>> Announcer: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE. Covering AnsibleFest 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back everyone it's theCUBE's live coverage here in Atlanta, Georgia for Red Hat's AnsibleFest. #AnsibleFest, check out all the commentary on Twitter. Of course, we're here for two days, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Mary Johnston Turner, Research VP Cloud Management International Data Corp IDC. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. >> So IT operations has been an evolving thing. AI and automation really changing the landscape of this data equation. IT operations used to be, "Hey, you go to IT ops, no problem." Now with the world changing to be more software-driven, software-led, a lot's changed. What's your take? What's your research say about the IT ops landscape? >> Well, I mean, you have to put it in the context of what's going on generally with IT, right? I mean, we're clearly seeing DevOps, you know it's either in production or in large scale testing and the majority of enterprises. We've got lots and lots of containers and Kubernetes usage, we've got multiple clouds in just about every enterprise you talk to. It's, you know, well over 90%. And what that all means is that there's just a lot of change on a lot of different levels. And so that's kind of really put stress on traditional, operational approaches on task-oriented automation. you know, siloed approaches to control and monitoring. And what we're really starting to see is now a move to how to become more integrated, more unified and more collaborative across all these teams. And that's actually kind of driving to me for a new generation of monitoring automation and analytics kind of all put together. >> It's interesting how management software has always been part of every IT conversation we've had in over the past decades. And, but recently if you look up the evolution of cloud and hybrid multi-cloud, you mentioned that. CloudOne, Dot, Amazon, public cloud, pretty straightforward to comprehend. Start-up start there. But this whole other cloud paradigm is shifting has taken these categories like network management, turned them into observability. Five companies go public and M&A activity booming. Automation similar kind of vibe to it here. It's got this management piece to it that used to be this white space. Now the aperture seems to be increasing. What's your take on this? Because we're trying to make sense of it. Customers are trying to figure it out, obviously. They've been doing configuration management. But now they got scale, they got some of the things you mentioned. What's this automation category look like or is it a category? >> I don't know if it's a category or not but it's certainly a thing, right? I think what we're seeing with automation is historically, it was very individual driven. It was, "I have a problem", right? I have to configure something or deploy something and I could whip up a script, you know, do a little code and it worked for me and it wasn't documented and that was great, you know. And I think what we're happening now with just the way applications are being architected, I mean, you're moving to very modular, microservices-based approach to applications, the way they're deployed. All the dependencies across all the different tiers from network to storage to public cloud to private cloud. It's really very, very difficult to rely on a bunch of ad hoc tools to do that. And so I think what's happened with automation is it's expanding up to become as much a business collaboration platform, as it is just sort of a task, feeds and speeds sort of control platform. We're kind of in the middle of that evolution. Even, you know, two years ago I don't think you saw the kinds of analytics, you know, and machine learning and AI that we're now starting to see come in as an overlay to the automation environment. >> Mary, one of the things we've been talking about for the last couple of years is that great buzz word of digital transformation. The real driver for that is I need to be a data driven organization, not just ad hoc things. So where does automation fit into that broader discussion of, you know, changing operational models like you were talking about? >> Well I think, you know done right, it can really be a platform for collaboration and accelerating digital transformation across the enterprise. Because rather than having, you know, each team have to do their own thing and then do a manual hand off or a big change control meeting, you know, these things just don't scale and move quick enough in today's environments. Particularly if you're trying to update your applications every five minutes, right? So, I think the collaboration, the different teams and also a creative environment where you can have more generalists too, right? you know, there's collaboration across IT ops and DevOps and sort of the lines start to blur. >> Yeah, you mentioned the word platform and we were talking to the Ansible team, they were very specific as to how they chose that for customers out there. You know, choosing a platform is a bit of a commitment. It's not just a tactical, "We're going to do this." What's your thoughts on the Ansible automation platform and what feedback do you have to customers as to how they're deciding which platforms and how many platforms that they'll develop on? >> Yeah, it's a really interesting conversation. I mean, I think one of the things that the Ansible team's really focusing on that's important is the modularity. The fact that you can plug and play and kind of grow over time. And also that it's a very software-driven paradigm with the automation artifacts under source control. Which again is kind of different for a lot of ops teams. They don't have that notion of Git and software development all the time. So I think that having a platform approach that still allows a fair amount of modularity integration, and it lets different parts of the organization decide over time how much they want to participate in a very curated, consistent integration. And at the same time, at least in the Ansible world, because of the way it's architected, they can still have modules that call out to other automation, you know, solutions that are in the environment. So it's not an all or nothing, and I think that's really, really important. And it's also a platform for analytics. I'm sorry, but data, you know, about what's going on with the automation. >> The data's critical, but we had mentioned earlier on our previous interview with Red Hat folks and Stu and I's intro about the cloud and how the complexity that is being introduced, and you mentioned some of those earlier, the complexities are there. Of the automation solutions that you've seen, which one's having the most impact for customers? >> Well that, what do you mean by impact? There's such a, such a range of them. If you look in certainly the configuration, infrastructure as code space, obviously Ansible, there's a couple others. If you look into the CI/CD space, right? I mean there's a whole set of very optimized CI/CD tools out there that are very important to the DevOps environment. And, again, you'll see integrations between the infrastructure and the CI/CD, and they're all kind of blurring. And then you've got very specific, almost domain controllers, whether they're for hardware or converged infrastructure-type platforms, or whether they're for public clouds. And those don't go away, right? You still need something that understands the lower level system. And so, I think what we're seeing is organizations trying to reduce the number of individual siloed automation tools they've got, but they're still probably going to have more than one to do the full stack with something, you know, acting as kind of a policy-driven control plane in analytics-driven control plane in the middle. >> So, you've still got to run the plumbing. >> Right, exactly. >> You've still got to run the system now. >> Yeah, I mean something like 70 to 80% of the customers we talk to that are using one or more of the big public clouds, they're also using a fair amount of control tooling that's provided by those cloud vendors. And those aren't going to go away, because, you know, it's just like a hardware system. You got to have the drivers, right? You got to have the core, but you've got to be able to again have the process flow across it that's really important. >> What's your take on the market place shaking out the winners and losers? Because I know you like to track the marketplace from a research standpoint. It just seems that all the events we go to at theCube, everyone's jockeying for the control plane. >> They are. >> Or something. The control plane of the data. We're the control plane for the management. So, the control plane, meaning horizontally scalable, much more platform-centric. You're starting to see kind of a systems thinking coming back into the enterprise versus the siloed IT, but this illustrious control plane, (Mary laughing) I mean, how many control planes can there be? What's your take on all this craziness? >> That's a good question. I mean again, I think there is a difference between sort of the driver level, right? Which it used to be, again, those scripts. They were kind of like drivers, right? That's almost becoming just the playing field. You've got to have those integrations. You've got to have a nice modular way to architect that. What really is going to be the control plane is the data. It's the metrics around what are you doing. It's the performance, it's the security, and being able to actually optimize a lot of the SLOs that go along with that. That's really where the, you know, being able to do a good thing with the data, and tie it to the business and the app is where the real control is going to be. >> Mary, how's Ansible doing as a business? We saw a lot of proof points in the keynote about the community growth, obviously, adoption is up. But, anything you can share about how, you know, they've been doing really about four years into the Red Hat acquisition? >> Well they're, I mean, they're growing pretty effectively. They, I think this whole category is growing, and so they're benefiting quite a lot from that. I think we are seeing really strong growth in the partner communities. Particularly here at this show we are seeing some really, you know, larger and larger scale partnerships, more and more investment. And I think that is really important, because ultimately for a technology like this to scale, it's got to become embedded in all kinds of solutions. So, I look at much as the partner adoption as a good sign as anything. >> Well it's, you know, I guess two things. One is, the whole market's growing. Is Ansible doing better or worse than that? And what is the impact of those cloud-native tooling that you mentioned is, you know, I looked there's kind of Red Hat, the Ansible traditional competition, which was more in the infrastructure management space and now, yes, they do containerization, and work more in the cloud environment. They're kind of spanning between those environments. >> Well, I think, you know, again I see most organizations using multiple tools. I think, from a revenue and growth rate, I can't really get into it, because, as you know, Ansible is actually part of Red Hat, and Red Hat doesn't report out numbers at that level. But we see certainly see a lot of adoption. And we see Ansible, you know, at least if not the primary, as one of the major tools in more and more organizations. And that's across compute, storage, network, very, very popular in the network space, and then growing. Probably not quite as strong, but growing interest in like security and IoT. >> It's interesting you mention the numbers and how Ansible is now part of Red Hat. When Red Hat bought Ansible a couple years ago, I think the year before Stu and I were talking about how configuration management automation was going to come. We kind of saw it, but one of the things that in the community and Red Hat had publicly talked about is, Red Hat didn't screw it up. They kind of got it right, they kept them alone. They grew organically and this organic growth is kind of a forcing function for these new things. Are you happy with what Red Hat has done here with Ansible and this platform? What's your take on this platform? Because platforms have to enable. Good things and value. >> I think you're right. Ansible grew very virally and organically for a long time, but you kind of hit a wall with that at some point. I think they rightly recognized that they needed to have the kind of tooling, the kind of metrics, the kind of hub and modularity that would allow it to go the next level. So, I'm actually really encouraged by this announcement, and I think it also, again, it positions it I think to make partner driven-solutions much more easily standardized. It opens up, probably more ways for people to contribute to the communities. So I think it's really positive. >> And as a platform, if it's enabling value, what kind of value propositions do you see emerging? 'Cause you've got the content collections, the automation hub, automation analytics. Is it just bolting onto RHEL as value? What is some of the value that you might see coming out of the Ansible automation platform? >> Oh, well I mean Ansible's always been very agnostic. It's always been its own business which certainly can compliment RHEL. There's RHEL rolls and all kinds of stuff. But that's not really the focal point for Ansible. Ansible really is about providing that modular consistent automation approach that can span all these different operational domains, and really reach into the business process. So, I think it's great for the Red Hat portfolio, but now as we start to see them building bridges into the bigger IBM portfolio, you know, we haven't had a lot of IBM/Ansible announcements yet, but I would expect that we're going to see more over time. I think the OpenShift Operator integrations are going to be important as part of the things that IBM is doing with OpenShift. So, I think there's more to come. >> Mary, I wonder what your research finds regarding open source consumption in general. You know, how many of the customers out there are just using the free community addition? You know, Red Hat's very clear, you know, they are not, the open source is not Red Hat's business model. It is the way that they work. >> Mary: It's a development model. >> It's their development model. So, any general comments about open source, and specifically around Ansible, kind of the community free edition versus paid. >> Well, it's obviously been an interesting week in open source world with, not Red Hat, but some other vendors getting a little bit of flack for some of the choices they've made about their business practices. I think, you know, there are many, many organizations that continue to get started with unpaid, unsupported open source. What typically happens is if it gets to a critical mass within a company, at some point they're going to say, either I have to invest a lot of people and time and do all the testing, hardening, integration, tracking the security updates you know, and they're still never going to get notified directly from intel when there's a problem, right? So, I think many organizations as they, if they decide this is mission critical then they start to look for supported editions. And we've done a lot of research looking at the benefits of getting that level of support and typically, it's just 50 to 60% improvements and, you know, stability, security, time-to-market because you're not having to do all that work. So, its a trade-off, but you'll always have some, particularly smaller organizations, individual teams that they're not going to pay for it. But I think its scale is when it really becomes valuable. >> Mary, final question for you, for the folks watching that couldn't make the event or industry insiders that aren't in this area. Why is this AnsibleFest more important this year than ever before? What's the big story? What's the top thing happening now in this world? >> I mean, there's great energy here this year. And I've gone to a couple of these over the years. First of all, it's the biggest one they've ever had. I think really though, it's the story of collaboration, building teams, automating end-to-end processes. And that's really powerful, because it's very clear that the community has stepped up from just saying, I can do a great job with network automation, or I can do a great job with cloud or with server. And they're really saying, this is about transforming the organization. Making the organization more productive, making the business more agile. And I think that is a big step for Ansible. >> You know, I think that is a huge point. I think that's something that's really important, because you know, we've talked about capabilities before. It does this, it does that to your point. This is kind of a testament to the operationalizing of DevOps. 'Cause people have always been the bottleneck. So this seems to be the trend. Is that what you're saying? >> Yeah, I think so. And I also see, again, this community talking so much about upscaling the people. Embracing things like unit testing and source control. And it's a maturation of the whole automation conversation among this community. And remember, this community is only what? Six, seven years old? >> Stu: 2012. >> Yeah, I mean it's really a very, very young community. So I think it's a really important pivot point, just in terms of the scale of the problems they can address. >> Solve for abstractions. Solving big problem, automation will be a great category. Mary, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Sharing your insights and your research and your analysis. I appreciate it. >> Okay, thank you. >> Mary Johnston Turner Research VP of Cloud Management at IDC, here inside theCUBE. Breaking down the analysis of Red Hat's Ansible position vis-a-vis the market trends. It's theCUBE, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (upbeat techno music)