 Live from the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California, it's The Cube at Oracle Open World 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsor Cisco Systems with support from NetApp. And now here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and Jeff Frick. Hi, welcome back to Oracle Open World 2014. I'm Stu Miniman with wikibon.org. Here we're silk and angle TVs, live, wall-to-wall coverage. Three days of Oracle Open World, everything's going on. The database world, cloud, new analytics and much, much more. Here in the Cisco booth, it's our fifth year at the show and for the first year we're actually at two venues. So we've been at the Cube Logic booth for a couple of days and also in the Cisco booth. So lots of content digging into a full part of the ecosystem. Pleased to bring on for this segment, first time Cube guest, Mike Evans, who's the VP of Technical Business Development with Red Hat. Mike, thanks for joining us. Sure, thanks for having me. So we've spent a lot of time with a lot of Red Hat executives this year. Red Hat, of course, is a critical part of the overall software ecosystem as software is eating the world and open source becomes even more important. Wow, it seems that it's moving into Red Hat space. So exciting time for Red Hat. Tell us a little bit about your role. You've been with Red Hat for a while. What do you focus on? Sure. I'm based out here in the Bay Area and I've been with Red Hat over 14 years now. And the last five years I've been looking at new markets and new technologies for the companies. Not necessarily acquisitions, but looking at new either vertical or horizontal markets or market categories that we want to expand our business into, including cloud computing four or five years ago. I started looking at that as well as big data, the mobile market, open stack. And then I actually have worked a lot with both Oracle and Cisco quite a bit in the past as well being based out here in the Bay Area. Okay, wow. I'm 14 years, I think back. I was actually in 2000, I was working for a very large storage company and I was the product manager for Linux when we were trying to figure it out. Because you had product managers that worked on all of the big operating systems and I got all that stuff that was left over that nobody understood. So I worked on Linux, I worked on this little company at a Palo Alto called VMware when it first started and lots of other pieces. So it's come a real long way. I mean, Linux is a foundational layer. When I look at the next generation of what's happening in storage and networking, we're looking at Linux as a core component of what's happening there. So talk to me, you said you work with both Cisco and Oracle. What's the relationship between Red Hat and those companies today? So I'll start with Cisco, that's a little more straightforward. I've worked with them for about eight years, starting more mostly when they started to get into the server business, when they made the big leap into UCS, they called it Project California, was double top secret. And then helping them sort of evolve into the higher end of the market and we're connecting that with the Red Hat Salesforce, which was a very natural fit because Red Hat had been focused on Unix to Linux migration for many years, as our way into the enterprise and into business critical systems. And where Cisco was aiming with those servers was at the higher end of the market, again the Unix kind of market. And it was actually interesting because Cisco when they first came out, they came out strongly with VMware, which was a key partner. But one of the things they realized when they got into the market was that a lot of those high end systems weren't being virtualized yet. So those customers kind of told them directly, yeah, it's nice you have VMware when we get to virtualization, but for right now you need to get Red Hat because so it was great because the market told them. So I worked a lot with them. And then in the last three years, things with OpenStack coming about, it really changed the Red Hat Cisco partnership because I view OpenStack as sort of supersized Linux in a sense. It's sort of, you know, Linux touch storage, it touch networking, it creates, you know, an operating system for compute. But OpenStack, the supersized storage, supersized networking, and supersized computing has more capability. So that really got the bigger part of Cisco, the network side of Cisco, much more engaged into the equation. So in the last two or three months, it's been a lot of work about connecting Red Hats technologies with Cisco's networking server technologies, you know, and then you combine into it the private cloud, public cloud boom happening all. And it's just, it was kind of a perfect lineup between Red Hat and Cisco. There's really no product overlap, you know, they, yeah. Yeah, so first of all, OpenStack, I agree in general, but your characterization, we've often said the operational model of Linux kind of expands to the rest of the stack. Yeah. So our Cisco and Red Hat, how do you work together from an OpenStack standpoint? Obviously you have your distribution and how does that play with Cisco? So Cisco uses Cisco from the server side and expanded into the network. We announced, I think in September, just about three or four weeks ago, a partnership around OpenStack, around ACI, Cisco's networking technology, and around intercloud as well. And being able to build both private clouds and public clouds that run on OpenStack. So we're working, they're doing a lot of work with us around OpenStack to certify it and integrate it with components. They're using it to run internal systems quite a bit. So it's evolved into the preferred OpenStack solution for Cisco for internal use and for use in the marketplace. Yeah, so Mike, let's pretend that we're not in the Cisco booth for a second. I want to get your honest opinion on Cisco and open source. We all know for many years Cisco was always kind of attacked as being proprietary. My general line when I worked in the vendor community and Cisco as a partner was that Cisco would actually solve a customer's problem and then help make that the standard. Well, that's different than kind of the open source engagement. Over the last couple of years I have seen Cisco very active in a number of open source communities in networking, you've got the Open Daylight project going on, and then of course in OpenStack they've got a pretty strong presence and some really good contributors. What's your opinion? What's your take on their maturity? I don't know that there's any company that has the credibility that Red Hat does in the open source community. Where do they stack? Okay, so we're fortunate in that we started our company purely on open source. So it's a pretty straightforward proposition. Whenever we put out a solution it's open source. Whenever we acquire a company, whenever it's ready we open source it. So it's sort of black and white, it just is what it is and we're purists. What we call as pragmatic purists because we have a lot of zealot purists at Red Hat but also there's a lot of pragmatic because we're a public company and need to make revenue, etc. and make profits. But every large company, especially one with an installed base and installed set of products with a lot of proprietary IP has a lot of challenges with how they navigate the open source proprietary in the lines and what eats what. Cisco is doing a better job than many I would say and it's a challenge and I know there's still people inside Cisco who believe if open source wins they all get run over and get out of business. So it's changing but I see the interesting thing I see about Cisco around open source is from the top down their game to understand the world's changing and to move on it and strike and keep turning the knobs and keep turning the knobs. It doesn't mean they're going to be everything pure open source utopian world. So they've done because I see from John Chambers on down he's willing to be bold and say okay I'm sorry I'm going to have to cut and as ugly as it is sometimes it's cutting the workforce in order to do it but he's able to adapt to the new model. And there's other people I call, I use the term Schizophrenic Opportunistic Open Source. All right so yeah Mike I think that's a fair characterization of Cisco. No, not the Schizophrenic, I said Cisco let's focus on Oracle, we're here at Oracle Open World. First of all what do you take a look at their open source activity? Obviously they've got Oracle Linux and Oracle VM and they made an open stack announcement about a week ago. So where do they sit in your viewpoint of open source? So for history I also saw eight or ten years ago when we did Oracle Red Hat Unbreakable Linux, I don't remember the big with Dell, Intel. So I managed the Red Hat Oracle through all that partnership and all that and it was a great partnership and it actually helped Red Hat quite a bit, probably more than any single other vendor. A lot of people give IBM most credit for Linux but accelerating but I would say actually the Oracle Red Hat partnership accelerated Red Hat Enterprise Linux faster than anything else in the industry. So let me understand that, are you saying just because Oracle's position from an application standpoint that they got us to be able to pull it from Unix to Linux through that? So the reason it was so impactful is because Oracle had such a presence both on every server vendor in the world had to deal with Oracle. Every storage vendor had to have an Oracle thing, right? And then almost every ISV in the world also worked with an Oracle database or an Oracle middleware. So by Oracle at that point shifting after 13 years of running Solaris as their internal development platform they now cleaned house, wiped that clean and said now Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a development platform and it's going to be the primary thing we certify everything on. It forced the entire ecosystem to play ball and it forced every systems integrator who deals with Oracle and so that had the biggest impact on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Not necessarily Linux overall but Red Hat Enterprise Linux success by far. And IBM did a great job early on pledging a billion dollars and doing a lot of activity but that was more broad Linux and actually Michael Dell doesn't get enough Michael Dell was the first server vendor to preload Linux on a server ahead of anyone else and what's what's astounding is that he built his company entirely on Windows for 20 some years, right? That's all. No other operator said well they might have put SCO or something on but really that was it and then all of a sudden he stood up and told his people no Linux is going to be a big thing and his people said you know it's not on our spreadsheets so anyway so that's a little bit we've gone forever for history but Oracle so Oracle had and to this day you know we actually I'd say 90% of Oracle's sales of their products on Linux are probably on rel they have their own Linux offering it's out there it feels a niche that they're or it feels a need that they're trying to solve in my mind it hasn't been successful to the extent they want it to be they prefer it's a standard blanket and so we compete in that front and I would say they fall into the schizophrenic opportunistic I mean they kind of do stuff and then they maybe change and then they'll use it but I mean they're a proprietary software company I don't think they make any bones about it I don't think they try to say we're an open source company No no as a matter of fact like when I listened to the keynote this morning John Fowler talking about the system solution I mean really bragging about all of the custom solutions that are built into the RedStack from you know the you know spark design through the silicon that they build through their own Linux all the way up the stack it's a full RedStack they made an announcement on something called the Oracle software virtualization appliance almost like a mini exadata so I'm not sure if you've had a chance to look at that but maybe you could talk about kind of exadata versus what Cisco does with converged solutions with all of their partnerships Yeah so I mean I've looked at exadata I've watched it for I guess four or five years now I think they've been talking about it and I was a little leery early on because the senior management of Oracle would talk so much about exadata and how great the pipeline was and how exciting and how and it just never really it never really felt real to me because the way I looked at it was you know the way the world was going was sort of broad based x86 hardware system sort of cheaply as a you know sort of brought out and swap easily swapped out and and that was the engineered systems in my mind people were engineering to this newer model of the cloud computing the horizontal computing and Intel was going to great strides and AMD to keep up with these models and so engineering systems seems like seems like a little bit of dragging back into the caves to me it's like wait a minute no it's all right here and so I personally don't believe they've been as successful as Oracle had predicted they would be and I think it as time moves on it's going to be a niche price sort of it feels like an AS-400 to me a little bit yeah well it's interesting the AS-400 analogy is what most of the converged infrastructure players talk about when IBM launched Pure Systems they talked about the AS-400 model even Cisco talks about that here's the one unique thing that Cisco has though that I've really realized in the last two years of now working more with the networking side of Cisco because the server side of Cisco is just like every other server vendor every every other x86 server vendor they've got between four and twenty percent share and they're kind of the same as Dell HP they're all kind of the same and they're switchable easily switchable so so they have to compete head-to-head with all those people when you go to the network side of Cisco there's there's there's markets where they have 70 and 90 percent market share there's customers where they have a hundred percent and there's not it's just not that easy to switch a lot of that stuff and if you look at now with private clouds public clouds hybrid clouds the network is is is more important in so many respects than the server but it doesn't get the visibility that the server wars get so Cisco's got this unique position of having the network side really dialed in in terms of the technologies the accounts the install the installation every service provider in the world you know telecom service writer use reams of Cisco gear so when you take that and combine their server expertise together and look at the private cloud public cloud hybrid cloud world they've got a big got a unique value proposition that Oracle can't handle Oracle son can't handle that HP that no one can really and so that's why one of the reasons I'm so excited about the partnership I like I like a lot I like great relationship with the HP x86 server group Dell's a great partner IBM's a strong partner in many areas as well but Cisco's got this unique position and for us as Red Hat there's no overlap with you know it's very complimentary so so Mike talking about partnerships one of the big opportunities for changes of course the move to cloud we've seen Red Hat make a lot of really good moves partnering to make sure that whether it be in private hybrid environments or in public environments Red Hat Linux it can be there so you already have a support for Amazon you work with Google curious as to when we're going to see Red Hat on Azure maybe you can speak to that and what about Cisco and Oracle and what they're doing with cloud how does Red Hat interact with those so yeah so so I mean we weren't as I've been at Red Hat for 14 years and I bounce out of bed every day to get come to work I tell people because it's still we're changing the world it's exciting and and with the open source movement in my mind we're also bettering the world so we're not just purely a purely financial driven company even though we are a public company and we're at the we're just in the best position we've been in my 14 years here partly because of having you know the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system is this rare beast of it's it's the only operating system out there that's both proven at extreme levels of you know running every stock exchange and pretty horizontal every IP it's proven it's trustworthy it's secure but it's also hip and cool it's still modern and cool and if you look at windows it's proven but it isn't hip and cool so nothing else has that unique balance and I tell you it's interesting and since Sacha Nadella has taken over there's actually a little bit of I agree Microsoft has even found out that there's this thing called open source has been talking to people about it so it's been refreshing but yeah so I mean so from Red Hat's position with having that unique platform where if you're if you're creating a new application right now whether it's a mobile app or you know an internet app and on the back end you're most likely going to use rel and jboss as starter points so that puts us in a great position they're having these two horizontal technologies now as you span to public cloud private cloud you know everyone needs to run their applications on something whether you're an ISV trying to run on the cloud or so again I go back to 12 months ago meeting with the CIO of of a big gaming company that 40,000 servers and he was trying to figure out how to move all his apps from his cloud to public cloud and it was all complicated around security and virtualization and storage and when it was going and at the end of a six hour meeting he said I think I need vodka and Tylenol he said Mike can you give me some simple advice because all his internal groups were disagreeing security group was disagreeing with the storage and the server group and I said well if you just port move every application to rel or jboss then no matter whenever it is your time I guarantee rel and jboss will be running in every major cloud in the world so you'll be able to move it there move it here or move it there so that's a unique advantage we've got as this cloud market plays out relative to Microsoft I'm also I would also agree that with Sotya Nadella coming in it's sort of a fresh air at Microsoft around the cloud and there's more excitement around azure than there was 12 months ago so will we see you know rel support on azure soon it's possible I think the market is interested in it and as long as there's something that can be done rationally for both companies customers it seems reasonable any commentary on working with Cisco's intercloud or the Oracle Clouds well Cisco's intercloud is straight we're one of the key building blocks of the Cisco intercloud I think they've talked about how 19 of their top 20 customers around the world have told them they want an open stack intercloud is really you can run other operating systems or other technologies but open stack is probably the most visible part of intercloud and it's the one that's going to connect private cloud to public clouds we also our open shift platform as a service product is on I've never seen a product take hold faster than that product and with hardly any promotion and advertising it's just one of those the past market was highly fragmented a bunch of people with 5 to 12% share and people were still trying to figure it out and it's just sort of rising in its adoption I think we just passed 2 million applications and it's just one of those where every time I've had to offer people do a head-to-head against whether it's cloud foundry or against Heroku or something it always wins whenever there's a head-to-head so it's really proven itself just on the quality of the product yeah I guess the only point I'd say there is it's interesting you are seeing a large ecosystem building around cloud foundry you've got a lot of your good partners like IBM and HP that have been working there and I've started to see some big customers that are using it yeah but don't confuse ecosystem with what those guys, ecosystem to me is people that actually build things that are one of the challenges I think cloud foundry will run into in doing the foundation consortium having 8 or 10 large vendors to try and they're all going to take it and do their unique challenges to it so cloud foundry will not be a cloud foundry the HPs will be 2% difference IBM will be 9% Pivotals and to me developers don't stand for that if it's 1% difference there's a challenge if it's 9% so personally I was actually happy when I saw cloud foundry did the competitive wise I was happy when I saw cloud foundry did the joint foundation element because as good as that might sound to press it's a really complicated process to navigate and it leads to all sorts of funky dynamics that I think will hurt them over time maybe not it is early days it's interesting to see how much the Pivotal cloud foundry will deploy versus what IBM is doing with bluemix what HP is doing with Helion and some of the same criticisms that you raised you can say about OpenStack we don't have full interoperability there were plenty of stones thrown at Red Hat when Red Hat came out with their statement about a distribution from the history I say that Red Hat has done a really good job of creating an enterprise version that's fully supportable and that's what customers need it is the biggest challenge I see around OpenStack is the perception of what it is today versus what it really is and what it will be meaning I jokingly call it the solar powered salt water desalination plant that cures cancer in the Middle East peace all at once if you believe what everybody writes about it the reality is it's functional good areas right now it's very weak in other areas it's evolving quickly and it has so much promise it has more promise than any other open source project I've ever seen but people have to get real about what it is today as well so so many topics Mike this has been an excellent conversation not even talk about storage even that's a wild world you want to talk quick quick on storage please give us your take especially from kind of an oracle mindset where does storage play from your standpoint well I mean to me everybody who has the legacy storage businesses whether it's actually Cisco is the only one who doesn't have a legacy storage business that's of size in terms of the vendors everybody who has a legacy storage play of size has to be worried about cannibalization from Red Hat's perspective I love our position of being able to say we're a trusted operating system supplier because buying storage there's lots of people who will evaluate new storage technologies buying it and deploying it is a whole other level because of the you need to have redundancy and recovery and everything so with us with Red Hat's storage now with the ink tank and the cluster we have the ability to say to the customer fine put us off for a storage solution and if you want to use your legacy EMC stuff knock yourself out if you want to use cheap X86 white box storage knock yourself out if you want to use cloud all one layer and from a proven vendor so that's just a unique position and that market, the storage market is bigger than, I mean is a massive market and growing fast. Yeah but so Mike we can spend another hour talking this because I've got some strong background here we're going to get the hook but I'm curious we look at from Wikibon's standpoint we think long term the storage is being pulled back into the compute side much more and Seth and Gluster definitely while Cisco also seems to be making some moves there so you guys having those discussions as to how your solutions compliment or you know but heads with what Cisco's doing. Well Cisco's a big user, they were actually I think the largest user of Seth before we acquired ink tank and they still so that's a key technology that they've already been using and in my mind because they don't have a legacy storage business there's just pure upside in terms of doing more together there and in some cases in our actions in the last 12 months with Cisco there's so many good things to do just the list is this long and we have to start with 4 or 5 and then keep going Alright so we've got a wrap I want to give you the last word on this Mike for customers that are you know heavily invested in the Oracle applications you know what's the message from Red Hat as to why they should be still talking to Red Hat and not just going full red stack Oh so if you're using an Oracle database or middleware for the users that are at this show sure I mean in my mind we still we compete with parts of Oracle but the database group and the middleware group and the apps all are partners of Red Hat and out in the field the Oracle sales reps you know 9 times out of 10 will promote Red Hat and recommend Red Hat because the sale goes down quicker for one just that's just a manic dodo type data but in my mind it's the ability to have the choice for running Red Hat more broadly than just it'll run perfectly fine on the Oracle solution and Red Hat's accountable to what Oracle is as well but you have the broader base of Red Hat offerings that can run wider range of applications allow you to switch easier if you want to so just more flexibility and more pure open I mean you know you never know when Oracle could change its policy on open source proprietary Red Hat's very transparent about where an open source company so I think that's also something people can sort of take to the bank all right well Mike you gave me one of my favorite lines of the week we didn't give Oracle enough credit for helping for enterprise adoption of Linux Oracle still you know huge mainstay in you know the enterprise and Red Hat is enterprise service providers and the cloud providers very relevant company appreciate you coming in sharing all your wisdom and experience in the partnerships that Red Hat has throughout the ecosystem I'm Stu Miniman we're going to continue with Silicon Angle TVs covered Oracle open world going right to the end squeezing all of the juice out of the experience here at the Moscone Center we'll be right back after this quick break