 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2017, brought to you by Cisco. Welcome back everyone, live in San Francisco, this is exclusive CUBE coverage of DevNet Create Cisco's inaugural event where they're going out into the DevOps world, into the community, ingratiating and donating a million dollars for hardware, really taking their DevNet developer program to the next level, really creating an open developer. DevOps ethos coverage, two days. I'm John Furrier, my cohost, Peter Burris, head of boogiebond.com research, and also head of research with SiliconANGLE Media. Our next guest is Abby Kerns, the executive director of Cloud Foundry. Welcome back to theCUBE, great to see you. Always a pleasure. Great, I'm excited to chat with you for multiple reasons. One, you've got a hot product, but at Dell EMC World, more than ever, you start to see the emergence of Cloud Foundry, really consolidating, coalescing, not consolidating, coalescing the stakeholders. And so you're starting to see multi-clouds starting to develop as the swim lane, or a path, certainly hybrid cloud is hot. Cloud Foundry is kind of interesting right now, so congratulations, give us the update. What's going on? Obviously, you've got a spring in your step. What's happening? Well, not to be biased, but I feel like Cloud Foundry has always been interesting. Well, from a growth standpoint, I mean, now more than ever. Yeah, I mean, we started talking about multi-cloud a year ago, so it's really interesting to see it really taking form in the industry, where people are like, yes, people don't want to be locked into a single cloud. Yes, they want to have choice. And yes, they want to be able to take their workloads and move them anywhere. And public cloud, right now, is gotten such amazing traction, and they're coming up with interesting things. You know, GCP is really coming into its own, and Azure is really starting to take shape. So I think there's a lot of potential for a lot of features and services to really be available. Do you think I like talking to you about is talking with you because you're in an area that is misunderstood early on, and you've been beating on the strong. We've talked about this before. Andy Jassy and I had similar conversations about Amazon, how they were misunderstood at the beginning. People were dismissing it. And so there's always a tipping point, and theCUBE's the same way. It's looking at you like, hey, what do you guys do? And we keep on, and then people figure it out. That's kind of when the rest of the world's mainstream starts to get it, and in particular, figures out the model. What was the tipping point for you? Because I know that you've had the same vision. What's the tipping point now? Why are we now, is it happening? Because of the pressure? Is because now the tools are coming to the table? What's the forcing function that's taken Cloud Foundry from, this is an alternative approach to a viable, scalable opportunity? Well, I think it's always been viable. I think where we are, though, is we're seeing users starting to get traction on digital transformation. And I know digital transformation, everyone's like, oh God, not that term again. I was so tired of it, but it's true. Is more of these enterprise organizations or I'm now a software company, or I'm now competing against Airbnb or Tesla. The landscape is changing. And so, as they realize they need to become software companies and they need to develop software, they're investing more in developers and development, and they're like, oh, well, how do I do that quickly? How do I really focus on that? Because it turns out, really investing in a lot of other ancillary aspects isn't core to my business. It's not changing who I am. And so investing in technology and software in particular allows you to differentiate your business and so a platform like Cloud Foundry really abstracts away the infrastructure, automates as much of that as possible so that developers have the freedom to create. And that's really what's going to differentiate business that are becoming software companies. So as you think about the developer, break it down where you think it's going to be in five years, because we're here at a developer conference and most of these people are folks with network expertise or folks with traditional software development expertise coming into the world where we're going to build distributed applications. Very, very important stuff. But as you think about the characteristics or how the demographics of what the developer is, how much is it going to be the professional hardcore developer? How much is it going to be citizen development? Where do you think all this goes in five years as we start to see how all this new software gets created to serve all the business needs that are on the horizon of a digital world? Well, my opinion is that eventually everyone's going to be a developer of some type. Whether it's taking advantage of business logic or operationalizing outcomes from machine learning or automotive or AI, just taking advantage of that. But in five years, I think where we are today, the technology is definitely growing faster than users capability to adopt it on. So there is a growing gap there that you have to recognize. And use cases are merging as well so that another dimension to that complexity is. New devices are connected, not just the... Exactly, so I think there's going to be an exponential over the next couple of years of growth in terms of the technology, what it enables, why it enables, and how the users are adopting it. Because I think we all theorize about what users could do and will do. But at the end of the day, if these large enterprise organizations start actually putting the focus and the force behind development, imagine what they can come up with. Look at what GE is doing with Credix or SAP is doing with their cloud platform and think about the investment around those applications and the ability to influence where we go. Seven years ago, we wouldn't have predicted the iPhone would be the tool that it is today or the iPad or the way that we actually make use of these platforms because of the applications. The applications have really driven the innovation around them. I think we'll start seeing that with the applications and the use cases really driving the innovation leads. Talk about the challenges and opportunities that digital transformation has for businesses that are trying to get there. And there's obviously different business profiles. Startup, fast growing, public companies, I mean Ford is the customer I know of years, I know, I want to get into the whole Mark Fields thing. But there's challenges at different levels of the organization. So to implement DevOps, I mean, at the end of the day, Ford's trying to get better cars, not necessarily a better cloud, it enables them to do things. So companies got to look at this and have a journey. What is the part that you see that companies are doing well from a journey standpoint and how are they laying out that digital transformation with cloud boundary? Well, I think more than a journey, they have to have a clear vision, a clear idea of where they want to go. Because at the end of the day, technology shouldn't be the goal. Technology should be the enabler to achieve that goal and ensuring that companies can maintain that clear vision and really lead from the top with that vision. Because at the end of the day, we talk about digital transformation. Technology is the part I talk about a lot because obviously cloud foundry is focusing on the technology piece, but the cultural shift, what it enables, is really what's both critical, but also the most difficult. Because these organizations that are trying to transform and become software companies are also fundamentally changing their business model, their organization, and the way they leverage technology. And that's a huge shift for many of these organizations. How should businesses look at, we were talking before camera about how companies should look at that process because you have to kind of invest and it's not just the old data by a general purpose software stack. Then the suppliers took care of it, say Oracle, whoever. Great, they supply it, they turn key, and there's some TCO total cost of ownership involved. I get that. But now with developers, you're talking about training, you're talking about DevOps, some about real investment. Restructuring, hiring, retention. It changes fundamentally the way you think about everything. How do you hire developers? How do you hire cloud-native developers? How do you retain talent? How do you restructure teams? When we talk about two-feet of teams or cross-functional alignment, what that's really saying is, hey, I need you to rethink your entire org structure in a way that you incentivize people and motivate people. And fund it. And funding, it's like, gone are the days of, give me your five-year plan and we'll do your CAPEX and OPEX allocations. But it needs to be more iterative because you're encouraging agile. If you're saying, fell fast or iterate more, you're really saying, I want you to take ideas, iterate on them, get them out the door, and then maybe that doesn't work. Maybe we try again. But the idea is to continue to iterate and innovate on that. Abby, what trends are you seeing in terms of pattern recognition as you go out and evangelize and support your customers with cloud foundry? Obviously people have, view these in the eye either beholder depending on how you implement your cloud IBM or customers. What's the pattern that's consistent across the cloud foundry ecosystem that's happening right now that may be different from a few years ago that's emerging? Well, to me, the cloud foundry users are key. I spend a lot of time talking to them because for me it's interesting. We can theorize about the technology and where it should go. But at the end of the day, how you're using it and what you're doing with it is the most important one might say. And what are they doing? What's the main examples? They are really starting to get traction. I mean, Comcast is a great example. The amount of traction they've gained, they have over a thousand developers working on cloud foundry right now. Over 10,000 applications running on it. They're doing 180 million transactions per day. That is huge. And for them, it's not just the amount of investment they've got in it but it's also how it's transforming the way they work. How much more productive they are and how they're getting better ideas out to the hands of customers. It's changing the way that they think about customers, improving the way that they connect to their customers. And that's the fundamental shift. Have you observed any, because we've, again, been fun to be president at creation of these events, especially inaugural events like DevNet Create, Cisco, which is to put in their toes in the water but they're committed to it. KubeCon, we saw that emerge. We saw a cloud native emerge back in the 2008 timeframe with theCUBE. OpenStack obviously has its trajectory. Are you seeing a community expansion? Now, certainly there's expansion of the community in general but we're seeing a lot of our CUBE alumni fans here. I saw Patrick Riley earlier. So Lisa Marie. So there's not one community anymore. There's a series of new communities. OpenStack has one. You've got cloud native foundation. Our compute found CNCF. You've got cloud foundry. So it seems to be kind of like a flowing set of people in the community. What is that? What's happening in the community layers? I mean, it's all good. Does it mean anything? Yeah, it means open source is amazing because in the day, that's what's amazing about open source is we can do work with other projects, other communities. We have a great relationship with OpenStack. We have a great relationship with our sister CNCF. In fact, the open service broker API project we announced last year was a way to really take the best of read technology and make it available across other platforms and communities. Because in the day, when we're talking about open source, we're talking about bringing together diverse perspectives, diverse people to innovate more. So collaborative R&D is where open source can really drive real value. It's an expansion of the community of open source. By the way, I will note that we covered on theCUBE. Peter, we talked about open source, we've gone public, Cloudera, MuleSoft, the list goes on and on. There's multiple new IPOs. I mean, since Red Hat, I mean, Hortonworks and started that great wave, so real companies. Real companies doing real things on open source. Let me talk about, let me push on this open source concept really quickly because it's very clear that it's been a successful model. But open source has been most successful where the marketplace has a very clear convention of what is being open source. So for example, we knew what a Unix operating system was. Linux is an open source option, became very clear. When we think about big data and Hadoop, the use cases of big data, the use cases associated with very complex analytics, not as clear. And so we get a lot of open source stuff that's being created that kind of marginally improves things. How is the open source world through companies like Cloudera that can provide some leadership going to evolve to get more focus on the use cases and how we're going to apply this through open source innovation, as opposed to just creating software that is defined in terms of other open source software around it. What are your thoughts on that? Well, I think going back to the point about diverse participation, that's where the real innovation's happening. So the innovation isn't happening in a single company or a single individual. It's happening when you bring together a bunch of individuals across a bunch of different organizations with a bunch of different perspectives because that's where you really start to see value because you're thinking outside of the box that you know. When you start thinking outside of your known use case, your known customer base, and start bringing in other perspectives, that's where you're really able to push the envelope a little bit more and a little bit faster and also build and accelerate an ecosystem around that quickly of people that want to participate and commit to driving that and continue to drive that innovation. And it's a recruiting opportunity for the companies. I mean, we just talked about Cisco being close with the networking side. This is an opportunity for them to have a foray into innovation, but also recruiting, getting some new blood in. Well, we found in our research that developers actually list that as one of their driving factors and whether or not they're going to join a company is what is their level of participation in an open source project? Because they want to be able to be part of something bigger. They want to be able to contribute and be able to influence where that technology is going and that is power. And you're starting to see GitHub on about pages for companies on the executive masthead. Check out my GitHub, see what my code. So again, this is the badge of honor like in the gaming world where you say how many merit badges you got or guns you've acquired, take which game you do. But in a way, this is now really the resume. It's not the static LinkedIn. It's like, what a code have you done? What are you putting, what can you do in? It's almost really is a testament. I think it's exciting because it's saying that we not only care about technology, but we care about where it's going. And that's really exciting both from an open source standpoint, but also as a developer and as a business leader. That should be exciting because you're now able to influence the technology. Okay, final question for you, Abby, is what does this event mean to you? Obviously Cisco, this is a new event, inaugural event, very cool, very humble, a very, very well done by Susie and the team. But they have a DevNet create Cisco developer program, networking guys, and we know they're, but what does this mean in your opinion in terms of Cisco's statement to the industry? I think any program that really wants to bring developers together and give them an opportunity to collaborate and develop more, I think it's amazing. That's something that we strive for at Cloud Foundry as well in our event coming up in a couple of weeks, which I think you'll be at. We'll be there, yep. Is also, we're trying to mimic something similar and give an opportunity for developers to come together, share ideas, share knowledge, and contribute and work together on common projects. Final, final question since you brought up the event. Give us a quick preview of what to expect at the Cloud Foundry Summit in San Francisco. Yes, so in a couple of weeks, we will host Cloud Foundry Summit North America. There's some announcements that you should pay attention to. Come on, tell us. Some really exciting announcements. Put the dots out there, we'll connect them. You have to say anything. Some new members that we're excited about joining, as well as some new technology announcements. But more than that, it's our first time, we've really been rejiggering the structure of the event and we'd like to think of ourselves as an agile foundation. And we wanted to encourage more developers to be there, so we're offering developer language tracks, so with Node and Cloud Native Java and SAP's got a track. But more than that, we're also going to be announcing general availability of the Cloud Foundry certified developers, so we're going to offer training on site and certification on site for the first time. So the idea is to make this a place for developers to come and share ideas and network, but also learn more about not just Cloud Foundry, but Cloud Native-esque practices. So with CONFAB, with all the bells and whistles plus now the learning tracks, to make it kind of a hands-on event. Awesome, Abby Curran, Executive Director of Cloud Foundry here at Cisco's and all-girl DevNet Creative Events Cube's Coverage. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. Stay with us and check out Cloud Foundry some in a few weeks. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. Be right back.