 Hi, Cube Nation, I'm Sam Cahane with Stu Miniman. Stu, thanks for joining us today. Glad to join you, Sam. And welcome to the OpenStack Summit 15 pre-show coming to you in Vancouver, brought to you by The Cube. Five years ago in Austin, Texas, NASA and Rackspace came together and created the OpenStack project. They open sourced it and it launched the OpenStack era. It's now five years later. Stu, what's changed in the past five years? What's different today? All right, Sam. Well, unfortunately, we don't have a couple of hours to go through everything that's changed, but real quick summary, and by the way, check out the really phenomenal post that Steve Chambers from Wikibon UK wrote about open source entering its second epic. So really what we said is it was really a lot of startups that came in, contributed to it. Developers and people helping to build what really is, people are saying, OpenStack, what is it? Is it a product? Is it a solution? And really it's a whole bunch of projects that fit under the umbrella of OpenStack. They release it every six months. The Kilo release just got released. Liberty's going to be the next one. That'll be in six months. And the community gets together every six months right after the release to talk about where things happen, to get the update from the OpenStack Foundation itself. And what we really think a big trend is, first of all, some of the big players are really involved and some big users are really using it. We've got companies like Walmart made a big splash saying that Walmart Labs is going in with OpenStack. They've got like 3,600 engineers working on this stuff. And I mean, talk about a global enterprise. I mean, you know, there's a few that match the global span of what Walmart does. Absolutely. So you started to mention, you know, the big players. So who are the other big players in this field? And can you tell us a little bit about the ecosystem? Yeah, sure, Sam. So it's, I mean, it's a huge ecosystem. Started out, I mean, you talked about NAS and Rackspace spawned companies like Piston Cloud and Nebula. Nebula unfortunately is no longer in business as of earlier this year. And there were a whole lot of acquisitions. I mean, talk about kind of the hot M&A season that we saw last year, you know, HP big move in the space, you know, purchased Eucalyptus. They've got the HP Helion project, you know, IBM is a big player always, you know, very active in the open source community. We remember back when they put a billion dollars into Linux, it was really one of the things that helped bring that to the enterprise. They're trying to do the same thing with the open stack to really bring kind of the almost the Linux of the data center, that full stack that IBM will help bringing Red Hat. You know, who's going to be the Red Hat of the open stack distribution? Well, hey, maybe Red Hat can be there. You've got Morantis, who was an early leader in this space that is adjusted with the times. They're, you know, still very active, of course, in open stack. They're working with Cloud Foundry. They're working in a lot of environments. So, I mean, there's so many players, you know, you've got, you know, I mean, compute players like Intel, you know, of course, close there, that the storage companies are all coming strong in there and networking. So, you know, Cisco's got a big play to make sure that as things pivot to this new infrastructure to service offering that they are still relevant in this space. So, boy, you know, everybody that cares about infrastructure and cloud or might be leveraging big data are there, so it's really one of those kind of pivotal moments for our community to come together around this growing and still maturing technology space. Absolutely. And you mentioned M&A, and, you know, I want to hear your bold predictions. Coming up, do you think there's going to be any big acquisitions, any mergers this year? What do you see on the horizon? Yeah, Sam is a great question. So, first of all, you know, a lot of acquisitions were done. We think there's still room for plenty of them. There's more VCs, you know, putting money into this space. So, there are a number of startups left that have some really smart people, some of the ones that, you know, came from NASA, came from Rackspace, helping to grow that space. And as you look at the companies that are trying to become, you know, larger players in the cloud marketplace, you know, they need to work with OpenStack. One of the big things I look at is it's not that saying, hey, I've got an OpenStack solution. It's, I've got a solution that's powered with OpenStack. And there's actually some things that are going to happen from the federations to how do I make sure what is OpenStack? Because as I said, there's all of these sub-projects underneath. And do I have to have all of them? Or what pieces do I have? What makes an OpenStack solution? And we're starting to really understand that in the market today. And absolutely, I think some of the big guys are going to find opportunities where they can make an acquisition. You know, we mentioned our friends at IBM. You know, perhaps they would build that out. They had the huge soft-layer acquisition. They've been very active in the big data space. You know, wouldn't be surprised if they did almost like an Aqua Hire, which is to, you know, buy a company to get some really good people. I look at what's happening in the cloud founder ecosystem, where both, you know, Pivotal and HP and IBM are very active in this space as they build out what they're doing. You know, boy, there's so much activity. Absolutely. I think there'll be more M&A coming on here. And there's a lot more revenue flowing into the space now, too, which just breeds more people coming in. Absolutely. It's a growing space and, you know, it's always changing. Coming into this conference, what are you the most excited to learn? You know, what excites you? So last year, some of the things I wanted to learn at the Atlanta show was, you know, really, where were we with the maturity? And some of the pieces were really mature. So if you look at kind of the core compute, the core storage projects there seem to be in pretty good shape. Customers are deploying them. The two, one, networking the neutron, you know, component. I want to see how far that's come in the last year to mature it. And secondly, you know, who's really got a good job to put together the solution because absolutely customers can take OpenStack either from working through a partner or spending a lot of time to pull it all together. They can build solutions based on OpenStack, but it's still tough. So that management and orchestration layer, you know, is one that we think there's a lot of potential to move forward with. So I want to see the state of that. And boy, there's some really good players in this thing. You know, I have to give a shout out to our sponsors that are at the show. So as we said, some of the bigger players are really heavily involved. Got two major headline sponsors. One is a joint sponsorship actually highlighting how Cisco and Red Hat are working together to the inner cloud and ACI from Cisco, along with everything that Red Hat is doing to bring their expertise in open source and building solutions together. EMC is the other anchor sponsor from the headline standpoint. And EMC made the acquisition. It was, you know, Randy buys a team in cloud scaling. So expect to see Randy's always a guest on are going back to our earliest shows that we talked about cloud. And I believe he's actually going to be our first guest of the show in Vancouver this year. And additionally, HP, the Helion Group and Brocade, also, you know, giving us an additional sponsor. Big big thank you for the sponsors there for helping us so that we can bring, you know, to this, you know, very important event to our community. I'm excited with all the interviews we've got, you know, you always hear me talking about Docker. We've got the kind of the Docker, Kubernetes, you know, cloud foundry space and what Cloud Foundry is doing with Lattice. We'll be teasing some of that out at this show and some of the other shows we've got in the spring. So, you know, I've got our top guest from last year, you know, Mark Shuttleworth is going to be back, you know, always exciting to be able to talk to him and other luminaries in the space. So, you know, way more guests than I can talk about. Three days, wall-to-wall coverage that we'll be doing. And, you know, what a beautiful spot in Vancouver. I'm excited. It's actually, I think the first time we're broadcasting live of the Cube from Canada and, you know, Vancouver is going to be an awesome place to do it. Absolutely. Exciting times for the Cube. And as you said, you know, we have all these great shows. Three days of action. What is the best way for our viewers to follow us, Stu? Yeah. So, first of all, those people that are coming to the event itself, we're going to be in a very public place. If you walk just past the registration area on level one, right between rooms 108 and 109, we'll be in the hallway there. Please stop on by. Take a look, you know, definitely chat with John Furrier and myself during the breaks. If you're watching on live, just go to siliconangle.tv, which is where you can see all our shows. Of course, go to wikibond.com for all the latest reachers at research that we have in this space. You know, hit me and the Cube team up and Furrier up on Twitter if you've got questions. I've got a couple of slots left on the Cube. If there's some key practitioners or contributors that you think we should be interviewing, you know, always looking for those guests. So, you know, that's our digits. Great. We're running out of time here. Stu, any last words? So just, you know, Sam, you know, it's open stack has come a long way. It's still real early. I mean, with that cadence of releasing every six months, you know, we're looking to show, you know, where it has come so far and where it needs to go from here. Absolutely. There are real customers, you know, deploying their real revenue coming to this market. But, you know, there's still plenty of room for growth and plenty of maturity. And there's always the big looming giants of Amazon and the like. You know, we just had the recent earnings report. So trying to help customers reconcile really what their multi cloud strategy is and definitely open stack is going to play a significant piece in that strategy overall. So looking forward to digging into it. Thank you, Stu. Please, please follow us. Follow all the action. Watch it live at siliconangle.tv. Follow us on Twitter. Stu is Stu's Twitter name. Mine Sam underscore Kahane. Follow the cube, Wiccabon, Silicon Angle. CubeNation. Thank you for joining and we'll see you next time.