 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2016. Brought to you by Red Hat. Now here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and Brian Gracely. Welcome back and happy to have on the program again, Redesh Balakrishnan, who is the general manager of OpenStack at Red Hat. Redesh, last time we caught up with you at OpenStack in Austin, so thanks for joining us again. Great to be back here. All right, so there's not any big announcements from the OpenStack standpoint, but tell us kind of what's new, what have you been spending your time here this week at the show? So the first thing to recognize is that from a customer conversation perspective, OpenStack is the second most popular subject here, the first being containers, and as you have seen and heard containers, you've never heard of them. Yeah, that's right, you can't contain the enthusiasm around containers. Now, from our perspective, we've been focused more on what I will call the three P's, one is the production deployment, partner ecosystem, and portfolio optimization. So from a production deployment perspective, if you had managed to catch the keynotes, we had BedFair, NASA JPL up on stage sharing their perspectives and experience. We also earlier, a couple of months ago, announced the fact that BBVA, Verizon, et cetera, are on production, et cetera. All told, hundreds of customers across the globe in production, so exciting spot to be in. Hopefully we can touch on partner ecosystem and portfolio optimization as we go along as well. So you mentioned that the hot topic this week has been containers, so, you know, we were OpenStack Summit, Brian was at DockerCon last week, we're here, you know, containers, OpenStack, of course they can go together, but sometimes people look at, you know, Paz and what you're doing with OpenShift and say, does one replace the other? What's your viewpoint? What are you hearing from your customers? Yeah, I think there are two ways to look at containers as it intersects with OpenStack. One is, how are you going to use containers as a technology to deliver the OpenStack services themselves or using containers as a way to deploy OpenStack? So that's one way of looking at containers. The richer conversation to be had is with container platform on top of OpenStack because containers still require compute services, storage services, networking services, and over the years, from an OpenStack perspective, you've done as a community an amazing job of simplifying that, bringing it to a standardized level of API. So how do you build a container platform such as OpenShift on top of it so that the holy grail of a cloud native implementation that customers are looking for can be had today and you don't have to wait for years together? So in line with that, if you look at our offerings, we have an offering called Red Hat Cloud Suite which packages our OpenShift platform with our OpenStack platform offering so that customers can get to it today and don't have to wait for too long. Yeah, we had Alessandro Pirelli on early. He talks about frictionless in the context of management but OpenStack, more and more customers just want it now. What are the go-to markets? What's the partner in go-to markets, the Red Hat go-to markets? So when a customer says, I want programmable infrastructure, they can get it quickly, they can get it up and running quickly and go start solving business problems. Excellent question, right? So clearly we are missionarily focused on making sure that more and more customers can get the benefit of OpenStack. So from that perspective, we clearly have OEMs such as Dell and Cisco who are pre-testing and so they've been, a customer wants to roll out a solution. There is no if, it's more of when they want to roll it out and how soon they can get the benefit. So that's one area of investment for us and we're excited by the fact that partners such as Intel, Cisco, Dell, we not only are jointly engineering the solution but also driving the go-to market together with them. An additional area of, or maybe two more additional areas where we are enabling more massive consumption by customers is the whole notion of managed services offering. So Rackspace as a partner fits as an example. We're also working with a couple of other partners that hopefully we'll get to touch upon when we meet again in Barcelona Summit because there is a set of customers who are saying, look, I recognize the power of OpenStack, I do want to consume the benefit of it but my precious IT resources are going to be spent more in the application platform side so can somebody manage that, right? So I think Rackspace with their tooling and their know-how and with our technology offers a solution in that space. The third one is of course the classical SI emotion and to me any technology reaching that critical stage of moving away from early adopter to early majority and a key sign is are the SI's investing in capacity and capabilities? You know, if you were to walk around in the show floor you'll see Vipro and a couple of other SI's actually showcasing the fact that they not only have the capability today but actually have production deployment of customers on OpenStack. So depending on the customer's preference for whether they want to do it on their own or have somebody manage, we are step-by-step enabling all the options for the customers. So Radesh, being a show like this, one of the great things is being able to just dig in with a lot of different customers. Can you bring us inside? You know, what are the conversations you're having about OpenStack, you know, kind of along the spectrum of adoption? What are some of the kind of key concerns or you know, where are they in those discussions? Right, if you were to ask this question three years ago, the conversation was about, hey, how do I get to an OpenStack infrastructure? That was more, you know, they're used to probably a traditional virtualization infrastructure, where does OpenStack fit in, et cetera. Now the conversation has gone up, you know, a couple of notches in terms of how they are viewing it. There is an overwhelming recognition that we have to get to a new infrastructure for the new kind of workloads and a new world that are in a new competitive reality that's facing the customers. In that context, OpenStack is one part of that, you know, stack that they want to get to with, you know, enterprise self as a storage solution, open shift as the platform as a service, cloud forms as the cloud management, et cetera. So this is where I think the fact that we have a truly open portfolio to offer a full solution becomes an advantage for RedAdam. I'm personally excited about the fact that, you know, we've not only invested in the portfolio, but also we have optimized the experience of OpenStack with each of these peace pods to make the experience from a customer perspective richer. Yeah, you talked about, you know, a few years ago, people had a virtualized infrastructure. There may have been a virtualization team. We were talking a little bit earlier with Ranga from the storage team, and he said he's seeing more and more that those teams are kind of spreading out. They're becoming horizontal. It's a cloud team or it's a DevOps team. Are you seeing that as well? Is that what you're seeing your customers say we'd like to move to? Absolutely, that's a, you know, definitely a push from top down to get into far more agile DevOps kind of approach. And that sets us up very well, not just from the perspective of, hey, we have the tools and technology, but also from the people and process perspective, because if you look at Red Hat, the best way to characterize this, we are a large DevOps organization, if you will, right? So I think we have a lot to share in terms of how we're able to drive things in an agile manner. So that makes the conversation go flow smoothly and puts us in a position where recently, we announced something called Open Innovation Lab, whereby we sit with customers, have a residence program to actually, you know, jam out code for a particular application that they want to build, and then that becomes a residual knowledge that then they can take back and then bring about the culture change. So this is a, you know, definitely a ground swell of change in terms of mindset that's being driven from top down. And to me, the exciting thing is it plays to the advantage for us as a technology offering perspective as well as from a culture perspective. Yeah, Josh, can give our audience a flavor of, you know, what your team's been doing here at the show, sessions, demos, other kind of cool things going on. Sure, so from a partner pavilion perspective, you know, we have tons of partners like Cisco, Dell, as well as SI partners highlighting the joint solutions that we've built as well as getting more feedback from the customers. Part of the team is also engaged in customer briefing centers. Earlier I talked about the fact that this is the, you know, second most wanted subject that customers are having conversation about from a delivering sessions perspective, a range of topics from, you know, say what are the experiences from production deployments to high availability to how do you think about embracing containers in conjunction with OpenStack are being addressed by our collective teams, et cetera. So all in all, you know, very excited about if I were to use one sentence, it'll be the fact that we've gone beyond experimentation from OpenStack to being able to now share best practices from real production customers and then get that virtual cycle going and that's what the exciting part of being at Summit. One of the things is obviously OpenStack developed openly in the community, but you're trying to solve customer problems as well so you have an ability to, you know, make it add-ons. What are the things that you're hearing from customers that say, you know, I see what OpenStack does community-wise, but I need this. I want you to add this for me that you, that Red Hat can bring that expertise. What are you hearing from them? Yeah, so the first one is take out the guesswork from, you know, dependency on hardware variability or, you know, it could be SDM embarking on SDN along with OpenStack deployment. I don't want this to be a guesswork and you make it easy enough for you. Now, for me, so that's an advantage to us because we have from day one invested heavily in building a partner ecosystem. We have so many of 500 partners with certified solutions around OpenStack. So that's one need that gets expressed and we are in a good position to address that. Another need that gets surfaced is make it easy to deploy and manage it and we are attacking that from two perspectives. One is from making the product itself easier to deploy and manage and that's an ongoing journey. For example, at the OpenStack platform version eight that we released a couple of months ago before the first time introduced the in-place upgrade from version to version from seven to eight and then when nine comes out, they can do that too. The other aspect is partnering more with rack spaces and managed service providers so that addressing a net new set of customers who want that easier deployment experience as well. And if they were to call our third one that's about the solution point that I talked about which is OpenStack is not the end destination. That's a critical ingredient of the destination. So being able to bring together an experience with other technologies that we have so that they can get to that destination sooner is another area that customers demand of us and then we are proud and excited to be able to deliver on that. So Radesh, OpenStack's been going on the six month release cycle here for a while. By the time we get to Barcelona in the fall it's going to be the Newton release. Where's your team, kind of the Red Hat contribution? Where are some of the main focuses? Anything you can give us a little bit of preview on? Couple of things that we are fundamentally doing a rethink on. One is today we take anywhere from two to three months from upstream release to deliver our product because we're spending cycles to make sure that partner integrations and enterprise hardening are taken care of. With the Newton release we are going to, rather than serialize it, we're going to parallelize it so that within four weeks of the upstream release we're going to have our product and we want to keep that drumbeat moving forward. So that's more of a how are we looking at delivering the solution to the market to meet the reality that customers want to consume it right away but they want it to be enterprise ready too. So we are doing the tooling to address that. The second area of focus is partners given the fact that we are on a six month cadence I've been demanding us to make it easier to recertify the solution, their solutions as new releases come out. Rather than every time let's test it all over again is there a way we could do a continuous integration and continuous testing model perspective. We are on that mode right now with Rackspace as a partner now we are in conversation with multiple partners to make sure that we can pervasively enable that with our partner ecosystem as well. So that's another area of focus. Outside of these two, the core area that we are we want to definitely make sure we hit it off the park and it comes to OpenStack Platform 10 based on Newton will be deployment and management experience. Both from a day one management experience as well as day two management with cloud forms included in the product. Okay so Red Hat just has some deep involvement in everything happened at OpenStack. What do you say to the industry watchers? I mean it's part of Brian and my job to look at hey where's money being made and that's been a big open question on OpenStack so what's your message to the industry watchers and people that say hey where's the money when it comes to OpenStack? So I think first is to frame the expectation not in terms of dollars and cents but in terms of what is the strategic importance that OpenStack has for someone like us. Couple of months ago we announced the fact that BBVA one of the banks based in Spain and marking on a three year journey to partner with us on OpenStack and OpenShift for their digitization strategy. To be able to get to that level of strategic partnership with an organization like BBVA wouldn't have been possible without OpenStack in the mix. So there's a value for that that I can't put a dollar in a cent today but over a period of time that's going to be hugely mutually rewarding. Verizon is another example. As you already know as you've been following the space closely carriers across the globe are in a burning platform moment. They have to get away from the proprietary past get it into a commodity hardware OpenStack based NFE solution and being able to onboard newer solutions quickly. Verizon as a customer is already in production across five data centers and we believe that's just the tip of the iceberg. We are engaged on a day to day basis with multiple carriers across the globe directly as well as with partners such as Cisco and Nokia. So that's going to be another area where being part of the transformative journey that our customers are going to, eventual customers are going to go through is not only going to result in dollars in cents but also up level the profile of Red Hat as a strategic data center partner in the eyes of the customer. So that's equally important as well. The third dimension I tend to look at is what is the portfolio attached that happens because of OpenStack and we talked a little bit about the fact that customers are now, they're looking for solutions rather than give me OpenStack, right? And that's as counterintuitive as it might sound as the OpenStack guy, that's music to my ears because they recognize there is a real business problem and they believe that OpenStack is part of it and we are in an amazing position to deliver on that. So the lens through which I look at stocks of OpenStack, what it means to Red Hat is a little broader than are we selling enough subscriptions? By the way, you know, the sales guys in Red Hat definitely are measured and they have to retire quarter, et cetera, but at the same time there is a larger strategic purport of OpenStack to Red Hat and its journey in the eyes of the customer. All right, so we're Deshpalakrishnan, really appreciate the update on all things OpenStack and beyond here at Red Hat Summit 2016. Thanks for watching theCUBE, we'll be back with lots more coverage after this quick break.