 All right, we're back. This is Dave Vellante. We're live from Strata Conf in Santa Clara, California. This is our second year of doing Strata. Here with Alex Williams. Alex is the editor-in-chief of Services Angle, our services publication. Welcome, Alex. Thanks for coming on with us. And we're here with JP Morgenthal, who is a cloud ranger. Cloud ranger, and you're also an in-focus blogger, right? That's correct. Yeah, so welcome. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much. What the hell is a cloud ranger? It's not like a Navy SEAL type of thing? I think that's how the name came about. It's a team within the EMC Consulting that basically helps executives to understand the end-to-end solution around cloud virtualization. Okay, so you sit inside the services organization, and you're part of the consulting group? I'm part of the EMC Consulting, yes. Okay, so what's happening out there? You guys are always talking about cloud and big data and intersecting. I mean, I know it's good marketing, but is that actually happening in the field? How are you making that happen? Well, it's really interesting. I also was on David Lenticum's podcast over the weekend. We had a great conversation regarding this. The question is, does big data exist with out-cloud computing? And of course, in some regards, yes, and in some regards, no. I mean, we have been focused on business intelligence for years, and there's been a significant investment in trying to manage very large quantities of data and operate on it and find solutions around extracting critical pieces of information. But no matter how hard we try this, we've been hitting ceilings very quickly due to the technology. And in addition to that, it's been very costly. One of the advantages that the cloud has brought is the ability to make complex data processing and operating on very large volumes of data fairly inexpensive. And I think that that's brought to the game a change and the ability for customers and end users to now focus on solutions that they didn't have before. You know, the line is, big data gives cloud something to do. Maybe so. I think that's fair. I mean, is people struggling to find use cases for the cloud? I mean, beyond sort of just bit buckets? You know, it's interesting. I work with a large part of my group is very strong in infrastructure and operations. I happen to be the app guy. My background is more applications than it is infrastructure and operations. And so from the application perspective, I believe that the cloud needs to be designed to handle the application specifics and that there isn't a one size fits all cloud. You really need to design in context. And so the application is very important to the overall architecture of the cloud. Go ahead, Alex. Yeah, so I'm curious about this metaphor for the use with the ranger. So where are the danger zones? What are the, who are the heroes out there that you're seeing on a day-to-day basis? What are, you know, what is the story that you're hearing from customers? Well, I mean, the CIO is struggling and I hate to take an opportunity to plug my book here, but it's relevant. Plug the book, run the queue. All right, so April 17th, books coming out. Cloud computing, assessing the risks was co-authored with Bernard Golden and Jared Carstensen. Multi-million dollar advance for that, or? No. Shall we? Keep working. Good day job. Keep it in the day job. But one of the chapters I wrote was on organizational governance and organizational change. And the cloud is really, you talk about who are the heroes. And it's the individuals in the IT shop that are struggling right now in the midst of a paradigm shift. How do I enable and leverage this technology without complete disruption to my organization while simultaneously battling this concept of shadow IT that's been enabled by public cloud computing? So the villains are the ones who are voting the public cloud? There are heroes and villains, what there are are people trying to get work done. And unfortunately, people underestimate how much and how difficult it is for IT shops to manage very large organizations and constantly dealing with these disruptions. I mean, mobile computing, big data. These are now becoming widespread terms that people have been up bringing to the table. And 70 to 80% of the budget is still dedicated to keeping the lights on. How do I introduce innovation? So how is IT adapting in your book because these disruptions are just gonna continue? Sure. And they are not. I mean, the book is to help them understand how to adapt. Hopefully they will recognize, I mean, I'm a big supporter of this concept of DevOps. The movement to that organization that's agile, working together, application, development with QA, with operations, everybody understanding. No more throwing the software over the wall and expecting operations to be able to manage this. I actually just, my first blog on Infocus actually was called The Cost of Being Unique. And it discussed that old bravado that we used to see in IT about, hey, I'm different than everybody else. Your application doesn't work for me because I got my own idiosyncrasies. And so I discussed that with cloud, hopefully people are seeing that the cost of being unique could be the business in the end run. But overall, I happen to see more IT executives starting to look across the tiers and asking what are their peers doing and wanting to copy the successes and not wanting to stand out alone and say, I'm unique, Mr. SAP, Mr. Oracle, come in and build me a very special customized version for $40 million because I have three things that are different. And so I think that this whole pattern is starting to emerge around managing the environment, relying on best practices, relying on what the rest of the industry is doing. And it looks positive. To be the organizational discussion is interesting. And particularly when you sort of think about the IT organizations that, they're handicapped in a big way. The deck is stacked against them. You got these cloud service providers. It's almost like you got one football team who's in a dome and they're on a nice dry field and they're just throwing it down. And the other one's outside. It's raining, it's snowing, and IT's got all this infrastructure and legacy processes built up that they've got to deal with. And the CEO's saying, well, why can't my IT be like Facebook or Google? It's so easy and simple and it's a single app and it's serving hundreds of millions of people. So are IT organizations at a disadvantage? Are they beginning to sort of have to benchmark themselves against these cloud service providers who largely have a green field? And how are you seeing them move from point A to point B? It is definitely an education for executives. I think the IT executive is now needs to understand what's out there for them to use, but they also need to be able to explain finally to the executives and to the board for larger companies that have that, where capital expenditure comes out of a larger group. Exactly why, in certain cases, this doesn't work for their business. And there's a lot of reasons. And some people that just come out as detractors against the cloud, oh, risks to this. One of the things, it was a Focus.com roundtable we did last week with Randy Byas. And it was very interesting because one of the things that emerged was this, one of the things that we identified with cloud that changes the game is a change from risk avoidance to risk mitigation. So this, instead of I'm going to only, I'm going to shut out the whole world, deny all and only grant a few, I'm going to accept that bad things can occur and I'm going to look at how I can mitigate to the best of my ability within my organization. That's a huge cost savings opportunity for an organization. Are you seeing more customers than wanting to adopt an Amazon web services type model where you will essentially can optimize your infrastructure so you have additional resources and use those resources for providing services of their own? I was talking about this with one of your colleagues. I don't see that many executives really even fully understand what Amazon offers. And Amazon is a double-edged sword. Sure, Amazon offers on-demand infrastructure, but they also offer an entire environment that is somewhat proprietary. And if you build to their environment, there's nothing else out there for you to move to in the service provider world. So that's a big decision. I don't, but I really don't even see them fully understanding what Amazon is offering with regard. I mean, the big issue that everyone is looking to is can I do the hybrid architecture and look at Amazon as a way to scale out when I need to? And there's a lot of people who don't believe that that's even possible in today's market yet. We're still stuck in a very private or your public and hybrid in cases, but it's very, very strictly defined and static. It's not on demand. But we are starting to see it. Eucalyptus is really promoting this model where you can use both Amazon web services and the Eucalyptus private cloud to be able to spill over data. We're seeing cluster, for instance, and the storage capabilities that go into Amazon web services and such. So we are starting to see that, is that just us on the leading edge seeing that kind of thing? Yeah, I think we are on the leading edge right now. One of the things I said about Randy is that Randy's perspective, Randy Byas, who's CTO of cloud scaling in case people don't know where, he's seeing something very uniquely because he's on the outer edge. He's building extremely very large scale infrastructures for cloud service providers. He's doing something that most enterprises and most small and mid-sized businesses are not doing. And so he gets a perspective on the industry that a lot of people may never see or won't see for many years to come. I think we're also in that same game. We're in the tornado. We're helping to drive it with thought leaders in the space. But there are, I mean, look at this conference. It's a great example. There are a lot of people here trying to look at what's my next career move going to be? Am I going to be a data scientist? But if you look at what the availability of people who can actually architect large scale data in these big data environments, it's very, very small amount of people that can do that today, right? So you mentioned tornado. You are right in the middle of the tornado and a lot of ways here are a job is to help people get through the tornado. Exactly. But the entire vendor, the enterprise vendor community is talking cloud. Even Oracle now is talking cloud. If the whole world goes to cloud, isn't that a bad thing for you guys? And if not, why not? Well, it depends how you define cloud. Actually, this was actually part of the round table discussion and what Randy brought to the table, which is what initiated this. It started as a Twitter conversation where he mentioned that he didn't like what the NIST definition, because he felt it was aged and it didn't really represent, it was very technical. And what it brought us to is this concept of an architectural pattern as a way to describe cloud computing. And the pattern entails all the different aspects of how you're deploying a cloud and what goes into a cloud. And from a business perspective, as well as the technical perspective. And that's changing a lot of things for us. Now, with regard to EMC, we are very, we have one of the things that brought me to be EMC. I'm only here three weeks. This is actually week three for me. Newbie. Yeah, a real newbie, but I love the breadth of the portfolio. I think the portfolio offers customers significant options to play the game, however it turns out. And so I don't have the concern that the cloud's a bad thing in any way, shape, or form. Okay, so you would embrace that. If that's what the customer wants to do, you'll help them get there. That's our job. We're objective. I mean, we look to help the customer in any way, shape, or form based upon what they have today and what they're looking to accomplish. Excellent. You mentioned DevOps before. We're launching, Alex is actually heading up this project with his colleague, Clint Finley. We're launching DevOps Angle. Okay, great. We've got a meetup on Wikibon next week. Actually, maybe a couple weeks in the sixth with Munder Capital, somebody who's achieving hyper-productivity with DevOps. Are you hearing CIOs talk more about DevOps now, or are they sort of still in the, what is that? Where's the developers who are talking about DevOps? Where's the operations guys? It's the operations guys right now. The interesting thing is I brought this to a conversation on LinkedIn, and I said, do we need kind of a manifesto for DevOps? And I spoke to the ops codes guys, and what's happening interestingly there is that executives, and this is a fear that was brought up by the leading DevOps guys, the executives are being introduced to it in a very poor way. They're being kind of, you know, they're getting this perception that they can substitute one for four with a DevOps, where I'm gonna have my programmer, and he's my sysadmin, and he's my dev, instead of... Mashing them all together. Yeah, and so he's looking at it as a way to cut headcount instead of a way to become more efficient. And so when they get that thought process, it destroys what DevOps can bring to the organization instead of being a benefit. Do you see that as well? I mean, you're obviously very... Yeah, I mean, it's such a, I mean, tornado is a good phrase for it, I think, because everything is kind of swirling up, and it's really, I think, in many ways. Well, we see there's a major push in application development, and that application development is creating much shorter development cycles, and with those shorter development cycles, you have these issues with operations. But that is the allure of DevOps, right? Is I'm gonna be able to cut... I'm gonna be able to manage way more stuff with way fewer people. But it's a cultural matter. And your point is, if you set out with that as the objective, you're gonna mess it out, as opposed to maybe engineering your organization around high productivity and highly motivated people. It's an approach that... So my concern was, and I've stated this publicly, is that I don't think that anybody who's an enterprise programmer wants to be a CIS admin, and most CIS admins don't wanna be enterprise programmers. And so the cultural personality type that do each of these don't fit and meld into one person. So is it DevOps, or is it Ops Dev? In other words, who's driving this? Is it the operations people, or is it the application development people? Because I'm not sure I'd want my infrastructure work like my application development. My, so my personal experience with this was I actually was in an organization where application development wrote code, threw it over the wall into operations. And every day the operations call in the morning grew by three people. And yet there was never an application developer on that call unless there was a customer in need. I think that to me, the whole DevOps is that during the entire development process, operations is part of understanding the code. They're understanding what they're deploying and they're part of the architectural environment as to what this application's gonna be deployed on. So that when you get to the end game, everything's been taken into account. I didn't write some middleware structure on my personal laptop running VMware and now I'm gonna deploy into this fixed environment where I have a bunch of stuff running on bare metal and things aren't performing. So it's getting that together and cleaning up that picture. And just from what we've written about and the people we've talked to, there are ways that DevOps becomes adopted just through the use of the technology that is being used inside the enterprise such as Hadoop, which does require kind of a bit of everything. You need to know operations, you need to know programming, you need to know analytics. And so it becomes kind of a technology that really requires lots of skill sets. Well JP, I didn't know what to expect from this interview. The new guy coming on and we hadn't met before so this has been great. We talked about cloud, we talked about DevOps. My last question is let's bring it back to data. How is big data changing your world? So the big change is really again, looking at the ability to look at complex data and very large volumes of data and looking for an infrastructure to make that work and bringing the two together. So you have data scientists and the architecture. Think about architecting map reduce modules. What goes into that design from that application perspective? And then how am I going to deploy this and actually run this in an efficient manner? And I think that that is really the picture that's starting to emerge here in the environment. JP Morgenthau, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Great job, great interview. We really enjoyed having you. Love the energy, cloud ranger. Good luck with everything. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you.