Meagen Eisenberg, TripActions | CUBEConversation, March 2019
from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation hello and welcome to this special cube conversation here in Palo Alto California cube headquarters I'm Jennifer echoes the cube our guest here is Megan Eisenberg CMO of a new hot company called trip actions formerly the CMO at MongoDB before that taki sign we've known each other some advisory boards great to see you yes great to see you as well so exciting new opportunity for you at trip actions just transitioned from MongoDB which by the way had great earnings they did what was the big secret to Mongo DB z earnings tell us well it's fresh and I think they're executing and their growth is amazing they're bringing their costs down I mean they're they've got product market fit their developers love them and so I'm proud and not surprised you're there for four years yeah transformed their go-to market so that fruits coming off the tree yes yeah it's exciting to see the you know process people technology all coming together and seeing them scale and do so well in the markets yes you know being here in 20 years living in California Palo Alto you see the rocket ships the ones that flame out the ones that make it and there's a pattern right when you start to see companies that are attracting talent ones that have pedigree VCS involved yeah raising the kind of rounds in a smart way where there's traction product market fit you kind of take special notice and one of the companies that you're now working for trip actions yes seems to have the parameters so it's off the pad it's going up its orbit or taking off you guys have really growing you got a new round of funding one hundred fifty million dollars yes unique application in a market that is waiting to be disrupted yes travel about company you work for transactions trip actions is a fast growing business travel platform we service customers like we work slack zoom box and we're growing we're adding 200 customers a month and it's amazing just to see these fast-growing companies right when they hit product market fit I think the keys are they've gotten a massive addressable market which we have 800 billion online travel they're solving a pain and they're disrupting a legacy the legacy providers that are out there we're three and a half years old and we are you know really focused on the customer experience giving you the choice that you want when you book making it easy down to six minutes not an hour to book something and we've got 24/7 support which not many can compete with you know it's interesting you know I look at these different ways of innovation especially SAS and mobile apps you know chapter one of this wave great economics yeah and once you get that unit economics visibility say great SAS efficacious happened but now we're kind of in a chapter two I think you guys kind of fit into this chapter to where it's not just SAS cuz you know we've seen travel sites get out there you book travel it's chapter two of SAS is about personalization you see machine learning you got cloud economics new ventures are coming out of the woodwork where you could take a unique idea innovate on it and disrupt a category that seems to be what you guys are doing talk about this new dynamic because this is not just another travel app when you guys are doing gets a unique angle on this applying some tech with the Corpse talked about that this chapter to kind of assess business I think when I think about chapter 2 I think about all the data that's out there I think about the machine learning I think about how we understand the user and personalize everything to them to make it frictionless and these apps that I love on my phone are because they they know what I want before I want it and I just took a trip to Dallas this week and the app knew I needed to check in it was one click told me my flight was delayed gave me options checked me in for my hotel I mean it was just amazing experience that I haven't seen before and it's really if you think about that that business travel trip there's 40 steps you have to do along the way there's got to be a way to make it easier because all we want to do is get to the business meeting and get back we don't want to deal with weather we don't want to deal with Hotel issues or flight changes and our app is specific to when you look at it you've got a chat 24/7 and someone's taking care of you that concierge service and we can do that because the amount of data we're looking at we're learning from it and we make it easier for travel manager half the people go rogue and don't even book through their travel solution it's because it's not tailored to them so this is the thing I want to get it so you guys aren't like a consumer app per se you have a specific unique target audience on this opportunity its travel management I'm I'm gonna date myself but back when I broke into the business they would have comes like Thomas Cook would handle all the travel for youlet Packard when I worked there in the 80s and you had these companies I had these contracts and they would do all the travel for the employees yes today it's hard to find that those solutions out there yes I would say it's hard to find one that you love and trip Actions has designed something that our travelers love and it is it's for business travel it's for your business trips it's taking care of your air your hotel your car your rail whatever you need and making sure that you can focus on the trip focus on getting there and not just the horrible experience we've all had it you travel a lot I traveled certainly back and forth to the East Coast and to take those problems away so I can focus on my business is what it's so just just look at this right so you guys are off to unicorn the funding great valuation growing like crazy got employees so people looking for jobs because they're hiring probably yeah but you're targeting not consumers to download the app it's for businesses that want to have company policies and take all that pressure off yes of the low so as a user can't buy myself can't just use the app or get I know you can Nano that's the the the whole thing is that as a user there's three things we're providing to one inventory and choice so you go and you know all the options you get the flight you want it's very clear and art we have a new storefront where it shows you what's in policy what's not so we've got that its ease of use it's booking quickly nobody wants to waste time dealing with this stuff right you want to go in booked quickly and then when you're on the trip you need 24/7 support because things go wrong airline travel gets cancelled weather happens you need to change something in your trip and so yes the user has the app on their phone can book it can you do it fast and can get support if they need it so stand alone usually can just use it as a consumer app but when you combine with business that's the magic that you guys see is that the opportunity yes I should say as a consumer as a business traveler so you're doing it through your company so I'm getting reimbursed for the companies the company is your customer yes the company's our customer is the traveler yes okay got it so if we want to have a travel desk in our company which we don't have yet yes it would we would sign up as a company and then all your employees would have the ease of use to book travel so what happens what's the sum of the numbers in terms of customers you have said 200 month-over-month yes we're over 1500 customers we're adding 200 a month we've got some significant growth it's amazing to see product market and the cost of the solution tell people $25 a booking and there's no add-on costs after that if you need to make as many changes as you need because of the trip calls on it you do it so basically per transaction yes well Little Feat one of our dollars yes okay so how do you guys see this growing for the company what's the some of the initiatives you guys are doing a new app yes mo what's what's the plan it's a massive market 800 billion right and we've only just started we've got a lot of customers but we've got many more to go after we are international so we have offices around the world we have an Amsterdam office we've got customers travelling all over so we're you know continuing to deliver on that experience and bringing on more customers we just on-boarded we were ten thousand travelers and will continue to onboard more and more so as head of marketing what's the current staff you have openings you mentioned yet some some some open recs yes yes hi are you gonna build out I've got 20 open Rex on the website so I'm hiring in all functions we're growing that fast and what's the marketing strategy what's your plan can you give it a little teaser on yes thinking core positioning go to market what are some of the things you're thinking about building out marketing CloudStack kind of thing what's what's going on all of these things my three top focuses are one marketing sales systems making sure we have that mark tech stack and that partnership with the sales tech stack second thing is marketing sales alignment that closed-loop we're building we're building pipeline making sure when people come in there's a perfect partnership to service what they need and then our our brand and messaging and it's the phase I love in these companies it's really building and it's the people process and technology to do that in the core positioning is what customer service being the most user-friendly what's the core position we're definitely focused on the traveler I would say we're we're balancing customer experience in making sure we get that adoption but also for the travel managers making sure that they can administer the solution and they get the adoption and we align the ascent in the incentives between the traveler and the travel manager and customer profile what small munis I business to large enterprise we have SMB and we're going all the way up to enterprise yes has it been much of a challenge out there in the business travel side I'm just don't know that's why I'm asking is like because we don't have one I can see our r-cube team having travel challenge we always do no centralizing that making that available but it'd have to be easier is it hard to get is there a lot of business travel firms out there is what are some of the challenges that you guys are going after there well I I think what matters is one picking the solution and being able to implement it quickly we have customers implementing in a week right it's understanding how we load your policies get you on board get your cut you're you're really your employees traveling and so it's pretty fast onboarding and we're able to tailor solutions to what people need what are some of the policies that are typical that might be out there that people like yeah so maybe for hotels you may have New York and your your policy is $500 a night what the I would say a normal typical behavior would someone would book it at $4.99 they go all the way up to the limit we've actually aligned our incentives with the travel managers and the employees and that if you save your company money you save and get rewards back so let's say you book it for 400 that $100 savings $30 goes back to the employee and rewards they can get an Amazon card donate to Cherry charity whatever they'd like to kind of act like an owner cuz they get a kickback yes that's the dot so that's how you an interest adoption yes what other adoption concerns you guys building around with the software and or programs to make it easy to use and we're constantly thinking about the experience we want to make sure just I mean I think about what I used to drive somewhere I'd pull out a map and map it out and then I got lucky and you could do MapQuest and now you have ways we are that ways experience when you're traveling we're thinking about everything you need to do that customer when they leave their front door all the way to the trip all the things that can hang them up along the way we're trying to remove that friction that's a very example I mean Waze is a great service yes these Google Maps or even Apple Maps ways everyone goes to backed away yes yeah I don't I mean ways did cause a lot of Street congestion the back streets of Palo Alto we're gonna expedite our travelers well it's a great utility new company what what attracted you to the opportunity when was some of the because you had a kid going over there MongoDB what it was the yeah motivation to come over to the hot startup yeah you know I love disruptive companies I love massive addressable markets good investors and a awesome mission that I can get behind you know I'm a mom of three kids and I did a lot of travel I'm your typical road warrior and I wanted to get rid of the pain of travel and the booking systems that existed before trip actions and so I was drawn to the team the market and the product that's awesome well you've been a great CMO your career has been phenomenal of great success as a CPM mother of three you know the challenges of juggling all this life is short you got to be using these apps to make sure you get on the right plane I mean I know I'm always getting back for my son's lacrosse game or yes event at school this is these are like it's like ways it's not necessary in the travel portfolio but it's a dynamic that the users care about this is the kind of thing that you guys are thinking about is that right yeah definitely I mean I always think about my mom when she worked in having three daughters and I work and have three daughters I feel like I can do so much more I've got door - I've got urban sitter I've got ways I've got Google Calendar I've got trip actions right I've got all these technologies that allow me to do more and not focus on things that are not that productive and I have no value add on it just makes me more efficient and productive how about some of the tech before we get in some of the industry questions I want to talk about some of the advantages on the tech side is there any machine learning involved what's some what's not what's some of the secret sauce and the app yeah definitely we're constantly learning our users preferences so when you go in we start to learn what you what hotels you're gonna select what where do you like to be near the office do you like to be near downtown we're looking at your flights do aisle window nobody wants middle yes but we're we're learning about your behaviors and we can predict pretty closely one if you're gonna book and two what you're gonna book and as we continue learning you that's why we make you more efficient that's why we can do it in six minutes instead of an hour that's awesome so Megan a lot of things going on you've been a progressive marker you love Terry's tech savvy you've done a lot of implementations but we're in a sea change now where you know people that think differently they gonna think okay I need to be on an app for your case with with business travel it's real policies there so you want to also make it good for the user experience again people centric this personalization has been kind of a cutting edge concept now in this chapter to a lot of CMOS are either they're they're not are trying to get there what are you finding in the industry these days that's a best practice to help people cross that bridge as they think they cracked the code on one side then realize wow it's a whole another chapter to go you know I think traditionally a lot of times we think we need we're aligning very much with sales and that matters that go to market marketing sales aligned but when it comes to products and a customer experience it's that alignment with marketing and the product and engineering team and really understanding the customer and what they want and listening and hearing and testing and and making sure we're partnering in those functions in terms of distribution getting the earned concept what's your thoughts on her and media yeah I mean I definitely think it's the direction right there's a ton of noise out there so you've got to be on topic you've got to understand what people care about you've got to hit them in the channel that they care about and very quick right is you don't have time nobody's gonna watch something that's 30 minutes long you get seconds and so part of the earned is making sure you're relevant you what they care about and they can find you and content big part of that for you guys huge part of it yes and understanding the influencers in the market who's talking about travel who's who is out there leading ahead you know leading in these areas that travel managers go and look to you know making sure we're in front of them and they get to see what we're delivering I like how you got the incentives of the employees to get kind of a line with the business I mean having that kind of the perks yes if you align with the company policies the reward could be a Starbucks card or vacation one more time oh whatever they the company want this is kind of the idea right yeah they kind of align the incentives and make the user experience both during travel and post travel successful that's right yes making sure that they are incented to go but they have a great experience okay if you explain the culture of the company to someone watching then maybe interested in using the app or buying you guys as a team what's the trip actions culture like if you had to describe it yeah I would say one we love travel too we are fast growing scaling and we're always raising the bar and so it's learning and it's moving fast but learning from it and continually to improve it's certainly about the user all of the users so not just the travel manager but our travelers themselves we love dogs if you ever come to the Palo Alto office we've got a lot of dogs we love our pups and just you know building something amazing and it's hard to be the employees gonna know that's a rocket ship so it's great get a hold on you got a run hard yes that's the right personality to handle the pace because you're hiring a lot of people and I think that's a part of the learning we need continual learning because we are scaling so fast you have to reinvent what we need to do next and not a lot of people have seen that type of scale and in order to do it you have to learn and help others learn and move fast well great to see you thanks for coming in and sharing the opportunity to give you the final plug for the company share what who you what positions you're hiring for what's your key hires what are you guys trying to do give a quick plug to the company yeah so I mean we've grown 5x and employees so we're hiring across the board from a marketing standpoint I'm hiring in content and product marketing I'm hiring designers I'm hiring technical I you know I love my marketing technology so we're building out our tech stack our website pretty much any function all right you heard it here trip actions so when you get the product visibility those unit economics as they say in the VC world they've got a rocket ship so congratulations keep it up yeah now you're in palo alto you can come visit us here anytime yes love to Meagen Eisenberg CMO trip access here inside the cube I'm John Ferrier thanks for watching you [Music]
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Rob Young & Rex Backman, Red Hat | VMworld 2017
>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners! (electronic music) >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and my co-host John Troyer, you're watching SiliconANGLES' production of theCUBE here at VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas. Happy to welcome to the program two first-time guests, but from a company we've talked to many times. Rex Backman and Rob Young, both with Red Hat. Rex is the senior principal marketing manager and Rob is the senior manager of Red Hat product management, gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us, we're happy to be here! >> So sorry, tripping over, sometimes, titles and things like that, just like acronyms go out there, sometimes. So you know, I go back, I started working with Red Hat before Red Hat Advanced Server came out, which became Red Hat Enterprise Server, then, when we talk about virtualization, it used to be RHEV, R-H-E-V, and now it's RHV! >> Yup, making it simpler! >> Sometimes the people stay in the same place and, you know, the badges change, other times things change a lot. So why don't we start with Rob, tell us a bit about how long you've been at Red Hat, your role there? >> So I've been with Red Hat now for two years, almost to the date. I come from an open source pedigree, so I worked with companies like MySQL, MongoDB, to develop not only the open source model but a community around those products, and a commercialized version that people trust in running their data centers. >> Alright, and Rex, yourself? >> I'm fairly new to Red Hat, joined about three months ago. Virtualization background, really, from the world of Microsoft. So happy to be at Red Hat, we've got a strong offering with RHEV, and we just want to help get people more educated on it and the opportunities we have to help solve their problems. >> Alright, it's always an interesting dynamic. You talk, you know, virtualization, we spent a decade, you know, VMware's ascendancy and the threat of Microsoft, you know, KVM and RHEV and everything were going to be there. There's a nice Red Hat booth on the show floor. Always, customers have had Linux sitting as guests in there and lots of those, I'm sure you probably have stats for me as to how much of that's been Red Hat over the years, but tell us about the relationship, you know, VMware, Red Hat, virtualization? >> So we see the relationship with VMware and other, you know, companies and partners within our ecosystem as very positive. If you look at the workloads that are running on VMware primarily, a lot of those are Red Hat Enterprise Linux, applications that are running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so we see it as a very positive relationship. And moving ahead, we see a challenge in maintaining a virtualization footprint within VMware, within the market, because of the evolution of the market. And we see that virtualization is becoming more of a commodity-based feature and the challenges that it poses to partners like VMware, going forward, to evolve along with that model in the market. >> Well, if virtualization is a commodity, and it's becoming a commodity, what's the Red Hat approach with KVM et al in terms of, it is, parts of it are commodity, but certainly, the stack and the system it plugs into is not. >> Yeah. >> I would say, it's also very foundational. Virtualization is everywhere, and I think the value that Red Hat brings to it is, you know, the capabilities we have in our team, the capabilities we derive from the open source model. And then virtualization with RHEV, bundled in with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it's foundational. And then if you bring in other aspects of the Red Hat stack, around manageability, cloud, things of that nature, I think we have a strong offering, a good offering that people can choose from. And I think that's really important for us, is our customers have choice. And us, we differentiate ourselves on the open source model, primarily. >> Rob, it keeps becoming a more and more complex world. We've been watching, for years, it was the pull of cloud against the data center, now we're even seeing Edge pulling at the cloud. But let's go back to the data center. What's Red Hat's viewpoints, what are you hearing from customers, what do they need in the data center, and how are they viewing that these days? >> So what we see in the modern data center, one, the workloads that we see around Mode One applications or Legacy applications, that footprint is not going away. It's going to continue to have a bare metal footprint as well as a virtualized and private cloud. So what we're doing, and what our customers are asking us for, is a transition from pure virtualization or bare metal to virtualization to hybrid cloud. And what we're doing now, with our engineering efforts, not only upstream but also from a proprietary and configuration standpoint, all open source by the way, is we are giving customers the option to standardize on that virtualization platform built on KVM that shares components with hybrid cloud technologies from Mode Two. So what we see, from our customers, is that they're maintaining a Mode One, but buying and planning for Mode Two. And that's how we see the on-premise data center market heading at this point. >> Okay, I'd like you to unpack that for our audience. Because, big discussion this week is, public cloud, yeah sure, it has virtualization, but it's not VMware. So now we've got this one option, VMware and AWS starting to roll out, are you saying that my data center can really be compatible with the public clouds and, you know, the Red Hat pieces on both sides, or is it native to what AWS and Google are doing? How does that dynamic work? >> So the way we're approaching it is, we look at it, not only as a software solution, but also as a paradigm shift in more openness, APIs, things are more generic. So if you want to plug into a common framework for management, as an example, or deployment, you can easily do that via the open APIs that are available in the open source community. So as an example, we provide a management solution called Cloud Forms. And with that platform, it's part of the Red Hat stack and solution, we allow customers to manage not only the virtualized environment but also, their hybrid or private clouds, but also AWS as well. So if they've got instances running on AWS, they can manage it through one pane of glass. And this is our strategy going forward, but it's not tomorrow, this is happening today with our Red Hat Stack platform. >> Rex, you've got a background in networking, networking front and center, and networking and security even more than ever, that I've seen at VMworld. How does that fit into Red Hat's whole story? >> You know, if you look at the world of virtualization, obviously, we've gone from the story of server virtualization, network virtualization, storage virtualization, and those are the antes into the game now, and I think, Red Hat, with what we provide, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, obviously the foundation started with, you know, the knowledge that our R&D team brings from their open source background around RHEV and server virtualization. But also, now, network virtualization capabilities, and also, what Red Hat has around storage. So I think we cover those three antes into the game of virtualization, and then, you know, it adds to the equation Rob was talking about, which is the whole Red Hat Stack, which I think is a good story, and a choice for our customers. >> I think, actually, 2017 is actually a really interesting year for virtualization. We're at an interesting era, right? 10 years ago you had some market dominance, you're looking at Microsoft and VMware like we talked about, we had Zen and KVM came up, and they were a little scary for people, right? They were developing, they weren't as mature of a stack. I do think, now, that the average admin in an average, you know, IT estate, is actually dealing with the fact that, oh, I could actually manage multiple hypervisors, look at a mixed estate, it's not as scary anymore, the technology is more mature, more manageable. Can you talk a little bit about that scenario of a mixed estate? Like, if you have, part of your data center is running VMware, what kinds of use cases and what kinds of management scenarios would you, as you start to add Red Hat virtualization to the mix? >> So the dynamic that we see and play right now is, there's a huge install-base on VMware. And a lot of customers, a lot of clients, a lot of partners are looking at that relationship now and deciding if they should invest elsewhere in other solutions. So what we provide is the ability to manage those environments, the clients for hyper-V, for VMware, for Red Hat, all within one pane of glass. But it allows customers who want the choice to manage that heterogeneous environment built on multiple hypervisors, but it allows them to evaluate if, maybe, the Red Hat solution is better for them. And if we can help them with V to V migrations as well, workload migration, mobility, I think that's the perfect scenario for Red Hat, an open source company, and choice. >> And I think some of the customers, you know, public case studies that we've promoted, some of the attributes that they've been looking at that shifted them over towards the Red Had side was performance, you know, was very important. Scalability was very important. So I think, it depends, customer to customer. >> I was actually wondering about, so do we see re-platforming as people are re-architecting? Are these green field opportunities? I imagine, again, it's all across the board. But have you seen any particularly common patterns of people standing up, maybe a new business-critical app on a new platform, maybe they're re-architecting it to be a little bit more cloud-native, any particular directions like that? >> I think, some of the things I've seen recently is an enterprise IT organization has decided to go down an open source path for their world. And then that kind of is a strong point for us. Mountain Health is a company that there's some news on, from last week, is an example of that. British Airways is another customer like that. And, you know, as Rob said. It's large companies, big brands, down to commercial companies as well, or governments, or education. So I think it could be performance, it could be open source, open source is definitely one of the drivers though. >> Yeah, and what we're seeing there with open source is, the more trust is built in open source, the more enterprise adoption, and the cost-effectiveness of working with a development team that's worldwide, a QE team that's worldwide, really helps to build the stability of the products that companies like Red Hat build subscription models around. So there's no vendor lock-in, as well, for proprietary licensing models. And we find that many customers are very open to that discussion, as opposed to, you know, the alternatives. >> One of the other discussions we've been having at VMworld for the last couple years is this whole containers discussion. VM versus containers, is it containers inside VMs, Red Hat Summit, there was huge discussion, there was the super popular t-shirt, on one side it said, Linux is containers, and on the other side it said, Containers are Linux. So where do you see that discussion? What do you think about how VMware's been looking at things? There was a big announcement about VMware and, through the pivotal activity, kind of embracing Kubernetes, Red Hat's, I'm sure, saying, welcome to the party, right? (laughing) >> So there's an interesting dynamic with containers, because containers, Kubernetes, you know, you name the project, is purely an open source play. And if you look at the projects, the contributors, most of this is going to be built on an open source model. So proprietary software companies, like VMware, are going to be challenged to adapt and evolve how they develop, how they contribute, their presence within those communities. Now, Red Hat is uniquely positioned in that our model has been, for the last 25 years, that we're purely open source. Everything we do is out in the community. And it lends itself very naturally, not only the way we've done commercialization of Linux, but we're doing that now with containers as well. And if you look at the dynamic in the market, a lot of people believe that there's VM or containers, and this is really a symbiotic or complimentary relationship. 85% of the workloads for containers runs within a virtualized environment, and containers and virtualization fill gaps for each other that's just a natural complement, and just because Red Hat is already comfortable operating in the open source environment in this way, we think we're just in a very good position to lead in both areas. >> You mentioned open source commercialization. And Jim Whitehurst, the CO of Red Hat, has been on theCUBE, Stu and I talked with him at the last Open Stack Summit. I was super impressed by his insight and grasp into the economics of open source and how Red Hat has been able to build a model like that. Can you talk at all about data centers, or IT spend in general, and capex, opex, where it's going in a more open source driven world? Where do you put your money then? >> So do you want to answer? (laughs) >> I'll take a stab at it. >> Can you now invest your money, that's a little better. >> Yeah, I think it's really interesting. And I'm going to answer this question from the perspective of a three-month Red Hat employee, but with, you know, a lot of experience in the industry with proprietary companies, if you will. I think the value, the commercialization of what Red Hat has done, there's the upstream aspects of open source and the programs available there. And then there's the downstream commercialization of what Red Hat has done, which is wrapping the value of a Red Hat subscription around that open source project. And I think what we see in our customers in terms of budget spend, you know, more on the opex side than the capex side, in our case, is looking at that price point. Because some of our customers, well, many of our customers, if not all of our customers, there is a price sensitivity. I think a lot of our customers right now, maybe this might be a crazy thing to say, may not be as price-sensitive as they used to be. Now it's more about innovation, agility, speed to market. But still, the economics is important. And I think the value Red Hat provides and the uniqueness in the model that Jim and his crew cracked early on to start Red Hat, is the ability to provide that Red Hat subscription at value for open source, and, what we see is that, most of the time, in cases, it's an attractive price point and that's how we win customers. So I think, long-winded answer to your question is, I think there's a strong future. You see more and more companies adopting open source in their programs. I think Red Hat is the leader of that and in good shape! >> Rob, why don't you just give us the final word. Conversations you're having at the show, how are people here in the VMware community embracing, is it an open source discussion, is it the innovation, and kind of, the new features, what's bringing them by to talk to Red Hat? >> I think it's a mixture. So what we're seeing is a lot of interest in Red Hat Solutions, the Red Hat Stack. And I think customers are now looking at Red Hat as a good enough alternative to more pricey alternatives, or more pricey options. And if you look at what we've done from a strategic standpoint is, much like we've done with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we are now using Enterprise Linux as a foundational support pillar, so to speak, for the Red Hat Stack. If you look at the APIs that we generated, a lot of the interest I'm getting, the question I'm getting not only from customers, but from folks out on the show floor, other vendors, is, what's your API look like? Can I learn more about it? And to me, that's the leading edge of a wave of, maybe that partner's looking a little more red (laughs) in the days to come. So, just, my opinion. >> Absolutely, I know John Troyer and I have been talking for a few years now, that API economy, something that's been coming into this world, and that intersection between what all the Linux admins have known for a long time as to their operational model matches a lot of what we're seeing in the cloud. So Rob Young, Rex Backman, really appreciate you joining us. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2017. You're watching theCUBE. (futuristic music)
SUMMARY :
Brought to you by VMware and Rob is the senior manager of Red Hat product management, So you know, I go back, and, you know, the badges change, So I've been with Red Hat now for two years, the opportunities we have to help solve their problems. VMware's ascendancy and the threat of Microsoft, you know, and the challenges that it poses to partners but certainly, the stack and the system it plugs into in our team, the capabilities we derive What's Red Hat's viewpoints, what are you hearing all open source by the way, the public clouds and, you know, So the way we're approaching it is, even more than ever, that I've seen at VMworld. obviously the foundation started with, you know, the average admin in an average, you know, IT estate, So the dynamic that we see and play right now is, And I think some of the customers, you know, I imagine, again, it's all across the board. open source is definitely one of the drivers though. to that discussion, as opposed to, you know, One of the other discussions we've been having And if you look at the projects, the contributors, And Jim Whitehurst, the CO of Red Hat, has been on theCUBE, Can you now invest is the ability to provide that Red Hat subscription is it the innovation, and kind of, the new features, in the days to come. really appreciate you joining us.
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