pretty fast shift and pivot and change priority. But I, you know, I question if it's too little too late or it's a question of, you know, apathy from a lot of development of our teams and the people that manage those. Do they want that stuff on VMware? Does it matter if it's on VMware? Or once I start to go that direction, build those sorts of applications and replatform, am I just going to do that in an open stack environment running on KVM and not worry about VMware and it's kind of baggage and it's kind of overhead? So I think it's a little early to tell, but I'm not really betting on VMware to win in that space right now. So we were at the Nutanix conference as well. And it was interesting to, when you talk to practitioners about, okay, so you got this Acropolis platform. You showed the demo of, you know, migrating off of VMware onto another planet. Got a lot of cheers, you know, was the loudest example of cheering. Stu was pointing out to me that that was just a demo. I guess I understand that, but it was an interesting dynamic. You were in the room, you know what I'm talking about. But the number I asked, the number of practitioners, why, why are you interested in doing it? They all said the same thing, cost, cost, cost, cost, cost, VMware is expensive. I'm sure you've heard the same thing. Oh yeah. So you see companies like Nutanix doing what they're doing with Acropolis started to get into this multi-cloud, multi-hypervisor environment. Are they bumping into these past players and other folks? I mean, is there a sort of a collision course or where do you put them all? Yeah, I'm not sure they're running into the past players simply because I think once you kind of move toward platform as a service as your model, what you're running there doesn't really matter. If you want to run platform as a service internally and you want to run it on KVM, maybe Nutanix and Acropolis as your platform, maybe you white box it and build it yourself. I think there's other things that come into play there. Is that your sole play? Is that what you do? Do you have a lot of legacy applications you need to run? I think that's the benefit of Nutanix is here's one platform, one storage, one compute platform. You want to run legacy on VMware where it runs really great, okay. You want to move on to next generation on Acropolis. That's great as well. I think a lot of people applauded in there but kind of missed a lot of what that platform does not do today. It was a demo. There's basic HA, basic VMotion, DRS, functionalities in there. And I think people kind of overlook that. But there's definitely an opportunity there for those mixed environments. Right now, if you want to run mixed hypervisors or mixed platforms, it's much more complicated with different management and deployment tools and failover scenarios. And I think that's where Nutanix has an interesting proposition. So Jason, I'm curious if you've seen at the show or just what you're seeing in the field, how Red Hat's doing in kind of the storage and converged market. So VMware is like the solution that everybody used in most of the converged infrastructure environments. I've seen Microsoft starting to come on and I expect a big year from them. Linux obviously sits on a lot of these environments. It's there, but I haven't seen as many stacks built with it. I haven't seen as many storage deep integrations. It's coming to like solid fire intentry that are here, have a good presence. But is Red Hat missing an opportunity there or is it something that your customers would be looking for, should they be more relevant in this space? That's an interesting question. I don't know, they're probably missing an opportunity, but I think it would be an uphill battle for customers to kind of trust them for that. You could take a startup like solid fire intentry and kind of gain that credibility by the people you bring in. I think Red Hat would really have to invest to make that worthwhile. And maybe that is an opportunity there. Definitely is kind of a value add-on that they could do that others could not. And I think there's some definite opportunity there. I just think right now that's kind of a crowded market and it continues to get more crowded by the day. So I'm not sure if that's where I would be positioning my investment, my engineering. So the world we live in and have lived in for the last several decades. You've got purpose-built infrastructure to support apps. You've got Cisco networking. You've got EMC storage. You've got HP or Dell, servers, now Lenovo. Okay, then you've got Oracle. You've got the Red Stack, boom. Hardened, runs a lot of businesses. Not that agile, not too flexible. What's the world look like in the future? And what's the role of these giants? Yeah, I think everybody is trying to figure that out. If you look at these, you know, the Oracles with their kind of their cloud strategy that kind of looks good on paper, we'll see if they execute. You know, EMC is doing the same thing with their acquisitions. Cisco with the same thing with their acquisitions. I don't think anybody expected them, at least inside those companies, to have to innovate this quickly. I think it's causing a lot of upheaval. I think it's causing a great deal of fear and uncertainty about what they do in the future. You know, we're starting to see that commodity infrastructure decline sharply. We're starting to see people want to roll all intelligence up. And I think that in the future, you're going to see things shift. You're going to see EMC and, you know, the Cisco's trying to position themselves as a platform company. We do things better. Come in and build our platform in the data center and then use our public or hybrid cloud platforms to move things in and out. And then you've got people like, you know, Red Hat who's like, look, run this on whatever you want to run on it. Yeah, we've got our own public cloud strategy but we play well with others as well and we can position that. I think people like that level of choice. So I think you're going to see things shake out and everybody try to convince, you know, customers what they need to do. I've talked a lot with Cisco and their intercloud strategy built on OpenStack. I think, you know, they would love to position a good full stack, open stack private cloud deployment model with their public cloud intercloud providers and offer that. I think EMC would love to do the same. You know, I think we'll see Red Hat probably partner with some people to be able to deliver that. And then it's up to who can execute the best and really who can get the development teams to come their direction. Yeah, you made some great points there. I mean, Jason, you've got a heavy networking background when you go into the partner building there. I mean, Cisco's the first big booth there. We had Cisco on earlier here. We've seen a lot of Cisco and Red Hat partnering. But Red Hat's also, I mean, they've got a part in the networking ecosystem there doing stuff with Open Daylight, ODL. They've got NFV type solutions there. Have you poked at the networking stuff at the Red Hat show? You know, I have and that's actually my plan for later this afternoon. But I've walked through, looked at a few, talked to a few. But I think that is the next big win. You know, I think the networking, even if you look at what we can do now, you know, it just depends on what your use cases are. I think for your enterprise type customers, it's a little bit too new. I mean, trying to sell ACI or NSX from established vendors into those teams is almost impossible. To do something from a startup here, I can't even imagine that conversation with those traditional network teams. So I think those have a long way to go. And I think really the key there is integrated in as well as you can. So when you deploy, say, open stack environments, those things are just part of it. Whether you like it or not, here's what we got. Plug in however you want to plug in with the existing physical environment and go from there. But I think that's going to be a struggle knowing those guys. So buying from a startup is always a challenge, you know, of a company. There's been statements here in a, you know, last year at the show, open sources mainstream. I'm curious, you're in the field, is that true? Oh yeah, I don't think that's an issue. And in fact, I made a comment on Twitter today that I think, you know, I don't think you need to convince people that open source is the right point to make. You don't need to convince people to do that. You can't walk into any reasonable size organization and not have a lot of open source there. I think it's where it's at, but I think the adoption is much greater. And now I think it's just going to continue. But I think we've kind of beaten that to death. I mean, again, in 99 at Linux world, everybody's going to go open source, you know? And then it just kept going. And I'm sitting here today and this morning in the keynote thinking, guys, this is a similar message that I heard 15 years ago. That discussion is done. I don't think you need to convince anybody of that. Yeah, I mean, you know, the issue for a lot of companies is how do you make money? And most companies have a strategy to make money. I tweeted out in the crowd chat, by the way, go to crowdchat.net slash rhsummit, crowdchat.net sites rhsummit. Why aren't there more billion dollar open source software companies? And it's because it's really hard. And it's hard to make money. Why buy the cow when the milk's for free kind of thing? That's right. Obviously has successfully created that model. Others have created successful models that get bought out. Right. You know, J-boss, Spring, right? See, there's been successes, but they haven't been sustainable. And the work is now trying to go down as well. And we're seeing, Dave, lots of companies that leverage open source, but they're not, you know, the banner child for open source. It's just in there because there's really two types of companies, right? People that are using open source and the people that just maybe not realize that they're using open source. That's exactly right. So we see the same thing from our side as a value added reseller. I'm here to try to figure out how we engage with customers, how we wrap professional services and consulting around this. You know, as we shift from the build it ourselves teams up into the enterprise customers that want some help getting there and maintaining and customizing. You know, I think there's a huge potential in market there, a huge potential, much greater than we saw with just straight Linux and these other tools. Once we extend beyond that into cloud environments, it gets much more difficult and harder to find those people. Yeah, well, but consultants and integrators can make a lot of money in open source, so it's a great market for you guys. If we can figure it out. Jason, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate your insights. Good to have you. Thank you, my pleasure. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Red Hat Summit. Check out crowdchat.net slash rhsummit and join the conversation. We'll be right back.