You might recognize Stu Miniman as the host of theCube. Others know him as a Senior Analyst at Wikibon. But the tables turned in the 24th episode of OSPod!

In this episode, get the inside skinny on:

• Stu's roots in tech, including sales, engineering, product management, and strategy
• OpenStack reality versus hype per the latest Wikibon survey data
• Startup culture versus enterprise culture, and the need to innovate around old processes
• How Docker really is changing everything
• Career transformation and staying relevant as companies head for the cloud

For a full transcript of the  interview, click read more below.

Jeff Dickey:                All right, hey everyone. I'm Jeff Dickey from Redapt.

Niki Acosta:               I'm Niki Acosta from Cisco and man the tables have turned today. We have an amazing guest with us. I'm so excited to not be the person being interviewed by Stu but instead serving the role as interviewer with Stu as our guest today. Stu, super stoked to have you, introduce yourself.

Stu Miniman:            Great. Thanks, Niki and Jeff. I appreciate you guys having me. I'm excited to share with the community. Stu Miniman, I am an analyst with Wikibon and as Niki was pointing out I'm also a co-host of theCUBE, some have called us the ESPN of tech. We go out to all the enterprise IT shows help direct the signal from noise, have a lot of fun with it. Got to interview you last year at the OpenStack summit with Scott Sanchez and yeah we love talking tech and getting down with all the tech athletes and podcasters sort of our brothers in this effort. I've got a lot of friends that are podcasters, I've had many of them on theCUBE and always appreciate when I can come and share with your community too.

Niki Acosta:               Totally and it's kind of neat to have you on not only because you've been to the OpenStack shows but you go to all kinds of industry shows and you talk to the veritable who's who of the tech industry. I'm sure you got some interesting perspectives and I can't wait to dive into that today. Typically we always start by asking how you got involved into tech to begin with.

Stu Miniman:            All right, I'm the traditional geek at heart. Started out in computers at a pretty early age. My mom I got Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 3 when I was in ... Gosh, I think it was in first or second grade and it came with that book like, "How to teach yourself basic?" I'm like, "This is awesome." Taught myself basic and learned logo and started playing around with it. For the holidays one year I got an Apple 2C which I felt like it was like the best gift ever, I mean come on, no internet, I had ...

To tell you how old it is and date myself a little, I know sometime to say we shouldn't date ourselves. My parents didn't know as much about computer and they were like, "The guy at the store said we had to get this for you but I don't know what it is," and it was the mouse with the one button on it and it only worked with the paint program and nothing else. I was pretty stoked... spent tons of hours on the computer in through high school. I'd always be the one that they just stuck in the corner and let me play with the computer because I was way ahead with what the class was doing on that.

I studied engineering as an undergrad but here's the thing I say and Niki I was listening to you on the geek whisperers and they kind of did a deep job on my whole history and career, and I realized I didn't want to be a programmer because I didn't want to spend all my life sitting behind the computer. Irony of course as we all sit behind our computers and our phones all the time now.

I actually went ... I've worked in the tech industry since I got out of college. I worked at a company APC power conversation when I first got out. They used to only hire engineers, started everybody in basic customer support, learn the product and then move into other groups and I did some tech support and some inside sales. I went to Lucent right after they spun out from AT&T in '96 and I was actually on sales side, Niki, you're going to have that in common out of sales background.

I'm not supposed to talk about. We're geeks and it's tech. I handled voice, video and data and what I loved at that point is I was really helping companies in Rhode Island in Southern Massachusetts connect to the internet. Because while I was helping them with their voicemail in their phones I was also getting them their ISDN or partial T1 or whatever else they needed from the network standpoint.

Usually wiring them up not only for voice but for data. I got out of that in 2000 and when I left the company I said, "Cisco is going to kill you guys," and they're like, "What are you talking about? We don't compete against Cisco," and I was like, "Yeah, there's this thing called Voice Over IP in the networking and it's going to decimate what you did," and of course the Lucent Groups now Avaya, Cisco has been doing a pretty good job in that space.

In 2000 I was finishing up my MBA and I got a job at EMC. I was started as a product manager in connectivity groups so it was really an early days of fiber channel handling both local connectivity as well as some distance connectivity. I did fiber channel, I did iSCSI strategy inside the company. A little bit of product management of getting, I spent six years in engineering where one of my claims to fame is, in 2002 I was handling Linux and adapters and all these weird connectivity options that I got handed from my executives. There's this weird little company out of Palo Alto. We don't what to do with them, not sure if we even want to talk to them but, "Can you please setup some relationship and see what we should do with them?" Of course a year and a half later EMC bought VMware in one of the best acquisitions in IT history. I was one of the first handful of people working with them, honored to have worked with Diane Greene, Ed [Brennon 00:05:11].

A lot of that early team. I was at the ground level for virtualization. Fast forward to 2007 I joined the CTO office at EMC and was working on what we call Next Generation Virtual Data Center. That turned into really the whole Cloud discussion. I got on social media around that same time. I was part of the old Clouderati and in 2010 became an analyst at Wikibon where I focus on convergence and networking and Cloud.

I do research on the analyst side and theCUBE is actually, we have an overarching umbrella that includes Wikibon, SiliconAngle, and theCUBE. So, as well as doing the research, I'm co-host for theCUBE and I wear a bunch of different hats. That's a lot of mouth hole but quick summary of my career date and just have a lot of fun with tech world.

Niki Acosta:               What do you love doing the most? You've been in engineering, you've been in product and you've been in sales which I can imagine you're a pretty effective sales person just because you have the technical chops for sure without a doubt. What do you love the most?

Stu Miniman:            I really love what social media really got to help me do is I love connecting with people and I love sharing ideas. Not to name drop I was talking to Steve Herrod though a year after he left VMware and he said, "You were the CTO there. What are you enjoying doing and what's it like being like on the VC side," and he's like, "I love talking to these like early companies, helping them just, you know, figure out. You know, we've got one of these three directions where do we start first, how do we grow."

That's one of the things I really love to do on my current job is I get to ... I've talked to companies when it's two idea ... Two guys and an idea or two women and an idea and give them some advice, talk to them about what we're seeing in the marketplace. I love talking to practitioners about what they're doing. One of the things where Wikibon was really first started out is we want IT practitioners to really share with their peers and help share that information. Because those early people that start new stuff... that's where you're going to find the best content.

Jeff Dickey:                Stu, can you talk a little bit more about Wikibon and kind of what makes you guys different?

Stu Miniman:            Yeah, happy to Jeff. Thanks. Wikibon, we are an open source research company and very focused on the IT practitioners. As I mentioned sharing with the peers. It was founded eight years ago. Really a group of independent consultants, most of them from the traditional industry analyst world. Just to clarify some people they hear analyst and they think Wall Street and financial analyst. We're the people that focus on the technology side.

Wikibon was really founded on, "Hey, this whole crowd sourcing and social media and wikis sounded like a really cool idea." When they started they said, "Well, we'll spend a couple hundred bucks, throw up a website, it's a Wiki, hence our name. Name of the company Wikibon, Wiki is fast, Bon is good, we get fast and good data." Anybody contribute, we have a community of about 20,000 people now that either participated in our calls, been part of the research that we've done.

At least originally everything that we did we'd share for free. Everyone around the globe if they want to learn basics on storage or networking or convergence or Cloud or big data's an area that we spend a lot of time on in the early days which is only about four -five years ago. Really helping define the market, we do some forecasts. Today we're a little bit of hybrid model still the vast majority over 90% of our content is free for anybody to get.

Some of our underwriters want more detailed content so there's some survey data some forecast data where we'll give the high level stuff away. I do social chats on it, we talk about it in videos but if you want all the niggly detail is you guys working for companies to understand. Customer wants to hear, "Hey, it's going to be$50 billion in five years that's something you should understand."

The vendors want to know, "Okay, well, what countries and what verticals and where should we focus first because that's where we need to put resources on." That content which takes more resources to create goes behind the firewall only for our clients.

Niki Acosta:               I'm assuming you've done probably a significant amount of research on OpenStack. Any data you can share with us around OpenStack?

Stu Miniman:            Yeah, thanks Niki. Yeah, I did a survey really focusing on infrastructure as a service and I was mostly focused on the public Cloud discussion but I was asked about a couple of questions about OpenStack. To be honest I was actually a little bit disappointed because I had done-asked the exact same question two years ago and just your general mindset, "What do you know about OpenStack? Where are you? Are you thinking about it? Are you testing it? Are you using it?"

The results were all identical for the beginning of this year as they were in 2013 which was I think it was between 15 and 18% said "Love it, either using it or starting to test it" about 50 -55% of the people said, "We think OpenStack's have great idea but we are not going to touch it until it's more mature." Then the rest of the market was like, "Yeah, I'm not sure." Either I don't know or whether I'm not ready for it.

Niki Acosta:               What size companies were you surveying when you asked these questions?

Stu Miniman:            It was anything from 25 employees up to a hundred thousand employees. It was a bit of a range, we stayed away from the real small handful of people but ... We didn't find much difference in the results from an OpenStack standpoint whether it was kind of a small, medium or large.

Niki Acosta:               It's not surprising. I spend a ton of time talking and educating customers of all sizes about OpenStack and coming from Rackspace. It's interesting now to be having the same exact conversations that I was having three years ago. I mean, there's a lot of people who are just now starting to look at infrastructure as a service and Cloud especially with in larger enterprises. I mean, there's always packets of groups that seem a little bit more ahead of the curve but it's surprising to me that's it not further ahead than where it is today.

Stu Miniman:            Yeah, it's funny. Those of us that Podcast, and we're active on Twitter, sometimes were in a little bit of a bubble. We said "Heck-we were having this PaaS argument four years ago," and it kind of went away for a little bit and it's coming back. OpenStack is only a little over four years old. Some of us have been having this discussion since day one. I remember the first articles that we wrote about OpenStack was, "The Big Enemy is Amazon."

OpenStack is a Hail Mary by all of these hardware companies to remain relevant while Cloud takes over the world. Then you talk to some of the vendors and there's a shift it's like, "Well maybe it's actually geared at the people that are virtualizing and building out some orchestration on top of that. Maybe they want to get away from VMware's licensing model." That maturation is taking a couple of years but I think I spent six years in engineering, and I tell you if it wasn't something that mattered for my meetings this week, the deliverables I have this month or maybe my quarterly objectives, I wasn't thinking about it. I didn't have time to read a ton of blogs, I didn't have time to look at the new technology that's going to be ready in a year or two. OpenStack-don't get me wrong-has come huge way in four years but still relatively young project.

I think back, I said when I started EMC in 2000 I was the product manager for Linux and that was before Red Hat had launched enterprise Linux. We were just working down at the core level to try to get some stability for enterprise customers and Linux took years and years and years of work to be mainstream. VMware came on like a rocket ship in relatively short period of time for enterprise but the enterprise takes a long time to evaluate and jump on these, so in my viewpoint it's always about setting proper expectations. You don't expect something to go from an idea to 50% market share in a couple of years.

Niki Acosta:               Agreed. I think a lot of people are still trying to adapt to this new model of pushing out code fast and not being afraid to fail and adapting your business around. What I think is probably going to include failure at some point. Stuff breaks, stuff fails, it's an interesting mind shift to be okay with that and architect around that.

Stu Miniman:            Yeah. No, you bring up a great point, Niki. IT most projects how many months or quarters is it going to take for me to roll this out and it better work. One of the critiques I have for OpenStack is, "How long does it take me to put that solution together? How fast can I get it up and running?" There's services that I can just go up and use. You want to talk simplicity, Amazon is really simple, swipe your credit card, I can be up and running real fast. Docker owns, delivers simplicity for certain environments now, there's certain various entry.

I need to understand what I'm getting into but OpenStack today is not what I would call simple. Overall it can help a lot and I've seen a lot of maturation especially in the last year as to really the growth of the solutions that are out there, a better understanding of what people are getting when they're using solutions that leverage OpenStack. One of the things we always argue about of course is, "How do we define OpenStack?"

Because it's not a product, it's not a single set, it's not a single software download, it's a bunch of pieces that help build a solution and that's a little harder to wrap my head around sometimes.

Niki Acosta:               What's the next new hotness? Obviously infrastructure as a service arguably is going to make it's way into enterprises and a few years from now I think everyone will have it and use it. What is the next focus area for a lot of the folks that you've talked to?

Stu Miniman:            My disclaimer, I'm an infrastructure guy by background. The thing I worry about my career is the goal of what we're doing with things like OpenStack, with things like Docker is you want to make infrastructure irrelevant. You want to make it so easy to use and understand. I've spent a bunch of my time looking at what the hyperscale guys are doing. What's Facebook doing, what's Amazon building, what are those OEM's out of Korea building and how is that just disrupting the entire vendor landscape?

Infrastructures [inaudible 00:15:49] is to really to support those applications. There are very few companies that build their business because of infrastructure; they build their business to deliver those applications and infrastructure of course is that enabler on that. The application side is where there's a huge hop is. I don't claim to be a devops guy but boy is there some amazing stuff going on in that space.

From an infrastructure stand point and enable it of application, I mean Docker is the hottest thing I think I've ever seen in my career. Where that has come in the last 18 to 24 months is just phenomenal and has ... It's still mostly misunderstood in the marketplace, but wow it just has huge potential to create huge disruptions out there which is an overused term but also really helped shake things up in a good way.

Because what I hate seeing as analyst and even before I was an analyst is most IT organizations spend way too much money on what would really be...what we call at Wikibon undifferentiated heavy lifting or wasted activity around fixing things that break and turning all the geek knobs to make a bespoke application infrastructure work just a little bit better.

That just go away. I could be able to focus on my application and get the resources that I need. Add some automation to be able to help and just to be able to focus on what my business needs not on the infrastructure that enables it.

Niki Acosta:               I had Cloud Foundry talking about how ... And maybe they have some statistics they've been sharing but how it's the fastest growing open source project ever and ... What do you think of the PaaS space? Is it too early for PaaS? Is Docker going to divert attention away from PaaS because it's potentially a little bit more agnostic? Where do you see that going?

Stu Miniman:            Yeah, first of all I'd agree. It is really early still in the PaaS space. While we've been talking about it for a few years and I give kudos to Cloud founder. They've got a great team, they've got solid feedback from customers that are using, building a good ecosystem. I really like a lot of what they've done with really the organization and how the open source solution is managed. You've got companies like IBM with Bluemix that are putting a lot of their strategy behind leveraging Cloud foundry.

But yes, I think there's huge potential for Docker disrupt/slow down/interfere with some of what Pivotal is doing specifically on the pivotal side and they're Cloud foundry in general. If you look from the EMC Federation, I did a video recently with Dave Vellante the co-founder of Wikibon and we look at the EMC Federation and said, "VMware is such a huge piece of what they're doing and where they're going and Docker could disrupt that."

While both VMware and Pivotal have embraced Docker both of them are also very publicly embracing Rocket and what CoreOS is doing. I'm saying it still early days and there's room for more than one solution out there but everything I see from momentum, the ecosystem, all the partnerships that Docker is doing that is the company that is going to bring Linux containers to the masses.

I think back to the early days of VMware. They didn't invent virtualization but they're the ones that really made it mainstream and they're killing with it too. We'll see whether or not Docker can make the same revenue opportunities as it but it's ... hugely exciting just to watch these potentially, radically ripple effect changes through the IT stack in a relatively short period of time.

It used to take something, the idea that you wait five years before getting off the ground. Now, we're talking about an open source project that can really drive some change in a year or two. Open source is a huge enabler of that change agent.

Niki Acosta:               Open source is interesting because there's a lot of people in the OpenStack community, me being one of them when I was at Rackspace that went out and told the world, "Hey, you don't to be locked into a particular vendor," right? Now, we're seeing the big vendors taking open source technologies and turning that into products and packing it in various types of consumption models. Do customers really care about lock-in, you think?

Stu Miniman:            There's a, I forget who does it but there's a big survey on open source that's done every year and last year I went to the unveiling of it in Boston and Red Hat was there, a bunch of other companies were involved, and they said the number one reason to choose open source wasn't the openness of the lock in as a matter of fact I think it was number four or five on the list. Things like security, things like the agility and speed of new features coming in.

Kind of a shared responsibility for what's going on is a huge piece of it. One of the things ... Look at what Facebook is doing with Open Compute and a lot of people looking at it sideways saying, "I don't understand, is Facebook getting into the infrastructure business?" We look at it and say, "Facebook buys so much infrastructure and they can either go the Amazon route," which is Amazon actually... they have two engineers that do nothing but work on the power supplies of their servers.

I call it the hyper optimized environment. Amazon's infrastructure needs to go in one data center: theirs. It doesn't have to worry about going from this temperature to that temperature data rates because it could be anywhere of what we know. They can go for one specific environment for one specific application and build it at massive scale. Facebook says, "Well, we don't want to go the Amazon route and have to own all of that development. Wouldn't it be better if the community can learn from what we did and help build on it and then in the future I shouldn't need to put as much resources on it."

It's kind of a shared development and together we can all do better. I go to innovation conferences usually about once a year and every company knows we have smart people but there's a lot more smart people outside your company than inside your companies. That kind of communal innovation can really help drive a lot and that was one of the reasons I joined Wikibon is to be part of that type of wave. Because we believe that together we can all accomplish a lot more and still make money-it isn't a bad thing.

Niki Acosta:               Jeff, I've been hogging the mic. I do have more questions about cultures and opinions and differences between startups and enterprise and how vastly different they operate but I want to give you an opportunity to ask a different question if you want to first. He doesn't, okay.

Jeff Dickey:                Sorry.

Niki Acosta:               You're on mute. That was directed at you, Jeff.

Jeff Dickey:                I broke up. I'm sorry. I missed it.

Niki Acosta:               That's all right. I'll ask my question and then you ask a question because I like hogging the mic. Going from Rackspace then to Metacloud then now being acquired into Cisco I definitely see the big divide in terms of mostly around culture but definitely around technology decisions that are made. Obviously when you are in a startup there's different concerns when you were a publicly traded company.

In terms of how startups are consuming IT and how that's different from enterprises do you think that that gap will lessen over time or do you think that enterprises and startups are always going to operate in completely different mode and look at maybe ... Maybe enterprises will be less risk averse? They're going to keep being risk averse?

Stu Miniman:            Niki, that's a great question. Actually I got to interview Michael Dell, at Dell World last year. They were talking about how much change they would bring to the company because they're not private. I asked them I said, "One of the challenges we've got is, hey, 70 or 80,000 employees." You don't flip and switch overnight and say, "Hey, you don't have to worry about Wall Street anymore. Let's change our processes we're now the world's largest startup."

That's a nice talking point and it's good to rally around and if there's plenty of evil around Wall Street that makes us think about the next 90 days and not about the long term liability of the products, the customer, my employees in the planet. I don't think it changes overnight and systematically there's a very different way that you do everything if you have five people in the room versus if you're five people inside a hundred thousand person company or even a thousand person company.

From an IT standpoint, you talked to any of the people that are funding small companies and they all brag about how they don't have any infrastructure and they do everything in the public cloud. Because if I need to be up and running this month I don't have time to build out a data center and get all my equipment and frame it up. It's so much easier to get off the ground that way.

Cloud is not a winner takes all solution and there's lots of different products out there and lots of different needs. Rackspace does well in their markets and it's been great to see to their stock rallying over the last couple of weeks. Cisco you guys are doing a lot of different pieces. Jeff and I were got to chat for a little bit, we have a solid fire event. They're a startup company that came with a very specific focus at the beginning and have grown from there and they're having great results with OpenStack.

Actually the top thing that I came out of their meeting is I think it was 37% of their revenue was around OpenStack which was like, "Wow." We're not just talking about OpenStack we're deploying OpenStack and customers are using it that's really exciting. I want to make sure I answer your question, Niki, because kind of a small versus large is a big multi positive piece.

From IT standpoint absolutely it's got to be different, it's what ... If you're a startup you don't have all that legacy stuff. One of the biggest things we've been saying for the last couple of years is as a CIO you want to be real careful what you sign up for that is going to lock you into something. My CTO co-founder Dave wrote an article and he said, "Don't build another data center if you're an enterprise customer, because if you build a data center that's 25 to 35 years that you are going to be owning that."

Unless you are one of a very small number of companies you're not good at power, you're not good at space, you're not good cooling, you're not good any of these things. Somebody else can do it so much better and you can consume it at a much cheaper price and that's just the base level. We call Crawford actually just announced a new company at the OCP event a week or so ago called Vapor IO and they're building this hyper dense rack that's built for ... it could sit it in anybody's data center but it would great for somebody's mega data center.

There's so much innovation happening, everything from the physical layer all the way up through the application stack that you don't want to lock yourself in. The biggest tragedies I saw with VMware which did huge great things to get better utilization out of ...the infrastructure I had is it really allowed people to stick with their legacy applications. Because I could just keep it running on the same operating system and the same code base for an extra five or ten years because it's in a VM and I don't need to worry about it anymore.

It's this old processes I want to build for a more modern world and the modern applications are where you're going to get a lot more agility, get much more speed in business. I hope I answered your question at least a bit. There's a couple other pieces around small versus large, I'd love to come back to later.

Jeff Dickey:                Stu, you're obviously talking to a lot of people and I want to get your take on the marketing around OpenStack and what you're perception on that. I've been thinking a lot lately it seems like there's a greater divide than ever between the CIOs and the engineers themselves and there's been such great marketing around OpenStack but still it's very complex, fickle, hard to scale infrastructure. Is that ... Are you still seeing ... Is that message being kind of spread like are you hearing that from CIOs that are, "I want to go to OpenStack because it's just everyone's doing it," or, "It's just the next step." Do they have concerns about it?

Stu Miniman:            Yeah, a good question. What I would say is the good news is for OpenStack and everybody involved is, OpenStack has won that marketing work so that when I'm thinking about what kind of Cloud solutions I'm going to consume. Let's put aside say Amazon AWS in your drawer for a second but if I'm looking to build something on-prem or consume a service from one of my traditional vendors. One the things they're asking is, "Are you OpenStack?" or, "How do I do OpenStack?" because that's the solution I should go with is basically what they've been told but it goes back to the old management by magazine. My C level suite got a magazine and they said, "Virtualization is hot, are you guys doing that?" "Great. Okay, I'm doing it." I've got my Dilbert mug here. Unfortunately when its get boiled down to the "OpenStack is good and you guys should be doing it" there's a lot of choices out there, t