 All right, we're gonna get started here. Good morning, everyone. How y'all doing? Come on. I am here. I woke up. How y'all doing? Good? All right, very good. Hey, can you guys close the doors in the back? That's it, no more people in. We're done. Look, this is our 13th summit. I remember the very first one. Some of you've been here since then. Some of you, this is your first summit, right? It is, OpenStack is an amazing movement. It has become the ubiquitous, open-source, platform infrastructure as a service. It is unbelievable. So the first thing I'd like to do before I introduce our speaker for today is give your all selves a round of applause because you guys have freaking arrived. All right, thank you. Thank you for all the work that you've done. All the contributions. Okay, so it is my pleasure to introduce Don Ripper, who is in charge of IBM's Cloud Business Technology development, okay, across the entire division. And he is here to tell us why IBM is betting on OpenStack. Anyone wanna know? Yeah? All right, Don, thank you very much. Thanks, Angel. Good morning. So I guess I could have said instead of why IBM is betting on OpenStack, I probably could have named this, why do old guys who wear sport coats to work wanna do OpenStack? And it's kind of an important question because there are a lot of old guys that wear sport coats and ties to work in our monk and they wanna know why we're doing it. And they wanna know whether the money we're spending, which is considerable, is gonna pan out to be the right decision. I'm gonna tell you what I tell them. I'm gonna tell you why we stick with OpenStack and why we're gonna keep with OpenStack. And I think we have a very good logical progression for it. To me, open source in general, there are three things I need to get. I need to get innovation. I need to get integration. And I need to get interoperability. If I get those three things, predominantly innovation, but if I get those three things, then we're in a good position. That's what customers want. They want innovation, they want integration, they want interoperability. If you can provide that, then they'll buy your products. Even if you can't, they won't. I think OpenStack, as an effort, a movement, a community, whatever you wanna call the organization and the people in it, is doing a pretty good job on two of the three. I think the innovation is there. I'm very happy with the innovation. The integration is getting there. The interoperability, I think we can do more. And I think if we did more, especially those of us who work for companies that provide solutions to consuming companies, like IBM, Mirantis, Cisco, I think if we do more in this category of interoperability, we'll be a more popular choice. If you ask customers why they think OpenStack is good, a very high percent of them will cite interoperability. The challenge comes at first are those who compete with OpenStack, I won't name names, but think Seattle. They are trying to claim that there is not interoperability in that you can't really do something on one vendor's OpenStack and then repeat it on the other without a lot of rework. Now you would expect the competitors to say that. Problem is there are a lot of industry analysts who say that too. And I don't know what they're saying publicly, I know what they're saying privately because customers tell me. So one of the features of what I'm gonna talk about is not just why IBM likes it, why IBM is dedicated to OpenStack. But what I think we can do together to take it maybe one more step forward in that interoperability world. So let me begin. And we've had a long romance with OpenSource. Most of you guys may not remember, but IBM was probably the world's most proprietary company at one point in time. Everything was done by IBM. IBM designed the chips, fabbed the chips, made the mainframe, wrote SNA, wrote the network architectures. It was IBM, IBM, IBM, IBM. I began working in this industry in 1981. There was no point in asking what kind of computer you were working on because the answer was always IBM. It's just what kind of IBM computer were you working on. So now I didn't work for IBM. I've only worked for IBM for two years. So I'm far from a historian in this category. So I think it was kind of amazing that in 1998, IBM saw the value of Linux, contributed to the Linux Foundation, set up a 200-person Linux center, swore over a bunch of patents, swore off the patent rights to a bunch of patents that could have potentially interfered with Linux and became a major driver behind Linux. Again, 1998, you gotta remember that was 18 years ago. So for a big proprietary technology company like IBM to have made that move 18 years ago, I think says something to the vision that the people working there at the time had about the importance that open source would provide. The Apache Software Foundation, at this point we began to remake some of our proprietary products with componentry that came from open source. We took the web sphere proprietary server and used the HTTP Apache server instead. So we began to use open source. We contributed, we had people working on Apache, still have people doing it. And then finally you get to Eclipse in 2001, just three years later, we actually founded that. We started with the, we were the original contributor, we were the founder, we moved along and made it an independent community. So we've had this history of open source, which for a large tech company is kind of unique. There are others that certainly do things. I think we have a long history. So open stack, why do we like open stack? Well, the first is because it's open source and the second is we believe that the innovation that you see in computing today typically comes more from open source than from proprietary. We've continued, it didn't stop in 2001. If anything, we've gotten bigger and broader. We've created the cloud native foundation. We worked directly with the Docker community. We contribute to Docker, we've been all around Hadoop. Pretty much in every category, no matter what category it is, IBM is a major contributor to that category within the open source communities. And we have a lot of people in that contribution, making those contributions. So we're gonna keep betting on open technology. I don't see any way that's gonna change. And the question is, how can we as a community around open stack do more to keep our customers happy, interested, focused, et cetera? And let me reign on the prey just a little bit right now. I probably talk to four different customers a week. I'll be having dinner in New York with the customers tomorrow night. And I see a pattern within the customer that's concerning to me. The CIO will often say, hey, cloud's great, but we can't be in the public cloud because we have PCI-based information, we have proprietary information, we have something. But good news is, I'll build us a nice private cloud. And so it'll be just like being in the public cloud, but it'll be a private cloud. We don't have to worry about being in someone else's facility. We don't have to worry about the contracts. We have our customers, et cetera. And a couple of years go by and that IT organization is building that private cloud. They start with the usual suspects of proprietary hardware and storage, not necessarily the software, but the kit itself. It tends to be sand-based, converged architectures. So the first challenge is, they're not using commoditized hardware. They're not using commodity storage. They're using the old hardware and the old storage, which works great, but it's expensive. Then they'll implement OpenStack. They'll come to the meetings. They'll get the OpenStack in. They'll build out the cloud and the cloud will work. It'll be a viable capability. The LOBs, the people in the lines of business, not in IT, will start saying, all right, when can I start using this private cloud? And they'll say, well, you can start now and here's what we're gonna charge you for it. And they go, oh my goodness, that's about the same as I'm paying already. For the non-cloud. Well, the trouble is you can't swap out business in a private cloud unless you have someone to swap in. And you don't use commodity hardware so you're paying more. In the problem you hear, OpenStack doesn't work. We tried OpenStack. It doesn't work. In reality, your philosophy didn't work. Had nothing to do with OpenStack. So I think one of the things we've gotta do in the community here is that we've gotta be both honest and blunt with customers. And we have to tell them, if you're trying to get to a dramatically different economic price point, economic point. First, assess how much you can really do without any other demand other than your own company coming into this cloud. And second, you may need to use some hardware providers and storage providers whose names you don't know because if you really wanna get under this and you wanna have a cloud that can fail and can recover from failure quickly which is kind of the hallmark of a cloud and you wanna have it cheap enough that your LOBs are happy with the price, then you gotta do it the way people who build clouds for a living do it. You can't just run OpenStack in your old philosophy and expect that you've solved the problem because you probably haven't solved the problem. Again, not an OpenStack flaw, but it almost doesn't matter. It wouldn't matter if it were CloudStack, it wouldn't matter what it was. You've got to work a cloud the way a cloud's meant to be. You've gotta operate it the way it should be operated. You can't just say it's a different implementation. It's a different way of doing things. And a lot of customers are kinda missing that. Pick of OpenStack was a natural. I don't know what alternative we could have seriously considered. There was OpenStack or build it ourselves. But I'll tell you, in a company the size of IBM, with the history of IBM, there isn't a day goes by. Someone doesn't wanna tell me why we should be building this ourselves. Now, Angel fights against him, Todd, everybody. We're winning the argument. We've been winning the argument for a couple of years. We're gonna keep winning the argument. But to say that there isn't somebody in one of our 12 research labs that doesn't think they could do it better, of course they are. It'd be a shame if they didn't. I'd be disappointed in them if they didn't think they could do it better. I don't believe they can do it better, but I'd be disappointed if they didn't have the gumption to think they could do it better. That's kinda what we pay them for. So we're dedicated to it. We're in it. We're fully in. And one message I gotta come across with is that we're not the only company in this by any means, and I'll talk a little bit about statistics in a minute. But too often within IBM and within some other companies, I get this. Oh, it's, you know, it's those guys from HP. They're trying to sell their private cloud. Are those guys from Morantis? They're out there pitching OpenStack. We gotta get kinda clear. We've gotta go from one OpenStack vendor fighting another OpenStack vendor to all of us mentally coming to the conclusion that it's open versus proprietary. My main enemy, as they used to say, isn't HP or Morantis or any other OpenStack provider. In fact, if it isn't us, I hope it's them that win the contract. I want us to win it, but if not us, then some other OpenStack provider. Our problem is AWS. Our problem is Microsoft. Those are our problems. People call me up when Google join OpenStack and say, oh my gosh, doesn't that concern you? I said, no, the best news I've heard this month. We gotta make OpenStack the standard. That's the belief. If we don't make OpenStack the standard, if it isn't what the customers want first and foremost, then we're kinda wasting our time here. Cause those other companies, the proprietaries, they're big, they're smart, they're skilled, and they have a ton of money. They're not gonna give up and go away. They're gonna keep fighting against this kind of open source movement, this OpenStack movement. I'm sure they'll tell me, someone will call me from Microsoft and say they're open source now. I don't know. They're not gonna convince me, I can assure you. But they're gonna talk about how they just discovered Linux. In any regard, I think we gotta get to more of the, you know, it is us against them. It is OpenStack against the rest. It is open against proprietary. We've gotta work more effectively together. And I'm directing this at the vendors, obviously. I'm directing this at those companies who are members of the OpenStack community who seek to create products to sell around OpenStack rather than those members of the community who are users of OpenStack. We have got to cooperate more. We've gotta put some of our differences behind us. You know, is it really, should the ref stack data be public? It's a bitter pill to swallow, but if you're doing your job, then that should be fine, in my opinion. It's transparent, it's open, it should be fine. So I'm first calling, first telling you that we are dedicated to OpenStack. We've been dedicated to it. We're remaining dedicated to it. We don't have an alternate plan in case this doesn't work. It won't matter much to me, because I'll be retired. I certainly won't have this job if it doesn't work. So my ultimate plan is to fish and golf. But we don't have a plan B going. This is the plan A, B, and C for us. Do wanna work more with people in the community, even our competitors, no problem. We gotta get to that mentality. If we can get the world to look at OpenStack first, we'll all win. And if we can't, I don't know that any of us will win. But having said that, let's not break out in kumbaya just yet. I do think IBM has the best plan to provide an OpenStack-based cloud. It hinges on some things. And this is what I would tell a customer. I'd say what you want is choice with consistency. You wanna decide whether you wanna run a workload private, dedicated in our data center, or public shared in our data center. And you wanna make those things work together. You don't wanna have three environments. Our answer is that's right. We understand that. In our environment is OpenStack, OpenStack, OpenStack. The best way to get consistency is to not change the environment. So we have OpenStack private, OpenStack dedicated, OpenStack public. That's the way we're going. That's what we think we have to do in order to get that hybrid capability. In the hybrid world, I've solved half the problem by using the same foundation. Now, I wanna win all three, but if I lose the private and win the public, then I want my public to interoperate with that private. So back we go again. If Red Hat wins the bid for the private, I want their OpenStack to work with our OpenStack in the public. And I'm gonna keep coming back to this theme of interoperability, because I think it's very important. You'll see us with open source in all of these categories. It's OpenStack we're available, but things like DevOps productivity, we use heat and hot. We try to stay as open as we can. It's only when we don't think there's an open capability that it'll suffice that we do something on our own. Analytics, we use Hadoop and Spark. We do management with Mesos, et cetera. Kubernetes, Docker. So we have what I think is, at least in the public cloud world, the most open public cloud. And that is important to a user if they get innovation, integration and interoperability. Meaning interoperability with other people's private clouds, interoperability with other people's public clouds. So, talk a little bit about Mitaka. A couple of the statistics just to show you what the dedication we have is. We had 212 technical contributors. IBM was number one in reviews or commits for nine projects. Maybe most importantly, we did two times the commit that we did in Liberty. So we did twice as much. If you watch the news, if you watch the announcements, we've hired quite a few OpenStack luminaries. I won't go name them all, but there's quite a few we've hired and we're gonna continue to hire OpenStack luminaries because that's part of our bet, is to have people that are contributing and leading in these projects. We were number three in overall reviews and commits for the entirety of the release. Morantis was number one and Red Hat was number two and I applaud both those companies for making a bet with us as well. And I think, hope they continue. I assume they'll continue. We certainly will as well. So we're in. We're in. We're putting our money where our mouth is. I can assure you when I go on Friday to Armon to talk to our CFO, he'll remind me of that. As he said last time, I gave you an unlimited budget and you've exceeded it. So again, whether you're serving the small and medium business community, whether you're serving the large business community, whether you're serving the government, interoperability is a key. RefStack's a big step in the right direction. DefCorp is a big step in the right direction. They don't go far enough because what they do is get to the kind of API-based interoperability but they don't get to scenario-based interoperability. And until we get to scenario-based interoperability, those industry analysts that are the doubting Thomases aren't gonna stop saying, doesn't matter if it's proprietary or OpenStack, you're still getting vendor lock-in. Those vendors aren't gonna let you interoperate. That's not how they work. And this is, I've heard this, no, maybe every industry analyst doesn't say that, that's sure. Enough of them say that. We're not getting the advantage that we should be getting in the community of being perceived as completely interoperable. So I'm gonna kind of issue a challenge on behalf of IBM. And that is between now and October, we will conduct interoperability proofs with any company that cares to do them with us. If you're from Red Hat, if you're from Morantis, if you're from HP, if you're a competitor of ours, send me a note, call me, do a direct tweet. I can deal with all that stuff. And I will get my kit in our labs connected with your kit in your labs and we'll start seeing whether we can send a VM from us to you without having to relearn your approach to OpenStack. What I'd love to see is that by the time October rolls around we're able to do a public interoperability demonstration among multiple vendors showing that the different implementations of OpenStack are in fact interoperable. Interoperable private to private, private to public. I don't care what the deployment mode is. I think it's very, very important for our community. It's very, very important for IBM that we be able to show this, that this is not a tricky way to achieve vendor lock-in. You know, we have reasons to believe customers will want to use our approach, but it has nothing to do with locking them out of using a competitor's approach if that's what they wanna do. That's not the game. And I'm telling you right now, we're not getting that belief set instilled in our common customer base. I don't think our customers believe that they're avoiding lock-in by picking an OpenStack vendor. They may be less locked in. They may agree with that, but they don't believe that the interoperability is there in a scenario-based event. I want our on-premise Swift to be able to instantly work with your on-premise Nova. I want it to interoperate, right? We make these things. I can't win all the bids. I wish I could. When I don't, I gotta interoperate with those who did win the bids. So this is my challenge. You've got my email address. You certainly know Angel and the rest of the folks that do a lot of work with OpenStack. Let us know if you're interested. I will be reaching out to my contacts at your companies over the next two weeks to see if there's interest. I've spoken with one company who is interested in interoperability testing and demonstrations with us, and I'll track them all down. If you are a consumer of OpenStack, if you are an enterprise not in the technology business and you wanna see something you're doing proven to be interoperable, let me know that too, and we'll try to demonstrate on some of your workloads that we can do it. I'm not sure right now whether it will be fully interoperable or not. I think it's more interoperable rather than less, but until we out-start doing it, until we start combining a bit from here and a bit from there, we just won't know. Once we start doing it, not only will we know, but our customers will know, and I think that's a big step forward. So that's the crux of what I wanted to come here to say today was that we are absolutely dedicated to interoperability. We are not interested in creating lock-in. We'd love customers to buy everything from us, but we know they won't, and I think if we can prove interoperability, that's a big step forward against those who are pitching proprietary answers instead of open-source answers. So places to come and see us. Here, we have a variety of different things, some training, modeling, presentations, et cetera, and looking forward to talking to you guys, and I hope you take me up on my offer to do the interoperability testing if you're from one of the companies with whom we compete within the OpenStack community. I'm happy to take any questions if there are any right now. If you ask me a hard question, I'll have to have Angel answer it. Well, if there are no questions, then we'll adjourn. Thank you.