 Welcome back, everyone. We're here live in San Francisco for the Red Hat Summit. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out through the events, and extract a similar from the noise. Now we're going to get some experts to talk about the cloud and government NERMA meta, cloud engineer, strategic innovations group at Booz Allen, and Jared Cottrell, engineer at Booz Allen. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So guys, talk about obviously government 2.0 has been discussed going back, it's been played out, but the reality is that the government has been a adopter of all new technology. I interviewed some guys back in the day on who built the first big data platform from scratch, the squirrel founders, and back then there was no Hadoop, so they had to build their own. So the government's always pushing the envelope on stuff, and it has to be turnkey. So I got to first ask you guys, Jared, we'll start with you. Cloud adoption in the government, where are we? Share with the folks who aren't paying attention to the government space. Are they deep in the cloud? Is it just a throwaway? Is it kicking the tires? So it depends, I know people don't like to hear that, but it really does. So I think there's a lot of organizations in the government. It's a big group of people, and I think we're finding they're all at different maturity levels. Some are seriously still just in the strategy part of their cycle. Some are doing proof of concepts. Some are actually implementing cloud, public, private, hybrid, what have you. So we're in the mix of all that. Other folks are even farther than that. They're really gonna get cloud management, cloud broker, and that's really where we're starting to see a lot of interest, a lot of growth, and it really just depends on where they're at and their budget cycles, and what risk we're willing to take. So what's the big driver? Obviously the cloud has economic benefits. We've seen Amazon, it's really been a forcing function for many, it's been that tide that's been coming in and taking some territory down, certainly in the enterprise, and I'm not sure about the government, but it really forces the people to say, okay, cloud has some benefits, but you can't just plug it into a public cloud because there are some security issues, other legacy issues, the government certainly has a lot of legacy. So how do you guys talk about that and how do you guys identify the disruptors in the emerging sector, how do you balance it too? So some folks think virtualization is in the clouds. That's the first thing is helping them understand what cloud really is, right? And I think a lot of the drivers end up being around money, obviously, but what comes with that is the automation, right? So they have a lot of backend manual processes that we're trying to fix, and them as well. And I think cloud really benefits a lot of that, whether it's public or private, right? I think in general, another big driver, and I think this is where cloud management brokering comes in, is there's a new workforce out there. There's new buying patterns, there's new consuming patterns, a lot like us on mobile phones now, it's just changed our lives. I think that's starting to get into the enterprise and we're gonna see a lot of procurements around that kind of thing. So two things, the trends of pay consumerization is happening and with a cost pressure. But also, is there a development focus? Do they say, hey, we have developers, do we wanna add on to, what's the developer impact in the government sector? I think it's even a lot like we zone, right? We develop applications, we have developers that work with clients who do different things. They want them to focus like a data scientist, right? You don't want a data scientist working on infrastructure, right? Your application goes down, they should not be spending their time working with Amazon, building the servers and all that. So I think that's where a lot of the cloud comes in, the platform as a service, especially some of the open shit stuff that my friend Norm here is working on. Absolutely, right? It's about the efficiencies and getting it quick and having them focus on what their role is. Before we talk about some of the procurement disruptions because certainly Amazon's lawsuit against Intel was very telling, we covered that on theCUBE. Norm, I want to first go into the tech side, talk about some of the, what's going on under the hood? Right, it's a lot of interesting new dynamics around automation and orchestration. It seemed to be the hot areas. Could you give us an update on where you think that market is? Absolutely, so last year we won the Red Hat Innovation Award for combining JBoss rules engine with JBPM and Fuse to automate the underlying infrastructure as a service. And since that point, I mean four or five years ago when we started doing this, elasticity orchestration was still very manual and no one was at that point. Now, putting business rules in, automating workflows is just accelerating tremendously. The space is really ripe for an open standard spaced view of how to create application stacks, create environments that are standardized and being able to be deployed in multiple environments at the same time. So interoperability, migration, ease of deployment of code is definitely where things are going right now. Underneath the hood, there's a huge race right now between different containerization platforms, OpenShift, Docker, there's Cloud Foundry, all these other V apps, things like that. And it's just, it's a very exciting time actually because finally we're getting to the point where the gap between your developers and the infrastructure and your production code is becoming smaller and smaller. And really we're starting to actually see the benefits of where Cloud is supposed to be. Talk about the customer use case, let's walk through something. So I'm a customer, I have a lot of Red Hat, I've been working with Red Hat, Red Hat has a lot of presence, I might have some NetApp drives and some EMC drives, a lot of legacy stuff. Now, so boom, I got to go to Cloud. Cloud is enticing, it's intoxicating, it gets your attention at many levels. But then the reality is, oh, how do I get there? So it's like, I want to service the Red Hat component. I have hardware, maybe there's different configurations on the software side, assuming SDN and all that stuff gets taken care of. But I'm a CIO, I'm a practitioner, I got to get this to market. What are some of the critical challenges and opportunities and technical points that they have to think about? To go from, oh, I have Red Hat, maybe some vendor servicing it, maybe Booz Allen servicing it, maybe another vendor is doing the services. But I got Red Hat, what do I go to the Cloud? Right, so now Red Hat has lots of different options in terms of Cloud service providers. There's Amazon, there's Microsoft Azure, there's the recent announcement of Google Cloud Platform being able to put your Red Hat subscriptions there. So there's lots of places where you can put those RELL licenses or entitlements, if you will. However, I think what we're really seeing is our customers want to put something on top of that first. And that's the Cloud Brokering Platform. So what we're building out and what we're seeing our customers demand is a way for their internal customers, their developers, their operations teams to be able to provision their systems to whatever Cloud Platform, whether it's internal, external, legacy, PaaS, SaaS services, and be able to understand the exact costs for each of those options and make the best decision based on the needs at that time. That over time will allow their internal customers to migrate and start adopting Greenfield projects in new Cloud environment. Okay, I got to ask you the reality of OpenStack. Okay, a lot of people saying, I love OpenStack, I can look under the hood, Lego blocks, composite applications, all that stuff goes on and on. It's a great conversation. However, the reality is OpenStack is emerging. A lot of folks in the use case I mentioned like OpenStack because they can look under the hood. They're not necessarily up to date on where it is in its life cycle. So where are we with OpenStack? How viable is OpenStack today? And where are we on that vision? Because it is appealing to those folks who have these environments. They see OpenStack as kind of like Amazon, but I could get some customization. So can you share your opinion on that? Yeah, sure. So a couple of years ago, we started looking at OpenStack and no one was really talking about it. It was still very new, very beta, if you will, software. A lot of our customers weren't even looking at it. We were just starting to look at it. And there was still some shakiness about what direction the industry is going. CloudStack, OpenStack, what flavors. All of a sudden in the last, I'd say about four or five months, it is just blown up. I think that's because, and this is just response from the market, OpenStack is finally at the point where it's production ready, it's vetted. Our customers are more familiar with it. And I don't think- There's production deployment examples out there. There's absolutely, but you know, the bigger the customer base, the bigger the production area, the better, right? And so I think we're at this turning point right now. 2014 is definitely going to be year of OpenStack in that sense. We see a lot of our clients coming up to us asking for it, asking for information about it, figuring out what the support models are for it, what flavors work for their environment. So, I can say that honestly- Certainly Red Hat's got a huge opportunity with OpenStores. I mean, I have a lot of people trying to, you know, block them into the wall, if you will, to use our NASCAR example. Everyone's got their wheels on their cars, they're speeding down in the race right now. Jared, I want to get your perspective on it. Is Red Hat at risk? I mean, you got others out there kind of trying to bump them around. What do they need to do to win them? I think their model works how it is, right? They support the community. They become the big name just to add to normal. So a lot of our clients, you know, they get a little shaky when you say OpenStores, but with a name like Red Hat behind it, let's not discredit that, right? Now there's a trusted name, there's support behind the product. I think that perspective, especially in the federal government, we're going to see a lot of adoption. We saw that with RHEL, what they did with Linux. I think we're going to see that same thing with OpenStack. To me, that was the, that's the biggest hope to get over. We're going to start to see OpenStack on the approved product list of all these agencies. They can't use it unless it's on that list. So we're really moving in the right direction. Well, I mean, I always get this question all the time, hey, is Red Hat blowing it in OpenStack? And I say, you know, if you look at the contributor list, not like in the last place, they're up in the top, if not number one. So that one, they're contributing a lot to OpenStack. Two, their brand value inside enterprise and government is massive. I mean, it's not like they're a bit player at all. I mean, they're pretty solid. So if you look at the competition, they're jockeying for that brand value. They don't actually have the same as Red Hat. So Red Hat has a huge opportunity right now, I think to be the leader of the community. Do you think that they're doing that right now? Being the leader, could they be doing more? Cause they're kind of a humble company. I mean, they don't do a lot of grandstanding, but are they at a good spot, guys? And what, if not, or what could they do better? Yeah, so I think this is where Booz Allen, as a, you know, a system integrator and a partner comes into play. We not only look at open source technologies and what Red Hat provides, but put together the use cases and the architectures and deployment models that will work for our clients. And really vet it and put a big check mark on it, saying yes, this will work for you. And I think, yes, Red Hat is kind of humble, but they are a recognized name within the open source industry. They basically represent open source to anyone on the street that doesn't know what open source is. And in the long run, they have a very good reputation in terms of supporting new innovations and new technologies and their own communities first. And I think that's a really powerful message that we can bring to our clients for long-term stability and innovation in the future. Terry, talk about the procurement cycle. We mentioned earlier, kind of teased out the Amazon IBM thing, which is kind of when the losses are on the bid. But to be more general, cloud has changed the cycles of procurement, right? It changes the implementation time to value. So the old days, when we were, I was just getting into the business. I mean, the rollouts were massive, you know, maybe two years, massive deployment cycles. Now you're seeing acceleration. What does a current deployment cycles look like? What, give us a taste of, what is it like, I mean? So the biggest challenge right now is, especially in the federal government, is how do you buy that stuff, right? Because it's not a typical, you know, paper use using the cloud. They don't have credit cards. You know, that's really the big hurdle. Not a lot of shadow IT in the government, is there? And there's, yeah, absolutely. Well, that's one of the drivers for CIO to broker cloud to their organizations, right? But the key thing is around, you know, how do we, how do they buy it? So that makes the procurement cycle a lot longer. So we've actually been following quite a few, like a, you know, storage as a service, infrastructure as a service, what have you. Those procurements just keep getting delayed. I think you guys could be the shadow IT organization for the government. Because they have to bring it into the house. So, you know, I think, like most big procurements, because what we're seeing is these large agencies, these are really big procurements. These are three, four, five, 600 million dollar procurements. It's going to take a couple of years to get those out. A lot of engineering as well. It's the requirements, right? How do we, all the different cloud providers, you know, license a little bit different. Their cost model is a little bit different. So until those become some sort of standard, I think we're still looking at another one or two years until we see really big adoption. Well, you know. Because of that. There's a huge process. The Obamacare website going down certainly puts a face to the average consumer out there who might not be in the weeds. So what do you guys say to the mountain, I want to get into that particular use case, but that kind of makes the government look like they don't know what they're doing in terms of technology. So how do you guys help the government kind of get faster and more relevant there? Not necessarily that website, but in general, for the tech. What do you guys do as a firm? So a lot of it is just, you know, by nature of being a consulting firm, we have a lot of clients, a lot of lessons learned. So we try and share that, right? We try and replicate how other folks are doing it. So we do have commercial practice. So we share a lot of that. We help push them towards some of these new procurement models. Granted, you can't change the government procurement model, but there are ways that you can work around and do different kinds of approaches. So a lot of it is just, as a firm, again, sharing lessons learned, helping them drive to different ways to procure. The technology is not always the hard part. It's there. We know it works to some extent. So Padma. How you integrate it? How you put the pieces together? So Padma Warrior was saying on her keynote this morning from Cisco that with SAS exposes things like these little scabs and like a website example. Highlights it versus, you know, if it's a software out of the box, but that's kind of an interesting anecdote. But more importantly, she said people would be buying outcomes, guaranteeing SLA around outcomes. What do you think about that? I mean, you guys are on the front lines. Is that reality? Is that fiction? Is that soon to be 10 years out? Or is that just vision? What's your take on that? Well, internally within the government, SLA's tend to be a lot trickier because the business drivers are a lot different. On the incentives are a lot different. It's not profit that drives things and reducing costs. It's oftentimes ensuring services and maintaining mission criticality. So we see cloud as, and procurement of cloud services as a way to kind of reintroduce good SLA's back into the procurement models. And as more and more of these systems that we integrate with become services, those procurement models will reflect that. And those inherently come with those service level agreements. So hopefully this will be a big driver to ensure good consistent agreements between internal customers and the providers of those services. So I think who owns SLA will be key to. Literally all of our clients, all of our major government clients that they're asking themselves, they're either going to become a broker themselves to these different cloud providers. The provider owns SLA. Or they're going to go to a third party maybe like Buzan or someone else where they go and just buy those services. We own the SLA and we're responsible for that. So I think you're going to see those two paths sort of come together at some point. Guys, great stuff here. Love talking about what's in the front lines and the trenches around the cloud, certainly in the government sector. We don't get a lot of that down the cube, especially private, but their business to government is getting a consumerization trend hitting them right in the face. So that's great. But I want to ask a final question to summarize out for the folks watching. What's this show all about? I mean, obviously you got IBM here for 10 years. Cisco just showing up for the first time. Open Source on its, some argue sixth generation, fourth generation. The commercialization of open source is not stopping. That train is like barreling down the tracks. Why is this show? It's so important right now in this point in time. I think for us, especially from a cloud perspective, if you look at what cloud, what the promise is around being open, being flexible, different kinds of services, being able to move around it, without open source, cloud's probably not going to be successful as the least as what it's promised to be. I think that's what this show is all about to be. I see it as a platform. This show is about seeing where the industry will be in terms of seeing the communities, what they're working on, what problems and features they're working on, and seeing where our clients will be, and really being able to engage with the direct people that innovate at the edge. And that is so crucial. Although a lot of other places, other conferences, you don't get that opportunity. And that's what this show is about. You know, so we were talking about Cisco earlier, a software engineering driving the bus here, you know, and it really is about the innovation around DevOps. And you're seeing Internet of Things being impacted by software engineering, software architecture with reversalization completely changes the game. I mean, this is like, and that wasn't like that 10 years ago. You know, you wrote your apps, you deployed it, you stacked up some gear, now everyone's pretty much a software guy. You know, another big word I think we'll start seeing over the next year is no ops. Right? So the automation is going to be. A lot of companies have a lot of those guys. Is that a title or is that a trend? Just no ops, right? All automated, right? The digital enterprise, we will. He's a no-op. He's a DBA. Actually, that's going to be a really hot job. We actually interviewed the guy from the San Francisco Giants, the CIO here in San Francisco, great interview, and they all get World Series rings. And the favorite quote was, even the DBAs get a World Series ring. Everyone in the company gets a World Series ring. So, you know, we see that being huge. Guys, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. We're stuck on time here. Red Hat, really the bell weather of Intel. We had Cisco on. Software, DevOps, Cloud is really making a real dent, Open Source is driving it all. Thanks so much for your comments. We'll be right back after this short break. Thanks. Thank you.