 From Seattle, Washington, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE on the ground at OpenStack Day Seattle 2015. Now, here's your host, John Furrier. Okay, welcome everyone to a special CUBE on the ground. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We are in Seattle for OpenStack's Innovation Day, which is really a real large Uber meetup in conjunction with LinuxCon, ContainerCon, MesosCon, you name it. A lot of people are in town and I'm here with Jesse Bluebox, a proud man. Welcome to the CUBE segment. Appreciate seeing you. Super thrilled to be here. Great to see your success. Congratulations on selling your company to IBM. Yeah, we were right in the midst of it last time we were on the video. A little smile, couldn't say anything, under total non-disclosure. Anyway, we're here at OpenStack, you gave a presentation. What's going on here at OpenStack? Kind of controversial up on stage. You talking about the distros are dead, things are happening. What's going on? What did you mean by your presentation? Yeah, I mean, so I think that the point is we wanna see OpenStack as successful as possible in the enterprise. So we had the panel immediately following that was, why isn't it as successful? And we had two speakers this morning talking about the challenges they've had and then the product they have that doesn't support upgrades. And so the reality is we built incredible software that can do incredible things, but if it's not usable, if it isn't provided good experience to the customer, nobody will use it. And so many of the vendors in the space have ignored this question of usability and experience focusing solely on technology. We can do this thing or we have this feature, but if it doesn't work, the features are irrelevant. So my point is companies that are focusing on delivering a great experience, Platform 9, Metacloud, Bluebox, those are the companies that will get traction in the enterprise. Companies that focus on features and technologies and bits and bytes. Those companies, they have proof of concepts and pilots and they have customers and I'm sure those customers are happy of it. It's a different type of experience for the customer. Red Hat accuses you of making an argument for outsourcing. Is that what you mean or are you just saying, guys, people want to adopt, make it easier to consume? What's your point? Are you pushing for more outsourcing? Yeah, I mean outsourcing I think is a funny topic. Like do you outsource your power to the power company? No, you get power from the power company because that's the best place to get it from. This is just an extension of that. So what we believe is that the talent that exists inside an organization should be doing work that helps that organization and differentiating based on raw infrastructure doesn't move an organization forward. The differentiation exists at the application layers. We want those engineers that sit in an organization and are investing all of their time, energy, and effort into getting OpenStack functional. They should be doing that to get their applications functional for their business. Let somebody who has experience, expertise, and view into thousands of different customers and installations, let them run the installation, bring value to your company. Things succeed or fail in a variety of reasons for OpenStack. We've been teasing out some of the details. One, awareness of what's available. What's usable or available. Two, products is inferior. Or three, they don't have a core team that could actually roll it out. Where do you see OpenStack on those three spectrums? Awareness of what's usable and viable, product viability, and also core team as those in three inhibitors. Where would you rank them? How would you talk to those? Yeah, it's a great question. So I think Mark put that slide up this morning that was the spectrum of projects versus maturity and utilization. And what you saw there was that all the original projects, Neutron, or excuse me, Nova, Neutron, Horizon, Glance, Keystone, those are the projects that are used. And all the new projects that have come out in the last year or two are the projects that are still in their infancy in terms of adoption. And it makes sense. We're five years in. Those were the original core projects. Those are the projects that work and are stable. And they're also the projects that are foundational to everything else. And then people are picking and choosing from that additional bucket of things that they need. What we found is that a lot of customers, they've either find that those additional projects aren't working the way they expect them to, or they just frankly don't need them. And so if they don't need them, we don't need to push them on to customers. The whole cloud's about lightweight applications and having the right infrastructure for the workload. So in a way, what you're arguing for and saying is why have a bloated set of features? Yeah, and I think the service catalog is critical. I've talked a lot about this in other panels I've done. Having a catalog of services that your engineers can use to deliver their applications is key. The question is, what are those services? Do you need all of them? What are the right ones and do they work? And if they don't work, nobody will use them. They'll just be frustrated. So I got to ask you about the quote from H.P. Healy and Cloud just tweeted that, let me see, get the actual tweet here to you. And I want you to describe where this come from. It says, misquoted and misrepresented on stage, get your facts right, Blue Box Jesse, before you slam a key contributing member of the OpenStack. Hashtag not cool. We gotta have a little fun in our vendor space, right? So I will say H.P. is a phenomenal contributor at OpenStack. I've been greatly appreciative of everything they've done to the space. And their engineering team in Seattle is also wonderful. We're talking to a lot of them. So the quote is referencing a comment I made about the keynote in October, I believe, in 2013 in Portland where, I believe it was, I can't remember the speaker, but the comment was, it was a joke at the beginning of his presentation saying H.P. contributes lawyers and contributes parties to the community. I'm finding the quote. I'll post it up on Twitter. We'll have some more fun with it. No, I think what we don't often see in the space is... But H.P. is a contributor in the community. Oh, huge contributor, huge contributor. So I was just referencing a quote that one of their executives made on stage. So they took it out of context. So they made a joke, you made a joke of their joke, and then it's one big little fist of cups going on. And then they tweet it. So it's all right, we'll hung it out later today. Well, we'll get them on and get their counter response. So of course, it's great to be on the action when the bombs are dropping in the OpenStack community. But I want to talk about one thing. Supplier management with the customer. I'm a customer and I'm looking for a supplier. I don't want to outsource supplier. I want to build a core team in my organization to be OpenStack, be cloud, handle the on-prem, the legacy, and then ultimately get to native applications. I need a partner, I need a supplier. I don't necessarily want to outsource it, but I want to be mindful of cost of ownership. I don't want to buy into a path that I'm going to have to deal with a ton of costs downstream. How do I do that? How do you talk to customers and what do you say about that? Yeah, so I try to remove the word outsourcing from our offering. It's not an outsourced offering. It's not a managed service. It's private cloud as a service. We're taking the same benefit, the same experience you get from public cloud and just putting it in your data center. And the customers that get that and get the value of doing something like that, light bulbs go off and they're ready to buy. And the customers that don't, they go and they buy a distribution and they do the work, like Nick from FICO this morning presented, and they hire a team and they go through pain. And there are customers where that makes sense. Like we're not saying this is the end all be all solution for everybody. We're saying that there are organizations that need to move faster and those organizations can move faster by using a product like ours that's delivered as a service versus trying to take raw software. So would it be safe to say that the old expression priming the pump is kind of what you're looking at right now. Customers want to get going, get that pump going, gets the water flowing or in this case, some cloud and then take those baby steps. You're looking for someone to kind of walk that bridge, cross that bridge with them. Yeah, it's time to market, right? It's time to market. These companies that we're speaking with largely already know and feel like they're behind. And so how do we get them up to speed even faster? Well, we could go and we could figure out, all right, which hardware do you use and which sand do you want to use and which software do you want to use and which neutron controller do you want to use and how is it going to all be laid out and 12 months from now we could get your cloud up and running or next week we can have a rack land in your data center and you can have a cloud operating today. Like those are the choices that we're making. And long term that 12 month implementation will give the customer more control over the physical bits and knobs and levers of the environment. But do they really want that control? Like people I think today, customers, that hasn't really, there's no final answer there yet. Well, they get the cloud. They know they got to go there. So the alternative on choice one in the 12 month is also opportunity cost of labor involved, engineering meetings, time taking out of other things. Well, and potential for failure, right? You might not even get the cloud in 12 months. Things might change. You might lose your team. You never know what happens in this space. These markets all about starter kit accelerating some innovation. That's pretty much what you're talking about. Absolutely. Okay, so what's the biggest thing that you've seen the past few months? Now that you're with an IBM. Talk about what's it like now for your company. Now that you're part of IBM, are they leaving you alone? Are you getting sucked into the big blue machine? Obviously the word blue is in your name, big blue. Great question. So we've had a total blast with integration. What was neat going through the M&A process is we had the opportunity to go speak to so many of the companies involved in OpenStack and learn their strategies and figure out how we would fit in. And in those conversations we had with IBM, it was the only company that we felt had a strategy that made sense and that we fit really well into. And so we're two months in now. We are our own entity. We'll be our own entity for the next year. And it's been unbelievably fun. I think that's the only way I can put it. So the month we were acquired, we hired 11 new people to the team. We have access to 37 software data centers around the world to deploy our offering into. We have access to a brand. Nobody gets fired for buying IBM, right? Like that is the trademark slogan. So we have access to a brand that is one of the top brands in the world. And we've got this enormous Salesforce that's out there. They have services too, all over the place. All over the place. Yeah, presence. So we're seeing just incredible uptick in momentum for the company. I think that the key for us and for IBM and for any company gets acquired, it's focused, right? So you got to say no a lot. So we've been saying no to a lot of things and making sure that we are focused on bringing a product to market, the same product to market we've been working on for the last two years. Getting that out, getting customers and moving forward from there. So we've been doing a great job. I've been really excited by the IBM team. We have an integration team that works very closely with us stacked as a buffer between IBM and Blue Box Independent. They've done an outstanding job with that job and the next 10 months between the integrated, the full final integration is going to be just an absolute riot. So talk about your status as a celebrity now that you won Cube Madness. I was saying your world's changed. People that want your autograph. What's going on? Well, I roll the red carpet up when I go to the dive bar. No, we love that product. I can't wait for the one this year. We're going to go rootin' for some folks. We're going to add a little twist on this year. It might be a security hackathon. We'll see. That's a good idea. All right, so final point. Really quickly give the folks who are watching a feel for the scene here in Seattle. Obviously this is your home turf, OpenStack event here at LinuxCon. A lot of VCs poking around. I see some tier one guys. A lot of stuff going on under the hood in the technology business right now. What's the vibe? What's Seattle all about? Yeah, I think the office of the CTO of Seattle this morning nailed it. This is Cloud City. This has been Cloud City for the last four or five years and now we're recognized in this, that. And so we see infrastructure companies, softwares and service companies, B2B companies focused on the space just erupting here. And I think it's a phenomenal thing. Amazon certainly has a huge presence but that's I think a great attribute to the city. We have all kinds of talent that is intermingling with everybody else that's in town. And now you look at every other cloud infrastructure company they're building a big office here. So part of the exciting thing for us now being part of IBM is we become that kernel, that hub, that point to grow fund from four IBM cloud in Seattle. And so we're pretty psyched for what we're gonna be able to do with that in the next 12 months. And you have a lot of wealthy people from the old Microsoft DNA to now other and hopefully the Inferior Capital will be emerging as well. Absolutely. All right, Jesse here inside theCUBE. This is a special CUBE presentation on the ground. I'm John Furrier watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. Thanks John.