Dr. Thomas Di Giacomo & Daniel Nelson, SUSE | SUSECON Digital '20

🎥 May 20, 2020 📺 SiliconANGLE theCUBE ⏱ 18m 👁 125 views

Dr. Thomas Di Giacomo, President of Engineering & Innovation, SUSE & Daniel Nelson, VP, Products & Solutions, SUSE sit down with Stu Miniman for a conversation as part of SUSECON Digital '20 #SUSECONDigital #theCUBE https://siliconangle.com/2020/05/20/s... SUSE turns open-source innovations into consumable business solutions While cutting-edge technologies may be the most appropriate for solving increasingly sophisticated business problems, companies need easy-to-use solutions. Simplifying modernization to facilitate its consumption by companies is one of the goals of the open-source softw...

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Transcript (21 segments)

Stu Miniman0:00

From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with coverage of SUSECON Digital, brought to you by SUSE.

Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman coming to you from our Boston area studio, and this is theCUBE's coverage of SUSECON Digital 2020. Happy to welcome to the program two of the keynote presenters. First of all, we have Dr. Thomas J. Giacomo, he is the President of Engineering and Innovation. And joining him, his co-presenter from Aquino State, Daniel Nelson, who is the Vice President of Product Solutions. Both of you with SUSE. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us.

Thomas Giacomo0:35

Thank you.

Stu Miniman0:38

Alright, so Dr. T, let's start out. Innovation, open source, give us a little bit of the message for the audience that you and Daniel were talking about on stage. We've been watching for decades the growth and the proliferation of open source and communities, so give us the update there.

Thomas Giacomo0:58

Yeah, and it's not stopping. It's actually growing even more and more, and more and more innovation is coming from open source. The way we look at it is that our customers, they have their business problems, they have their business reality, and so we have to curate and prepare and filter all the open source innovation that it can benefit from, because that takes time to understand how that can match your needs and fix your problems. So at SUSE, we've always done that since 27-plus years, working in the open source projects in a way there, but with customers in mind. And what is pretty clear in 2020 is that large enterprises, small startups, everybody is doing software, everybody's doing IT, and they all have the same type of needs in a way. They need to simplify the landscape because they've been accumulating investments, hardware, infrastructure, software, different solutions, different platforms from different vendors. You need to simplify that and modernize, and they need to accelerate their business, stay relevant and competitive in their own industries. And that's what we're focusing on.

Stu Miniman2:08

Yeah, it's interesting. I completely agree when you say simplify. Daniel, I go back in the communities about 20 years, and in those days we were talking about how Linux was helping to go past the proprietary Unix platforms, Microsoft, the big enemy. And you were talking about operating systems, servers, storage, applications. It was a relatively simple environment there compared to today's multi-cloud, AI, and internet-based architecture. Applications going through this radical transformation. Give us a little bit of insight as to the impact this is having on ecosystems, and of course SUSE now has a broad portfolio.

Daniel Nelson2:55

It's a great question, and I totally get where you're coming from. If you look 20 years ago, the landscape is completely different. The technologies we were using are completely different. The problems we're trying to solve with technology are more and more sophisticated. At the same time, though, there's kind of nothing new under the sun. Every company, every technology, every modality goes through this expansion of capabilities and the collapse around simplification as the capabilities become more complex and manageable. And so there's this continuous tension between capabilities, ease of use, consumability. What we see with open source is that that dynamic could still exist, but it's more along the lines of developers want easy-to-use technologies, but they want the cutting edge, they want the latest things, they want those things within their packages. And then if you look at operations groups or people that are trying to consume that technology, they want that technology to be consumable, simple, it works well with others, be able to pick and choose and have one pane of glass feel to operate within that. That's where we see this dynamic, and that's kind of what the SUSE portfolio was built upon. It's like, how do we take the thousands and thousands of developers that are working on these really critical projects, whether it's Linux like you mentioned, or Kubernetes, or Cloud Foundry, and how do we make that more consumable to the thousands of companies that are trying to do it who may even be new to open source or may not contribute directly but want to have all the benefits that are coming from it. And that's where SUSE fits. Historically and where we see us continuing to fit long term is taking all those Legos, putting them together for companies that don't want to, and then allow them a lot of autonomy and choice in how those technologies are consumed.

Stu Miniman4:42

Right. One of the themes that I heard you both talk about in the keynote was simplify, modernize, and accelerate. It really reminded me of the imperatives of the CIO. There's always run the business, they need to help grow the business, and if they have the opportunity, they want to transform the business. I think you said run, improve, and scale. A critical thing that we talk about these days. When I think back to the Cloud Foundry summit, the keynote stage, it was the old way if I could do faster, better, cheaper, you really could just do them. Today we know faster-faster-faster is what you want. So give us a little bit of insight as to you talked about Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes, application modernization. What are the imperatives that you're hearing from customers, and how are we with all of these tools out there helping IT not just be responsive to the business but actually be a driver for the transformation of the business?

Daniel Nelson5:46

It's a great question. And so when I talk to customers, and Dr. T, feel free to chime in, you talk to as many or more customers than I do. They do have these historically competing imperatives, but what we see with the adoption of some of these technologies is that faster is cheaper, faster is safer. Creating more opportunities to grow and to innovate betters the business. It's not risk injection when we change something, it's actually risk mitigation when we get good at changing. And so it's that modality of moving from a simplified model, a very manufacturing model of software, to a much more organic, much more permissive, much more being able to learn with an ecosystem model. And so that's how we see companies start to change the way they're adopting these technologies. What's interesting about them is that same level of adoption, that sustained thought of adoption, is also how open source is developed. Open source is developed organically, is developed with many eyes make shallow bugs, it's developed by let me try this and see what happens, and be able to do that in smaller and smaller increments. Just like we look at red-green deployments, or being able to do microservices, or any of those things. It's like let's not do one big leap that we're used to in waterfall, because that's actually really risky. Let's do many many many steps forward and be able to transform iteratively and be able to go faster iteratively and make that just part of what the business is good at. And so you're exactly right, those are the three imperatives of the CIO. What I see with customers is the more that they are aligning those three imperatives together and not making them separate, but we have to be better at being faster and being transformative, those are the companies that are really using IT as a competitive advantage within their enterprise.

Thomas Giacomo7:40

Yeah, because most of the time there are different starting points. They have a history, they have different business strategies and things they've done in the past. But you need to be able to accommodate all of that. And the faster microservice native developments for sure for the new apps, but they're also coming from somewhere. And if you don't take care of that together, you can't just accelerate if you simplify your existing, because otherwise you spend your time making sure that your existing is still running. So you have to combine all of that together. And you mentioned about Foundry and Kubernetes, and I love those topics because everybody knows about Kubernetes now, it's picking up in terms of adoption, in terms of innovation and technology, building an ML framework on top of it. Now what's very interesting is where Cloud Foundry was designed for fast application development, and we knew from the beginning that would affect our apps four or five years ago. What we see now is we can extract the value that Cloud Foundry brings to speed up and accelerate your software development cycles, and we can combine that very nicely and very simply, in a simple way, with all the benefits you get from Kubernetes. And not from one Kubernetes, from your Kubernetes running in your public clouds because you have workloads there, you have services that you want to consume from one public cloud. We had a great SUSECON fireside chat with Alpesh from Microsoft actually discussing those topics. Or you might have Kubernetes clusters at the edge that you want to run in your factory or close to your data and workloads in the field. And then Daniel mentioned that as well, taking care of the IT ops, like simplify, modernize, and accelerate for the IT ops, and also accelerate for the developers themselves, benefiting from a combination of open source technologies. And today there's not one open source technology that can do that. You need to bundle, combine them together, and make sure that they are integrated, that they are stable together, that the security aspects, all the technology around them are deeply integrated into services as well.

Stu Miniman9:50

Well, I'm really glad you brought up some of those urban eddies that are out there. We've been saying for a couple of years on theCUBE, Kubernetes is getting baked in everywhere. SUSE's got partnerships with all the cloud providers and you're not fighting them over whether to use a solution that you have versus theirs. I worry a little bit about how do I manage all of those environments. Do I end up with urban eddy sprawl just like we have with every other technology out there? Help us understand what differentiates SUSE's offerings in this space and how do you fit in with the rest of that very dynamic environment.

Thomas Giacomo10:29

Let me start with the aspect of combining things together. Daniel, maybe you can take the management piece. We are making sure at SUSE that we don't solve just for one type of pool. We have the SUSE stack and we are very happy people use it. But the reality is that our customers, they have some investments, they have different needs, they use different technologies from the past, probably want to try different technologies. So you have to make sure that for Kubernetes, like for any other part of the IT stack or the developer stack, your pieces are modular, that you can accommodate different elements. Typically at SUSE, we support different types of hypervisors, we're not focused on one. We can support KVM, Xen, Hyper-V, vSphere, all of the net new TENEX hypervisor, and everything. Same thing with the OS, there's not only one Linux that people are running, and that's exactly the same with Kubernetes. There's no one that I've seen in our customer base that will just need one vendor for Kubernetes, because they have hybrid cloud needs and strategy, and they will benefit from the native Kubernetes they find on AKS, EKS, GKE, Alibaba Clouds, you name them. And we have partnerships with those providers as well doing that. So for us, it's very important that what we bring as SUSE to our customers can be combined with what they have, what they want, even if it's from the so-called competition. Cloud Foundry is running on AWS, you can find it on the marketplace of public clouds, it could run on any Kubernetes, it doesn't have to be SUSE's Kubernetes. But then you end up with a lot of clusters, right? So how do we deal with that, Daniel?

Daniel Nelson12:16

It's a great question, and I'll actually even broaden that out because it's not like we're only running Kubernetes. Yes, we've got lots of clusters, we've got lots of containers, we've got lots of applications that are moving there, but it's not like all the VMs disappeared. It's not like all the bare boxes in the data center suddenly don't exist. We all bring all the sins and decisions of the past with us wherever we go. And so for us, it's not just that lens of how do we manage the most modern, the most cutting-edge. That's definitely a part of it, but how do you do that within the context of all the other things you have to do within your business? How do I manage virtual machines, how do I manage bare metal, how do I manage all those? And so for us, it's about creating a presentation layer on top of that where you can look at your clusters, look at your VMs, look at all your deployments, and be able to understand what's actually happening within your environment. We don't take a prescriptive approach. We don't say you have to use one technology, you have to use this technology. What we want to do is to be adaptive to the customer's needs and say, you've got these things, here's some of our offerings, you've got some legacy offerings too, let's show you how to bring those together. Let's show you how you modernize your workloads, how you simplify your operational framework, and how you end up accelerating what you can do with the staff that you've got in place.

Stu Miniman13:40

Yeah, just on the management piece, is there any recommendation from your team? Last year at Microsoft Ignite there was the launch of Azure Arc, and we're starting to see a lot of solutions come out there. Our concern is that any of us that lived through the multi-vendor management days don't have good memories from those. It is a different discussion if we're just talking about managing multiple Kubernetes, but how do we learn from the past and what are you recommending for people in this multi-cloud era?

Daniel Nelson14:18

So my suggestion to customers is you always start with what are your needs, what strategic problems you're trying to solve, and then choose a vendor that is going to help you solve those strategic problems. So isn't going to take a product-centric view, isn't going to tell you use this technology and this technology and this technology, but it's going to take the view of this is the problem you're going to solve, let me be your advisor within that, and choose people that you're going to trust within that. That being said, you want to have relationships with vendors that have been there for a while, that have done this, that have a breadth of experience in solving enterprise problems. Because I mean everything that we're talking about is mostly around the new things, but keep in mind that there are nuances about the enterprise, there are things that are intrinsically bound within the enterprise that it takes a vendor with a lot of enterprise experience to be able to meet customers where they are. I think you've seen that in some of the real growth opportunities within the hyperscalers, and they've kind of moved into being more enterprise view of things, kind of moving away from just an individual perspective to enterprise problems. You're seeing that more and more. I think vendors and customers need to choose companies that meet them where they are, that enable their decisions, don't prescribe theirs.

Thomas Giacomo15:33

Sorry, I also wanted to add that I would recommend people to look at open source-based solutions, because that will prevent them to be in a difficult situation potentially in a few years from now. There are open source solutions that can do that. Look at viable, sustainable, healthy open source solutions that are not just one vendor but multi-vendor as well, because that leaves those open options open for you in the future as well. So if you need to move to another vendor, or if you need to complement with an additional technology, or you've made a new investment, or you go to new public clouds, if you base your choices on open source you have a better chance but one day to not.

Daniel Nelson16:21

I think that's a great point, Dr. T, and I would glom onto that by saying customers need to bring a new perspective on how they adjudicate solutions. It's really important to look at the health of the open source community. Just because it's open source doesn't mean that there's a secret army of gnomes that in the middle of the night go in and fix bugs. There needs to be a healthy community around that, and that is not just individual contributors, that is also what are the companies that are invested in this, where are they dedicating resources. That's another level of sophistication that a lot of customers need to bring into their own vendor selection process.

Stu Miniman16:59

Excellent. Speaking about communities and open source, want to make sure you have a chance to share a little bit about the AI platform that SUSE has discussed.

Daniel Nelson17:10

Yeah, it's very very interesting and something I'm super excited about at SUSE. We're starting to see AI in these really interesting problems to solve. I'll just give you one example: we're working with a Formula One team around using AI to help them actually manage in-car mechanics and actually manage some of the things that they're doing to get super high performance out of their vehicles. And that is such an interesting problem to solve, such a natural artificial intelligence problem, that even then you're talking about cars instead of servers, you're talking about racetracks instead of data centers, you still got a lot of the same problems. And so you need an easy-to-use AI stack, you need it to be high performance, you need it to be real time, you need to be able to get decisions made really quickly. These are the same kinds of problems, but we're starting to see them in all these really interesting real-world scenarios, which is one of the coolest things that I've seen in my career. Especially in terms of IT, is that IT is really everywhere. It's not just grab your sweater and go to the data center because it's 43 degrees in there. It's also get on the racetrack, it's also go to the airfield, it's also go to the grocery store and look at some of the problems being addressed and solved there. And that is super fascinating, one of the things that I'm super excited about in our industry in total.

Stu Miniman18:29

Alright, well, really good discussion here. Daniel, Dr. T, thank you so much for sharing everything from your keynote. Been a pleasure, thank you. Alright, back with lots more coverage from SUSECON Digital 2020. I'm Stu Miniman, and as always, thank you for watching.

Thomas Giacomo18:46

Thank you.