 From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2018. Brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation. I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of Cloud Foundry Summit 2018, here in beautiful Boston, Massachusetts. Happy to welcome the program. First time guest, Dr. Nick Williams, CEO of Stark and Wayne. Dr. Nick, thanks for joining me. Thank you very much. All right. I think you must have come to the conference from a different direction than I came. I'm a local and I'm trying to get more people to come to the Boston area. We've been doing theCUBE now for coming up on our ninth year of doing it, and it's only the third time I've done something in this convention center. So please, more tech shows to this area, Boston, the Heinz Convention Center. There's plenty of tech people. I was at the Nero Cafe. Yeah. Everyone seemed like they're a tech person. Oh, no. The seaport region here is exploding. I've done two interviews today with companies here in Boston or Cambridge. There's a great tech scene. For some reason, you and I were joking. It's like, do we really need another conference in Vegas? I mean, really. All right, no, I like the regional. But yeah, the weather here is unseasonably cold. It was snowing and sleeting this morning, which is not the spring weather. It is April. It is mid-April, and it's almost snowing outside. So, Dr. Nick, first of all, you get props for the teacher. You've got Iron Man and Dr. Doom, and we're saying that there is a connection between the superheroes and Stark and Wayne. Right, so Stark and Wayne is founded by two fictional superheroes. They're the best founders of the fictional ones. They don't go to meetings. They're too busy making films. Yes, but everybody knows that Tony Stark is Iron Man, but nobody's supposed to know that Bruce Wayne was Batman. Right, right. But I've heard Stark and Wayne mentioned a number of times by customers here at the conference. So, for an audience that doesn't know, what does Stark and Wayne do, and heavily involved in the Star Foundry? So, Stark and Wayne, I first found Bosch. I founded Stark and Wayne. Earlier than that, I discovered Bosch six years ago. And when it was first released, it became like I claimed to be the world's first evangelist for Bosch, and still probably the number one evangelist. And so, Stark and Wayne came out of that. I was Pivotal's VMware Pivotal's go-to person for standing things up, and then customers grew, and people want to know who to go to. And when it comes to running Cloud Foundry, that's us. Yeah, well, there's always that discussion. Right, we've got all these wonderful platforms and these things that go together, but a lot of times there's services and people that help to get those up. Pivotal, I just had a great discussion with a Pivotal person talking about, that's the reason they bought Pivotal Labs. Originally, it was like, wow, when people get stuck, that's what Pivotal Labs helps with that whole application development. So, you're doing similar things with Bosch. Correct, yeah, no, we have our mental model around what it is to run operations of a platform, where you're running complex software, but you have an end user who expects everything just to work. Like, and they never want to talk to you, and you don't want to talk to them. So, it's this new world of IT, where they get what they want instantly, that's the platform, and it has to keep working. Dr. Nick, is it a reasonable thing for people to say that, yeah, I want the things to work, and you know, they shouldn't go down. Well, what is Shadow IT? Shadow IT is the rebellion against corporate IT. So, we want to bring back, well, we want to bring the wonders of public services to corporate environments. Okay, so, that's the Cloud Foundry story. Yeah, so, talk to me a little bit about your users. We've watched this ecosystem mature since the early days, things are more mature, but what's working well? What are the challenges? Well, what are some of the prime things that have people calling up your team? So, I'll scope our users, or our customers, are people, they're the GEs and the forwards of the world, running either as a service or internally large Cloud Foundry installations. And whilst Cloud Foundry is getting better and better, the security model is better, the upgrades seem to be flawless, it does keep getting more complex. You know, you can't just add container to container networking, and it not get more complicated, right? So, they're trying to keep up to date with not just the core, but even the community of projects going on is part of the novelty, but also trying to bring it to customers and be successful. Yeah, I go to a number of these shows that are open source, and every time you come there, it's like, well, here's the main thing we're talking about, but here's, you know, six other projects that come up, and, you know, how's that impact some of what you were just talking about, but maybe elaborate as to how you deal with the pace of change, and those big companies, how are they help integrate those into what they're doing? So, my Twitter is different from your Twitter, right? So, my Twitter is 10 years worth of, you know, collecting of people who talk about interesting things, putting in a URL, just referencing an idea they're having. So, they tend to be the thought leaders, they might be wrong, right? Let's put Docker in a production, like, that doesn't make it wrong, but you gotta be wary of people who are too early, and you just start to piece a picture of what's being built, and you start to know which groups and what individuals are machines and make great stuff, and you sort of track their work, like HashiCorp, Mitchell Hashimoto, I knew him before HashiCorp, and he is a monster, and so you tend to track their work. So, your Twitter and my Twitter might be more alike than you think? No, maybe. I interviewed Armin at the KubeCon show last year. My Twitter blown up at the show was a bunch of people arguing about whether Serverless was going to eradicate this whole ecosystem. Well, we can argue about that if you like. But, with love, I mean, one of the things coming into this show was, you know, how does the whole Kubernetes discussion fit into Cloud Foundry? We've heard of the show, Microsoft, Google, many others talking about, look, open source communities that are going to work together. See, vendors are going to track things because they think they need to sell them, right? But then Microsoft has Service Fabric, which they've owned and operated internally for 10 years, and so I think some really interesting products may be built on top of Service Fabric because of what it is. Whereas, you know, Kubernetes will run things, Service Fabric may build net new projects, and then Cloud Foundry has a different experience all together, some people, it's what problems they experienced comes to the solution they find, and unless you've tried to run a platform for people, you might not think the solution is a platform, you might think it's Kubernetes, but. Yeah, so one of the things we always look at when you talk about platforms is, you know, what do they get stood up for? How many applications do you get stand up there? What don't they work for? Maybe you can help give us a little bit of color as to what you see. I'm pretty good at jamming anything into Cloud Foundry, so I have a pretty small scope of what doesn't fit. But typically, the idea of Cloud Foundry is the assumption that user is a developer who has 10 iterations a day, right? So they want to deploy test, deploy test, and then layer pipelines on top of that. You also get, you're gonna get the back end of long stable apps, but the value is for many people is that deploy experience. And then, you know, but while you're gonna get those apps that live forever, we still get to replace the underlying core of it. So you still maintain a security model even for things that are relatively unloved. And this is really valuable, like the nice clean separation of the security, the package, CVEs, and the base OS, then the apps is part of the value. Absolutely. There's been an interesting kind of push and pull lately. We need to take some of those old applications and we might need to lift and shift them. It doesn't mean that I can necessarily take advantage of all the cool stuff and there's some things that I can't do with them when I get them onto that new platform, but absolutely need to worry about security. You know, data's at the center of everything. If you're lifting and shifting, there probably is no developer looking after it. So it's more of an operator function and they can put it anywhere they like. It's there looking after it now. Whereas the Cloud Foundry experience is a developer led experience that has an operations back end. If you're lifting and shifting, if it fits in Cloud Foundry great, if it fits on Kubernetes great, it's your responsibility. What interaction do you have with your clients with some of the kind of cultural and operational changes that they need to go through? So thinking specifically, you know, you've got the developers doing things, you know, the operators, whether they're involved, you know, whether that be DevOps or not. But I'm curious. So the biggest change when it comes to helping people who are running platforms, and I know many people want to talk about the Cloud transformation, but let's talk about the operations transformation. Is to become a service-oriented group that you are there to provide a service. Yes, you're internal. Yes, they all have the same email address that you do, but you are a service-orientated organization and that is not technology. That is a mental mode. And if you're not service-orientated, Shadow IT occurs because they can go to Amazon and get support organization that will respond to them. And so you're competing with Amazon and Google and you need to be pretty good. Yeah, you mentioned that, you know, your typical client is kind of a large, you know, maybe I'm putting words, you know, the Fortune 1000 type companies. This is sort of- We haven't got Berkshire. Yeah. We haven't got Berkshire, so if we're going to go Fortune 5, you know, would like, you know, I've read my Warren Buffett biography, I reckon, you know, if I've got a meeting, I reckon I can get in the customer. Right, so one of the questions is this only for the enterprise? Can it be used for, you know, smaller businesses, for newer businesses? What's interesting is people think about Cloud Foundry, it's like, oh, you run it on your own infrastructure. Like, I did a talk in 2014, 15, when Docker was starting to be frothy, was before you think you want to build your own PaaS, bring me on the hotline. Like, argue with me about why you wouldn't just use Heroku or Pivotal Web Services or IBM Cloud, like a public PaaS. Please, I beg of you, before you go down any path of running on-prem anything, answer solidly the question of why you just wouldn't use a public service. And yeah, so it really starts at that point. It's like, use someone else's. And then if you have to run your own, so who's really going to have all these rules? It's large organizations that have these, oh no, no, we have to run our own. Well, Dr. K, one of the things we've said for a while is there's lots of things that enterprise suck at that they need to realize that they shouldn't be doing. So, you know, start at the most basic level. There's like five companies in the world that are good at building data centers. Nobody else should build data centers. If you're using somebody else that can do that. So, as you go up and up the stack, it's you want to get rid of the undifferentiated lifting. I like to joke that every CIO, the moment they get that job, that's their ticket to get to build their own data center. It's like, what else was the point of becoming a CIO? I want to build my own data center. No, not anymore. Not anymore, but yeah, hasn't been allowed a little longer than. What is that line? What should companies be able to consume a platform versus where do they add the value? And do you help customers kind of understand that? By the time they're talking us, they're pretty far along, having convinced themselves about what they're doing. And they have their rules, right? They have their isolation rules, their data ownership rules, and they'll have their level of comfort. So they might be comfortable on Amazon, Google, Azure, or they might still not be comfortable in public cloud. They want the vSphere, but they still have that notion of, we're going to run this ourselves. And most of them, it's not running one because that idea of we need our own propagates throughout the entire organization and they'll start wanting their own cloud. Look, I find when I talk to users, the vendors and those that watch the industry always try to come up with these multi-cloud, hybrid cloud type discussion. Users have a cloud strategy and it's usually often siloed just like everything else. And right there, they're using, oh, I had some data service and it's running on Google. Developers just want to have a nice life. They just want to get their work done. They want to feel like, this is a great job. Like I'm respected, I get interesting work, we get to ship it. It actually goes into production. If you haven't ever had a project you've worked on that didn't go into production, you haven't worked long enough, many of us work on something for it not to be shipped. Get it into production as quick as possible. So, do you have your utopian ideal world, though, as to, you know, this is the step? Oh, absolutely. And this is how it'll be simple? Let tell developers what the business problems are. Get them as close to the business problems and give them responsibility to solve them. Don't put them behind layers of product managers and IT support and security. But Dr. Nick, the developers, they don't have the budget. You ask me for utopian. So, how do we sort through that? Because, right, the developer says they want to do this, but they're not tied to the person that has the budget or they're not, you know, working with the operators. I mean, how do we sort through that? How do we get to utopia? Well, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, they all solved utopia, right? So, this is, you know, think more like them. And perhaps the CEO of the company shouldn't come from sales. Perhaps it should be an IT person. Well, yeah, what's the t-shirt for the show is like running at scale. When you reach a certain point of scale, you either need to solve some of these things or you will break. Right. No, I look, hire great sales organizations, but if you don't have empathy for what your company needs to look like in five years' time, you're probably not gonna allow your organization to become that. The power games, right? If everyone assumes that the marketing department becomes the top of the organization, or that, you know, then the good people are gonna leave to go to organizations where they might become CEO, right? Dr. Nick, I wanna give you the final word. For the people that haven't been able to come to the sessions, check out the environment, what are they missing at this show? What is exciting you the most in this ecosystem? Like any conference you go to, you come, the learning is all put online. Your show put online, or every session's put online. You don't come just to learn. It's, you get the energy. I live in Australia. I work from a coffee shop. My staff are all in America. And it's a common, and just to get the energy that you're doing the right thing that you get surrounded by a group of people. And certainly no one walks away from CF Summit feeling like they're in the wrong career. Excellent. Well, Dr. Nick, I appreciate you helping us understand the infinity wars of cloud environments here. Stark and Wayne, thanks so much for joining us. I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE. Thanks, Stu.