 The Computer Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley, extracting the signal from the noise. It's the Cube, covering OpenStack Silicon Valley 2015. Brought to you by Morantis. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Frick. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live here in Silicon Valley. This is Silicon Angles, the Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the civil noise. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick. I'm my co-host this week for two days of live coverage of the OpenStack SV Silicon Valley event here at the Computer Museum in Mountain View. One exit from our Palo Alto office. Our next guest is Tyler Britton, Technical Marketing Manager, Blue Box. Welcome to the Cube. Thanks for having me. So Blue Box we're big fans of because Jesse wins one of our Cube Madness got the trophy to prove it. Moreover, you guys have been big in the OpenStack, big part of the ecosystem, big success story out of Seattle, recently acquired by IBM. So give us the update. What's going on? And the recent news, soft player in 90 days. Come on, tell us what happened. That's just a long time, it could have been 30. It was true DevOps, it could have been 30. Well, of course, some of those challenges end up not being from the technical angle, right? It's getting the right people in the right room together. But I think it's a real testament to the technical operation staff and engineering staff at Blue Box to be able to take what was a pretty standard well-built platform in our data centers and be able to deliver them in soft layer, working with the soft layer teams pretty closely. So I'm just joking, 90 days is obviously press-releasable you guys for pumping that up as a success, but you know, I'm kind of kidding, but also DevOps is about pushing code daily, right? So take us through why the 90 days was a success. What was part of the reason? What were some of the insights you guys learned and what was the process? Well, I think what made the process really interesting was, you know, the acquisition happens and it's, you know, just the initial kind of integration work to have Blue Box operate as part of the IBM family. But then also starting the process with soft layer, meeting the appropriate people and getting the teams together and being able to hammer out not just the technical, but the commercial pieces. So soft layer has these types of servers in their data center. Is that going to be a problem for our tools? They offer, their offerings are slightly different what we deliver as a standard. So do we change our standard to match soft layers and working through those types of things? And then obviously the obvious technical challenges of deployment. So it was all of those things happening at once at the same time being part of the usual acquisition integration work was just a lot of balls moving at once. But it was pretty exciting to see how quickly it could come together. Yeah, and get that IBM sales team ramped up. That's what everybody wants to get going. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I mean, there's been so much interest from IBM, from IBM customers. And then just even the community as a whole, you have a successful delivery system like Blue Box, bringing private clouds as a service now available with the big IBM brand name behind it. Supporting it is really exciting. So was there an IBM OpenStack config that Blue Box replaced or is this another option? Today, this is another option. The IBM team has a number of different OpenStack things they've been working on. And kind of that's the process where it now is rationalization of some of that is. And I will, I have to say the IBM team's been a real breath of fresh air as far as really open to say, hey, what does Blue Box do? How are they doing it? Are they doing it better than us in some areas? Where can we learn from them? And what can we show them stuff that we've been doing to kind of really collaborate? It's a very collaborative relationship. So I think you're going to see some really great things going forward from that too. Okay, so are there some natural ways that that could get segmented out where there's different kind of flavors of OpenStack based environment coming from IBM for the customer base? And what are some of the differences between the difference? Sure, I think the main focus is going to be kind of in three areas, right? So the traditional private cloud as a service, what we call dedicated, which Blue Box was delivering in the software or Blue Box data centers, Blue Box local, so in the customer's data center as well, still delivering OpenStack as a service, but on customer, on their premises. And then third is public cloud, right? So IBM has not been shy saying they're not moving out of the public cloud space. So I think those are going to be the three main focuses for IBM when it comes to OpenStack, kind of in those buckets. And then obviously the Cloud Foundry, the Blue Mix stuff on top of all those things. Good portfolio. Let's talk about Blue Box's history right now. Where you guys are, number of employees, the IBM transition, what does this all mean for folks out there? And does it change the OpenStack involvement product? What are some of the impacts of the IBM acquisition? Sure, so I actually joined right after the acquisition. So I joined Blue Box, I believe I joined IBM technically as all the Blue Box employees were joining IBM. So at the time, I think it was 50 or 60 employees, Blue Box at the time, and it's continued to grow. So that was the exciting thing of what got me willing to join post acquisition was Blue Box is doing exciting things within IBM and those opportunities were there for growth and even more engagement. Instead of less, where we've seen some of the other OpenStack startups get acquired and kind of teams get broken up or they kind of go quietly into a corner, Blue Box is still in front and center in OpenStack along with IBM going forward. So I think that's really exciting. So I think you're going to see even more Blue Box instead of less. Even more, Jesse. So what's going on here at OpenStack? Share with the folks out there watching what does OpenStack Silicon Valley mean to you? I think OpenStack Silicon Valley is kind of, we started to see some of it in Vancouver at the last summit, but we're really hearing the message loud and clear here is it's about focusing on the experience, the end user's experience. Operational challenge is absolutely, OpenStack operators how they're going to do it, OpenStack service providers, but it really boils down to, if we don't care how you do it, it's how the users consume it. If the users don't like it, you're OpenStack deployment no matter how operationally sound it is, they're not going to use it. So there's been a clear message through all the sessions of the focus on less on the underlying technology and more on how the developers are going to consume and use it, both public and private clouds. What do you think about hybrid cloud? When someone says, does hybrid cloud exist? What do you think? I feel, I think conceptually hybrid cloud makes a lot of sense. I just don't feel like anyone's really got it figured out in delivering it. A lot of things are either, we're doing the same thing in two different places and calling it hybrid cloud or we're doing a private cloud and we're allowing a connection to a public cloud so we're calling it hybrid. But if the user's experience is different, is it really hybrid then? So if a user says, oh, I want this thing, oh, that's only available on the private side or I want that thing, oh, it's only available on the public side, that's, it's not the right user experience. So I think it's something that enterprises are interested in. I don't know if someone's really fully delivering that experience. That's something that's really important to IBM and to Bluebox is to get that experience. So having the OpenStack public and private teams work together, the BlueMix local, as well as the hosted BlueMix teams all working together to give the customer that continuous experience across both public and private to actually try and deliver a hybrid experience. So I think it still hasn't been put together yet but I think a lot of people are trying to figure it out. So what's your take on OpenStack's vision? Is it competing with Amazon Web Services as much more of a bigger enterprise opportunity? I think that's one of the things people are having trouble wrapping their minds around is the democratic nature of OpenStack is there isn't, you know, this leadership team, you know, commercial leadership team, you know, looking at market opportunity and basic and based on that. It's kind of a demand driven. So I think it's, I think the original intent was let's compete with Amazon. And now I think people see as a project as a building block to build what you need out of it, right? So for some people that's building private clouds, for people like Rackspace or, you know, it's building public clouds, it's be interesting to see, you know, as things like containers are more integrated, do people use this with Kubernetes instead of Kubernetes? Like, I think it's one of those things it's hard to predict because there's not a clear, clear straight line to the future that there's all these different people getting involved. And I think it almost builds that kind of market feedback you want, so something isn't helping users or isn't interesting to them. They're not working on it anymore. So that kind of dies off. So I think that's the good news with OpenStack, but obviously when you have a lot of cooks, the kitchen can get crowded. So I got to ask you, Cube Madness, we had a very big success. Jesse was the winner. What hacking techniques did you guys use to win that? I can't disclose any proprietary blue box. Even our security is pretty lame. You're on a kitty script on that, I mean, no problem. As before my time. Well, this year we might have a security bracket. Might make it a security hackathon where each round gets harder and harder to hack. So, you know, I'm only kidding. And all seriousness, that's all with security. So security is a big deal. I brought just getting inside with that Cube Madness. What is security issues do you guys take into consideration? A lot of work being done in OpenStack, but no one's talking about security. Is that even a conversation now? Certainly for customers, it's a top conversation. What's your take on that? I think it's one of the challenges of reality that OpenStack as a community is coming to grips with was the early days, it was easier to just say, oh, well that's your problem, Mr. App User. You'll write your app to do everything over SS. You're going to secure the app layer and then we're just not going to really think about it too much. Hey, security groups is enough. But I think that's what they're seeing is that is not nearly enough, especially for if you want enterprise adoption. So I mean, we're starting to see more projects like BarberCan, which is key management, focusing on some of those things. A lot of the neutron SDN work that some of the SDN provides with are very security-centric. I think it's tough because there's no roadmap to say, well, here's what customers did before. So let's just copy that in OpenStack because those things are not working anymore. I was reading something this morning that, I forget who the provider was, they've gotten rid of antivirus because they said it's too much of a burden and it doesn't actually stop anything anymore. They've moved past it to some other techniques. So it's not as straightforward as, well, let's see what we were doing before and bring that to OpenStack. So I think it's like most things, it's a murky future but I think there's definitely a lot more attention on it now than any time previously in the open side space. What's the core mission right now, BlueBox? The core mission of BlueBox has not changed. It's to deliver private clouds to our customers both in our locations or theirs and give them a great user experience. So that way they can focus on working with OpenStack instead of on OpenStack. So OpenStack in your mind on the scale of adoption, 10 being fully adopted, where are we in the market in your opinion? So I think because we start from, we focus too much kind of on the hype cycle. So if there's not as much talk about it, it falls behind. I think we're, I think we're, I would put us at maybe, you know, like a four, a four or five, you know, it's starting to get there. We're starting to see real traction. To me that's the kind of negative energy is actually a positive result because that means people are actually doing it, trying it and deploying it versus talking about it and seeing demos. And I say, that thing looks awesome but we didn't actually try it and now that customers are running it, they're learning things, we're growing on it, we're making better improvements to the projects. So I think it's on the cusp of large scale enterprise adoption. They've stopped asking, what is OpenStack? I don't really understand it. They're trying to figure out how do they want to do OpenStack now? Do they want to work with a provider? They want to build it? What do they want to do? Tyler, thanks for coming on theCUBE, sharing your insights. This is BlueBox, Tyler Britton on theCUBE, technical manager at BlueBox. We'll be hearing from Jesse, the founder shortly. Again, we're live here at Silicon Valley at the OpenStack, Silicon Valley, OpenStack SV, hashtag OpenStack SV or hashtag OSSV15. Join the conversation. We'll be right back with more after this short break.