>> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts it's the Cube, covering Red Hat Summit 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back to Boston, everybody. This is Red Hat Summit and this is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante, with my co-host, Stu Miniman and Matt Hicks is here. Is the Vice President of the software engineering for OpenShift and management, at Red Hat. Matt, welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you very much, good to be here. >> So this is where all the action is, is management and management of Clouds and inter Clouds and intra clouds, and it's the sort of next big battleground and you guys seem to be, doin really well there. Have a lot of momentum. >> It's been a good year. I think it's going to be a great year going forward, cause it, it adds a lot of customer value you know, they're seeing the drive to get applications across all these environments, and I think we've hit a good balance of what we can provide in OpenShift, or middle work portfolio management and you hear a lot of customers talking about it all through summits. >> Well we saw some pretty sick demos this morning. I got to ask ya, it was basically the reference model, was okay, got some web logic, and web sphere apps. You know, wink, wink. And you want to modernize them, and so you guys just showed like a five click modernization process. Is it really that simple? Are people really, really doing that? >> Yeah. We have customers that have moved thousands of applications like that, and they're all different sorts of applications. But going from, a proprietary EE stack to getting on something closer to EAP. To deploying it on OpenShift, that is our bread and butter. And it's great because EAP can take advantage of OpenShift, lets customers re-platform the apps that they have. And like we said on Key Net, it sort of frees up your time then to start building the fun stuff. Building the next apps, and you know we've had a ton of success with that. >> Matt so we had the opportunity to talk to some of the innovation award winners. What we haven't actually gotten to cover too much yet, is all the news. So there were a number of announcements in your space, wonder if you could help us, kind of unpack for our audience. >> Sure thing. So we, You will hear a lot about the, just the enterprise production adoption, of the new technologies. Because one of the things for us, it's easy to come up and talk about new technologies. We like actually bringing customers up that have taken that new technology to production. So that's one of the big themes you'll see here at Summit. We launched OpenShift IO. Which for us actually had great success of OpenShift as Hybrid Net platform, Prod. But as you heard from United Health Group, Optum this morning. They have 10,000 plus developers to roll that out to. And we knew we needed to close the gap on how to get empowered developers. So OpenShift IO was the new Cloud based services for that. We will also announce and talk about our container health index. So when you start really making the bed on containers, how do you know what's inside of em, how do you get a simple grading system to understand like A through F. How well maintained is this. As well as being able to look under the covers and understand what goes into that A or what goes into that F. >> And maybe explain that a little bit more, because I think about like, you know, okay, I remember like in the virtualization world, I understood that. So many of containers live a lot shorter life, so, is there, is this just a dashboard that rolls that up, because I want to know probably the general health of what's going on, because there's no way humans going to be able to keep track of it. And I mean, we're not all Google with two billion containers, being brought up and killed every week. But it tends to be, at least from what I've seen, tell me if you see otherwise, that most containers are still much shorter lived than OS's. Or you know, VM4B4. >> You know I think that's, it's one of the advantages. Is that they can be pretty volatile, like that effect. You know, we have capabilities, like in OpenShift, like Image Streams driven to say, "How do you respond and incorporate this?" At the end of the day, if you can grab a container that in our world has an A rating, no security vulnerabilities today, and in a week, you could have multiple critical CVE's, that have been open that now affect that container. And so the benefit of containers is, you can re-roll em, and you can consume that update, but if you don't know about it, and you stay on that old version, you carry the same risk as if you had an out of date OS, that was very static. >> Yeah, I think that answers back to, you know, Ben Gustav, that golden image. And they would pardon that, and they'd leave it that way for two to five years. Right. And we all laughed because my friends in the security space is like, that's the biggest problem we have, is you're not ready for that. So this is, understanding what you've got out there, being able to address that, remediate, you know, push out changes, or know like hey, if you haven't, this is what you're at risk of. >> Absolutely. And that creates for us, it creates this foundation of, both trust between our customers and Red Hat, with their consuming. But then also between Red Hat and our ISV's. Because most of out ISV's, they're not in the Linux business or they're building specialized middle work capabilities on our products. So it's equally important for them to understand that if they're on an out of date version of RHEL, and they've embedded that into their container, that can cause as many problems, and they need to apply the updates in their stack as our customers. >> But that kind of gets to the business model a little bit. And you're engineering, but so I have an engineering question. But, I think most people in our audience understands that you know, Red Hat is a company built on, open source. And you know people say, "Why buy the cows, the milk is free." Well you've perfected that model, you know, 2.4 billion dollars in revenue. Three billion dollars in bookings. So you're obviously doing something right, although, not many have been able to, actually nobody's been able to create a business model like this. My question is from an engineering stand point. When, you're built on open source, and you're not, driven toward a proprietary mindset of okay, let's lock them in to the next REV. How does that change, sort of the engineering mindset, the culture and the protocol going forward. >> I love it. I have been in Red Hat 11 plus years, and everyday you're not tied into, dropping a new feature and pushing customers to that new version for revenue. And so it changes our mindset of, how do we provide value across the entire range of supported offerings that we have. In the case of RHEL, you could stay on some versions of RHEL for quite a while, and we provide value there in keeping that thing working. But at the same point, we're constantly moving this along, adding new innovation. We're able to provide value there. And it, as an engineer, it is refreshing. Sorry. >> I'll chat for a minute. So you, you know, a lot of companies that are 20 plus years old, are criticized. Oh, they don't, innovate. You hear that all the time. They do incremental R and D. And it's true. They may spend a lot on R and D, but R and D is like a feature here, or another feature there. Design, to just keep putting the crumbs out. And what you're saying is, incremental is not, really fundamental part of your plan. >> Absolutely. We can, you know, we want to provide the same value for our customer if they're on RHEL six, or they're looking towards the next major version of RHEL. And they can move anywhere on that life cycle, and that's what they get as part of their subscription. Same thing with OpenShift. And that choice of customers, of being able to take a product, consume anywhere on the life cycle of it, it's good for customers and it's nice for us, because they're just different ways that you innovate. Of driving like, the next new great feature. Then you have other customers, that you are going to provide value through stability. >> So, when you, we go to a lot of these events, as you can imagine. And when you talk to the traditional, you know, software players, you get this massive dose, of well we do that too. We do containers, and, you know, we do Cloud, and we do Hybrid, and. So help us understand, the difference between how they do it and how you do Cloud. >> I think for us, if we picked containers, you know, I was talking to a group of customers this morning of every upstream technology we pick, that we're going to pull together into our products, We don't just pick em up and re-package em and give em to a customer, because we're a support business. So if it breaks at 3 a.m and I have to re-roll a kernel to be able to fix it, I have to understand every piece in the stack. So we start with, we're going to drive a contributor position in the technologies. We pick our bets and we go all in on those areas. So Cooper Netties will carry you know with Google as you know a great technical partner, we run the majority of the SIGs with them. We have a top contributor position, and that we invest really heavily in understanding that technology inside and out. And I think that's what shows in the customer value of we could certainly take stuff, repackage it and ship it. It doesn't carry the same value as being able to work with a customer, drive new features into the product and keep them running in PROD. >> Matt so you mentioned Cooper Netties. And I was actually a little surprised this morning in the key note, I didn't hear Cooper Netties. And I think the reason was, because I heard a lot about OpenShift, and that's just your mechanism for rolling that out there. I'm assuming your customers kind of understand that maybe you could help, you know, explain that a little bit more. >> Absolutely. And so, OpenShift is our enterprise, distribution Cooper Netties is, and that's sort of the business we're in. We have Linux and RHEL is our enterprise distribution of that. We now have Cooper Netties, this really popular community. OpenShift is our distribution of that, and for our customers. >> I was just saying, I guess you couldn't call it RECK. Which, Red Hat Enterprise, Cooper Nettie, probably wouldn't be a good idea. >> The world changes too fast. You pick names a long time ago. But it's a nice motto, because we know it. It's what we've done for a long time, and it builds on everything we've done with RHEL and it connects our middleware portfolio as well. So I've been on the op side, and I've been on the development side, and I love seeing us address stuff right in the gap there for customers. And I think that's why we're seeing so much customer traction. It's a sweet spot for where they've had pain, and it adds a lot of value for em. >> Could you speak a little bit of your customers. Where are they with containers, Cooper Netties, that whole adoption. >> A lot of them in production. Which is nice. It's nice from a support business, because if you have excitement, or if you have early traction, we're a subscription business, so we want to make sure you know, the more customers use it, the more you know, they're going to grow and actually utilize it. And when you hear customers like UHG saying, the 4000 projects built on OpenShift there. Those are, they have built up significant deployments on that, and Barkways, and I know we have a whole list of em that are here today. And so I like that fact of, it's not just a cool technology. Customers have taken all the way into production. And they're being really successful with it. which as an engineer you love. You want to see people using your products and solving problems with them. >> Absolutely. Matt you talked about the ethos of commitment and committers, to open source projects. One of the challenges for a company like yours, is you got to support a lot of different projects. So though, you saying, you make your bets. We've talked a lot about okay, will there ever be another Red Hat that emerges in the big data space. You see Cloud air, and Hortonworks, and they're always sort of lookin at those guys, as possibility. But they always sight the challenge of having to support so many projects. How do you manage that and did you, you've been with Red Hat for a while, did you hit a tipping point, at some point? Cause I mean certainly you have software margin, 80, 90% you know margins. You got a great operating you know margins. So you've crossed that chasm so to speak to pick a bromide, but, others have had such a challenge. Is it because they have to support those projects and it just takes a long time? And you guys baked over 20 years. I wonder if you can give us some insight there. >> You know, I think it's as much art as it is science, I would love to say. Like this is a you know, cold formula that we apply but, we have a good gut feeling for, if you're going to back a technology, or an upstream project, you want to make sure that it's going to expand beyond your own investment, and we've certainly made a lot of wrong bets that the technology doesn't evolve. But you've got to be able to change, and when we see some of the early indicators like in Cooper Netties. Those are the ones where, we like how it's governed, we like how it's structured, we like the other players that are in there, and that's just been one of the unique aspect of Red Hat, is we pick pretty well. >> So Matt, I'm wondering if you're willing to comment, we were at Dockercon a couple of weeks ago, they've done a shift to, how they're managing kind of, but the Moby project to do the open source stuff, what's your take on that? What's Red Hat's positioning there? It's been an interesting dynamic between Docker and Red Hat to watch the last couple of years. >> Yeah you know, I think Moby for us, it's one of, it's about 16 hundred different upstream projects that we pull in across our portfolios. And so, we're certainly watching it, and we're seeing them evolve. We've been involved for the technology for a while now, but we don't necessarily know where that's going to go right now. But we certainly look a it like we do, you know the whole, breath of open source projects we pull in. >> What else is on your horizon? What's exciting you these days? >> You know, I think just seeing the reality of Hybrid Cloud becoming, it's becoming real for our customers. Where they're able, you know, you probably saw some of the Amazon announcements today where, you're able to take services, that might be in the public Cloud and now pull them on Premise. You heard customers talk about taking OpenShift and running that all the way out to the public Cloud. And we love that aspect, because you know, being able to use infrastructure to power applications, I think it's going to change IT and, then all the pieces that emanate around that, it's exciting for ISV's, it's exciting you know, around our management products from Ansible to Cloud forms. It's just a lot that we can do there. >> On the management products, you know, what Dave said, one of the Bromides out there, when I became an analyst seven years ago, it's like we can say, well it's security and management are the biggest problems we have. I feel like I can go to that well anytime I need to do. How are we doing in industry and management. Obviously you've got your position, but you know, as the surface area of the landscape is just expanding exponentially, every. You talked about how many customers are multi Cloud today. So you know, we know there's not a single thing that can do everything but, how are we doing as an industry, in Red Hot specifically? >> I think form Red hat's position, we've had a lot of success with Ansible. Just becoming a core automation technology, cause I think the one common thread is, you have so many choices, you have so many pieces, you have to start automating them. How we did IT 15 years ago, just will not. It won't scale anymore. I think building up from that stack. How you move to policy based management, that's earlier in the space. But there is a ton of capabilities and we've seen customers using, you know from our perspective, it's combining Cloud forms on orchestration, and satellite for content, Ansible for automation. Because I describe it, so I have the operation teams that run our OpenShift online environments. That's a, a relatively small group of people that manages millions of applications. And they change faster than a human could push a button. And so, as customers get into that world, you know we're certainly not in the Google world yet, but when you get that 4A it changes how you have to manage it. It has to become automated, it has to become policy driven, and then it's fun. I like it. Like doing ops in the 90s versus how you do it today. It is refreshing as an operator to just have these tools are your fingertips. >> High frequency application development. Matt thanks very >> It really is! >> Much for coming on the Cube. It's great to see you, and congratulations and good luck going forward. >> Fantastic, thanks S. >> You're welcome. Alright keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be right back with our next guest. This is Cube, we're live from Red Hat Summit in Boston. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)