 Live from Mountain View, California, it's The Cube at OpenStack Silicon Valley, brought to you by headline sponsor, Morantis. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Frick. Okay, welcome back. We're live in Silicon Valley. This is the home of The Cube Silicon Valley. This is OpenStack Silicon Valley event here sponsored by Morantis, hosted by Morantis. But really it's an OpenStack community event. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angle. I'm joined by my co-host, Jeff Frick, general manager of The Cube Silicon Valley. Our next guest is Chris Kemp, founder and chief strategy officer for Nebula. Welcome back to The Cube. Great to see you again. Thanks for being here. You were here in this event. We were here for an OpenStack event. Also, we talked at OpenStack in Atlanta. Again, they can't even go by with you much about having another event. The demand is so high. Again, some consolidation, CloudStack, kind of going to its final chapter. Eucalyptus, certainly that chapter is now closed almost closed literally from HP. So OpenStack clearly is the initiative. All that marketing, all the little mud fights and food fights are kind of at a main level gone. Certainly there's still some skepticism and debate, healthy debate and skepticism to keep things going. But we're going to the next level. What's your take on that? Are we going to the next level? Have we crossed that over? And what is the next level? I think the last couple of weeks we've seen a lot of really significant shifts in the market. We've seen Brian Stevens, who was over at Red Hat, sat next to me on the OpenStack board for a couple of years, joined Google to run their cloud initiative. So there's a clear tip of the hat to open source and the work Red Hat's been doing with OpenStack. I'm not sure what their strategy is as it relates to that, but it's interesting. One of the folks that is actually an investor in Nebula and a friend of mine, Bill Voss, announced last week that he was joining Amazon Web Services as a VP of Engineering. He was one of the folks responsible for the NSA's adoption of OpenStack and the CIA's adoption of Amazon Web Services. It's interesting on, of course, the acquisition of Eucalyptus by HP, putting Martin in charge of OpenStack. We're not going to be able to have any more of those fun panels anymore. Well, it takes the next conversation to the next level, which is, okay, the debate about approach and religion, if you will, quote, you know, religious wars around what the direction is. There now is the building blocks. Okay, let's put the final building blocks in place and let's start building out aggressively. What's your take on that? Certainly, the marketing will have to shift to now deployments, success stories. Will it be a brutal year in 2015? Some are speculating the marketing is oversold. What could be delivered? I mean, I think we're starting to see adoption. We have Nebula systems at a number of really high profile customers and they're doing real things with the product. We're also seeing OpenStack at HP and at other companies get some real adoption and that's a big shift. The second big shift, I think, is we're starting to see applications and a whole ecosystem emerge around OpenStack. So there isn't a single company that talks about a platform, be it Pivotal or be it Docker, that doesn't talk about OpenStack being the foundation, the computing and storage and network foundation under which that platform is being built. And so I think that will just lead to more adoption because you're not adopting OpenStack directly or consuming OpenStack directly or consuming products and platforms and software that runs natively on OpenStack. So that will just make it easier. So I want to send a hat tip out to Tim Crawford who's basically our virtual co-host. He's on our crowd chat throwing a bunch of questions in. I'm going to go back to him again. He has a question for you, Chris, at Kemp on theCUBE, long time OpenStack leader. What's your take on the direction of OpenStack? There's been some discussion around lack of product leadership, too much bits and bobs, not enough senior messaging. I think OpenStack's just fine as evidenced by the latest developments in the market. What we have at OpenStack is a bunch of different projects that together form a framework, a platform, some of called it a toolkit. I think that's right. If you want to build a public cloud, it's a great place to start. If you want to build a product, like an appliance, like a software distribution, it's a great place to start. Power of OpenStack is not in being a product. It is in being a platform that provides interoperability between all these different products and services that companies will compete in the free market to innovate and to build into great products in their own right. And I think that's what's been missing in computing for the past 25 years. OpenStack provides an opportunity if we maintain a goal of interoperability and portability. If you look at what's actually being talked about at the OpenStack board and at the OpenStack sessions, it's all about increasing the consistency of these implementations. It's about having a core definition of OpenStack. It's about ensuring that what that means is we pass tests so that if HP says they have OpenStack, we know that it means that it does certain things and it's compatible with the Nebula and it's compatible with the Red Hat distribution. These are all the right conversations for the community to be having right now. So David Pollock is also chiming in that the customers want, they don't want to do it yourselves. The big vendors have a positioning of being full service and little guides are being pigeonholed as do it yourself. Customers don't want all the elements and configure themselves. It's really a challenge. So is that going to be an issue? Is that an opportunity? Is it a challenge? How do you see that? Well, I see customers having choice. They have companies like HP that'll bring in a set of hardware and software and consulting. They have consultants like Mirantis. They have turnkey products like Nebula. They have software distributions like Red Hat. And it gives customers choice. And they can choose two or three. And if I were a customer, if I were a CIO at a Fortune 500 company, I would not pick one OpenStack partner. I would pick two or three. And that allows you to, number one, reduce your risk that one will succeed. It allows you to hold these companies accountable for the whole value proposition of OpenStack, which is portability and interoperability and freedom from lock-in. And so if you bring in two or three OpenStacks, run each OpenStack in a different region or data center. And then you're in the strongest possible position for the next 10 years. So what's your advice to the folks out there who are trying to get navigation around what to do next? They're looking at the community. They see it baking out. They want to join in. They could be a developer or could be a provider of some sort. I mean, I think it's never been more clear. I think that we've seen a lot of focus now in the different products and services that are being offered. If a company wants to bring in OpenStack, there's a fairly clear call to action from Nebula. There's a pretty clear call to action from Morantis. If you want to build it yourself, there's a pretty clear call to action from a lot of the bigger systems integrators companies. If you have a huge investment in HP and you want to leverage their services and their technologies, they'll do that for you. So I would say just get started. So we want to ask you one final question. I know you got some other things going on. We're running behind schedule, but I want to get your point because you've been a great leader, right? If you could have your magic wand this year and kind of fix some things quickly, what would they be? Well, I mean, I think that I would, if I were able to wave my wand, I would say I would address this cultural issue within the companies because we have so many systems deployed that just frankly aren't being used as much as they could be because of cultural issues. If you think your data center is something that you have to control every aspect of, if you don't believe in quotas, if you don't believe in giving people self-service, on-demand, pure cloud, the problem is your employees will start to use public clouds, even when they shouldn't, even when it's more expensive, even when it's less secure. And so if I were a CIO, I would move along. I would just stand up a cloud and I would try to immediately overcome these cultural issues because if you don't, you're going to get too far behind and your competitors will and then you're going to be in a position where your competitor has computing infrastructure that's a thousand times less expensive and they're going to build some innovative product on that and then you're going to get fired. So if I were a CIO, I would take this very seriously. I love how you spin the magic wand question into it, like you're going to get fired. So that's good. So I'll ask you that in the next question because again, you're part of that young generation. I'm from the older generation. You got born on the cloud, clear DevOps benefits, no brainer there. We all see that app developers born in the cloud today. It's just such a no brainer. Amazon does great. So that's the goal standard. Born on the premise is really where the IT is and these service providers, they are doing hybrid clouds. So how do you get the benefits of born in the cloud to the born in IT? You do it. So I was having a dinner last night with my former deputy and then later CIO of NASA Ames which is where this all started. James made this happen. He's now the CIO at Slack at Stanford. And James told me that after I left to start Nebula, there were over 400 internal organizations that were using literally the 0.1 alpha version of what we're all talking about today. 400 organizations. And it's all because we just did it. And I think you have to believe. If you're a CIO, you have to innovate, you have to get out there and you have to, yeah, once you build it, they will come because it's so much easier than the alternative. It's easier than fighting with accounting and about the Amazon bills and what to do them. It's a lot easier than trying to get your organization to be as agile as an OpenStack API. Chris, Cam, great to hear from you. I know we had more time. You're a great, great brain on the OpenStack community. Been there from the beginning. You have a good handle of what's happening and we appreciate your perspective. Live in Silicon Valley, this is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick. We'll be back after this short break. Thanks John, thanks Jeff.