 on the ground. Presented by theCUBE, here's your host, John Furrier. Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We are on the ground here in Seattle, Washington for IBM's Open Cloud Architecture Summit. I'm here with Angel Diaz. He's the Vice President of Cloud Technology and Architecture at IBM. Great to see you. Great to see you. So we just had Docker come up for the past couple of days. Total Docker madness. But really that's the architectural play for the cloud. You guys are having a separate event here. Talk about your Open Cloud Architecture Summit. What's it all about? What's it all about? Sure look, this is the fourth year where we've had this event and we do them in different cities maybe four or five times a year, right? We're doing them here in Seattle, coinciding with DockerCon. We have been trying to build us with our partners in the industry an Open Cloud Architecture for the past four or five years. Think about it. Open hardware, something like Open Power. Open compute storage network worth OpenStack. An Open programming model for building applications. Quickly people call that platform as a service. Cloud Foundry, containers, Docker. Open event driven architectures with OpenWisk. And then OpenAPIs with things like the OpenAPI initiative. This has been something we've been doing systematically for quite some time. And what's exciting about this event is that we bring together clients, okay? Our clients, the people who are trying to implement this stuff, use this stuff along with our leaders in open source and the actual open source leaders in industry luminaries. And we have great conversations, great debates, and great feedback that help us steer this in the right direction. So I got to ask the question about what you guys have been doing. Obviously, we've been following BlueMix, Wisk was a great announcement at Interac. IBM Interconnect, fantastic. Compose IO, all these kind of tools happening. But BlueMix has been accelerating very fast. So you guys have been pedaling as fast as you can on the BlueMix side. Yet the market as we saw at DockerCon is exploding with developers. How are you guys balancing that? Because that's the question that everyone's asking us. Okay, there's a moving train in the market requirements. Yet you guys are building the technology really really fast with BlueMix. What's the update? What's the current status of the cloud? And how do customers react to that? No, we are entering what I think of as cloud 2.0. Everybody needs compute storage and network. We do that. OpenStack API's provide that. We've got our data centers across the world. 46, 48 data centers across the world. You can access this anywhere, any geography. Bare metal or virtual machines. Great. But now we're moving into time to value. Speed is the currency. Whether you're building containers and building out microservices. Whether you need to build systems and engagement applications using Cloud Foundry. Or compose all these things in an event-driven architecture where you can really start to bring together services and build almost industry-specific clouds. That's what we're headed, right? So the open source piece is a very interesting dynamic. We were just talking on theCUBE at DockerCon about the dynamic of the playbook of success. You get stuff out there. You grow. You build an ecosystem. Some propriety or some unique advantage that suppliers would have for customers. But that's the old way. And we were kind of saying, oh, Docker's got the playbook from VMware or other successful trajectories, if you will. But now open source is a big part of it, unlike previous successes in the past. Technically, you have that new balance. So how do you guys look at that? What are you guys doing? How do you leverage that open source component? Because you've got open source now. You've got cloud, then you've got on-prem. These are three main channels. Yeah, you know, we are living in a multi-cloud world. Our objective is hypercloud, to make all clouds behave as one. So you want to have capability on-premise, because you want to be close to a transaction. You want to have capability off-premise. You want to connect those worlds across clouds. The only way to do that is with choice with consistency. We did this back in the 90s, right? When we helped create the Linux Foundation. We helped create Apache. When we helped create the HTTP server, right? So we kind of understand how to do that. We're trying to do it again. Because that way clients can have this choice of consistency, build with an open architecture on-premise, be able to, whether it's compute storage and network, expand and contract, whether it's building in a polyglot world, their development organization, expand and contract. That has been our strategy. That's what we're doing. And it seems to be working. Because you come to these events, you know, look, if you look back, you know, we had a press release with Docker two and a half years ago. Well, we're going to be working the open together and create an open community. And now you've got 3,000 people here at this event. I was talking with Mariana Tess, who's now running alliances and strategy for Docker. She was VP of engineering. There's more of a technical role now on the alliances because of the deeper integration requirement with Docker. And certainly Docker has their own agenda how they think the world should be. But you guys have a lot of clients that have been running compute and been doing computing for years and generations. How are your customers looking at the Docker world? And how does that fit into the real world scenarios that you guys are building with customers? Because that's the question I get. How do I make sense of this Docker ecosystem? I just want to get stuff applications out there fast. And I want it on the cloud. What's the IBM customer reaction to the Docker madness? What clients are asking is they're asking for an open cloud architecture. And there are centers of gravity, okay? Which is the good news, right? There's lots of open source out there, but there's open governance around centers of gravity. Open stack for compute storage network. From that, you can build out a container layer reusing those elements. That's what we do in our cloud with Bluemix. We've got over 20,000 new developers a week joining up with Bluemix, right? And you look at Cloud Foundry, you look at WISC, and you look at the APIs. Those are the centers of gravity. No matter where you start, if you want to use containers to help you with your CI-CD pipeline, you're building out your applications and then moving into a microservices world, we can do that, and then you expand down to other layers. If you do that, if you follow that architecture, you will be able to have choice of consistency. You'll be able to do it in a multi-cloud environment and on-premise or off-premise, which is kind of the reality. Does Docker change the architectural equation in that open model, or does that accelerate the value of the customers? It accelerates the value. Look, we stood up two organizations last year. The Open Container Initiative, to deal with Run-C and some of the lower-level things, and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Docker's part of both of that. Cloud Foundry's part of that. All of these constellations are working together so that we reuse the right elements of the architecture, and Docker's playing a big role in that, as well as lots of other peoples. I love the open-source political theater that goes on, because there's a little job-hanging co-operations in the time case, but the most part, Open is open who always wins, and we've seen that success. You mentioned Linux and what IBM had experienced in Linux, and at that time, that was a coalescing moment around Linux. People in the industry kind of pulled around Linux, and that was a forcing function for stability, but also growth, and that rest of history is well-documented. What is that moment now? Is it Docker? What is that center that's people are coalescing around? Is it microservices? Is it Docker? What is that moment? There are several centers of gravity, so there's been a lot of terraforming going on. You think of this as Stardust, and then the Stardust comes together, and it terraforms, right? First one was OpenStack. If you think in those days, right? I mean, this was pre-foundation, pre-anyone. I walked in, had a conversation with buddies in Rackspace. We decided to join up, got a couple other people together. Six of us launched the OpenStack Foundation. I came back from Austin, 9,000 people at the OpenStack Summit, right? Cloud Foundry, we just had the summit there, upwards of 3,000 plus at the Cloud Foundry Summit, right? Here you are, DockerCon, right? Three, 4,000 people. Those are the centers of gravity. Cloud Native Computing Foundation at Oskon. I stood up on stage with my buddies from Google, and we announced, and Jim Zemlin, and we announced to the world the Cloud Native Computing. Those are the coalescings that are happening around this architecture. It's multiple pieces, right? It's multiple pieces, but these pieces are working well together. Are they unified, or is this fragmented? How do you see that all kind of together? Oh, it is again. That's why we're here. An open cloud architecture. It is all elements of a programming model that we're creating from the hardware. Don't forget, open power all the way up. Open power has been a big success for IBM. Oh, it's been for the industry. And we've got Rackspace, Google, everyone involved in that. All the way up to how you expose things through an API, through Swagger, using the OpenAPI initiative, to where we're headed with the venture of an architecture and these industry clouds, right? Leveraging the services. So I got to ask you a lot of people, so the naysayers, all those open foundations in this set, computing foundations, they're all kind of like just marketing programs for the vendors and it's just, they never ever be doing this. Historical views, some say that. What's different? What can you say to those folks that would be out there saying, hey, just another foundation, it's just a land grab or it's something that's just a posturing in the marketplace? How do you refute that to when people say, these things are all had no cattle? What do you say to that? Well, I don't hear that often. But for those who do say that, yeah, just look at the activities, look at the vibrancy. We've got 400 developers on OpenStack, for example. That's quite the investment, right? We have literally dozens, 100 in Cloud Foundry. We've got developers on all of these things and then also look at the people who attend these events. It is not just the vendors that create product around it, but it's the end users, it's the end users, the clients, they're really interested. And that's what's different. It's not your parents' open source world anymore. Back in the 90s, when I was doing this at IBM Research, it was a bunch of academics, we were just having fun. Now it's like, nope, we're having fun, but we're having fun with the end user. It's interesting. I mean, the perspective, I don't hear very often, but it's mostly from the old data center guys that have lived through the client server and they saw a lot of proprietary stuff going on. That's gone. And my answer to that is, we saw with OpenStack, you vote with the code. And that ultimately is the key performance metric. Open governance, meritocracy. Those are the keys to a good foundation and a good ecosystem. If you can get good code and you get good users. The scoreboard doesn't lie with code, right? So, okay, with that final question, what did you learn from OpenStack and what did the industry learn from OpenStack and some of the early, formational stuff that now seems to be hitting a stride? It's a great question, you know? And we announced this at the OpenStack summit and we took it, we did it first with Cloud Foundry and that is interoperability. Interoperability is key. So what we're doing with RefStack, for example, and the challenge that we laid at the OpenStack summit and what we're gonna show in Barcelona, interoperability around containers, interoperability around Cloud Foundry, because that is necessary. Not just between our own products sets, right? Whether it's on-premise or off-premise, but across the vendor landscape. That is the key lesson that I think we learned then and that we're doing now in all of these that will ensure that you get the choice of consistency, you deliver hybrid cloud, that you can run across geographies, that you can run across data centers and make all these clouds behave as one. Because at the end, it's all about the application, the business process, right? You want to be able to compose and recompose your business process quickly. Final question, share with the folks out there what they can expect to see from IBM in the next coming years in terms of what you guys are gonna do with the Open Cloud Foundation, IBM Cloud, what are you guys striving to be? Yeah, yeah, that's a great one. You are gonna see us, we're doing great in Cloud 1.0, computer storage network. Cloud 2.0, the platform. You talked about Bluemix. I mean, it is so exciting to see the eyes of the developer light up where they can now have to worry about the infrastructure, build out an application and start being productive. 20,000 new developers a week. Now we're talking about industry specific clouds where we take all of the services that we provide, our cognitive services, our weather data, our partnerships with Apple and Twitter and all the open source. We bring that together in a way that is semantically more relevant to the applications you're building. You start doing that, you go to Cloud 3.0 which is time to value. And, you know, back in the days of the web when we started that, I could not imagine, we did not fathom the world that we live in now. And now that the users are involved, our clients are involved, I can't fathom the world. There's an application tsunami coming, a lot of greatness, Angel Diaz here. We are here on the ground in Seattle for the Admin's Open Computing Architecture Summit. I'm John Furrier, watching theCUBE on the ground.