 We're back day three of theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2023 in steamy Las Vegas, Dave Vellante with Rob Streche. Brent Schroeder is here, he's a strategic technology and product development executive at SUSE. Let's talk open source. Good to see you man, thanks for coming on. Good to be here. Yes. I'm excited about this because I was bringing it up earlier to some of the folks around here and actually for the moment, we had an analyst session with her and I'm like, we just haven't spoken about open source that much this week and I think it's open source is basically one from that layer with Kubernetes and really Linux is just the foundation of a lot of things. So. It's hard to talk about the industry these days without talking about open source. It really is, right? I mean, we did come up in our interview with the folks from Esmerell. The Esmerell folks. But it wasn't front and center and so let's bring it forward. Absolutely. What's the update on SUSE? Well, this week we've been here talking about how we're working with HP on edge to cloud. Actually, you guys commented an observation from the keynote earlier in the week that cloud native seemed to be missing from the message and we're here to help with the cloud native environment. So in the last few months, we've gotten SUSE's K3S as the default Kubernetes platform in GreenLake Edge as a service. We've got RKE2 as an option for GreenLake's private cloud enterprise and then Rancher Manager. Obviously it's available to manage those and we've now made Rancher Manager available in GreenLake's online market. That makes a lot of sense. I think that especially where Rancher has always had a really strong following and is that really where you're seeing a lot of the uptake with SUSE since that acquisition of Rancher and how it's been integrated back in? Is that really where the strength of it comes? Is that automation in? A lot of our conversations are about that modernization to cloud native. But then also companies have a tremendous amount of traditional still in play, right? That's not going away for years, decades. And so we've got to provide both and so how do we secure it? How do we make it enterprise ready? That's really the focus. So what's happening at the edge? I mean, I've been having discussions, Rob and I and Lisa as well this week around what is edge? Even the Colo is now considered an edge to the cloud. And then you get the near edge, a retail store, you know, and then the far edge. Space, we talked about space. Pretty much anywhere. Yeah, what are you seeing in edge? It seems really obviously fragmented and somewhat disjointed but you as a horizontal technology company. Yeah, let me tell you a little bit about how we're trying to pull that together. Bowser was here last year. Kind of introduced our entry into an edge solution. And we talked about how are we going to simplify onboarding, the entire management stack, and securing that. And since then we delivered our edge 2.0 solution which brought that all together. What does that mean edge 2.0? So edge 2.0 is you've talked about fragmentation and let's say disparate building blocks. So what we wanted to do is bring this as an experience to manage the edge and deploy and secure the edge. So we can onboard a remote device securely, install the operating system, do the full stack on top of that and then life cycle manage that entire thing. And whether the device is in space on an oil rig in a car or back getting data back to the cloud, we can manage that application portfolio across that spectrum. When I talk to customers about it, I really talk about edge, it's not edge as an island. Edge is a continuum and actually much of the theme of the keynote again was connecting the edge to the cloud. Neither of them can any longer exist in isolation. And so our solutions are about bringing that together. My first Mobile World Congress was in 2021 during the pandemic. There was like Mobile World Congress usually hundreds of thousand people there. There were maybe 10,000, right? It was just us and I think called cloud city. But the big trend was that year was cloud and then we went this past year and the whole trend around the disaggregation of the telco stack was so obvious and palatable. So how do you play in telco? That's obviously a key part of the edge. Maybe give us the update there. Yeah, we are working with many of the telco providers especially in Europe, Orange, Georgia Telecom, Ericsson, et cetera, close partners of ours and working on developing a platform. We actually announced a advanced telco information platform earlier this year that's part of our edge solution and that's working with those vendors on what are the building blocks that are needed and that they want to have as a common framework across the telcos so that we can eliminate or minimize fragmentation, let them add value on top of that. And so building that common platform is really key. And then one of the challenges that the telcos have is many people in cloud native is the velocity with which things change. Well, if you've deployed a big infrastructure, hard to keep up, you can't be changing on a daily basis, right? You have to have some degree of consistency and changing on a more methodical manner so that's really what our platform's about. Yeah, and the telco infrastructure is, for those of you who don't know, I mean it's fossilized, it's in there, it's the entire stack and it doesn't move and that's why when you listen to the telco execs, they'll say things like with 5G, we can't let this happen again and what they mean is we can't let the over-the-top vendors like Netflix come in and take all our business away and so they have to have a flexible infrastructure in order to be able to develop applications. Now whether or not they can do that because they've got a great business and connectivity but it takes a mindset, but I think they've certainly got the resources and they learned a lot from the last era. So do you see the telcos sort of beginning to get it right? Are they in a position from a developer standpoint to really take advantage of it? I think so, I think they've really embraced the notion of cloud-native architecture and containers and what containers can deliver so that they can deliver more rapidly and it's not fixed for 10 years, right? That they can add incremental capabilities as they're made available. Yeah, and I think one of the things when you talk about telco is resiliency and efficiency, especially in security, those three at the edge because hey, it may not be in my premise, it may be somewhere else where it could be accessed or something of that nature. How does that play into what you're doing in the edge strategy? Well, if I interpret that correctly, where I think there's a big intersection is we look at our next generation, so edge 3.0, we're focused on two areas, industrial IoT and better enabling that and then mission critical edge. So we talk about life cycle management and criticality of the edge. There's many scenarios where I think when people started to go into edge, it was almost viewed as a disposable type of item, right? But when you start talking about automotive, telco, healthcare, those are not disposable scenarios, right? Our interaction with the customers is this needs to be up seven by 24 and it's got to have the highest degrees of resiliency, yet we want to deliver new capabilities on top of it, right? So those two tug against each other. So as we look at mission critical edge, it'll be a combination of our enterprise infrastructure that we've got in 30 years of experience building plus collaboration with our customers in pre-deployment validation, in security integration, and continual runtime validation to ensure that they're adhering to best practices and always at the right level, so. Yeah, and that's why things like, people are so cautious about open-ran, because it doesn't necessarily give them, you think about the telco network, it doesn't go down. I mean, even during the pandemic, when everything shifted, or a lot of it shifted to landlines, you didn't even notice a beat. But what's the hardest part from your perspective of the edge? What are those pain points that people are experiencing and how can you help and bring HPE back into the disk? Probably two biggest, two hardest parts. Manage against scale. It's one thing to go in a lab or even in a small region and do a dozen or a hundred endpoints and devices. It's a totally different game when it's 5,000, 10,000, you can imagine 100,000 clusters and how do you manage that? That's absolutely one of those. And then when we get to the far edge and really almost disconnected edge, one of the things we're seeing with our customers, and this kind of brings HPE back into it and discussions we're having, is edge as a service. There's no IT people at an oil rig. So how do we help those types of customers with the life cycle management? So they would like to see it as, hey, just bring me edge as a service and we'll manage the applications. Get us the infrastructure, the operating system, the whole platform, make sure that it's secure, that we can onboard it securely and then operate its life cycle wherever and whenever it needs to be managed. Well, security is an interesting topic at the edge too because by default it's been air gapped in many cases, all these years and then all of a sudden the business says, oh, we got to connect and the engineers go, whoa, wait a minute and so it's a complicated situation. It is. We've got to have that bimodal model because in some places you get 5G connectivity, right? Walk 10 steps over and you lost that 5G connectivity but we also have companies that are telling us we've got to be able to do an air gap to model. So for example, one big customer partner of ours is Home Depot, right? One of their, as they rolled out edge, one of their key requirements is, our stores are located where there's natural disasters and our customers rely on us the most when there's a natural disaster. Well, what's the problem when there's a natural disaster? There's no connectivity, right? Hurricanes take out all the communications, there's no towers left. So they want to make sure that resiliency and continuing to operate in a disconnected environment is critical for them. And I think we heard also this week that there was a product called Harvester. Can you go into what that is? And I mean it's a super interesting name, I would say. Yeah, so in the spirit of the Rancher model right now harvesting, we're using the analogy and continuing that. So what Harvester is, is we really tried to rethink hyper-converged infrastructure. Hyper-converged infrastructure started decade and a half ago from a virtual world. And then as containers started to come along, it was more of how do we bolt containers onto a virtual model. And we thought, hey, this is backwards, why don't we just jump forward to the container world and support virtual machines on a cloud native architecture. So that's what Harvester is all about. It's containers at the base and we can run virtual machines in that context and we manage them from a Rancher environment just as if they were a cloud native entity. So it's helping people with that migration to train transition. There's very few that are, you get a perfect green field switch over, right? And so let's bring this to edge. I want to deploy a new edge solution. Most of the application is written from the ground up and then I've got a security app from a vendor that wrote the app 15 years ago in a virtual machine and they don't have plans to containerize it. Well, how do you get that in there? So you might have a full cloud native infrastructure and you need one or two virtual machines. Harvester's a perfect match for that because now it lets you use a common management paradigm to manage that entire experience at the edge. Excellent, yeah, makes sense. I think that's one of the hardest is how do you keep your skills gap as low as possible and as people go to cloud native, they're bringing people on with these new skill sets who may not be as experienced with VMs and things of that nature. Yeah, true. Is that something you're seeing out there is that the people are really embracing and I guess you could say, building their teams differently to take advantage of edge? Yeah, edge and cloud native. So the edge teams have largely stayed the same but then they've brought in the expertise, right? So probably the expertise gap is in the cloud native space as they ramp up and retrain and learn to how to do that. You know, one of the things we're doing to help address that is we've stuck our foot in the AI space and so this week at SUSECON, some of the new capabilities we announced about Rancher are the introduction of AI, both the generative AI and the ability in a Rancher assistant to naturally language interact with the help system so that if you're new into cloud native in the Rancher and containers and you're getting error messages and you're like, what is this? I don't have any idea what to do about it. You can just interact with it and we'll guide you through the resolution of that problem. And then we're also applying AI to the observability layer so that we can improve the meantime to detection of an issue and kind of take that out of the manual mode where it's nice that observability exists. That's a very common term, right? So it brings stats from all of these different systems and now I'm just blurry eyed because of all the data I've got. And so we have to apply AI to that to make it manageable and improve that. So we think we'll get a pretty dramatic improvement in productivity and meantime to resolve issues with these new introductions. To your first point, the cloud turned the data center into an API and GPT is going to turn technology into a natural language interface. Great to have you back on the theCUBE. It's good to see you, thank you. Yeah, absolutely, thoroughly enjoyed it. All right, okay, Rob, Stretche and Dave Vellante will be back right after the short break. This is the HPE Discover day three, the CUBE's continuous coverage. Up next is Bobby Ford who's the chief security officer at HPE, he's an unbelievably dynamic individual. You're not going to want to miss this. We'll be right back.