>>Live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the cube covering Ansible Fest 2019. Brought to you by red hat. >>Welcome back. Everyone's cubes live covers here in Atlanta for Ansible Fest. Here's the cube covers. Have red hats event around automation for all. John Ford's do many men. Our next guest is Joe Fitzgerald, Cuba Lum, vice president, general manager of the management business unit at red hat. Great timing for Ansible. Great to have you back on the cube. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. And it's great to have you here at Ansible Fest. Super essential for camera timing about Ansible. Let's do an, I did our intro, uh, analysis and platformization of automation. Big, big move, big news. But there's a bigger trend at play here around automation. Why is the timing now for automation discussions with Ansible? So good. The demand for automation is so broad in enterprises, right? They're trying to do everything from, you know, dev ops, tool chains to IOT devices. >>I'm trying to deploy things faster, uh, you know, fix security vulnerabilities faster. It's all about speed, agility, efficiency. It all comes back to automation. And the news here is the general availability, although available in November as announced on keynote of the Ansible automation platform. So this is something that's been going on for a while and I suppose just been grown weighing now it's a platform. What's in the platform? Why is it important? Why should customers care? So, uh, you know, we've been on this journey with Ansible which started off as this incredibly simple, elegant architecture and a way to automate things. And what's happened over the past couple of years is it's exploded in terms of the number of people who are using it, the number of people who are generating automation integration. Um, and so in working with a lot of customers, right, what we saw the need for was really to help them collaborate and scale their automation efforts. >>Um, scale, you know, who could, you know, build, reuse, share, uh, score content and track it. Really important. So we put a lot of those efforts into the platform to take it to the next level. Really. You know, we've been talking about Ansible, gum stew, going back when you know, 2014 OpenStack, I think I remember we are first talking about the cube. It had a cult following when it emerged. You guys acquired it at what, the next year, 2015 roughly. Um, but Annabelle had this cult following of people who just loved to get into the configuration side of things, make them go better. You guys acquired it, done well with it, kept it going, get the community flywheel, keep rolling a lot of progress since then. So what are you most proud of? What's the most notable things? Oh, the growth of the Ansible journey. What's, what's the big story there? >>So, uh, it's almost four years since red hat acquired Ansible. And I remember when I proposed acquiring Ansible and swell was this small, you know, Eastern U S company with sort of a community cult following, but very small in terms of, you know, commercials and, and reach and stuff like that. Mostly focused on the configuration space. Like a lot of the other automation tools over the past four years. Probably the best thing we did that redhead is really good at is we let the community do what the community does best, right? The innovation, the number of contributors, the amount of Ansible integration modules, playbooks has exploded, right. Uh, if you were in the keynote this morning, um, it was number six on the, you know, repository list out of 100 million, you know, almost, you know, just a massive amount of projects and here it is at number six. >>So we didn't perturb the community, we actually helped it grow and we've been able to help the technology evolve from a config automation product and technology into this very broad spectrum. Now enterprise automation platform that crosses domains like, you know, networks and security and storage and cloud and windows. Just a phenomenal, uh, you know, growth in it. Yup. Show help. Explain how platform sets up Ansible for it future. They talked in the keynote a little bit about starting with some of the, uh, kinda core partners in the collections that they're offering. But in the future for a platform to really be a platform, it needs to be something that users themselves can build on top of. So, you know, help us understand where it is today. You know, when it first announced here for November, um, and where it shows shall be going in the future. >>So we didn't use the platform word lightly. Um, I think that, you know, platform has a set of connotations and, and it's sort of a set of requirements. What we saw was that different teams and groups inside organizations, we're bringing Ansible in and using the technology and having very good success in their particular area. Then what we saw was these teams were trying to share automation and collaborate across organizations. Then even in the community, there's tens of thousands of rolls and playbooks out there that the community has built. There might be 300 that do the same thing, which is the best one, which, which one are people using? Uh, you know, how successful is it? How long does it take? Um, what we found was that they needed a bunch of tools to be able to collaborate, track, uh, analytics about stuff so that they could share and collaborate at a higher scale. >>Yeah. I, that's one of the great value propositions when we talk about SAS is if it's done well, not only can I share internally, but I can learn from others that have used the platform and make it easier to take advantage of that. So is that part of that vision that you see with the platform? Yeah, so I mean, there's a couple different ways of sharing. If you're running a SAS service, then you know, a central person is coordinating the sharing and things like that. What we tried to do with the, with the Ansible platform is basically enabled the way that people can share content without having to go through a central, you know, agent, if you will. So we provide services and things to help them manage their, their content, you know, with uh, you know, uh, galaxy and collections and things like that. >>Um, it's all about organizing and being able to share content in a way, uh, to make them more efficient. Should I talk about the trends around, um, you've done it. First of all, you done a great job with Ann's book. Congratulations. Um, the big fan of that company and you guys did a good job of it. As it goes full, where you're thinking about cloud complexities as people start looking at the cloud equation, hybrid and cloud 2.0 and the enterprise complexity still is coming as more of it. How do you guys see that? How are you viewing that, um, that marketplace because it's not just one vertical, it's all categories. So how are you guys taking animal to the next level? How you guys look at that, managing those complexities that are around the corner? Yeah. So if you think about it, you know, everybody's moving towards a multi, multi hybrid cloud, you know, sort of configuration, right? >>Um, each one of these platforms and clouds has their own set of tools which work really well perhaps in their particular cloud or their silo or their environment. If you're an organization and you're running multi-cloud, you're responsible for automating things that might span these clouds. You don't want to have different silos of automation tools and teams that only work in one cloud or one environment. So the fact that Ansible can automate across these, both on premise and in the public clouds, multiple public clouds, across domains, network storage, compute, create accounts, uh, you know, do all sorts of things that you're gonna need to do. So it's one automation technology that will span the complexity of those environments. So it really, it's, I don't see how people are going to do it otherwise without fielding lots of people and lots of tools. You know, we were talking with Stephanie and Sue and I talked on our intro insights segment around the word scale has been kicked around, certainly is changing a lot of the landscape on how companies are modernizing the open source equation, but it's also changing the people equation. >>I want you to explain your vision on this because I think this is a key point that we're seeing in our community where people have told us that automation provides great efficiency, et cetera. Good security, but job satisfaction is a real big part of it. You know, people, it's a people challenge. This is about people, your view on scale and people. So organizations are under tremendous pressure right now to do more, right? Whether it's deploying new application faster to close security vulnerabilities faster, uh, to move things around to, to, to right size, you know, resources and applications and things like that. And you know, Ansible allows them to do that in a way where they can be much more efficient and be much more responsive to the business, right? Otherwise, you know, you see some of the customer testimonials here where the amount of time goes down from six hours to five minutes, the teams can be far more productive. >>Um, it, it really gives job satisfaction because they can do things that were almost impossible to automate before by using Ansible to automate network storage and compute in the same playbook. Before, those were three different tools or three teams and people of solving some of the same problems in different areas. And this is where playbooks can be a problem and an opportunity because we have too many playbooks, you have to know which playbook to be available. I mean you can almost have a playbook of playbooks and this is kind of a opportunity to use the sharing collaboration piece. What's your rich to thought on that as that playbook complexity comes in as more playbooks enter the organizations, you know, there's a lot of deployment of the same kind of stack or the same kind of configuration and things like that. So you know, it's really extending community beyond, you know, you know, working on code into working on content, right around automation. >>So if somebody wants to deploy engine X, I think there's over 300 different, you know, playbooks to deploy engine X, right? We don't want to have 5,000 playbooks to deploy engine X. Why can't there be a couple that people take and say, wow, this is perfect. I can tweak it from my organization, integrate my particular systems, and I can hit the ground running instead of trying to either start from a blank page or to go sift through hundreds of almost close, uh, you know, playbooks that do sort of the same thing a lot of times. David's big time. Enormous. Alright. >>So Joe, congratulations on the four years of just continued growth, you know, great momentum in the community wanting to touch on, you know, the, the, the big move, uh, you know, in the last year is, you know, IBM spending, you know, quite a few dollars to, to acquire red hat. What will this mean for kind of the reach and activity around Ansible in the community, the IBM acquisition. >>So IBM had been involved in Ansible in a number of their, you know, products, right? In terms of integration into Ansible. So they have teams and folks within IBM that obviously got Ansible all before the acquisition. Um, I think that it's, it's highly complimentary. IBM has very strong capabilities around management and monitoring, security and things like that. All of those things inevitably turn to automation. Right. Um, so I think it really, um, it only gives us access to IBM and, and they're sort of, you know, their their channel and their accounts in their, and their reach, but also their teams that have these, these sets of technologies, um, that are natural compliment, you know, whether it's Watson driving Ansible or security or network monitoring, driving Ansible automation. It's a really powerful combination. >>Yeah. I also just want to get your kind of macro level view on automation. I sat on a panel talking to CIS admins about careers and it was the number one thing that they felt they needed to embrace. We see like the RPA community probably in adjacency to what you see heavily pushing automation, uh, you know, help explain how important automation is and that it's not, you know, just a silver bullet also. >>Yeah. So, you know, a lot of times people are, you know, the, the sort of the easy, um, you know, description is automation's gonna eliminate jobs or things like that. I think it's more like sort of the power tool analogy. You know, you know, if you had a, you know, a hammer and a screwdriver before, now you've got a power screwdriver and a pneumatic hammer and uh, you know, all sorts of additional things. They're force multipliers for these people to do broader, bigger things faster, right? Um, and that's what every organization is driving them to do. How agile can you be our competition deployed something, how fast can we deploy it and how many, you know, new releases a week. Can we deploy, um, when security hits, you know, how fast can we close the vulnerabilities that hours, days, weeks, or can we do it in minutes? >>The old expression, if you, if you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But if you're an agile, you can adjust to figure out the opportunity. It's kind of awesome kind of quote there. This speaks to the changes. I want to get your thoughts. Last question for you is, as someone who's been in the industry for awhile, we've first interviewed and I think 2014 at OpenStack when we first started chatting around the industry. So much has changed now more than ever. The modern enterprise is looking at cloud impact, operating as an operating model, cloud one, Datto, Amazon compute, storage standups software, and they're piece of cake startups. We're doing it now as enterprises really want to crack the code on cloud software automation. Observability these new categories are emerging, kind of speaks to this cloud 2.0, how would you describe that to folks if, if asked, what's the modern era enterprise cloud architecture look like? >>What is cloud 2.0, how would you take a stab at that definition? So I would say after all these years, cloud is really entering its infancy and what does that mean? We're just starting now to appreciate what can be built in cloud and we're going to get a big boost soon with five G, which is gonna, you know, increase the amount of data, the amount of, uh, you know, edge devices, uh, IOT and things like that. Um, the cloud is becoming, you know, the first choice for people when they build their architectures and their business. Um, it's gonna fundamentally change everything. So I think, you know, some people, what's the quote? You know, some people overestimate, you know, what the technology can do in the short term and underestimate what it can do in the longterm. We're now getting to that point where people are starting to build some really powerful cloud based applications. See this as a big wave then big time wave. Yeah. I mean, we had a quote still on the cube last week. Data is the new software, so software, abstractions, automation. This is the new way. I mean, it's a whole new architecture. So exciting. Thanks for coming on the cube. Appreciate juncture having thanks. We're here at the Asheville Fest, the Cuban Chalfont stupid men. Break it down. The analysis, getting into the automation for all conversation. Big category developing. We're covering it here. Live back more after this short break.

>>live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the Q covering answerable Best 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat >>Welcome back. Everyone's cubes Live coverage here in Atlanta for answerable fest. Here's cube covers of red hats. Event around automation for all I'm John for a stupid man. Our next guest is Joe Fitzgerald cable. Um, vice President General manager of the management business Unit at Red Hat. Great timing for answerable. Great to have you back on the Cube. Good to see you. Thanks, Mom. Thanks for >>having me. It's great to have you here. A danceable fast, super >>tight before camera timing about answerable to do And I did our intro analysis and platform ization of automation. Big, big move, Big news. But there's a bigger trend at play here around automation. Why is the timing now for automation discussions danceable. So good. >>The demand for automation is so broad in enterprises right there trying to do everything from, you know, Dev ops tool chains to io ti devices trying deploy things faster, you know, fix security vulnerabilities faster. It's all about speed, agility, efficiency. It all comes back to automation >>and the news here is the general availability of the available November as announced on Keynote of the Answer Automation Platform. So this is something that's been going on for a while, and it's just been grown. Now it's a platform. What's in the platform? Why is it important? Why should customers care? >>So you know, we've been on this journey with answerable, which started off. Is this incredibly simple, elegant architecture and a way to automate things and what's happened over the past couple of years? It's exploded in terms of the number of people who are using it, the number people who are generating automation, integration. And so in working with a lot of customers, right. What we saw the need for was really to help them collaborate and scale there. Automation efforts scale. You know who could build re you share, score content and track it really important. So we put a lot of those efforts into the platform to take it to the next level. Really? You >>know, we've been talking about answerable comes stew going back when 2014 open stack. I think I remember were first talk about the Cube. It had a cult following. When it emerged, you guys acquired it what the next year? 2015? Roughly. Um, but Ansel had this cult following of people who just love to get into the configuration side of things. Make them go better. You guys acquired it, Done well with that. Kept it going that the community fly. We'll keep rolling a lot of progress and say So. What do you most proud of? What's the most notable things of the growth of the answerable journey? What's what's the big story there? >>So it's almost four years since Red had acquired danceable. And I remember when I proposed acquiring answerable insult was this small? You know, Eastern U S company with sort of, ah, community cult following, but very small in terms of commercials and reach and stuff like that mostly focused on the configuration space. Like a lot of the other automation tools over the past four years. Probably the best thing we did that redhead is really good at is we let the community do with community does best, right? The innovation, the number of contributors, the amount of answerable integration modules, playbooks has exploded, right? If you were in the keynote this morning, it was number six on the you know, repositories list out of 100 million almost, you know, just a massive amount of projects. And here it is at number six. So we didn't perturb the community. We actually helped it grow. And we've been able to help the technology evolved from a config automation product in technology into this very broad spectrum. Now, enterprise automation platform that crosses domains like networks and security and storage and cloud and windows just a phenomenal growth in it. >>So help explain how platforms sets up answerable for its future. They talked in the keynote a little bit about starting with some of the kind of core partners and the collections that they're offering. But in the future, for a platform to really be a platform, it needs to be something that users themselves can build on top of so, you know, help us understand where it is today when it first announced here for November, and where it shows shall be going in the future. >>So we didn't use the platform word lightly. I think that, you know, platform has a set of connotations, and it's sort of a set of requirements. What we saw was that different teams and groups inside organizations were bringing Ansel in and using the technology and having very good success in their particular area. Then what we saw was thes. Teams were trying to share automation and collaborate across organizations. Then, even in the community, there's tens of thousands of roles and play books out there that the community has built. There might be 300 that do the same thing, which is the best one, which, which one of people using How successful is that? How long does it take? What we found was that they needed a bunch of tools to be able to collaborate, track analytics about stuff so that they could share and collaborate at a higher scale. >>Yeah, that's one of the great value proposition when we talk about SAS is if it's done well, not only can I share internally, but I can learn from others that have used the platform and make it easier to take advantage of that. So it is that part of that vision that you see with the platform? >>Yes, so I mean, there's a couple of ways of sharing. If you're running a sass service, then you know a central person is coordinating the sharing and things like that. What we try to do with Sensible Platform is basically enable a way that people can share content without having to go through a central you know, agent, if you will. So we provide service is and things to help them manage there. They're content, you know, with galaxy and collections and things like that. It's all about organizing and being able to share content in a way to make them more efficient. >>You're talking about the trends around. You've done it for a while, you know, great job. And congratulations, big fan of that company. And you guys did a good job with it as it goes full where you're thinking about cloud complexities as people start looking at the cloud equation hybrid and cloud 2.0, on the enterprise, complexity still is coming. There's more of it. How do you guys see that? How you viewing that that marketplace? Because it's not just one vertical. It's all categories. So how are you guys taking animals? The next level how you guys look at that? Managing those complexities that are around the corner? >>Yes. So if you think about it. You know, everybody's moving towards a multi hybrid cloud, you know, sort of configuration, right? Each one of these platforms and clouds has their own set of tools, which worked really well, perhaps in their particular cloud or their silo, where their environment. If you're an organization and you're running multi cloud, you're responsible for automating things that might span these clouds. You don't want to have different silos of automation tools and teams that only work in one cloud or one environment. So the fact that answerable can automate across thes both on premise and in the public clouds multiple public clouds across domains, network storage, compute, create accounts, you know, do all sorts of things that you're gonna need to do. So it's one automation technology that will span the complexity of those environments. So it really it's I don't see how people gonna do it otherwise, without fielding lots of people and lots of tools. >>You know, we're talking with Stephanie, and soon I talked on our intro insights segment around. The word scale has been kicked around certainly is changing a lot of the landscape on how couples heir modernizing the open source equation, but it's also changing the people equation. I want you to explain your vision on this because I think this is a key point that we're seeing in our community, where people have told us that automation provides great efficiency, etcetera, good security. But job satisfaction is a real big part of it. You know people. It's a people challenge. This is about people, your view on scale and people. So >>organizations are under tremendous pressure right now to doom or right whether it's deployed new application faster, too close security vulnerabilities faster to move things around. T right side's resource is and applications and things like that. And, you know, answerable allows them to do that in a way where they could be much more efficient and be much more responsive to the business. Right? Otherwise, you know, you see some of the customer testimonials here where the amount of time goes down from six hours to five minutes, the teams could be far more productive, productive. It really gives job satisfaction because they can do things that were almost impossible to automate before by using insult, automate network storage and compute in the same playbook. Before, those were three different tools or three teams, >>and people are solving some of the same problems in different areas. And this is where playbooks can be a problem and an opportunity. Because we have too many playbooks. You know which playbook be available? You could almost have a playbook of playbooks. This is kind of ah, opportunity that used the sharing collaboration piece What you're Richard thought on this as that playbook complexity comes in as little playbooks enter the >>organizations. You know, there's a lot of deployment of the same kind of stack or the same kind of configuration and things like that. So, you know, it's really extending community beyond, you know, you know, working on code into working on content, right around automation. So if somebody wants to employ Engine X, I think there's over 300 different playbooks to deploy Engine X right. We don't wanna have 5000 playbooks to deploy Engine X. Why can't there be a couple that people take and say, Wow, this is perfect. I can tweak it for my organization, integrate my particular systems, and I can hit the ground running instead of trying to either start from a blank page. Let's go sift through hundreds of almost close playbooks. That sort of the same thing A >>lot of times, David. Big time. Enormous. >>So, Joe, you know, congratulations on the four years of just continued growth, you know, great momentum in the community wanting to touch on. You know, the big move, you know, in the last year is, you know, IBM spending, you know, quite a few dollars to acquire red hat. What will this mean for kind of the reach and activity around answerable in the community, the IBM acquisition. >>So IBM had been involved in answerable in a number of their products, right in terms of integration into danceable. So they have teams and folks within IBM that obviously got and some old before the acquisition. I think that it's it's highly complimentary. IBM has very strong capabilities, room management and monitoring security and things like that. All those things inevitably turned to automation, right? So I think it really it only gives us access to IBM in their sort of their channel and their accounts in their reach, but also their teams that have these sets of technologies that are natural complement, you know, whether it's Watson driving Ansel or security or network monitoring, driving danceable automation. It's a really powerful combination. >>Yeah, I just want to get your kind of macro level view on automation. I sat on a panel talking to sys. Admin is about careers, and it was the number one thing that they felt they needed to embrace. We see, like the r p a community, probably an adjacency toe. What you see, heavily pushing automation, you know, help explain. You know what? How important automation is in that it's it's not, you know, just a silver bullet also. >>Yeah. So, you know, a lot of times people are, you know, the sort of the easy description is automation is gonna eliminate jobs or things like that. I think it's more like sort of the power tool analogy. You know, you know, if you had a you know, a hammer and a screwdriver before now you've got a power screwdriver and automatic camera, and you know all sorts of additional things. Their force multipliers for these people to do broader, bigger things faster, right? Um and that's what every organization is driving them to do. How agile can be our competition deployed. Something How fast can we deploy it? How many new releases a week Can we deploy when security hits? You know how fast we closed the vulnerabilities of hours, days, weeks or we do it in minutes. >>The old expression. If you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But if you're an agile hammer, you can adjust the figure out. The opportunity is kind of awesome. Kind of quote there. This speaks to the changes. I want to get your thoughts. Last question for you is that someone's been in the industry a while. We first interviewed nothing 2014 and open staff when we first started chatting around the industry. So much has changed. Now more than ever, the modern enterprise is looking at cloud impact, operating as an operating model cloud one Dato Amazon Compute storage stand up software and there piece of cake start ups were doing it. Now it's enterprises really want to crack the code on cloud software automation, observe abilities, new categories emerging kind of speaks to this cloud. 2.0, how would you describe that to folks, if if asked, what's the modern error enterprise Cloud architecture look like? What is cloud two point. Oh, how would you take a stab at that definition? So >>I would say after all these years, Cloud is really entering its infancy. And what does that mean? We're just starting now to appreciate what can be built on cloud. And we're gonna get a big boost soon with five g, which is gonna increase the amount of data, the amount of edge devices I ot and things like that the cloud is becoming, you know, the first choice for people. When they build their architecture in the business, it's gonna fundamentally change everything. So I think you know some people. What what's the quote? You know, some people overestimate You know what a technology can do in the short term and underestimate what it can do in the long term. We're now getting to that point where people are going to build some really powerful, cloud based applicator. >>You see, this is a big wave that big time twice. Yeah. I mean, we had a quote stew on the Cube last week. Date is the new software software abstractions. Automation. This is the new way means the whole new architecture so exciting. Thanks for coming on the key Appreciate Just for having. We're here at the animal fests Acute I'm Jumper Stewed Minutemen breaking down The analysis. Getting into the automation for all conversation. Big category developing. We're covering here. Live with more after this short break.