>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020. brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back. This is theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020. Of course this year instead of all gathering together in San Francisco, we're getting to talk to Red Hat executives, their partners and their customers where they are around the globe. I'm your host Stuart Miniman and happy to welcome to the program Nick Barcet, who is the Senior Director of Technology Strategy at Red Hat. He happens to be on a boat in the Bahamas. So Nick, thanks so much for joining us. >> Hey thank you for inviting me. It's a great pleasure to be here and it's a great pleasure to work for a company that has always dealt with remote people. So it's really easy for us to, kind of thing. >> Yeah Nick. You know it's interesting, I've been saying probably for the last 10 years that the challenge of our time is really distributed systems. You know from a software standpoint that's what we talk about and even more so today number one of course the current situation with the global pandemic but number two the topic we're going to talk to you about is edge and 5G. It's obviously gotten a lot of hype. So before we get into that my understanding Nick, you know you came into Red Hat through an acquisition. So give us a little bit about your background and what you work on for Red Hat. >> About five years ago company I was working for eNovance got acquired by Red Hat and I've been very lucky in that acquisition where I found a perfect home to express my talent. I've been free software advocate for the past 20 some years. Always been working in free software for the past 20 years and Red Hat is really wonderful for that. >> Yeah it's addressing me okay yeah. I remember back the early days we used to talk about free software. Now we don't talk free, open-source is what we talk about you know. Bream is a piece of what we're doing but let's talk about you know, You know, eNovanceI absolutely remember they were partner of Red Hat. I talked to them and a lot at some of the OpenStack shows. So I'm guessing when we're talking about edge, these are kind of the pieces coming together of what Red had done for years with OpenStack and with NFB. So what, what's the solution set you're talking about? Bring us inside, how you're helping your customers with these types of split. >> Well clearly the solution we are trying to put together as to combine what people already have with where they want to go. Our vision for the future is a vision where OpenShift is delivering a common service on any platform including hardware at the far edge on a model where both v-ends and containers can be hosted on the same machine. However there is a long road to get there and until we can fulfill all the needs, we are going to be using combination of OpenShift, OpenStack and many other product that we have in our portfolio to fulfill the needs of our customer. We've seen for example Verizon starting with OpenStack quite a few years ago now going with us with OpenShift that they're going to place on up of OpenStack or directly on bare metal. We've seen other big telcos use that in very successful to deploy their 5G networks. There is great capabilities in the existing portfolio. We are just expanding that simplifying it because when we are talking about the edge, we are talking about managing thousands if not millions of device and simplicity is key if you do not want to have your management parts in Crete. >> Excellent. So you talked a lot about the service providers. Obviously 5G as a big wave coming a lot of promise as what it will enable both for the service providers as well as the end-users. Help us understand where that is today and what we should expect to see in the coming years though. >> So in respect of 5G, there is two reason why 5G is important. One it is-- It is important in terms of edge strategy because any person deploying 5G will need to deploy computer resources much closer to the antenna if they want to be able to deliver the promise of 5G and the promise of very low latency. The second reason it is important is because it allows to build a network of things which do not need to be interconnected other than through a 5G connection. And this simplifies a lot some of the edge application that we are going to see where sensors need to provide data in a way where you're not necessarily always connected to a physical network and maintaining a WiFi connection is really complex and costly. >> Yeah Nick a lot of pieces that sometimes get confused or conflated, I want you to help us connect the dots between what you're talking about for edge and what's happening in the telcos and the the broader conversation about hybrid cloud or Red Hat calls at the open hybrid cloud because you know there were some articles that were like you know edge is going to kill the cloud. I think we all know an IP nothing ever dies, everything is all additive. So how do these pieces all go together? >> So for us at Red Hat, it's very important to build edge as an extension of our open hybrid cloud strategy. Clearly what we are trying to build is an environment where developers can develop workloads once and then can the administrator that needs to deploy a workload or the business mode that needs to deploy a workload can do it on any footprint. And the edge is just one of these footprint as is the cloud as is a private environment. So really having a single way to administer all these footprints, having a single way to define the workloads running on it, is really what we are achieving today and making better and better in the years to come. The reality of... to process the data as close as possible to where the data is being consumed or generated. So you have new footprints to let's say summarize or simplify or analyze the data where it is being used. And then you can limit the traffic to a more central site to only the essential of it. It is clear that with the current growth of data, there won't be enough capacity to have all the data going directly to the central path. And this is what the edge is about, making sure we have intermediary of points of processing. >> Yeah absolutely. So Nick you talked about OpenStack and OpenShift. Of course there's open source project with with OpenStack. OpenShift the big piece of that is is Kubernetes. When it comes to edge are there other open source project, the parts of the foundations out there that we should highlight when looking at these edge loop? >> Oh, there is a tremendous amount of projects that are pertaining to the edge. Red Hat carries many of these projects in its portfolio. The middleware components for example Quercus or AMQ mechanism, Carlcare are very important components. We've got storage solutions that are super important also when you're talking about storing or handling data. You've got in our management portfolio two very key tool one called Ansible that allows to configure remotely confidence that is super handy when you need to reconfigure firewall in mass. You've got another tool that is the central piece of our strategy which is called ACM, Red Hat's I forgot the name of the product now. We are using the acronym all the time which is our central management mechanism just delivered to us through IBM. So this is a portfolio wide we are making and I forgot the important one which is Red Hat Enterprise Linux which is delivering very soon a new version that is going to enable easier management at yet. >> Yeah. Well of course we know that realers you know the core foundational piece fit with most of the solution in a portfolio. That it's really interesting how you laid that out though. As you know some people on the outside look and say, " Okay, Red Hat's got a really big portfolio. How does it all fit together?" You just discussed that all of these pieces become really important when they come together for the edge. So maybe you know, one of the things when we get together summit of course, we get to hear a lot from your customers. So any customers you can talk about, that might be a good proof point for these solutions that you're talking about today? >> So right now most of the proof points are in the telco industry because these are the first one that have made the investment in depth. And when we are talking about various and we are talking about very large investment that is reinforced in their strategy. We've got customers in telco all over the world that are starting to use our products to deploy their 5G networks and we've got lots of customer starting to work with us on creating their strategy for in other vertical particularly in the industrial and manufacturing sector which is our next endeavour after telco yet. >> Yeah well absolutely. Verizon a customer, I'm well familiar with when it comes to what they've been used with Red Hat. I'd interviewed them, it opens back few years back when they talked about that those nav-pipe solutions. You brought a manufacturing so that brings up one of the concerns when you talk about edge or specifically about IOT environment. When we did some original research looking at the industrial internet, the boundaries between the IT group and the OT which heavily lives in manufacturing wouldn't, they don't necessarily talk or work together. So how's Red Hat helping to make sure that customers you know, go through these transitions, pass through those silos and can take advantage of these sorts of new technologies? >> Well obviously you have to look at a problem in the entirety. You've got to look at the change management aspect and for this, you need to understand how people interact together if you intend on modifying the way they work together. You also need to ensure that the requirements of one are not impeding the other on demand, on environment of a manufacturer. Is really important especially when we are talking about dealing with IOT sensors which have very limited security capability. So you need to add in the appropriate security layers to make what is not secure, secure and if you don't do that you're going to introduce a friction. And you also need to ensure that you can delegate administration of the component to the right people. You cannot say, Oh from now on all of what you used to be controlling on a manufacturing floor is now controlled centrally and you have to go through this form in order to have anything modified. So having the flexibility in our tooling to enable respect of the existing organization and handle a change management the appropriate way. These are way to answer this... >> Right Nick, last thing for you. Obviously this is a maturing space, lots of change happening. So give us a little bit of a look forward as to what users should be expecting and you know what pieces will be the industry and Red Hat be working on that bring full value out of the edge and 5G solution? >> So as always, any such changes are driven by the applications. And what we are seeing is in terms of application, a very large predominance of requirements for AI, ML and data processing capability. So reinforcing all the components around this environment is one of our key addition and that we are making as we speak. You can see Chris keynote which is going to demonstrate how we are enabling a manufacturer to process the signal sent from multiple sensors through an AI and during early failure detection. You can also expect us to enable more and more complex use case in terms of footprint. Right now, we can do very small data center that are residing on three machine. Tomorrow we'll be able to handle remote worker nodes that are on a single machine. Further along we'll be able to deal with disconnected node. A single machine acting as a cluster. All these are elements that are going to allow us to go further and further in the complication of the use cases. It's not the same thing when you have to connect a manufacturer that is on solid grounds with fiber access or when you have to connect the knowledge for example or a vote and talk about that to. >> Well, Nick thank you so much for all the updates. I know there's some really good breakouts. I'm sure there's lots on the Red Hat website to find out more about edge in five B's. Nick Barcet thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> All right. Back with lots more covered from Red Hat Summit 2020. I'm Stuart Miniman and thanks for watching theCUBE. (bright upbeat music)