 Good afternoon. There are a lot of chairs up here. Well, welcome to the final day of Cloud Foundry Summit Silicon Valley edition. Thank you all for staying and hanging out with us. We have the distinct honor of having John Rose join us. He was the chairman of the Cloud Foundry Foundation board to do a little closing fireside chat minus the fire. But we thought we could go through a couple of, get your opinions and your thoughts on some things to have your finger on the pulse of what's going on right now. Can you tell us a little bit about your new role since the acquisition? Yeah, we had a small combination of two companies. We're now about eight, nine months into this creation of something called Dell Technologies, which is the combination of the Dell ecosystem and the EMC ecosystem, which includes VMware, Pivotal, RSA, SecureWorks, Virtustream, Dell, Dell EMC. I think we're running $75 billion a year now, pretty much all aspects of infrastructure, keeping us very busy. I mean, I spent the first year prior to the acquisition figuring out the strategy to put the two companies together. Thank God that's done. That was a lot of work. It seemed to work reasonably well. Now my responsibilities are the overall CTO for Dell EMC, and I run a kind of virtual CTO structure for the Dell Technologies side. And then that would be enough. But unfortunately, I also am responsible for what's called cross-profit operations. So many of you who probably are in large companies know that the challenge isn't innovation in a silo. It's trying to make everything work together. And so CTOs tend to be responsible for setting a strategy. I got the pleasure of also being asked to make sure that we put the underpinnings underneath it. So I run cross-product operations, which is all of the things that the engineering organizations use and share, and the things that we want to do in common across all of our portfolio need to be done in a more centralized way. And so I describe us as bookends. And then given that I had, you know, co-ed this amount of free time after that, a couple of years ago when we formed the foundation, I took the board seat and got elected chair. It's been a lot of fun. We had a little transition last year, putting Abby in place and Sam moving over to Google. I realized that when you're the chairman of a nonprofit and you have a leadership change, your job gets quite busy because certain things like signing legal documents suddenly become your responsibility. So anyway, super excited, you know, love what's going on in the foundation right now and in this ecosystem. You know, who would have thought a couple of years ago that, you know, we would have this level of population of end users and people putting this technology into practice. In fact, I think that Cloud Foundry by and large is probably the most adopted and used in real-world scenarios, cloud-native architecture in the world. And, you know, that's pretty humbling, given that every technology has an opportunity to be successful. But the measure of that is whether or not it actually gets used by real people doing real things that have real meaning. We're absolutely at that stage now, so super excited. Well, we are pleased to have you here and still continuing to be the chairman of our board. You know, since you've been here since the foundation was created, how do you feel about the progress that's happened so far and even like at this event from last year, how do you feel about the momentum we have? Yeah, yeah, I think, you know, like everything we went through in evolution, the first was, you know, launching Cloud Foundry. How do you make this a large open source initiative? And if you think about it, you know, we actually started later than most other kind of current open source projects that are out there. You know, Cloud Foundry came into existence after a number of cloud-native stacks had already been out there and definitely things like OpenStack. But the progress that we made in the last couple of years is just staggering. I mean, we went from, okay, let's build and deliver something that people can use. By the way, that's where most open source projects actually fail. Open source communities and foundations think that they're there for the purpose of just encouraging people to figure it out and hoping that the ecosystem actually delivers something usable, I think, with the certification programs and the kind of discipline that we have around this ecosystem. The fact that pretty much every Cloud Foundry distribution out there works can be consumed and is utilized by real customers is a huge testimony. So that's item number one. Number two is if all you have is a collection of people building the technology and you don't have an ecosystem of people using it, then you probably will fail also because, again, great technology nobody uses isn't really all that interesting. In the last year, we've begun to see that pivot. And I think this year the summit is a great indication, just a number of end users that are here, the number of people putting it into practice. The last panel is a great example of that. That is exciting. This is not theoretical work. This is now real. I put a challenge out in the Cloud Foundry Summit in Europe at the end of last year that I still think we have more work to do on and that is that it's great to have the technology and it's great to have the customers that are going to use it and are putting it into practice. There's another dimension of ecosystem around that that has to form. And I think we're making huge progress on the developer ecosystem. I still think we need to do more and spend more time as an overall ecosystem encouraging services companies and professional services companies and even infrastructure companies to step up and make it easier for the customer to consume the technology. Because the technology exists well. The demand is there. The customers want to use it. It's a question of how do you fill in all those gaps. Simple things like training. We have a nice program now that has got plenty of content. Now we need companies to embrace it and to leverage it. Professional services companies need to pivot from being kind of dark ages, legacy development methodologies to building practices around cloud-native development practices so that we can scale that. But overall, I'm incredibly happy with the progress given that this is literally a two-and-a-half-year journey and we've gone from beginning to really a very significant presence in the overall industry and real-world environments without anything miraculously happening. Just a lot of good effort and great technology that people can actually use. Turns out hard work can make you an overnight success. Yes, exactly. We've talked a lot this week about digital transformation. I opened talking about the role developers play in that. But I do think that's something that's been top of mind this week and most of your day-to-day. As you think about when we talk about digital transformation and cloud-native practices and cloud-native application architectures, do you think there's an opportunity thinking beyond cloud foundry to start applying some of those methodologies to edge devices and development happening on the edge? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think we're already seeing it, actually. I think, you know, at the risk of using buzzwords, I'm not a big buzzword fan. I'll digress for a second. I'm a networking guy from a long time ago. I used to be the CTO of a company called CableTron Systems in the 1990s. For any of you who are networking people, today we call networking devices switches. We used to call them bridges. We used to call it the actual accurate term. And then somebody decided to create a buzzword called switch. And most of us in the standards body kind of looked and said, this is nuts. Why are we renaming something? So we have a lot of buzzwords out there. I'll try to be accurate and not marketing. But there's this buzzword called IOT, the Internet of Things. It is, you know, conservatively described as a multi-trillion-dollar market. Now, it's really not a multi-trillion-dollar market all by itself as a new market. It represents a fundamental shift that people are realizing that you used to build IT systems to scale to the number of users in your business, internal users. When we became digital in the first wave, we started to think about building our systems to be able to scale to the number of consumers of our service. But the definition of consumer was a human being. If you were a bank, you no longer built systems just to help your tellers do their job. You built a system that allowed your customers to do electronic banking. It was a great shift, and we went from building IT systems that scaled to tens of thousands of users to maybe millions of users in some cases. IOT is different because it basically says we're redefining what a user is. A user is now any intelligent device, even if it's marginally intelligent, that benefits from being connected to this broader ecosystem of services that represent the IT infrastructure. Like a fridge. Like a fridge, exactly. I still don't quite get that one, but I think that's something useful. But fridges are good. I'm not sure there's a great business model there yet. Anyway, punchline though is when we move into the IOT world, one of the things that we've realized is I like to describe it as there's a conservation of IT, the law of conservation of IT. For those of you who are scientists, there's law of conservation of energy, things of that nature. What it means is all the things that are necessary to make IT happen have to happen somewhere, regardless of what's involved in it. You have to be able to access data. You have to be able to process data. You have to be able to get results. You have to be able to have management. You have to be able to understand how to survive. When you move to IOT, what happens is we shift the intelligence of the thing, the client, down to a very minimal level. In fact, we have to. We have to make it incredibly dumb. You don't want to put a lot of data out there necessarily and store it there forever. You don't want infinite amounts of compute. People are saying, hey, Tesla's building a data center in a car. That's not really the goal, because if you put a data center in a car, you couldn't put enough batteries in there to actually make it run very long. You actually want the minimal amount of compute capacity in that car, but you want it to appear as if it has a data center in the car by being able to connect to the rest of the IT infrastructure. And so I think, in order to make that work, this interrelationship between what's happening at the edge, which is this pervasive connectedness of new things and their need to interact with the other things requires us to think in a cloud native model. Because if we don't, if we think in a legacy model, we'll try to build a data center in a fridge or build a data center in a car. Instead, in a cloud native world, we can simply build microservices in containers and we can connect them to an agile framework and that, whether it be smart or dumb, application close to that car that has certain access to certain data can seamlessly interact with the other microservices and containers and other services that exist within the overall cloud. It can form dynamic relationships and ultimately you can create this seamlessness in which the overall end-to-end experience is under one framework, something like Cloud Foundry, but the instantiation of the containerized, microservice, API-driven applications can be distributed appropriately into very lightweight edge devices or very high-capacity data centers or whatever else and it can work as a coherent system. I don't think you can solve IoT without a cloud native paradigm. I don't think you can solve IoT cost-effectively without rethinking how you design applications across this and I don't think you can solve the edge without the core and if you solve them independently, you'll solve nothing. So you have to have these frameworks to tie them together. Yeah, absolutely. And so as we're continuing on that and we're seeing a broader proliferation of IoT and use cases around the edge, where do you see this going and the momentum that we've talked about this week even with cloud native and cloud native applications and looking at just the number of users that are attending this event and the interesting things they're already doing with this technology, where do you think this can go? Where do you see things going over the next couple of years? Well, first of all, I think we're just at the beginning. I mean, you know, we're applauding ourselves righteously for having lots of users now of Cloud Foundry, but if you look, there are entire industries that really haven't pivoted yet. The funny thing is the industries that have pivoted are not the ones I would have expected five years ago. The fact that the industrial industries have pivoted and our cloud native early is stunning to me. I've dealt with that industry for 25 years and never seen anything like this where early and fast adoption of a new technology is happening out of the industrial side. Normally, they take a lot longer, which is great. At the same time, you know, we look in the banking sector and we've seen certain, you know, disruptive areas adopt it, but the core systems haven't pivoted yet entirely. When we look into areas like healthcare, which are very obvious ones that we think we ought to be doing a lot of new application development and new ways to deliver IT systems, we've actually seen very little yet relative to the size of the industry. And so I think we're kind of at the beginning of that journey. So the first principle of what I expect to happen over the next couple of years is some of these industries that are still figuring out how to make that jump, how to move into this paradigm will figure it out because there'll be enough examples from other industries and enough maturation of the technology and hopefully enough maturation of the ecosystem to help them make that jump. And so we should see a lot more diversity and balance that won't be overly concentrated on a specific set of early industries and what we'll see is a representative sample of all industries sitting in this audience over the next couple of years. So that's number one. Number two is we're going to discover all kinds of horrible unintended consequences of moving to the cloud native world that have nothing to do with technology. You know, Abby and I were talking about it. One of the ones that we're seeing already, which is a victim of our success, is when you apply a cloud native continuous integration, continuous delivery technology, it doesn't have to be cloud foundry, to a regulated environment. You start to run into weird human problems. For instance, if I'm continuously streaming new componentry into an active environment, which is kind of the principle of how you do this stuff, yet that active environment is regulated and somebody has to sign off on the risk profile of it and guarantee that it is safe and that it's predictable. That human intervention, that it's historically been a gate between testing and productization, starts to become a problem. And now we've worked through that by a lot of manual intervention and trying to constrain the use cases, but we're gonna have to solve that problem more systemically. We're going to have to develop architectures, not just in cloud foundry, but across the board, that allow you to accommodate for risk models that are different than a web scale company or are different than a consumer company. And I think that's a huge area of innovation that I'd be very disappointed if we haven't solved those not by just throwing bodies at it, but by actually thinking about better ways to sign code and to profile code and to be able to do kind of intelligent, maybe AI-driven certification and testing so that the person responsible for the risk profile feels comfortable that they can absorb code very quickly into a production environment even in a regulated environment. So there's a bunch of these new technical problems that emerged because we've actually had use of the technology that we're gonna have to solve. And so I think it's gonna be both a breath of adoption transformation over the next several years and a bunch of these kind of unintended technical obstacles that we're gonna work through that will ultimately harden and evolve the technology to make sure that that breath of customers can actually adopt cloud-native architectures without compromising on their business success or their business profile or their industry dynamics like regulation. Which will probably also drive the technology in new ways. Absolutely. And the trick is, you know, just to be careful, let's not drive it off a cliff by chasing something that only two customers need. So we have to have this balance of let's keep the core pure but recognize where these incremental problems can be solved and in the spirit of building something cloud-native, build it modular, build it with APIs, build it so that somebody who doesn't need that value-added service is not encumbered by it. And if we do it the right way, we'll actually have probably for the first time in history a nice modular consistent architecture that can address the needs of a consumer company equally well to a regulated bank. That would be a nice aspirational goal. Well, that's one we hope we can get on stage and talk about in a year or two. With one final note, we have an amazing group of contributors, committers, users, developers that are here and in the audience and watching on the live stream. If you had one ask, one call to action for them, what would it be? Well, the simple call is stay engaged. This can't be done without you. I am consistently amazed as to, let's call it the size of the teams accomplishing the things that are done within the various sub-projects of Cloud Foundry. Now, that doesn't mean we don't want more people engaged, but what it tells me is that when people engage, if you are an active committer, if you are involved in those projects, the proof that developing in this way and really embracing modern architectures and modern development methodologies can actually deliver things that historically would require thousands of people and take years and years to bureaucratically get to an end state. The first message is, first thanks, it's incredibly important that you're contributing. The second is, stay in the front end of the curve in terms of development methodologies because the amount of productivity that these relatively small cross-company development teams are able to actually achieve in this architecture is just staggering, and so stay the course. The second piece, though, is recognize that, you know, this project, just like any other, is going to continue to expand and there will be continuously new demands. There will be new architectures, and so along with staying consistent with Cloud Native Development principles, have an open mind about the fact that when a new user environment materializes from a new industry that you know nothing about, educate yourself about it. So now with those customers, try to figure out why they want some crazy regulatory framework to be put in place or why they need this particular way of interacting with some small form factor compute device stuck in a windmill. These things will help you think creatively about how we actually make sure the project is flexible enough to address a larger set of use cases. And, you know, the good news is, we now have this wonderful cross-pollination between end users and the core developers across the ecosystem, and I think we need to make sure that we continue to do that because it's that insight from the end user that allows the creativeness inside of the development games to actually result in the kind of things that we've been able to achieve. 100%. Well, John, thank you for coming on stage and sharing your time with us, and I'm going to wrap up real quick, but thank you so much for coming and hanging out. Right, thank you, Abby.