 From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018, brought to you by NetApp. Welcome to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend and we are in Orlando at SAP Sapphire Now 2018. We're in the NetApp booth and we are now talking with Gerald Pfeiffer, the SUSE VP of products and technology programs. Gerald, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for having me. So thank you for bringing the SUSE chameleon here. So let's talk about open source. What is an open source company? What are the key hallmarks that define an open source company? So when you think of open source, technically it's about the license. It's about the open source license that the software is under. But if you want to be a real open source company, there's actually, it goes beyond that. And that's where many, we see many of the classic companies fail. You take a piece of software that you have written in-house, you open source it, which means you put an open source license on it, and then you throw it over the fence. You put it on an FTP server or a web app server or GitHub or somewhere and say this is an open source project, technically true. But what open source really is about also is how you develop the software. It's a development model. It's about the community or communities you have. And so as an open open source company or if a true open source company, what it means is you need to change how you develop the software and how you go about it. And then involves, you need to let go to something. You need to lose in a way you lose control and you need to help if it's something that you initiated, you need to make this attractive for others and easy to contribute. And so the development model, the transparency, collaboration, communications, all that is really important for a successful open source project. But I would argue also for a successful open source company. So let's talk about the community for a little bit when it comes to open source and specifically what is SUSE? SUSE is one of the most successful open source companies in the world. However, your key product, SUSE Enterprise Limits, you guys don't control the kernel. You have to work with a community of organizations and personalities and conflicting agendas. How has SUSE organized itself that over a 25 year period you guys have consistently grown, become more prominent and it is, how you've had that when you don't even own, we don't rather control the key technology, the kernel to your product. Yeah, so that's actually the trick behind that. And the short answer is you cannot control but you can influence. And so how do you influence? And it's really about becoming part of the community. Or I usually actually, when we get new employees that come from a proprietary background, one of the first things I teach them is there is no such thing as the open source community. It's actually open source communities. There is actually many of them. And even your example, the kernel, there is the Linux kernel community but inside the group of everyone who contributes, they're actually subgroups, people focusing on different aspects. And so if you want to influence that the easiest way, and the hard way is you start contributing. And so you start building up rapport, you start building up credibility. And it's usually not something you do overnight. It's not like you can come and say, oh, I've been doing operating systems for 30 years. I'm a distinguished engineer. And now I'm telling you, this is how you need to do it. You start by contributing code. You start by being part of the conversations, by critiquing constructively, hopefully other people's contributions, usually in a certain area. And then people start getting to know your name and they start trusting you. And I'm not a kernel engineer, but there are a couple of open source projects I've contributed since writing my PhD thesis. And I'm still doing that usually on my weekends or evenings when I have a little time. And so there are people I've been working together for 15 years or more who I've never met in person. And some I've met and then I realized, wait a minute, I know he's going to be at the conference. And I don't know how old he is. He wrote about his children, so they give a certain or his young baby children so they may give an idea. But I don't know how old he is. I don't know what color of hair, what color of skin. But then you meet them because you have this relationship, you actually, you know, you get together. And there is trust. And once you have this trust on a personal level, but also at least as importantly, or I would rate both the same on a technical side, I trust your judgment, then you start influencing. Is that what makes SUSE an open source company? Yeah, that's definitely one of the aspects where when we want to drive something, and I'll give you an example that's actually, especially in SAP context, this is really relevant, it's something we call life kernel patching. So, you know, you have this HANA systems with lots of memories and you have all those security issues that keep popping up now and then. And so one of the challenges is you want to apply the security update if you are an IT person, but when you do so, you need to, and it's a kernel thing, then you need to restart the server because other subsystems like the web server, you just restart the web server and you're down for one millisecond and nobody really notices unless you're cnn.com or whatever. But if you restart the kernel, the whole machine reboots. And then you scan the memory and you have a HANA machine with 12 terabyte of memory or 16. So the startup takes and then why is HANA so fast? Because all the data is in memory. Now, doing that isn't fast. So, that's really interesting as you look through a lot of the integration between SAP and SUSE. The in-memory, the config kernel patch, the ability to integrate the two solutions. It's interesting, you guys have a partnership and you have outside of SAP with these companies that are not necessarily from a licensing perspective. The application is closed source. So, there's a myth I think in industry that closed source software versus open source software, what is more secure, what is more stable? Random religious arguments. What are we seeing in the, wow, what are our customers embracing the SUSE relationship along with the SAP relationship? You know, in a way, and that's a tricky statement to make, but in a way, in first approximations, customers don't care where it's open source or proprietary. As a customer, I care that it works. Right. And if I'm an SAP customer, my SAP workload needs to stay up. And so what I'm looking for is performance, is security, is scalability, is availability, high availability. And so whatever platform gives that to me is the platform that I choose or in the case of HANA, actually, SAP choose. So if you look at HANA, it's an interesting sample. The only operating system it's available on, the only platform it's available on is Linux. So SAP actually has done that research and they looked into it and said, okay, we need certain characteristics. What's the, where do we get the best solution? It turns out Linux offered that. And so I don't see when it comes to applications in particular our workloads, I don't see it as much as being open source or proprietary. It's really what's the best technical solution. And then there obviously is the question, behind the question is, how do you actually get to the best solution? And that's where the open source model, where it's not just one company doing that. We have lots of engineers contributing to the kernel and other parts. But it's only one part. Many of our partners contribute. Our competitors contribute. And so in this open source arena, things move just to improve. For example, the Linux kernel and you get a better outcome than any proprietary vendor would actually been able to deliver with a plastic unit system, for example. You talked about, you know, customers not caring about the technology, it just needs to work. And it's kind of the same thing I think of when you look at technology like ERP software, that's largely invisible, right? So is SUSEA. And SAP wants to be one of the top 10 most valuable global brands. And this morning during the keynote, Bill McDermott said they are now number 17. So they're getting up there to the big brands like Apple, Coca-Cola, Google, who all have products that we can kind of see and touch. So when you are partnership with SAP, how do you articulate the value of what you guys can deliver to help the customer, not, hey, not care about what's under the hood here, but also ensure that they're actually able to deliver what they need to to their customers. What are some of those unique, maybe customer examples that you have where customers with SAP on SUSEA are transforming their businesses or their industries? Yeah, so much of this transformation really comes from the SAP stack. What we contribute is really the stability of the platform. And so, obviously, at the technical level, people do care, do care actually about open source because the one thing open source provides you is the transparency. You can see an SAP engineer's actually developing HANA, for example, but also other things we do together. They have been looking at the source code, trying to understand what's going on and then optimize HANA. So when I said customers don't care, that's in the first approximation because it needs to work. If it doesn't work, everything else doesn't matter. But if, and so there are people who care about the technical more details. Often these days, or usually when it's really with like at the CIO level or an IT director level, what they care more about is things like high availability scenarios or blueprints. So it's not just one bit of technology or even how HANA runs on SUSEA, but they know a server is going to fail at one point. So when I ran an SAP environment, one of the things that we did, we did a bake-off of Linux distributions for our appliances, and these are appliances. In theory, you get it on appliances, you turn it on, you install your SAP app and life goes on, and no one should care about the underlying appliance. But for us, it was about the OS and availability. You know, we were coming from a non-stop HP titanium shop, and we were very happy with the non-stop capability. But going to x86, there's a lot of thought that goes into making that non-stop. Can you talk to the relationship between NetApp, SAP, and SUSEA from a community perspective, because this is related to the conversation around open source, and making that happen and to your point, how do you care, why would an IT director care about SUSEA versus some other distributions? So if I look at the conversations I'm having, often it's then looking at the solution level. So if you can point out that you have the blueprints or reference architectures or whatever you want to call it, you have customer success stories, et cetera, where you can say, look, this is in a scenario like this in your market or in your vertical, this is what you can do, and this is how it'll be supported so that your guys don't have to start from zero, but it's actually really easy to go high availability. Or in fact, we have a dedicated team that sits in the Linux lab with all the other partners you named and many more, where SAP, and that's actually a really clever thing they did, creating this Linux lab, and they also have a partner port, we're talking about communities, they have created this level of community, where different vendors come together, and you have whole conversations, and you want to do something, said, okay, hey, how do you do this with the SUSEA side, how do you do this on the NetApp side? And then, at an engineering level, and at the solution level, you build something that actually works, technically, and then obviously the support relationship is really important, so that's one of the challenges open source had in the beginning compared to proprietary, because if you look at some of the old full stack companies or established ones, they used to deliver hardware, and then the operating system, and then middleware or database, and the application top, so you had one phone number to call when there's a problem, and originally with open source, you know, you've got this piece here, and then you've got the storage from NetApp, and who do you call, and then the finger pointing starts, so what has made open source also successful is the establishment of really processes, agreements, and just practical workflows, so that our companies work together, and when it's a customer, they can pick up the phone. In fact, if you look at less for SAP applications, what we have set up in this SAP environment is, you can call SAP, and that's the only phone number you ever need to call, and everything behind that happens fully transparently, so all the vendors get together. So to sum up, it sounds like what you're talking about that's really key for SUSEA is openness, transparency, trust, collaboration. Yes, and at the open source level, at the Linux kernel compiler and the individual project, but essentially the same, exactly what you explained, also at the business level, what we do with partners and what we do with customers. And we heard that in the keynote this morning, Bill McDermott really kind of was talking about trust as the new currency, so Gerald, you're right in line with that. Thank you so much for joining Keith and me today. Thank you for having me. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend from SAP Sapphire Now 2018. Thanks for watching.