 Live from San Jose in the heart of Silicon Valley. It's theCUBE, covering AWS Summit 2016. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Silicon Valley for AWS Summit, Amazon Web Services Summit. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE, our flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Lisa Martin. Our next guest is James Casey, VP of Partner Integration at Chef. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, John. Thanks for joining us today. One, Chef has been one of those companies that's been really, like Amazon, early days in a very, very core area that is now totally mainstream in the DevOps ethos, automation, orchestration, configuration management, all the hard stuff that used to be part of that big build out time sink that application developers used to do or IT would have to do to get set up. Right. So I'd love to get your perspective now as we're 10 years on the 10 year anniversary of AWS this year, what's changed? Where are we? Where is Chef and what is the current state of the business from an automation DevOps perspective? Yeah, sure. Yeah, we're a pretty old company now. I think it's eight and a half years we've been going doing this. I think one of the really interesting things for us was we started in the cloud. We began doing an open source automation cloud native and then sort of went away towards the enterprise and we saw much more four or five years ago as we really started understanding what our model was and what our business was, enterprises want to deploy on premise and it's only really been the last 12 months ago those exact same enterprises are now moving to the cloud. So this T-shirt, the rule of the cloud, we actually have a version of this I think it's about six years old when we were called Opscode and not Chef with the same logo and we've actually been able to bring the logo out again because all our customers have moved back to the cloud. Yeah, and it's been a really wonderful ride and it really complimented the company and you guys have done a lot of great work and really pioneering for the right reasons but the notion of recipes, a.k.a. Chef pretty much put that together is what the modular design, it's what people call the Lego block is the fundamental concept on agile programming and that ethos of DevOps which now is moving into the enterprise so fast with the Docker container madness at DockerCon, we saw that, DockerCon was just at the worldwide Microsoft Partner Conference this week displaying Docker madness highlights the mainstream aspect of DevOps. So what are the core things that are being going on in this enterprise developer community? How would you describe it? I think you hit the point there about the developers. I think DevOps really came from the operations world and it was how they could break down the silos with developers and start to move things through. With the rise of Docker it's turned around again and it's coming from the developer perspective. They're realizing how easy it is to actually push things all the way through to production. I think some of the challenges still are there about what happens when you get it to production. How do you manage containers at scale? So we still have new problems that we've sort of created for ourselves. We're able to move things much faster. The good problems though, right? There are great problems to have, yeah. And what are some of those problems that are being focused on? Containers at scale, some management and automation. I think the other one is really what's an enterprise DevOps workflow? Again, DevOps grew up in these small companies or web innovators and not everybody can become a Facebook or a Yahoo. Not everybody wants to become a Facebook or a Yahoo. They've got different issues. A bank has very different concerns. They have regulation that a lot of the early innovators didn't have. So their challenge is how do they balance getting that speed that they see with DevOps with the sort of, with the regulatory burdens, the concerns they have of actually running large businesses often with large legacy footprints that are making them a lot of revenue. So it's all about finding that balance between innovation and safety, innovation and quality and sort of finding that line in between it for them. So along those lines and helping customers find that balance, as you talked about the shift and they talked about it in the keynote this morning that Dr. Wood did about really the direction Amazon is moving in, direct target with Adelastic File System service rather against the big incumbent storage vendors. You look at where enterprises are going. How are you helping, give us some examples of, I know you've got some great customers, Alaska Airlines, Morrison for example, talk to us about how you're enabling enterprises like that to facilitate that migration and really automate their infrastructure on AWS in a single way. Yeah. I think when you look at these large customers you mentioned, Alaska, not a great example is Intuit or Genet who have moved everything, a really traditional business that moved completely to AWS. The challenges they see are really, sometimes around tools, but a lot around culture, it's really around transformation. Companies are transforming to be digital first. Often by the fact that their competitors are pressuring them to move faster, that their customers want to consume everything digitally. Alaska is a great example, the rise of their app, how many people now use their app all the way through from booking their flight through to check-in, through right through to the gate and how they can use that to get there. So often when we talk to customers, they're really on a journey of transformation not just tool adoption. One of the important things when we talk to them is find our trusted partners who actually is gonna help them on that journey, who's already been through that journey. Amazon's a great example, they transformed themselves with AWS, transformed Amazon.com into that sort of high-velocity, large-scale company. So we can help them with the tool automation transformation together with a partner like Amazon. That's a great thing, I'm glad that you brought up culture is one of the things, and you were talking about being a DevOps expert yourself. We talked about kind of the Amazon target audience historically being the developer community, that the full-scale developer community, the hybrid IT folks. We're looking at the shift from an organizational standpoint as businesses are on this long journey of digital transformation. We're seeing a shift in terms of buying decisions and making those decisions to shifting to the cloud, hybrid, public, private, et cetera, shifting out of IT's control and into the C-suite, into the lines of business. What are you seeing there and how are you helping facilitate the organizational mind-shift that an enterprise has to go through in order to, as you said, move at this speed in order to compete? Yeah, that's exactly what we're seeing. Traditionally, Chef would have been adopted by the web group, the digital group, the cloud team, and really within their silo, and they were the people who were moving faster. And what we now see is sort of these C-led decisions coming down. I think what's really important when we see that is how do you join up those efforts together? You need to take that grassroots to actually understand what DevOps is and how to apply it in the culture and get them connected with the people who can start to push that on the broad adoption. You know, like DevOps is breaking down silos between those teams building one product, but what we see usually in large enterprises is the business units are still themselves operating as very independent silos. Intuit is a great example of this. What they saw was that they had like 30 units all working pretty independently, some more advanced than others. And when we came in, it was really around connecting the dots. They built teams of people internally whose main job was just to connect their existing teams together, run phone calls, get them together, find the best examples, and spread that internally. Often they didn't even have to look outside. It all was there already. But joining those dots up between the teams so that they all can accelerate at the same time, get that learning that's happening in one small team and start to put it across a much wider set of teams. I'm glad you brought that up. It's kind of a parallel to what Dr. Wood talked about in the keynote with perspective big data and really the opportunity to land and expand across business units within an organization to be able to take advantage of that data. So just an interesting parallel. Great point. That brings up the whole ecosystem plan. You're involved in partnering with Chef, which has always been partner-friendly. It's been open source around Nando knows, ops codes, history. But I want to get your thoughts on this because we go to so many different events. We're like a horizontal programming machine and the audience knows we do that. But the thing that is that the becoming a generic buzzword is, I'll quote, ecosystem play. We have the ecosystem play going on, which is basically business term for we want to invest in building our own ecosystem, fostering collaboration, which means partnering. So I have to ask you the question, in this world of Amazon as cloud and open source continue to rise as not only tier one capabilities, but community, how has that changed partnering and how has Chef partnering and how do people partner today? How do you participate in the ecosystem that has so many multiple dimensions? I think one of the interesting things for us as an open source company when we look at partnering is we often give maybe more than we get. And I think that's a good way to be a successful partner. Like, we know that for our partners, if we can make using Chef, allow them to install their tools easier and faster and get faster adoption, that's good for them and it's good for us. So on the code side. So on the code side. Clearly open source participation. Okay, you got that, that's pretty straightforward. Business wise, that's always the question. The business model. Because we are feeling a little softening in some of the sectors of the tech economy. We talked about the troubles internationally from an economic standpoint. People want to make money too. They still have a product to sell. Visa, granted it's different and open. How are you guys doing business deals and what are some of the standard new ways to partner and make money together? Yeah, I think one of the things that's key is like, automation is a great driver for consumption. So as the cloud players move to a consumption based model, partnering with automation vendors is a really great thing for them. But I think that's where we've seen most of our success. So enabling. Enabling, yeah. So those business deals, are they mostly just kind of support partnerships or what not? It depends. We're seeing more and more, I would say over the last 12 months, we see more and more of our deals with a partner. We've done a lot of work sort of enabling our global SI partners. Like Accenture. Accenture, the smaller ones, CloudTP, CloudReach, DataPy, the new brands, the new cloud native. And I think that's where we see ourselves working really closely with Amazon, with partners like that. They're really the Amazon native partners in what they can do. They can really take all these new ideas of DevOps, of Chef, of AWS, and put it together in a package. So I got to ask you the question. I ask everybody at your IQ level. It's very, super smart. There's two dynamics going on. I want to get your thoughts with you. You mentioned some of the boutiques or alcohol boutiques. The new guard, the new partners, global partners. But Amazon and open source is a horizontally scalable concept. Elastic, it's about building this a really horizontally scalable infrastructure. Yet, all the focus and big data and IoT is vertically focused with domain expertise. So how does that change some of the dynamics and partnerings? It certainly changes the selection process on who to partner. I think as well, it changes very much the partners you get into the deal. What we tend now to see is we will have a cloud partner providing infrastructure and then you have these vertical experts. A great example is around compliance. So we launched last year a new compliance product that's part of our Chef Automate Suite. And what we see is a lot of the partners in the federal space and the healthcare space have this deep, deep, deep expertise and they're being really successful turning that and saying now you can do HIPAA compliance, now you can do PCI compliance, now you can do Fed compliance but you can do it on the cloud. And so I think it's important to have that combination between the broad play infrastructure partners and the high vertical specialized knowledge. So to tease that, to connect the dots here in real time. So that means that your strategy is enable that horizontally fabric of scale vis-a-vis the enablement and let the partners differentiate in a vertical way. We want to sell product licenses and not consulting services and a lot of our partners they have that consulting expertise, they have that domain knowledge. They can build content and that's a great thing about open source as well. With Chef as an open source platform it's very easy for them to build content and it's very safe for them to build content because what's their decision? They could always go to the open source version and still continue to make money. It's got to ask a hard question. What does Chef 2.0 mean to your customer and ecosystem? With Chef 1.0 was the first eight years. All that hard work, brute force, building the foundational sets of services now with the automation and scale going really fast. What's Chef 2.0 all about? I think when you look at Chef 1.0 it really was configuration management. Those baby steps. How do I configure my server fleet? How, when I'm in the cloud, can I get repeatable environments? And now what people are looking at is how can I extend this all the way out across the entire workflow from a developer writing code to it appearing in production? So we had our user conference yesterday and today in Austin and we just launched yesterday, Chef Automate which I think is our attempt at sort of framing what you would call Chef 2.0. So microservices, things of that nature. It combines sort of the core automation tools that people need along with how do you do compliance at scale? How do you do compliance at speed? Also, how do you do application delivery in this microservice container world? Because it's different. I think we spent the last 18 months really trying to understand what are the existing concepts around how we think to build infrastructure works in a containerized world? What needs rethinking? So extending the DevOps workflow would be? Extending the DevOps workflow, exactly. And giving that Enterprise DevOps workflow. And the Enterprise needs a lot more things. When you're working at huge scale with so many teams working together, visibility becomes important, governance becomes important. And how do you layer this without slowing people down because then you're losing the spirit of the DevOps flow. You want people to move fast but you want them to do it safely. Well, the thing about DevOps is, Mark Zuckerberg once said for Facebook move fast and break stuff. And then he recanted that when they started growing and scaling to move fast and be 100% uptime. So again, he welcomed to the maturity phase of Facebook. But this speaks to the DevOps of the 2.0 which is I want to be agile, move fast but customers aren't going to reduce SLAs. Banks aren't going to say, oh wait a minute, now your transactions will go slower now because we're more agile. Right, exactly. And I think that's where we see all these new concepts coming in. I think three years ago if we had come to a conference and we're talking about automation, people weren't talking about security or compliance. And I think you see it from Amazon, you see it from us, that bringing security compliance to the forefront of that workflow is really how you're going to get a lot of enterprises to move quickly. Absolutely. And on that front as we talked about Chef 2.0 and the announcement yesterday of Chef Automate, what's Chef 2.0 AWS? What does that look like and where are these folks here coming to learn today and extend their businesses? How is that partnership in the 2.0 world going to help them? I think the great thing about AWS for us is that when you come through an event like this it's a mixture of customers. You get the people going, I need to configure my first Chef server and I want to do it in the cloud all the way up to the early adopters who are still here using the latest generation of AWS services. I think when you look at it for us at Chef, AWS is a great vehicle for us to ship our products, AWS Marketplace and how people can consume services easily. And also it's just a great enabler for us. I mean we really work in terms of being neutral across all the infrastructures and give the customer a choice and often the customer's choice is I'm on-prem where do I want to move and AWS is the services they want to consume. And is it fair to say that this partnership and service that you're doing with AWS is an enabler to use that word of mitigating concerns that enterprises have regarding security and compliance? Right. I think as well in the automation front that one of the things we can do to a customer is say your choice isn't binding, you can move to AWS, you can be hugely successful, but you know, here's your get-out at GeoCard, you can move back to your data center, you can have some of your fleet still there and still have all the benefits. And that's a safety net for them. Exactly. And they love that. Right. We know that you aren't going to use it probably, they aren't going to go back because once they feel that experience of moving fast, they want to stay there, but having that safety net and that B plan is really important. Well, and you know, even with the dogma of the cloud and we're all cloud native guides that we're all cloud native, you are too, enterprises want to be cloud native, it's not that they don't want the cloud, some things just aren't cloud worthy. Yeah. Specific, hardcore, legal and or compliance issues. It's a really important message as well that when we talk to customers, not everything has to move to the cloud and not everything should move to the cloud. So we work very closely with like GE and Citi and they talk about moving 4,000 applications to a more modern infrastructure and sometimes that's a cloud, sometimes they've not and it's giving them the framework where they can decide how to do that. The cloud today to me feels a lot like, you know, one big, you know, free love. We saw GE last year, they reinvent on stage with Andy Jassy saying, quote, we're betting our business on Amazon. Yesterday, Jeff Emmelt was on stage with Saty Natela saying, we're betting the business on Microsoft. So there's a little bit of love going on. So to me, this, you know, would say cloud is going to be an inter-cloud world. Exactly. And so inter-networking of the 80s, 90s would spawn massive wealth creation and innovation around the OSI model and TCPIP was around inter-networking. That word didn't live around. So do you agree that inter-cloud will be a big deal between vendors like inter-networking was? Everybody talks about the journey to the cloud. That's a journey that's never going to end for most customers. There is no end state. They're going to have some work on-premise in their data center. They're going to be in one, at least two clouds, maybe more, and that's okay. And I think that's part of the uncertainty that enterprises have to accept as they start to transform themselves to this digital first wave being in the cloud to say, it's okay for things to be different. Let's now begin to look at where the best place to put things are and let's make those decisions and revisit them as we go forward. That's exactly it. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and every enterprise is different and the cloud is the nirvana for that. Love the quote. We're going to end it there. The journey to the cloud never ends. It will never end. James Casey, thanks so much for sharing your awesome insight here on theCUBE. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE here live in Silicon Valley with AWS Summit. We'll be right back with more after this short break.