>>live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the Q covering answerable Best 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat >>Hey, welcome back, everyone. This is the Cubes. Live coverage here in Atlanta, Georgia, for Ansel Fast, part of Red Hats Annual event with their customers, their community. I'm Chon hurry with the Cuban stupid men. My co host. Our next guest is Jason Smith, vice president. North America Service is for Red Hat. Jason, welcome to the Cube. >>Thanks. Thanks for having me. >>So mostly the service is wrapped around this or huge opportunity because of the impact that the automation is having the tasks people's jobs shift on the things they can do, more things. That service is opportunity, bigot. You just take us through kind of your strategy of how you look at answerable in context of the red hat portfolio. >>Sure, yeah. So from the service's perspective, we're really responsible for ensuring customer success and sex successful adoption of all of our technologies. So across the entire portfolio and so as opposed to a service. This company that's focused on surfaces were really focused on driving customers success and making sure that customers were successful so overall, from the service's perspective we have obviously are consulting, which really focused on working with customers. Implement solutions around red technology is expanding the use of redhead technologies. We have our training business, which is our education and certification business, which has on sites, open enrollment. But also over the last couple years we released our Red Hat Learning subscription, which is basically gives customers access to the entire portfolio of training on demand in the self paced way, which is been really fast growing part of our business. And then I think we've talked to you a little bit about this before, which is our open innovation labs, which is really focused on people in process and helping customers go through that digital transformation type of journey and focus around culture and things like that. >>It's interesting you look at the interviews we had yesterday with some of your customers. It's actually have a couple different profiles. You have the man. We nailed it. Now I gotta bring us across the entire organization, get a champion driving change. Other groups are standardized with that substrate for answerable. Others were like, Wow, I have other stuff. I need to really figure this out, take us through how you guys would approach those use cases because they're different. But all would want more. Service is some to accelerate either, say a champion, some to get a new prospect on board. >>Right? So, um, we've laid out We'll release is about 90 days ago, which is called Dark Automation Adoption Journey. And this is a five phased approach where we've worked with customers hundreds of customers around the world, in every phase of adoption of automation, obviously specifically around answerable. And this really looks at helping customers go from more of a tactical strategy, typically is what we're seeing today. A lot of customers have and school in different pockets, doing a lot of tactical things that are driving a lot of value. But how do you take that? And then really get two more of an enterprise strategy? So that's really what we've focused on taking what we've learned with customers at all of those phases and really taking those best practices and coming up with a standardized approach that we can really work with customers to be ableto get through that journey with him. >>Jason could bring us inside the customer base a little here. You know, what we hear is it's really easy to get started. But when you lay out those five steps is everybody looking to get to st five? Is that a, you know, year journey? Are some people okay? Just being at phase two or three. Help us understand a little bit, Kind of. And we know it varies greatly, but some of the characteristics as toe how fast they move along where the end journey is for most organizations, >>right. So as I mentioned this, customers are coming in. Some have been early adopters of answerable for a long time. So we've been working at more of a department departmental level with customers where they're driving value at that departmental level. Others were kind of coming to us for the first time, saying we're hearing all about this automation stuff. We know we need it, but we need to get started. And so we're really looking at, um, kind of starting out. We typically start with the Discovery session, and so we're bringing in our architects and consultants to come in and meet with their business and technical stakeholders to really understand where they are in that journey and really defined kind of their goals and objectives. So every customer is different, so really understanding what their goals and priorities are and then being able to help kind of craft that road map with, um to get through that journey. But I'd say most of our customers looking to figure out how to take it from kind of more of those tactical implementations to how do we leverage that in a more scalable, consistent way and be able to manage it more across the enterprise? >>Well, it's a direct software development often is different at different, different parts in an organization. If you look a kind of a dev ops movement, it's, you know, trying to get a little bit consistency across those, and it sounds like answerable plays well, toe help get collaboration and you know those playbooks that could be used across and know that I have something that is supported and works, and my organization buys into it >>exactly. So a lot of customers air doing great things in those pockets. But like you said, how do you take those and not reinvent the wheel every time but take them and kind of break them down into consumable chunks, kind of validate those and then publish them. So you have a standard set of playbooks that people can use and reuse versus developing them again for the first time. Because we know that answerable. You can do things quickly, but you don't want to redo them 10 different ways to do the same thing. So having that kind of blessed standardized way and then publishing them out managing them is really important. >>Great feedback from customers on that two on. Then they get more playbooks to get more. I gotta manage that. But one of the interesting things we talked about yesterday with Stephanie Cheers with on the rail side was connecting, answerable to rail the insights. Was the analytics certainly compelling? A lot of benefits scare coming into the rest of red hat. Well, where is that opportunity? How do you guys servicing those pieces? >>Yes, so we're really looking at answerable to be part of most of the red hat portfolio. So as we're working with customers and they're adopting more and more of the Red Hat technologies, answerable becomes a bigger part of that. So whether it's kind of bringing in our training to help train and enable customer associates on using answerable not only for automation but whether you're a real admin or open shift, or no matter what kind of product you're using, being ableto have the training enablement and service is around that to help everyone learn to understand how to use an school in leverage danceable across any area of the plot. >>You guys aren't new to platforms. Answer would have been a great product. Now the platform approach, any things you guys are gonna do different is going to the same Red Hat playbook dealing with other platforms like Open shift in other things. You guys been successful with similar playbook for you guys, or what's the? Is there a nuance with the platform of sensible automation? Ours business as usual? >>Yes. From the service's perspective, we've tried to really standardize on a set of offerings, um, and leverage kind of a consistent approach, whether it's with open shift for helping customers adopt containers or helping customers build a hybrid cloud. Or we've even got a adoption journey around huts for Tokyo's the leverage to create an NFI architecture. It's the same kind of process and framework. So we try to build a standardized process and no matter kind of what type of solution customers air building We look to follow those types of >>dreams. Nice glue layer kind of fits everywhere on a personal question for you. What's the show been like here for you share with the people watching who weren't here? Why is this year important? This seems to be an inflection point for answerable fest, the vibe, the number of attendees, the moment in history where the cloud journey on premises What's What's your take on? This is your personal view. It's >>been great. I mean, I think just the size talking a lot of people that have been coming here for many, many years, even prior to the redhead acquisition of Answerable. This is really community driven event, and it's still set up like a community driven event. You won't see a big red hat stuff everywhere. It's really kind of by the community for the community. And just to see the sheer size of on the number of attendees here, and really kind of the evolution of what customers are being able to talk about on stage with a value they're getting out of answerable is pretty tremendous. So just seeing the pure return on investment of leveraging, answerable and looking at all of the large customers they're here, speaking even on the panel last night was really incredible to see them talk about their journeys over the last couple of years, going from just starting to be work with, answerable to really kind of driving that across the enterprise and getting continually >>local on feedback. But they're also vocal on success. They have all these building in champions inside your inside the customer base, >>and they're all very, very excited about when you have excited customers. >>So, Jason, I'm wonder if you could help us connect the dots with how automation ties into the other journeys customers are going through. You know, the digital transformation, modernizing their applications, changing their hybrid and cloud hybrid and multi cloud environment. What's the role of automation to, you know, enable that and participate in those journeys? >>Yes, it's and it really has kind of a part in all of those journeys. So we work with lots of large customers that are going through a kind of different parts of those different journeys, and it seems like ants will becomes a part of it. And so, for instance, one of our customers that working we're working with right now through a large digital transformation, kind of across the entire enterprise from a both people process and technology perspective on this is leveraging things like open shift and modernizing all of their applications and breaking down things in the micro Service's and really transforming their business. But part of that is leveraging, answerable. And so one of the CEOs mottoes was, If we do something more than twice, we're gonna automate it. And so I hear that kind of over and over again, no matter what type of customer we're working with, no matter what type of kind of solution we're implementing, they're coming up with these monsters that they get really excited about around automation. Um, so we're not going to do things the old way with these new projects. We wanna automate everything, and I just seeing a ton of value and efficiency out of it. >>Awesome. What's the biggest surprise that you've seen over the past year on the service aside and just in terms of enterprise readiness Enterprise and appetite. Adoption, Any observations you could share around what's going on with automation, Observe, ability, a big part of the business. We're seeing that, too. Automation Observe ability to hot new sectors. Just exploding opportunity. >>Yeah, I think just continuing to see this kind of digital transformation effort across so many different customers and get everybody's really focused on not only the technology and the technology, especially things like open shift in Ansel and Rail. They're enabling all of this change in all of this movement to the cloud and the automation, but really working with customers to focus on the people in process so they can leverage those capabilities because just adopting the platforms doesn't give you all of the benefits without changing your people in process. So we spent a lot of time talking about really around the culture, and customers are looking at us saying Red Hat Service's Don't just come in with the technical experts would help us really understand how we transform our people in process along the way to really take advantage of the innovation that's going around right now with the cloud. >>So, Jason, uh, IBM Zach Wizard Read had been very clear keeping the brand, the products, the people of Red Hat. IBM knows a thing or two about service is though we think that, you know, service is really are the main focus that that will happen there. So give us a little insight as to how the scale of IBM will increase what redhead service is able to be able to dio. >>Yeah, So it's great for Red Hat, right? Because we now have a company the size of IBM out driving the adoption of our technologies. So everything that we're able to dio to date from a red hat perspective got us to one level of scale. But IBM is gonna take us to that next level of scale. And from a service's perspective, IBM already has service's departments around all of their different technologies. And so we really are gonna be treated kind of service department. So we're gonna continue to be the experts around Red Hat Technologies. But it really doesn't change that much for us because we worked with large s eyes. Um, since the time we started here and were always part of a lot of largess, I implementations so although IBM will be a very important partner of ours. They won't be on. The other part of the only partner will still work with all >>the flights. IBM That's right. And so we worked at >>IBM before the acquisition as a partner will work with him after the acquisition. But IBM What will change is on the IBM side, they will be building much larger delivery organizations around Red Hat Technologies, which will allow us to kind of get the the customer started on that journey. But when they look to really scale out than IBM can take in and kind of take that to the next level, that we would never have the scale to be able to get to that side. So it's good for us. It's good for our customers, and it's good for red hat driving adoption. >>Jim pointed this out on the many times on multiple calls around the broad portfolio. You guys have an IBM. They have somewhere broad portfolio. Thanks for coming on, sharing your insights. What's new for you? Take a quick minute to plug in what's going on your organization and what you're up to? >>Yes, So we're just continuing to scale. So, um The good news is IBM has a large service's organization, but that also drives a lot of demand for us. So we're continuing to scale, will continue to improve. Our offerings were continuing to help our customers reach those goals, moving to the cloud and everything they're looking to try to accomplish. >>Great. Thanks for coming. I appreciate it to Cuba. Coverage here. Danceable fast. I'm John for a student. Stay with us. More day, too. Live coverage after this short break.