 Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE at OpenStack Summit Vancouver 2015. Brought to you by headline sponsors EMC and jointly by Red Hat and Cisco with additional sponsorship by Brocade and HP. And now your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live for day three coverage of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. This is Silicon Angles, the CUBE, our flagship program. Go out to the events, expect to see the noise. Live in Vancouver, British Columbia for OpenStack Summit. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman from wikibon.com. Our next guest is Boris Renskees, the CMO co-founder of Morantis. Welcome back to theCUBE. Great to see you. Got your jersey on the Canadian shirt. That's right, that's our word. You guys are kicking ass, taking names here at OpenStack again. Congratulations. Thank you very much. Good to be back. We are proud to see you guys being so successful in the marketplace. And we've been following you guys. And you know, there's always Morantis just doing this. And you guys had some naysayers, okay? Early on and you guys had great success. You have proven domain expertise in OpenStack. You guys had great domain expertise in wiring it together. But now with the growth, you're delivering value to customers. Give us the update. Why are you winning? You stayed true to your mission. What's, give us your take on all this. Yeah, well I think that I've mentioned this before. We kind of did not fall into the trap of following the standard VC playbook for building a company. And we understood that the market they're playing in is an open source market. So the approach we took is we actually started monetizing slowly with services. We started making money right away. We didn't push product onto people. We kind of wedged ourselves into pretty much every single production bound deployment of OpenStack out there. As a services company, it's kind of like the Switzerland of OpenStack. We learned from our customers and then gradually we leverage that understanding of how they actually use OpenStack to start slowly building up our product. And going forward, we kind of remain convinced that this is a long-term game. It's not the kind of thing where you invent something, you patent something and then you sell it for a billion dollars. I think that the path to success in OpenStack is similar to the path to success that companies like Red Hat have traversed in a Linux space. It took them what, like 10 years to get to a billion dollars. So we understand that to be able to win in this market, you have to have a staying power and you have to have the right combination of kind of momentum and agility. And that's kind of the reason why we've raised this monster a hundred million dollar round six months ago. We don't intend to just kind of blow all of this money right away. We're very conscious about how we're spending and we're kind of running the company to make sure that there is at least a very clear five-year horizon as to how we're going to evolve and build the business. I think that's been paying off. And the market's evolving with you. So it's one of these situations where the VC Playbook would be, give me some product, I want to see some monetization. You guys are sticking with your formula, but the product market's still evolving. So there's still opportunities with some headroom for you guys, but also more importantly, the demand for OpenStack quickly to stand up OpenStack beyond POCs. Talk about that dynamic. So the demand to stand up OpenStack beyond POCs, so on that note, and kind of relating back to my point of kind of slow and steady, we've applied the same philosophy to actually building our installer and manager for OpenStack, which is Fuel, which is now an OpenStack project and we're developing it under the OpenStack umbrella. And we've been on this thing for probably now three and a half years. And while we were kind of steadily and consciously evolving it, there's been a whole bunch of kind of dynamic in this installer market. So we've seen Canonical, who's juju very aggressively, we've seen community kind of start with pack stack and then there's been, you know, triple low and then redhead doubling down on triple low and then HP kind of backing out of triple low. In the meantime, we continue to kind of slowly push on our way to deploy OpenStack, which is Fuel. And according to the recent OpenStack user survey, which Foundation just published, Fuel is now the number one OpenStack specific deployment tool. So if you look at just the list of tools that are being used to deploy and manage OpenStack, you know, number one naturally is Puppet, but it's more of a kind of generic configuration management tool. Number two is Ansible and then comes Fuel ahead of Chef. And I think that, you know, this kind of slow and steady approach is key to winning in open source across the board, be it how you structure the company or how you approach a product strategy. Yeah, so Boris, it's interesting. I like the slow and steady. I'm also seeing branches pop up in a lot of new environments. So, you know, Cloud Foundry, you guys are part of what's going there. A lot of partnership announcements this week. I think you're doing a great job of getting the brand out there as all the other big guys are coming into OpenStack. So how do you manage that? You know, you've only got so many resources and where it can put your effort, you know, it's kind of your marketing hat on, you know, where's the primary effort go? So here I think is where we kind of play our, what I call, you know, the pure play card. And a lot of people get this wrong notion about how we're trying to play the market. As I was saying, the pure play, that means a partner of absolutely everybody and everybody's our friend. But that's not exactly true. The way we approach this is by being pure play vendor, we are in a very unique position to instead of, you know, focusing our kind of integration efforts on those infrastructure providers and solution providers that are part of our existing product portfolio, we focus them on those that are most in demand. And we've recently announced, for instance, you know, a partnership with Cloud Foundry, with Pivotal CF specifically, we joined Cloud Foundry Foundation. So the reason we did that is because we believe, and we see it from our customers, is that the Cloud Foundry, these guys, they have the mind share of the customers when it comes to platform as a service. Now, our number one competitor, Red Hat, and OpenStack Space, they unfortunately cannot do that because they have OpenShift. And, you know, I can keep listing examples where there is certain solutions or infrastructure components that are the ones that customers need, but our competitors simply cannot invest in integrating with those because this is going to go against the grain of their current company direction. So that's, you know, it's not, we don't partner with everybody. So, you know, if you look at the Mirantis Unlocked Partner Program, which is our technology solutions partners, there's 47 partners there. It's not so many. If you look at, you know, I don't know, again, going back to Red Hat, they probably have hundreds of something. So, we actually focus on the ones. We actually focus on thousands of partners, usually when they do something. Thousands, exactly. So, we actually focus on those that are most important to OpenStack adopters and spend resources on high quality integrations with those partners. All right, so Boris, you know, coming into the show, we felt there was a lot of misconceptions about where OpenStack was, where things were going, talked about some of the things in the press, you know, where do you think we are coming out of this week here? Do you think we've shown a lot of proof points there? You know, what's the reality on the ground that you're seeing and talking to customers about when it comes to OpenStack? So, yeah, it's a good question. So, I think that there's this constant pressure, I think, by the market for OpenStack to show more real customers, more enterprise customers, et cetera. And I think that there's a certain notion in the community and within the foundation that you just have to keep doing that. And I think that it's just some time has to pass for this to go away. I think that every single summit at this point, you have marquee customers like Wells Fargo, Comcast, eBay, et cetera, on stage talking about the scale that they use OpenStack at and PayPal recently announced that, yes, they are actually standardizing on OpenStack and all of their production workloads are now OpenStack. Eight and a half thousand hypervisors in OpenStack. I think that there's no need for additional proof points that OpenStack is real. But having said that, I think that now the summit is kind of a very important point of evolution in the OpenStack community. If you look up until now, most of the OpenStack story and most of OpenStack hype has been driven by vendors kind of proclaiming their commitment to OpenStack. Lexisco, we're committing billion dollars to OpenStack, HP, we're committing billion dollars to OpenStack. Every week, you'll have a new infrastructure vendor come in and announce that they're doing a driver for OpenStack or something like that. And this summit, I'm glad to see that actually the OpenStack foundation and the community is starting to see that it's not just about the infrastructure and vendor side of things, it's also about the workload and developer side of things. So we saw Mark Collier come on stage on Tuesday and announce the community marketplace. So we were one of the folks inside the community that were kind of helping put this together. Many others were involved kind of helping us push this ahead. But I think that we're coming to this point where the next wave of OpenStack evolution is going to be less about the NetApps and the MCs of the world announcing that yes, we do OpenStack now and it's going to be about actually the application vendors and the software vendors saying that yes, now our software runs on OpenStack. Yes, now our solution, Hadoop, Cloudera Hadoop is now in community marketplace. Pivotal Cloud Foundry is now in community marketplace. Kubernetes now in marketplace, et cetera. So we're kind of, it's evolving towards the developer and application side of things. If I could just talk about OpenStack growth, if you look at the public cod market, one of the challenges there is it's really North America heavy. One of the things that's really impressive about OpenStack is it really is trying to build a global effort if you look at just the summit itself, goes to North America, it goes to other places, going to be in Tokyo in six months. You guys help put together the OpenStack Silicon Valley because there's a lot that goes on there. Is OpenStack going to have more success than Public Cloud globally? Any commentary on that? Well I think that, I don't think that's entirely correct to just compare OpenStack to Public Cloud because there's OpenStack powering some of the bigger Public Clouds out there. Fair point, absolutely. Rack space for the guys that started OpenStack. But I think that basically the way I see OpenStack evolving is I see it as one of the kind of, there's this notion of data center operating system. So I believe that this is going to be one of the fabrics, one of the data center operating systems out there. And I don't think it's going to be the only one. I think that actually Amazon, you can think of that as kind of a data center operating system only fully integrated with the entire hardware stack. So if I was to compare Amazon, Amazon is like a mainframe or maybe like an iPhone where it's completely integrated, where OpenStack is just a software for it. And going into the future, there's going to be different types of fabrics, right? There's going to be like the Amazon fabric, there's going to be a number of flavors of the OpenStack fabrics, maybe there's going to be something else that we'll see. But this notion of actually the world transforming from being server centric to being data center centric is what ultimately is powering all of this movement. Where are you guys winning right now? I mean, obviously we've heard from Patrick Riley at his company with Kubernetes, standing up through the appliances as a tactic client. What's going on in the customer environment? And why are you winning and where are you winning? So we are winning across three sectors and those are the three sectors that we believe but we have kind of our narrow, maybe point of view that are the key sectors for OpenStack. So the first one was Web and SaaS. So WebEx, Work of PayPal, Workday, et cetera, this kind of customers. Second sector is actually Telco. And third, something that we refer to as the techie enterprises. So basically, traditional enterprise customers that historically have invested pretty heavily in technology. So financial services, e-retail, media, all of those organizations that are forced to kind of reinvent themselves through technology. And the interesting thing is that people ask kind of about the use cases. So what is the use case for Web and SaaS? What is the use case for Telco? Is it an FV? What's the use case for financial services? The use case that we see primarily is really the same across all of these sectors. And that use case is OpenStack as basically a developer platform. So all of these organizations, they kind of, you know, they see the benefits of something like Amazon. Many of them cannot do or will not do a public cloud period. But they understand that they're kind of forced to compete with a startup, with a technology startup and they're forced to enable their internal development organizations to be very agile. So be it, you know, Web and SaaS guys like, you know, Workday or PayPal, same exact problem, agility for their development organization. If you look at Telco space, there's a lot of, you know, kind of directional statements about NFV. But I think that the real use case, at least across the customers that we see where they're running OpenStack in production, the use case again, is enabling internal development organizations. And, you know, tech enterprises exact same thing. So it's really kind of, you know, a horizontal platform for various segments. Talk about the OpenStack community and also talk about the event that you're running in Silicon Valley. Last year you guys had a real innovative event, really a big void in the OpenStack community, no Silicon Valley event. So you guys ran OpenStack SV last year, huge success, you got one coming up, to share some insights into what's going on with that event and what's going on. Yeah, yeah, so again, like I don't want it to be, to sound, it's not our event, this is an event, this is something that, you know, we've helped pitch to the foundation and we're working together with foundation to organize it. We've, you know, contributed quite a bit to organizing it, but again, you know, We put resources into it. We put resources into it, but foundation also puts resources into it and, you know, they put resources in the form of, you know, foundation members on stage as well as, you know, Robert Caffee, he is there kind of helping organize the event as well. But yes, so. It's a community event, not a morantist event. Yeah, and it's very important, exactly. So for us, it's very important that it's not going to perceive as like, you know, the morantist event. That is a completely community event. But you guys spearheaded it, just to be fair. You saw the opportunity. Exactly, we spearheaded it, we spearheaded it and we had, you know, absolutely kind of just super successful event last year. We are doing it again this year, the week before VMworld, August 26th, 27th. This time we're expanding it. It's going to be two days. We're expecting much bigger crowd and it's really kind of, you know, the high quality. More food trucks. More food. Last year. More food trucks, exactly. More food trucks, you know, smaller lines, hopefully. Yes, that's right. That was a huge success last year, you guys had a great event. I mean, but this is the thing, right? The community, you guys had saw an opportunity like Cloudera did with Hadoop World to bring people together locally in Silicon Valley. Were the acts of action there, obviously, there? Yes, that's absolutely correct. Because Silicon Valley, in our opinion, is really kind of, you know, the heart of a lot of things in OpenStack. Simply, Silicon Valley is like the heart of the technology industry. And because, as Tu mentioned, OpenStack is a global phenomenon, Foundation actually has to make the summit travel across different locations. So there's only so often that they can do it, you know, in the heart of the technology, right? So we kind of took it upon ourselves to, you know, kind of help probe the foundation to put together this event, and we're doing it again. Everybody's going to be there, very much looking forward to it. All right, now what's next for the community? In your mind, you guys have been an active participant, you know, in some cases, you know, ruffling some feathers here and there with your business model, which was contrarian at the time, but now it's people are giving you guys props for that. You stick to your focus. The community, what's your take this year on the ground here at the OpenStack Summit? What's the vibe? What's the community like? What's the heartbeat like? Is it pumping on all cylinders? What's happening? Yeah, no, it's absolutely pumping on all cylinders. I think that, you know, there's some maybe negative rumblings around, you know, the recent consolidation that has happened in the market. We think that, you know, that's kind of the natural phenomenon. So naturally, you know, some of the smaller guys were acquired, some were acquired, but there's kind of no way around it. On the side of all of this, I think that we're seeing what like 20% more still increase in attendance for this OpenStack Summit versus the previous one in Paris. We can see, you know, the interesting thing is, you know, like OpenStack because it's so big, it's becoming not just about exclusively, you know, OpenStack itself, but it's becoming the hub for all of the different open source communities to kind of come together. So you see people, you know, from Linux here, you see people from the new cool communities like, you know, the Google Kubernetes community, you know, the Mesos community or the Docker people, all the stuff. So, and there's a lot of the discussion around how OpenStack works with all of these adjacent communities. So it's, you know, I think that kind of OpenStack took the flag of being like this, you know, the central open infrastructure thing. And then there's a lot of kind of, you know, satellite communities that are now starting, but they're all kind of, you know, kind of glued onto OpenStack as a central thing. And that's what I'm seeing. And that's what's empowering the OpenStack community to continue growing. For us, you know, we love about, we love conversations, we love the crowd chat, we love getting, we find out what's happening in the ground, in the communities. What are the top conversations that you're involved in with customers? And what is the language of the customer? They don't talk about, I need some infrastructure as a service, I want some platform as a service, I want some SaaS. I mean, that's just the cloud. This is, they have different views. What is the language of the customer and what conversations are you involved in and share some insights into that? Yeah, sure, so I think that the conversations have clearly been, as OpenStack's been maturing, they've been evolving from kind of, you know, techy and very, you know, infrastructure and, you know, OpenStack-centric conversations to more of the conversations around business value. So if before, you know, you'd go into a customer and, you know, most of the questions you'd have to answer were around, you know, will explain to me, you know, how you can stand up OpenStack for me so that it works. You know, what projects are you going to, you know, incorporate and what's how, you know, how are you going to go about it? Now, many more questions are around actually the business value of OpenStack, the new workloads that you can run on top of OpenStack and, you know, just the general concept of how OpenStack can unlock kind of the, you know, developer agility and engineering velocity inside the organizations more so than, you know, some alternatives. Have you seen the crossover from POCs to much more deeper production capabilities that you're seeing more of that? Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, you know, I wish I could give you a more elaborate answer to that, but yeah. You name names. Which companies? Yeah, sure, I mean, I can, I'll be careful, you know, I'm known to kind of, You can spill the beans a little bit. Spill the beans, you're probably in there, but, you know, so I mean, I think that, you know, so Wells Fargo is a big customer of ours. They are also on stage talking about OpenStack. American Express, very heavily involved with OpenStack. We work with American Express. They have real kind of a production stuff. AT&T is a big customer, you know, far beyond POCs doing some serious OpenStack stuff. I mean, I can keep naming, but I'll be careful to, you know. I think you guys have knocked on down some good deals against some of the bigger guys. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. All right, Boris, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate you taking the time and know it's the end of the day. Everyone's kind of reaching for that last gasp here, summit here. Thanks for coming on and looking forward to the event. In August, it is? August, August 26th, 27th. OpenStack Silicon Valley. Computer History Museum, same venue. Computer History Museum, same thing, only bigger and better. Smart move, double down and bring in the foundation, make it an industry event. Congratulations, Boris Rensky, CMO, co-founder of Mirantis. Really good example of success in the market. Congratulations. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with more after this short break.