 The Cube, at OpenStack Summit Atlanta 2014. Is brought to you by Brocade. Say goodbye to the status quo, and hello to Brocade. And Red Hat. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. Okay, hello everyone, this is The Cube. This is SiliconANGLE and Wikibon's flagship program, The Cube. We go out to the events, Georgia for, we are, Stu, OpenStack Summit, and I'm your Stu Miniman, my co-host for this week, Stu. Welcome in from Boston, I flew in from California. OpenStack Summit, 4,500 attendees here to find out what is going to happen with the open cloud, the open cloud initiative. A lot of action going on in hybrid cloud. We've been in all the different events, IBM, EMC, you name it, we've been covering cloud up and down and around Amazon as well. Stu, I got to get your take, first of all, a lot of great keynotes here. The theme of OpenStack this year is, you know, kind of a Star Wars theme, the rebel army, but basically it's about putting it in an orbit, it's about putting the open source philosophy of open cloud into reality where it's going to move from a vendor fest, contribution from a code standpoint from the developers to customers. So I got to get your take, 4,500 attendees, about the same size as last show, but the vibe here is very much like we're happening, we're happening, we're happening. Is it happening? What's your take and what do you expect to see? Yeah, John, so, you know, you're right. We need to switch from kind of that vendor fest to the customers, you know, Rackspace comes out and talks about the Rebel Alliance. I like what they talked about this morning. We need to go beyond just the developers and talk about the operators and the users without getting too many silos and being able to really have that DevOps mindset. And if you, John, the inside baseball at the show is you look at some of these keynotes and you know, there's a bunch of names that you know in there, of course, Rackspace is there, helped create OpenStack and you know, now have they lost their mojo in OpenStack because there's a lot of companies, if you were to ask who are the top, you know, two or three companies in OpenStack, I don't know that I would start with Rackspace. But there's a couple of companies that got kind of pushed out of the top keynotes slots because there's only so many slots and there's a lot of companies that are all, you know, going for that land grab and want to be, you know, be a big part of OpenStack. Yeah, and the key thing is about 4,500 attendees and this is like a lot of players here. I mean, the key is you're seeing a lot of the developers obviously developer conference focused but you're talking about massive penetration by the big whales, the big vendors, IBM, HP, VMware, Rackspace, IBM has an announcement today with some storage, so huge vendors are in here as well and a lot of startups. So some news, you see here, Piston Cloud has got support from Swisscon, huge for the telcos. You see OpenStack really not only just for the enterprise, it's for service providers. You're seeing all this discussion about net neutrality, the telcos and the service providers. Certainly have a huge opportunity with OpenStack and finally the ecosystem in terms of development and support, Stu, are looking at, you know, as Troy pointed out as keynote, the top three proprietary cloud vendors have committed to spend $25 billion on cloud in 2014 alone. The spend and the effort in this land grab called the cloud is critical and the debate happens on CrowdChat even this morning about how much is on-prem and which will go into the cloud. Obviously the cloud purists will say, hey, it's going to be all cloud but we're hearing, you know, certainly from the analysts that on-premise will not go away anytime soon. We believe that. You'll see a nice combination between the data center and the cloud and finally the key message of the keynotes this morning was software-defined culture. This is right in our wheelhouse. I mean, I think David Floyer at Wikibon was the first analyst in the industry to publish the software-led infrastructure paper going back a few years ago. That now has really kind of set the table for what virtualization has done with software-defined data center, et cetera. So a lot of action happening, a lot of news. I got to ask you from your standpoint, what do you feel is the most important thing and what is the biggest surprise that you think is going to happen here at the OpenStack Summit? So John, the first question is, what is OpenStack going forward? It's supposed to be open and it's supposed to be a stack. There's a lot of kind of, if you ask the average end user, what is OpenStack? They think they're going to get cloud in a box. And of course, that's not what you're getting. It's not even just a full layer. Some people have called it that really at the end of the day, you've got a kernel. And one of the things I'm looking at is there's dozens of distributions out there and the question is, are we going to get some leaders in the space? Who are the lead horses? It's good that there's a lot of players. It's good that there's a lot of action but a customer can just be buried by all the different options that there are out there. And John, you talked about kind of the public versus private. That's obviously something that's an important topic. If you look at, Amazon obviously has got huge growth. Google and Microsoft are chasing them. And if I look at the big players here at OpenStack, John, some of them are building their clouds. IBM's got their soft layer acquisition that they can put OpenStack on top of it. They've got their Paz layer, BlueMix on top of it. HP just made a big announcement last year with their Helion. It's Helion, right, John? Helion, Helion is the HP framework but it's based on Cloud Foundry and it'll sit in OpenStack. Yeah, so right, as you build that stack, even OpenStack alone is not enough. There's that Paz layer on top of it. When we were at Red Hat Summit just a few weeks ago, Docker really stole all the buzz of that show. One of the real values of Paz, Platform as a Service is supposed to be that portability of applications that I can separate my application from my infrastructure and Docker helped to do that. So HP and IBM building their clouds, Rackspace of course is hosting and all of these guys that sell infrastructure, not only you guys that sell infrastructure but a lot of them that sell services are helping customers to deploy OpenStack in their private environments. Well, I want to say that we would not be here if it wasn't for Red Hat and Brocade and this Red Hat supply is great. What are the mugs here? And theCUBE is the independent media operation. We're funded by our sponsors. We want to thank Red Hat and Brocade in particular. Of all the vendors, they are the best here this week in my opinion for stepping up and supporting theCUBE and theCUBE, we work hard to bring you the news, the analysis and the commentary and that would not be possible without Red Hat and Brocade and we want to thank those guys. They are clearly the MVPs this week. Let's talk about Red Hat for a second because obviously with the Red Hat Summit we had theCUBE there. They're not involved in Cloud Foundry as Stu in the past layer but also they have the Linux market. They've been in that for a long time and Linux is what's made all this possible. They're really the DNA and all the messaging from the other events we just were at were Linux for the cloud. And that's really kind of what people are talking about. So what is Red Hat's opportunity? What do you think Red Hat should do here at this event? Yeah, John, so Red Hat Summit was about the same size of this event and if you look last year, Red Hat was a billion three, which is good revenue, especially if you think that what they're trying to do is sell free software. When we had Jim Whitehouse on theCUBE, he said, we asked him, why aren't there more billion dollar open source companies? And he said, selling free software is hard. It's not selling the software, it's everything that they can wrap around it. And OpenStack is a huge opportunity for Red Hat. Anybody that's got support with Red Hat are comfortable with them. They know that Red Hat has experience taking something that's an open source project, making it enterprise ready and giving a distribution that customers can trust and they know that that support. So Red Hat has got a good partnership, partner ecosystem out there and they have the potential to be a leader in this space. They've got close partnerships with Dell. IBM is a partner, but IBM also has their own distribution. So there's a lot to work out, but Red Hat could be an important player here. As you mentioned, they're not part of Cloud Foundry, so the past strategy with OpenShift does put them at loggerheads with some of the other players out there. But Red Hat definitely a big player that we expect to hear lots from here at the show. Again, a lot of developer focus, IBM recently with Blue Mix in the past, certainly is key HP with their Helion approach. Red Hat has their OpenShift, certainly past has always been the battleground, the middleware environment, but OpenStack is more than the past. There's a lot going on at the storage level. We've always felt for many years at Silicon Eagle, Wikibon, theCUBE that storage is really the heartbeat of what's going on with all the innovations on the disk side and certainly the flash side. That's changing the game from a programming standpoint and those guys will win there. But you're seeing big presence here from IBM HP and Red Hat and certainly Rackspace is out there as well. And again, Stu, we got some startups that we're going to talk to. We're going to talk to the founder of Ubuntu, StackStorm, obviously Randy Baez and always a favorite I'll have on theCUBE. Controversial from CloudScreen. He's going to give us the update on the board meetings and the governance side. A lot of debate, but the ecosystem is ultimately still a fragile piece of the OpenStack Foundation. You're seeing some competing efforts, if you will, with the Cloud Foundry. I always point to that because I love the action there. But Stu, the ecosystem is critical, right? It's obviously strong and I say fragile. I don't mean it's weak. I mean, it's like if there's cracks on the foundation on the OpenStack ecosystem side, then all hell will break loose. There'll be a lot of leaks. So what's your take on what needs to happen from the ecosystem side here? Yeah, so John, there's a lot of players. I mean, I don't know. I think there's, I'm trying to think how many thousands of contributors there are to OpenStack. But there's a lot of players. We're going to have, you know, some of John, as you said, the big whales. So if you look at HP and IBM and Red Hat, lots of developers, IBM's got over 400 people contributing to OpenStack. We're going to have Lou Tucker from Cisco, who's got a new business unit that has Cisco's inter-cloud offering. So Cisco, of course, you know, is known as being the networking behind everything. So, you know, how does cloud, you know, how does Cisco stay ahead of being disrupted by all of these cloud players? Because the mega cloud guys, you know, aren't looking to buy Cisco hardware. You know, talk about ecosystem, John. You know, VMware, you know, is an important part of this ecosystem. If you look at the networking components, NYSERA, which VMware bought, is a big piece of what goes into Neutron. So, you know, it's a very complex and nuanced ecosystem. As you said, there's competing, you know, forces in here. There's some projects that get spun up. You know, the one that caused, you know, a lot of buzz in the industry was when solemn came out and that seems to have died down and I'm not sure if there's anyone driving it. So there's, you know, lots of different, you know, pieces of the puzzle. OpenStack is not a single, you know, product. It is, you know, multiple pieces that make up the stack. Kind of like if you look at the big data ecosystem. I mean, there's, you know, Pig and Hive and all these other little pieces and somebody's got to wrap it all together and help deliver the customers. And the thing for me is if I look at the enterprise, John, you know, enterprise likes simple solutions that are pre-packaged for them. So I expect the converged infrastructure is going to be important in this space and, you know, people have to simplify that, give that orchestration layer, automate the whole thing and enable not just the developers but everybody that managed the whole infrastructure. And as always, we'll be on crowdchat.net slash OpenStack. We decided not to use the OpenStack summit hashtag for the crowd chat this week because mainly it's just too long for hashtag. No offense to the show here. They got to shorten that down a little bit. But Tim Crawford's out there. Hey, Tim, say hello. He says a comment already. Arguably the ecosystem will make or break the ability for the platform to succeed. I totally agree with him on that one. There's already some jokes on Twitter like, hey, they imagine Dragon's going to be the live band for the OpenStack summit given that they played at the past three week of tech shows, back to back to back. But Stu, in all seriousness, the ecosystem is critical. I do agree with you there. But if you look at what's in that room, the room is packed. I mean, standing room only. I mean, this is what I love about this event. This is why we're here. I mean, we wish we had more support from some of the vendors out there to do more of a bigger production. So we have limited slots available this week. But it is where the action is. And that's our philosophy. We go where the action is. I'm telling you right now, Stu, OpenStack is the real deal, in my opinion. I am looking and watching for cracks in the foundations. We can identify them and talk about them. But really, the news is pretty positive. You're seeing certainly the telcos with the pistons, very good news today. Also, you're seeing a lot of stuff on the enterprise. You're seeing the discussions going from vendor, Olympics, jockeying for who's got leadership to actually buying and they're seeing some purchasing. So we will be focusing on that this week. So anything else to chat about, Stu, before we wrap up? Yeah, I mean, if you talk about on-premise, maybe we can get into a little bit of the economics of this. How is it going to make enterprise IT's life easier? How is it going to be cheaper? Because if you just look at, it's not necessarily simple for a customer to put all of this together. And if I'm putting it on-premise, how is that cheaper than what I was doing before? We're going to dig a little bit into some of the security items, John. I was talking to a friend of mine worked for a pretty large security company and they just had their customer counsel and they said, from a security standpoint, I don't want to go to the public cloud because I'm worried about the NSA. I'm worried about Heartbleed. I'm worried about so many different things. But my concern is if I do it internally, is that kind of private hybrid cloud really going to save me any money over what I was doing? So John, I know you're going to dig into the DevOps angle here because that should really help the agility of what companies are doing. And from an infrastructure standpoint, if customers aren't making changes or adopting something new, then they're not going to kind of save what they need to to be able to deal with the onslaught of growth that they have of all of their data. Yeah, I mean, the game is still the same. The players are moving around. The dollars are coming in. You're starting to see some formation. You're starting to see the swim lanes, as it's being talked about in the industry. But ultimately it's still a jockeying stew for who's going to have what position. It is totally a land grab in the open stack area. Cloud certainly will be a disruptive massive force that's going to change the economics. Yes, well documented. Certainly we've been doing that for two years. Certainly this past year has 100% dedicated to the conversation of mobile, cloud, big data, and certainly with social connected consumers with the phones. You're seeing an absolute disruption that will be at the cloud level. The cloud is the engine of the economics. It's the engine of the innovation. You're seeing new experiences, new stuff happening. So we're excited. This is theCUBE live here at the OpenStack Summit. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We'll be right back with our first guest after this short break.