 from the computer museum in the heart of Silicon Valley, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE covering OpenStack Silicon Valley 2015. Brought to you by Morantis. Now your host, John Furrier. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in Silicon Valley. This is theCUBE Silicon Angles flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. We are here for day two of coverage of OpenStack and Silicon Valley. This is where all the thought leaders are here. A lot of companies are here. Obviously Silicon Valley is where the innovation engine of entrepreneurship and also the big companies. Trying to figure out this next generation infrastructure, unlocking the future potential in a software driven, software enabled environment. Our next guests are Boris Ransky, co-founder at CMO of Morantis and Jonathan Donaldson, VP and general manager of software defined infrastructure at Intel. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for being here. Intel also announced, you guys, Morantis announced a $100 million fresh funding, real fat financing, good to have some dry powder as the quote bubble is bursting, which we'll talk about later, but another question, Intel again, the big blind as we say in poker, you know, it was out there as $100 million. You guys led the round. You guys have been really behind the big trends where you see big data with the Cloudera investment that was obviously game-changing. You guys backed out of the distribution business of big data with Hadoop, going all in with Cloudera. Now Morantis, again, a big bet. So what does this mean? I mean, besides the support from Morantis. Right. So we like to, if we see trends, right? So obviously from being the Silicon landscape, which covers a tremendous amount of the data centers, we have a good landscape to kind of view across and see the trends that are happening. And then also from that same trend line and from that same landscape, we get a lot of feedback from our customers. And so in the Morantis case, right, we were getting a lot of feedback from customers. How do I get open stack in my enterprise, right? How do I get private cloud to be real for me? And obviously we had a great relationship with Morantis as well as some of the other announcements that we'd made. And so we said, well, this is a perfect place for us to reinvest for some work upstream and then some work that really can move the needle on private cloud. Obviously we're in the Computer History Museum. Obviously former home of an Intel back in the day, but Intel, Moore's Law, and Lou Tucker yesterday, from Cisco, who actually has a product in the museum. Like Lou, you're an old guy now, like us. He's actually got a product here in the museum and he was commenting that it was the fastest machine he's ever built, it was the fastest in the industry for a year, and he was highlighting Moore's Law. Obviously Intel, you know, Gordon Moore. Moore's Law is coming to this cloud, right? So that means a complete change over. You guys have made great investments, certainly everywhere from wireless down to the chip level, compute, multi-cores, all this stuff's happening. Is that the part of the vision here is to get Intel's assets into the market with the software-enabled infrastructure? Is that kind of the vision? Absolutely, and I think it's a little bit of a two-pronged approach, right? So obviously we have a tremendous amount of those valued assets in the market already, and so it's exposing the value that our customers are asking us for. So making sure that they receive the value for purchasing Intel, and then on top of that is exposing the new features that we're coming out with so that we can continue to drive that Moore's Law innovation cycle through the rest of the data center. Of course, I've got to ask you as an entrepreneur, you've been the trials and tribulations of starting a company, you get to a point now where the market is at an inflection point, certainly with OpenStack. The cloud, I'll see it's out there, it's games on, it's totally, you know, the genes out of the bottle, cloud is the future. How do you feel about this? Because you guys are in a good position, you guys have been out talking to customers, the Intel backing, certainly huge endorsement, the future of integration is coming, where performance matters, you got Intel watching you back there, but you guys are still out there with customer delivering cloud and OpenStack. What is the current state of, I'll see this is going to be a good trajectory for your company, but what does it mean for you guys and to your customers? So I think that I mentioned this before, I view the collaboration of Intel and now kind of this motions that Intel's making under the cloud for all initiative is kind of a symbolic period in OpenStack's life, because Intel historically has had a very solid track record of backing various open technologies. And Intel has always been behind OpenStack, but it's just in the last several months that they've joined the foundation as a Platinum member, been accepted, and now have started really making very meaningful contributions through the cloud for all initiative. You probably know about the work that they're doing with Rackspace, now they're doing the stuff with Morantis, and to me, that means that OpenStack has reached the point where there is a consensus in the market that the open cloud fabric of the future is OpenStack and Intel is going all in. And another interesting data point, which relates to a lot of the things that are happening here around containers and things like that is according to the recent market survey that was done by McKinsey just this year, when people think of private clouds, they think of free options. And the free options is VMware, Microsoft, and OpenStack. And there's a lot of interesting stuff and dynamic happening around the containers and all that stuff, and people can argue to Diff that maybe OpenStack is not the same as VMware and it will never be there and that it works with VMware, it doesn't work with VMware, but the thing is that enterprises and CIOs have a very short attention span. They don't have time to look into how these technologies work together. They look at things in a fairly straightforward fashion. And the straightforward fashion that they look at it right now is that private cloud means free choices. Two choices in Microsoft and VMware for proprietary cloud, Open, private cloud is OpenStack. So it's exciting times ahead of us at Morantis, I think, that we have a tremendous responsibility to make that vision a reality at this point. So talk about the dynamics of the customers. Right now, customers here, OpenStack, and they're a little nervous. And we had a quote yesterday on theCUBE here where the comment was, hey, the cloud with OpenStack is a puzzle piece kind of concept, it's Lego blocks, or it's an engineering opportunity for this open fabric and that message resonates, that's clear, we hear that. But everyone worries about one-offs, right? How do you have one-offs and how do you scale a one-off? So the comment we heard yesterday in theCUBE was, and have to look back at what we said, I can't remember which guest said it was. The range of bias problem. No, but it was good comments. I was basically saying, there's a problem here, is one-off doesn't really create a scalable cloud. And no, I think it was Todd from IBM, he said, yeah, they want to basically do one-off with standard components. Which really kind of hits home to kind of the value of an open fabric. If you standardize, you then can mix and match technologies to cobble together or engineer together whatever system, from POC to full scale production. So, okay, take us through, what does that mean? Standard components, and how do customers mix and match, and then what's under the hood, via Intel and or other things that are abstracted away from the customer. So I think that there's kind of two sides to this. On the one hand, I completely agree with the sentiment that there has to be some opinion, there has to be some degree of prescriptiveness when you're delivering a product to the customer. Because the customer wants a standard, that's true. And it's also true that to a large extent, in the open stack world, we've seen a lot of snowflakes because of the nature of what open stack is, right? It's a pluggable framework. But I think that the most dangerous thing is to assume that something is a standard before it really has become a standard. And open stack in a data center cloud market is a very new thing. So when it comes to, and it touches upon many things, many data center technologies. So there's SDN, there's software defined storage, there's container standards, we have Rocket and Docker, all this stuff happening, right? So the ideal kind of vision will be like, just let's standardize, open stack will have one SDN, one software defined storage, one container framework, et cetera. But the thing is that because the market is so new and so nascent, so many things are changing around and moving around, that's not a very wise strategy because the one thing that you will embrace might not be the thing that is the standard of tomorrow. So the open stack approach historically has been about actually creating the glue for different components and leaving some options as far as an SDN or storage or all of these things. And then over time, as certain areas kind of mature, there's always going to be some standard, a couple of standards that will emerge. And these standards will naturally plug the empty holes in the open stack puzzle. So, and I think that the open stack community is approaching this completely correctly. So there's glue, does that mean control plane? Is that what you're kind of referring to? API is control plane. I think Boris is correct in that, if for enterprise customers, they want semi-packed solutions, right? It's like ordering a car or buying a car, right? You'll have certain brands of vehicles that you like and you will then say, okay, based upon whatever the character says that a vehicle are, I'm going to have certain options that I would select in there. I think you're going to see the same type of thing happening in the software stacks. You're going to trend towards that package solution that offers the general care abouts that your business needs, and then you're going to pick some of the guard railed options internally. So Jonathan, if it's a car analogy, let's go with that a little further to the next level. Are we in kind of prefabricated designs? Is there an assembly line? Is there cars? Is there Ferraris? Is there a Model T? I mean, take us through the life cycle. Exactly. You have, I think, all of the above, right? So depending upon if you're the kit car kind of person, right? So using analogy and you're the DIY type of enterprise or cloud service provider and you want to pull upstream and cobble it together yourself and you're going to have to spend the engineering time in the garage to go do that. And that might be good for, like, say, service providers and big, big operators. Somebody that has an absolute strategic benefit for building it themselves, which are not very many customers, right? It's only those that have some sort of secret sauce that they're going to inject into that. I would say predominantly, where OpenStack is going to play, will be for those customers that want to have that opinionated solution as Boris, but it, right? Or more big-doubt use cases, if you will. Or big-doubt use cases, right? That have some guard rail set, right? Choice is great. Too much choice is really, really bad, right? Because you get some of the analysis paralysis, like, do I choose this, do I choose that? And then you get some of the technical debt that can build up behind that. If you make a left turn when everybody else goes right. Unknown, unknown, certainly in the enterprise business, we know, scene puts the brakes on. People, whoa, whoa, I need to see some proof points. So, Boris, with that, what are some of the use cases that you guys are seeing that are standardizing, that are accelerating, that are becoming much more, hey, I need a Ferrari because the roads can go fast or, hey, I need a bus because I'm trapped. I got more people coming in. So there's a lot of different use cases. What are the most common that you guys are seeing? Well, for OpenStack, there is two major use cases on those use cases. One is, I think, specific to a particular vertical. Another one cuts across all verticals. One use case is enabling DevOps, basically. OpenStack is a platform for developers. It's much of the same use case that actually, you know, AWS is addressing. It's an acute problem. I think that AWS has paved the way for a lot of organizations. And in fact, a lot of organizations that we engage with, they have started with AWS. They've built kind of a significant AWS footprint. They were kind of transformed into the cloud mindset and culture by their embrace of AWS. And once they've gotten comfortable with it, they want to bring some of that in-house and they complement it with a private cloud that is OpenStack. And that cuts across all segments. It's just enterprises, telcos, service providers, everybody's doing it. The other use case is pretty specific and that use case is around network function virtualization. So telco manufacturers, now telco equipment manufacturers, are going through the stage of kind of, you know, separation between the software and the hardware. So before, you know, people would ship those huge boxes like mainframe like switches that are telco grade, so cost millions of dollars. The new paradigm is that you have some sort of virtual infrastructure management fabric and on top of that you have a network functions that you can provision in an agile fashion. And OpenStack has emerged as the kind of almost de facto standard for kind of the NFV. Is cloud native a big use case? You hear about cloud native with OpenStack? Are people interested in that piece too? Well, I mean, that's standard. That goes to my first use case. So that's cloud native, that's correct. That's the DevOps cloud native stuff, exactly. Okay, so I guess in the last couple of minutes I want to get you guys to answer a couple of questions. First one is, does hybrid cloud exist? I mean, this is something that I want to put on the table. We've asked all the guests here. Is there a hybrid cloud? Is it a category? Is it a product? Do I want to buy some hybrid cloud? Do I just back the truck up and hybrid cloud just shows up? Is it subordinate to public, private? Is it the top level? It's a combination of the two. And I think that's the thing that people tend to forget sometimes, right? So I don't think any of it will dispute that public cloud is there and it's available, right? So as we saw yesterday in Diane's presentation, the actual production implementation of private cloud is still very, very early. And what we mean by that is, self-service portal, easy access directly for developers and exactly. All of those things. But that's in a data center, the private cloud can be based on premise, right? And then the big thing for hybrid is when you connect that with the public cloud. So by default, if you have public cloud, but yet you don't have a predominant landscape of private cloud, you don't have hybrid cloud yet. And so I think that we do in pockets and in more sophisticated users, they are using what we would consider hybrid cloud. But I think there's a lot more that needs to happen for that. Is hybrid cloud the top level solution or outcome? Absolutely. And is private and public subordinate? Because if you say, I'm connecting them, that's just a kind of an umbrella to a concept. It's like distributed computing. I mean, hybrid cloud wins, right? It will be the paradigm for how people consume and deliver IT services in the business, right? I'm moving forward. But it's not a pure play kind of thing. There's no hybrid, or is there? What's your take on that? It's like, I mean, people try to put things in buckets. Is a hybrid cloud category? Is there a category? Is there a product? I mean, or is it just a... It's a category. It's a category of how you deliver your IT service, right? Where you draw your resources from, how you connect the public cloud to your private cloud. Are you sharing things like authentication and identity and some of those other policy type of things that you would normally do internally? And I think kind of our kind of bar is, if it's absolutely seamless to your users inside your enterprise, that they don't know where their resources are coming from. They just select from the right criteria. And it either chooses in a public cloud environment or in a private cloud environment. If it's that seamless experience, you've actually reached hybrid cloud. So basically, Boris, I want you to kind of go with taking the next level. So like that answer, if I'm connecting, it's hybrid, right? And if it's seamless, it's even more hybrid. It's the ideal hybrid preferred environment. Okay, now let's go to the customer. I don't care about all that stuff. I got cash to spend. I have capex that I've invested in, legacy. I want cloud native DevOps. And I got a lot of workflows I need to move around. Alex kind of brought this up yesterday, your co-founder. And he's like, look at this at the end of the day. It's I got cash, I have how I buy and how I deploy. What's your take on that? Yeah, I think that I mentioned that the most predominant use case is DevOps. And the consumer in the DevOps use case is a developer. And the developer couldn't give a crap about, you know, the private or hybrid or whatever, right? The developer wants to just get exposed to a consistent set of APIs, hopefully, you know, high level APIs to be able to increase developer velocity. So for me, hybrid is just kind of like a feature of a cloud. Really it's like, do you want to have your cloud in this data center and that data center, do you want your application run to run in this rack but developer doesn't really care, right? And as far as, you know, our customers are concerned, you know, to a question of whether or not exists, it absolutely does exist because that, for example, Alifium on stage yesterday and they were talking about how they have AWS and they have in-house open stack and they have an abstraction layer running across both of them and the developers are exposed to that abstraction layer and it's really, where do you run this workload or that workload is very transparent to the developer and a lot of people are doing that already now. And this is kind of a traditional tactics of policy-driven software-driven infrastructure. That's kind of like your wheelhouse. Right, I think that's the big shift we're seeing here is that developers are king, right? So they used to be second-class citizens kind of behind whatever the infrastructure teams were allowing them to go do. I think the advent of AWS and the success of that has really raised the developers. Well, mobility too has put them close to the customers so developers used to be kind of, don't bring the developers in front of the customer but now they're involved in UX decisions really closer to the customer. So I totally agree with you on that. The developer is the first-class citizen now, right? And you're starting to see the infrastructure teams catch up to their needs and not wants and demands. Okay, final question for each of you guys to answer individually is what is the open stack Silicon Valley event about? I mean, it's a special place. Obviously, we live here. We love it. We love the Valley. Silicon Valley is great innovation, entrepreneurship to huge established companies driving change and change in the world. What's open stacks vibe here? What is, what's about open stack and Silicon Valley that's different than some of the other venues? Yeah, so I think I'm in a good position to answer this question. We specifically purposefully call this the Unlocked Infrastructure Conference. And what we meant by that is this event is really about bringing open stack and the entire ecosystem of data center software components that interoperate of open stack. So the theme for this particular one is open stack and containers. It might be something else next year. But the whole notion here is that we see open stack as a fabric that eventually as it evolves, we'll be able to glue together best of brief components and kind of put together the innovation of the open community overall into a cohesive fabric consumable by the developer. So this conference is about actually marrying open stack as that fabric with all of the different innovative components that are becoming a new standard inside a particular kind of area in the data center. And a lot of players are here in Silicon Valley, too. Right, and that's why we're here, right? That's because. Hey, John, now you're taking Intel, I'll say in Silicon Valley, huge presence. Right. Generations of innovation, Mars law, it means epic, it's been great. So what's your take of open stack and Silicon Valley this event? Right, so I think the most interesting thing for us, and I was actually thinking about this this morning when I was doing the welcome, I looked out across the audience and I see people that, oh, I need to go talk to this person, I need to go talk to this person. When we're at the larger events, you ships in the night, right? You may say hello and you may pass and buy, but because this is such a focused event with some good focused topics and you draw a lot of the talent and a lot of the leaders in the community for open stack together, you actually get some of the time to actually have that community building experience to share, here's what's working, here's what's not. Hey, we should go work on this together in the community, et cetera, et cetera. So I think this is a really good focused event to really push forward kind of the whole goal of the community. It's really a great industry event too because people get to look at each other doing, share best practices, avoid scar tissue. You know, see how people are making the money and see how people can participate. Yeah, exactly correct. Jonathan Boris, thanks so much for spending the time on the queue, we went a little bit over. Sorry, Greg, producer, give me the hook many times, but I wanted to get those questions and thanks for sharing that insight. This is theCUBE, live in Silicon Valley. We'll be right back with more after the short break.