(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Women In Tech, International Women's Day 2022. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I have two guests from AWS here with me. Carolina Pina joins us, the head of Enterprise Enablement for LATAM and Laura Alvarez Modernel is here as well, Public Sector Programs Manager at AWS. Ladies, it's great to have you on theCUBE. >> Nice to meet you. >> Thank you for having us. >> Carolina, let's start with you. Talk to me a little bit about your role, what it is that you're doing there. >> So my role in AWS is to actually create mechanisms of massive training to try to close the talent gap that we have in the region. And when I mentioned talent gap, I'm talking about obviously digital and cloud-computing skills. So that's, that's, in a nutshell what my role entails. >> Lisa: Got it. How long have you been in that role? Just curious. >> So I've been at AWS a little bit over, over two years. I was actually in the public sector team when I joined, leading the education vertical for Latin American Canada. And I recently joined the commercial sector now leading these massive training efforts for the region for LATAM. >> And Laura, you're in public sector. Talk to me a little bit about your role. >> Yes, I'm in public sector. I'm also based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. So yeah, I'm from Latin America, and I lead educational and community impact programs in the Southern cone of Latin America. I also lead diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and I'm part of the Women at Amazon global board. That's our affinity group to make sure we make efforts towards building a more equal world. And on a personal note I'm really passionate about the topic of gender equality because I truly think it affects us all as women and as Latins. So that's something that I'm always interested in collaborating with. >> Lisa: Excellent. Carolina back to you. If we think about from an enablement perspective how is AWS partnering with its customers and its partners to train and employ women particularly in technology? >> Oh, sure. Lisa, so it's not a surprise. We, like I mentioned, you know we have a big cloud skills, talent gap in the region. In fact, you know, 69% of companies have reported talent shortages and difficulty hiring. So, and this represents a 15 year high. So, many of these companies are actually, you know, our own commercial customers. So they approach us saying, you know, asking for for support training and developing their talent. So like I mentioned, in my role I create massive training efforts and initiatives. So we always take into consideration women, minorities, underrepresented community, and not just for the current talent, meaning like the people that are currently employed, but also to ensure that we are proactively implementing initiatives to develop a talent of younger you know, a younger generation and a talent. So we can, you know, to inspire them and, and ensure that they, that we're seeing them represented in companies like AWS, you know and our customers, and in our partners. And obviously we, when we sit down with customers to craft these massive trainings you know, leveraging their ecosystems and communities, we actually try to use all our AWS training and certification portfolio which includes, you know, in live in class with live in structures, in classroom trainings. We also have our AWS Skill Builder platform which is the platform that allows us to, you know to reach a broader audience because it has, you know over 500 free and on-demand classes. And we also have a lot of different other programs that touches in different audiences. You know, we have AWS re/Start for underrepresented, and underemployed minorities. We also have AWS Academy, which is the program that we have for higher education institutions. And we have AWS, you know, Educate which also touches, you know, cloud beginners. So in every single of these programs, we ensure that we are encompassing and really speaking to women and developing training and developing women. >> Lisa: That's a great focus there. Laura, talk to me about upskilling. I know AWS is very much about promoting from within. What are some of the things that it's doing to help women in Latin America develop those tech skills and upskill from where, maybe where they are now? >> Well, Lisa, I think that is super interesting because there's definitely a skills gap problem, right? We have all heard about. And what's funny is also that we have this huge opportunity in Latin America to train people and to help further develop the countries. And we have the companies that need the talent. So why is there still a gap, right? And I think that's because there's no magic solution to solving this problem. No, like epic Hollywood movie scene that it's going to show how we close the gap. And it takes stepping out of our comfort zone. And as Carolina mentioned, collaborating. So, we at AWS have a commitment to help 29 million people globally to grow their technical skills with free cloud-computing skills training by 2025. I know that sounds a lot through educational programs but we do have as Carolina mentioned, a Skill Builder you can go into the website for free, enter, choose your path, get trained. We have Academy that we implement with universities. Re/Start that is a program that's already available in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Costa Rica. So there are a lot of opportunities, but you also mentioned something else that I would like to dive a bit deeper that is Latin American women. And yesterday we had the opportunity to record a panel about intersectionality with three amazing Latin women. And what we have to learn from that is that these are two minorities that intersect, right. We're talking about females that are minority. Latinas are minority. And in tech, that is also something that is even bigger minority. So there are more difficulties there and we need to make sure that we are meeting that talent that is there that is in Latin America, that exists. We know for sure we have unicorns in Latin America that are even AWS customers like Mercado Libre, and we have to meet them with the opportunities. And that's why we created a program that came from identifying how this problem evolves in Latin America, that there is a lack of confidence in women also that they don't feel prepared or equipped. There is a cultural component why we don't choose tech careers. And we partner with universities, more than 12 universities in Latin America with the International American Development Bank as well to create tech skills that's a free five weeks program in order to get students and get female in Latin America, into the tech world. And we also have them with mentorship. So I think that is an opportunity to truly collaborate because we as AWS are not going to solve these by ourselves, right? We need everyone pitching in on that. >> Lisa: Right. It's absolutely a team effort. You mentioned something important in terms of helping women, and especially minorities get out of their comfort zone. Carolina, I'm curious when you're talking with women and getting them into the program and sharing with them all of the enablement programs that you have, how do you help them be confident to get out of that comfort zone? That's a hard thing to do. >> Yeah, no, for sure. For sure, Lisa, well, I, you know, a lot of times actually I use myself as an example because, you know, I studied engineering and industrial systems engineering many years ago. And you know, a lot of my career has been in in higher education and innovation and startups. And as I mentioned in the intro I've been at AWS for a little bit over two years. So I, my career has not been in cloud and I recently joined the cloud. So I actually had to go through our own trainings and get our own certifications. So I, that's, you know a lot of times I actually, I use my own example, so people understand that you don't have to come from tech, you don't have to come, you can actually be a non-tech person and, and also see the the benefits of the cloud. And you don't have to only, you know, learn cloud if you're in the IT department or in an IT team. So sometimes, I also emphasize that the cloud and the future is absolutely the cloud. In fact, the world economic foreign, you know teaches us that cloud-computing is that the technology that's going to be mostly adopted by 2025. So that's why we need to ensure that every single person, women and others are really knowledgeable in the cloud. So that's why, you know, technical and untechnical. But I, you know, I use myself as an example for them to say, you know, you can actually do it. And obviously also I collaborate with Laura and a lot of the women at Amazon Latin America Group to also you know, ensure that we're doing webinars and panels. So we show them ourselves as role model like, Laura is an incredible role model for our community. And so it's also to to show examples of what the possibilities are. And that's what we do. >> Lisa: I love that you're sharing >> And can I make a note there also? >> Please, yes. >> To add to that. I think it also requires the companies and the, and the private sector to get out of their comfort zone, right? Because we are not going to find solutions doing what we are already doing. We truly need to go and get near these persons with a new message. Their interest is there in these programs we have reached more than 3,000 women already in Latin America with tech skills. So it's not that women are not interested. It's like, how do we reach them with a message that resounds with them, right? Like how we can explain the power of technology to transform the world and to actually improve their communities. I think there's something there also that we need to think further of. >> It's so important. You know, we say often when we're talking about women in tech, that she needs to see what she can be or if she can't see it, she can't be it. So having those role models and those mentors and sponsors is absolutely critical for women to get, I call it getting comfortably uncomfortable out of that comfort zone and recognizing there's so many opportunities. Carolina, to your point, you know, these days every company is a tech company, a data company whether you're talking about a car dealer, a grocery market. So your point about, you know, and obviously the future being cloud there's so much opportunity that that opens up, for everybody really, but that's an important thing for people to recognize how they can be a part of that get out of their comfort zone and try something that they maybe hadn't considered before. >> Yes. And, actually, Lisa I would love to share an example. So we have a group, O Boticário, which is one of our customers one of the, the lead retails in Brazil. And they've been a customer of AWS since 2013 when they realized that, you know the urgency and the importance of embracing state of the art technology, to your point, like, you know this is a retail company that understands that needs to be, you know embrace digital transformation, especially because, you know they get very busy during mother's days and other holidays during the year. So they realized that they, instead of outsourcing their IT requirements to technology experts they decided to actually start developing and bringing the talent, you know within itself, within, you know, technology in-house. So they decided to start training within. And that's when we, obviously we partnered with them to also create a very comprehensive training and certification plan that started with, you know a lot of the infrastructure and security teams but then it was actually then implemented in the rest of the company. So going back to the point like everybody really needs to know. And what we also love about O Boticário is they they really care about the diversion and inclusion aspect of this equation. And we actually collaborated with them as well through this program called Desenvolve with the Brazilian government. And Desenvolve means developing Portuguese and they this program really ensures that we are also closing that gender and that race gap and ensuring that they're actually, you know, developing talent in cloud for Brazil. So we, you know, obviously have been very successful with them and we will continue to do even more things with them particular for this topic. >> Lisa: I've always known how customer focused AWS is every time we get to go to re:Invent or some of the events but it's so nice to hear these the educational programs that you're doing with customers to help them improve DEI to help them enable their own women in their organizations to learn skills. I didn't realize that. I think that's fantastic very much a symbiotic part of AWS. If we think about the theme for this year's International Women's Day, Breaking The Bias I want to get both of your opinions and Laura we'll start with you, what that means to you, and where do you think we are in Latin America with breaking the bias? >> Well, I think breaking the bias is the first step to truly being who we are every day and being able to bring that to our work as well. I think we are in a learning curve of that. The companies are changing culturally, as Carolina mentioned we have customers that are aware of the importance of having women. And as we say at AWS not only because there is a good business reason because there is, because there are studies that show that we can increase the country's CPD, but also because it's important and it's the right thing to do. So in terms of breaking the bias I think we are learning and we have a long way to go. I talked a bit earlier about intersectionality and that is something that is also important to highlight, right? Because we are talking about females but we are also talking about another minorities. We're talking about underrepresented communities, Indigenous People, Latins. So when these overlap, we face even bigger challenges to get where we want to get, right? And to get to decision making places because technology is transforming the ways we take decisions, we live, and we need someone like us taking those decisions. So I think it's important at first to be aware and to see that you can get there and eventually to start the conversation going and to build the conversation, not to just leave it but to make sure we hear people and their input and what they're going through. >> Lisa: Yes. We definitely need to hear them. Carolina, what's your take on breaking the bias and where do you from your experience, where do you think we are with it? >> Yeah, no, I'm as passionate as Laura on this topic. And that's why we, you know we're collaborating in the Women at Amazon Latin America Chapter, because we're both very, I think breaking the bias starts with us and ourselves. And we are very proactive within AWS and externally. And I feel it's also, I mean, Lisa, what we've been doing is not only, obviously gathering you know, the troops and really making sure that, that we have very aggressive goals internally, but also bringing you know, bringing our male counterparts, and other, you know, other members of the other communities, because the change, we're not going to make it alone. Like the change where it is not women only talking to women is going to make the change. We actually need to make sure the male and other groups are represented. And the dialogue that they're that we're very conscious about that. And I feel like we're seeing more and more that the topic is becoming more of a priority not only within AWS and Amazon but we also see it because now that I meet with when I meet with customers around the region they really want to see how we can collaborate in these diversion and inclusion initiatives. So I think we are breaking the bias because now this topic is more top of mind. And then we are being more proactively addressing it and and training people and educating people. And I feel we're really in a pivoted point where the change that we've really been wanting to we will see in the next you know, few years which is very exciting. >> Lisa: Excellent, and we'll see that with the help of women like you guys. Thank you so much for joining me today, talking about what you're doing, how you're helping organizations across AWS's ecosystem, customers, partners, and helping, of course, folks from within you, right. It's a holistic effort, but we are on our way to breaking that bias and again, I thank you both for your insights. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, Lisa, for the opportunity. >> My pleasure. For Carolina Pina and Laura Alvarez Modernel, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Women in Tech, International Women's Day 2022. (upbeat music)

>> From Tavern on the Green, in Central Park, New York, it's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision Solution Day, brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to the beautiful Tavern on the Green, in the heart of Central Park. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name's Dave Vellante. We're covering Vertias Solution Days, #VtasVision. Veritas used to have the big, single tent, big tent customer event, and decided this year, it's going to go belly to belly. Go out to 20 cities, intimate customer events where they can really sit down with customers across from the table; certainly, this beautiful venue is the perfect place to do that. Harish Venkat is here as the VP of Marketing and Global Sales Enablement at Veritas. Thanks for coming on, Harish. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> So, we're going to change it up a little bit. Let's hit the Escape key a few times and talk about >> Yeah. >> some of the big mega trends that you're seeing. You spend a lot of time with customers. You had some intimate conversations today. What do you see as the big trends driving the marketplace? >> So at my level, what I observe with the highest thing is simplicity, instant gratification, is two things that customers love. Forget about customers, even we as individuals, we love simplicity and instant gratification. Examples around that, you know, think about back in the days where you had to take a picture, process the film, and then realize, "oh my god, the film's not even worth watching." Now you have digital photography, you take millions of pictures, and instantly you view the picture, and keep whatever you want, delete whatever you don't want. A small example of how simplicity and instant gratification is changing the world. In fact, if you listen to Warren Buffett, he'll say, "Invest in companies that is making your life a lot easier," so, if I spread that across the entire industry, I can go on with examples like Netflix disrupting Blockbuster because it made it easy for customers to watch movies at their time, and making it easy for consumption. You look at showrooming concept, where you go to Best Buy's of the world and many others, and look at a product, but you don't buy it right there. You go to your phone and say, "okay, do I do a price compare?" And then order it on the phone, where someone delivers it to your house So the list goes on and on, and the underpinning result as a result of this is disruption, all right? You look at Fortune 500 companies, just in the last decade. Over 52% of those companies have been disrupted and the underpinning phenomenon is all about instant gratification and simplicity. >> And Amazon is another great example of, I remember when my wife said to me, "Dave, you got to invest in this company." It was like... 1997. >> Yeah. >> Invest in this company, Amazon? >> Yeah. >> At the time, it was mostly books, but they started to get into other retail, so right-- >> We missed that boat, didn't we? >> I actually did, but I sold, ah! (laughs) >> I never lost money making a profit, so okay. So, at the same time, customer... Customers just can't get there... >> Yeah. >> Overnight, so what are some of the challenges that they have in getting to that level of simplicity? >> Yeah, so you look at IT spend, and when you look at the breakdown of IT spend, you'll see that about 87%, and in many cases, even greater than 90%, they spend just to keep the lights on and these are well-established companies that I'm talking about. In fact, I was doing a Keynote in, in Minneapolis one time and a CIO came and said, "Harish, I totally disagree." "In my company, it's 96%." >> (Dave laughs) >> Just to keep the lights on! So you're talking about less than 10% of your IT spend gone towards innovation, and then you look at emerging companies who are spending almost 100% all around innovation, leveraging the clouds of the world, leveraging the latest and greatest technology, and then doing these disruptions, and making things simple for consumption, and as a result, the disruption happens, so I think we have an opportunity to re-balance the equation in the enterprise space, and making it more available for innovation than just keeping the lights on. >> So part of that... the equation of shifting that needle, moving that needle, if you will, just eliminating non-value-producing activities that are expensive. We know, still, IT is still very labor-intensive, so we got to take that equation down and shift it. Are you seeing companies have success in shifting, re-training people toward digital initiatives and removing some of the heavy lifting, and what's driving that? >> Yeah, so I think it's a journey, right? So, I mean, the entire notion of journeying to the cloud is one of the big initiative to take out heavily manual-intensive, data center-intensive, which is costing a lot of money. If I can just shift all of those workloads to the cloud, that'll help me re-balance the equation. I view the concept of data intensity, which is really two variables to it. Back to your point, if I can take the non-core activity, rely on my partner ecosystem to say what is best in class solutions that I can use as my foundation layer, and then innovate on top of it, then yes, you have the perfect winning formula to really have a lot of market share and wallet share. If you're trying to do the entire stack by yourself, good luck. You'll be one of those guys who will be disrupted. There is no doubt. >> So well, okay, that says partnerships are very important. >> Without a doubt. >> You're not too alone. >> Channel is very important. >> Yes. >> So, so what do you see, in terms of the ebb and flow in the industry, of partnerships, how those are forming? Hear a lot about "co-opetition," which is kind of an interesting term, that is now, we're living. >> Yeah. >> What's your, what's your observation about partnerships, and how companies are able to leverage them? What's best practice there? >> Yeah, so just as Veritas, we're a data protection leader company. We have incredible market share and wallet share, amongst the Fortune 500 and Fortune 100 companies, but even within our incredible standing, we have to rely on other partners. We don't do everything on our own. We have incredible relationship with our cloud service providers, with the hyper-converged system to the world, like Nutanix. We just announced Pure today, so when we combine those partnerships, we can offer incredible solutions for our customers, who can then take care of the first variable that I talked about, and then innovate on top of it. So I think partner ecosystem is extremely important. For customers, it's very important that they pick the right players, so they don't have to worry about the data, and they can continually focus on innovation. >> We were talking to NBC Universal today, and one of themes in my take-aways was he's trying to get to the... he's a, basically a data protector, backup administrator, essentially, but he's trying to get to the point where he can get the business lines to self-serve. >> Yeah. >> And that seems to me to be part of the simplicity. Now... an individual like that, got to re-skill. Move toward a digital transformation. Move that needle so it's not 90% keeping the lights on. It's maybe you get to 50/50. >> Yeah. What are you seeing in terms of training and re-education of both existing people and maybe even how young people are being educated, your thoughts? >> Yeah, I think the young people coming out of college, they're already tuned to this, so to me, those are the disruptors of the world. You got to keep an eye on those millennials of the world because you don't have to train them more, because they're coming out of college, you know. They don't have the legacy background. They don't have the data centers of the world. They are already in the cloud. They're born in the cloud, sort of individuals, so I think the challenge is more about existing individuals who have the pedigree of all the journey that, you and I, we have seen, and how do you re-tune yourself to the modern world? And I think that presents an opportunity to say, "Okay look, if you don't adapt real quick," "you don't have a chance to survive" "in this limited amount of time you have in the IT space," but having said that, we're also seeing that you have some time window, and that time window will continue to shrink, so when we talk about this transformation journey, you can see year after year, the progress that, that's been made in the transformation, this leap and bound, and that's all related to Moore's Law. You think about computer and storage, it's becoming a lot cheaper, and so the innovation rate is continuing to go up. So you have very limited window: adapt or die. >> So, Harish, we were talking about, we've talked about digital transformation. We talk about simplifying; we're talking about agility. We're talking about shifting budget priorities, all very important initiatives. How is Veritas helping customers achieve these goals, so that they can move the needle from 90% keep the lights on to maybe 50/50, and put more into innovation. >> So four major themes: one is data protection. If you don't have your core enterprise asset, which is your data protected, then you can't really innovate anything on top of it. You'll constantly be worrying about what happens if I have a ransomware attack, what if I have a data outage, so Veritas takes care of it, back to the notion that you pick the best players to take care of the fundamental layer, which is around the data. The second thing that I... I would say Veritas can help is the journey to the cloud. Cloud, again, is another instrument for you to take out cost out of your data center. You're agile, you're nimble, so you can focus on innovation. Do you see the trend? So again, Veritas helps you with that journey to the cloud. It allows to move data and application to the cloud. When you're in the cloud, we protect your data in the cloud. The third thing I would say is doing more with less. I talked about the IT equation already. Software-defined storage allows you to do that. And the last thing I would say is compliance. We can't get away from compliance, the fact that Veritas has solutions to have visibility around the data. You can classify the data. You can always be compliant working with Veritas. You take care of these four layers, you don't have to worry about your data asset. You can worry about innovation at that point. >> So it, to me, it's sort of a modern version of the rebirth of Veritas. When Veritas first started, I always used to think of it as a data management company, not just a backup company. >> Right. >> And that's really what we're talking about here today, evolving toward a data-centric approach, that full life cycle of data management, simplifying that, bringing the cloud experience to your data wherever it is. Could be "on-prem." >> Yeah. >> Could be in the cloud, sort of this API-based architecture, microservices, containers... >> Yep. >> All the kind of interesting buzzwords today, but they enable agility in a cloud-like experience, that Netflix-like experience that you were talking about. >> Absolutely, right, so we're super excited. The one thing I would also say is what our latest net backup, 812, the other thing that I talked about, which is simplicity and ease of use: we are addressing both of that in addition to the robust brand that we have around protecting data. So you now you have simplicity, ease of use, instant gratification, all the basic ingredients, and Veritas is here to protect them. >> Harish, it's been a great day. Thanks for helping me close out the segment here. This venue is really terrific. It's been a while since I've been at Tavern on the Green. Some of you guys, I don't think you've ever seen it before. Seth's down here; he's, he's a city boy but we country bumpkins up in Massachusetts, we love coming down here, in the heart of Yankee country. So thanks very much-- >> Of course. >> For helping me close out here, great segment. All right, thanks for watching, everybody. We're out here, from New York City, Tavern on the Green. You've been watching theCUBE; I'm Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (light electronic music)

(ambient Music) >> Announcer: Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE. Covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, The OpenStack Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's coverage of OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost for the week is John Troyer, happy to welcome back to the program two CUBE alumni, we have Margaret Dawson and John Alessio. Margaret is the vice-president of Portfolio Product Marketing and John is the vice-president of Global Services. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Good to be here. >> Alright so, John has gotten the week and a half now of the red hat greatness of being at summit last week, I unfortunately missed Summit, first time in five years I hadn't been at the show, did watch some of the interviews, caught up on it, and of course we talked to a lot of your team but, Margaret, let's start with you >> Margaret: Okay. >> One of the things we were looking at was, really, it's not just a maturation of OpenStack, but it's beyond where we were, how it fits into the greater picture, something we've been observing is when you think about open sourced projects, it's not one massive stack that you just deploy, it's you take what you need, it kind of gets embedded all over the place, and help us frame for us where we are today. >> Wow, that's a big question. So I think there's a couple things, I mean, in talking to customers, I think there's a couple trends that are happening. One is one you've probably talked about a lot and we probably covered at the Red Hat Summit which is just this overall digital transformation, digital leadership, whatever you want to call it, digital disruption tends to be a thing, and open sources definitely playing, really, the critical role of that, right, you will not be able to innovate and disrupt or even manage a disruption if you're not able to get to those technologies and innovations quickly and be able to adapt to it and have it work with other things. So the need for openness, for open APIs, for open technologies, inner-operability allows us to move faster and have that innovation and agility that every enterprise and organization needs world wide. And tied to that is kind of this overall hybrid cloud, so it's not just, OpenStack is a part of a much bigger kind of solution or goal that enterprises have in order to win and transform and be a digital leader. >> Margaret, I love that. Digital transformation, absolutely something we hear time and again from customers. >> Margaret: Yup. >> John, I've got a confession to make. I'm an infrastructure person and sometimes we're always like, why, come on, we spend all our time talking about how all the widgets and doo-dads and things-- >> Margaret: Blinky lights. >> Blinky lights, up on stage we have the-- >> He missed the blinking lights >> He did miss the blinking light. >> They had a similar stack up on stage yesterday. >> Oh, that's right. >> Same fans you could hear in the back of the room. But the whole goal of infrastructure always, of course, is to run the application, the whole reason for applications is to run and transform and do-- >> John: Serve the business >> Yeah, so that's where I'm going with this is we're talking more about not only that foundational layer of OpenStack but everything that goes with it and on it so maybe you could talk about the services-- >> Sure. So I think, Stu, that's exactly what we're seeing. So if you think about the last year and what we're seeing with services and projects here on OpenStack, I think the first thing to talk about is the fact that it's been growing quite a bit, in fact, from a 2017 versus 2018 perspective, our number of OpenStack projects have increased 36% year on year globally. So we're seeing a lot of demand, but we're seeing the projects be a lot more comprehensive. So these are OpenStack projects, but they're OpenStack with Open Shift, with Cloud Form, with Suff, as an example, and this combination is, really, a very very powerful combination. In fact, it's been so powerful that we started to see some common patterns of customers building a hybrid cloud solution, using OpenStack as their kind of private cloud infrastructure, but then using Open Shift as their way to kind of deploy applications in containers in that hybrid way, that we created a whole solution, which we announced two weeks ago, when John was at our Red Hat Summit, called Containers on Cloud. And that's taking all of our best practices around combining these products together in a very comprehensive, programmatic approach to deploying those solutions together. >> And I think it's really important, I mean, as you know, I think you and I met when we were both in networking, so coming from that infrastructure background but we really all need to talk about the workload down, starting with the application, starting with the business goal, and then how the infrastructure is almost becoming a services-based abstraction layer where you just need it to be always there. >> John: Yup. >> And whether it's public cloud or private cloud or traditional infrastructure, what developers in the business want is that agility and flexibility and containers provide that. There's other kind of architectural fabrics that allow that consistency and that's when it gets really exciting. >> One thing that's really interesting to me this week at OpenStack, as we've drilled into different customers, and talking to different people, even at lunch, is one, it's real. Everyone I've talked to, stuff in deployment, it went quickly, it's rock solid, it's powering, as we know, actually a lot of that is technical infrastructure that's powering a lot of the world's infrastructure at this point. >> That's right. >> The other thing that was interesting to me is some folks I talked to were saying, "Well, actually we have enough knowledge "that we're actually doing a lot of it ourselves, "we're going upstream." However, so that's great, and that's right for some people, but what I'm kind of been interested in both just coming from Red Hat Summit is both the portfolio, the breadth of the stack, and then all the different offerings that Red Hat, you know, it's not Rel anymore, it's not just Linux anymore, there's everything that's been built up and around and on top for orchestration and management, and then also the training, the services, the support, and that sort of thing, and I was wondering, that's kind of a two-part question, but maybe you all could tackle that. What does Red Hat bring to the table then? >> So, let me just start with, again, just to kind of position what we do as global services, our number one priority is customer success with Red Hat technology, that's the first and foremost thing we do and second is really around building expertise in the ecosystem so our customers have choice and where to go to get that expertise. So, if you start to look at kind of what's been going on as it relates to OpenStack, and, again, many customers are using Upstream bits, but many customers are using Red Hat bits, we see that and we look at the number of people who are getting trained around our technology. So over the last three years, we've trained, through our fee-based programs, 55,000 people on our OpenStack portfolio and in fact from 2017 to 2018 that was up 50% year on year and so the momentum is super super strong. So, that's the first point. The second is it's not just our customers. So part of my remit is, yes, to run consulting and, yes, to drive customer enablement and training, but it's also to build an ecosystem through our business partners. Our business partners use a program we call OPEN, Online Partner Enablement Network, which actually will just be celebrating five years just like OpenStack will, we'll be celebrating five years for OPEN. And our business partner accreditations on OpenStack specifically are up 49% year on year. So we're seeing the momentum in our regional systems integrators, our global systems integrators, our partners at large, building their solutions and capabilities around OpenStack, which I think is fantastic. >> No and it helps a lot with the verticalization of that, right, 'cause every industry has slightly different things they need. The thing I that would add to that, in terms of do-it-yourself community versus a dis-ter that's supported from someone like Red Hat, is it really comes down to core competency. And so even though OpenStack has become vastly simplified from a day one, day two, ongoing management, it is still a complex project. I mean that's the power of it, it can be highly customizable, right, it is an incredibly powerful infrastructure capability and so for most people their core competency is not that, and they need that support at least initially to get it going. What we have done is a couple things. I've actually talked to customers a lot about doing that training earlier and it's for a couple reasons, one is so that they actually have the people in house that have that competency but, two, you're giving infrastructure folks a chance to be part of that future cool stuff, right? I mean, OpenStack's written in Python and there's other languages that are newer and sexier, I guess, but it's still kind of moving them towards that future and for a lot of guys that have been in the data center and the ops world for a long time, they're looking out there at developers and going, I'm not the cool kid anymore, right? So OpenStack actually is a little bit of a window, not just to help companies go through that digital transformation, but actually help your ops personnel get a taste of that future and be part of that transformation instead of being stuck in just mainframe land or whatever, so training them early in the process is a really powerful way to do a lot of things. You know, skillset, retention, as well as then you can manage more of that yourself. >> And then all the way up to Stack, right? I mean, we're talking about containers, and then there's containers but then there's container data storage, container data networking. I mean, you've got the rest of the pieces in that, in Open Shift, in the rest. >> Absolutely. >> That is correct. >> And I think, John, you were at Red Hat Summit, we had a number of different innovation award winners. So I think one good example of kind of this kind of transformation from a digital transformation perspective, but also kind of leveraging a lot of what our Stack has to offer is Cafe Pacific. And so we talked about Cafe, they were one of our innovation award winners and what their challenge really was is how do they create a new modern infrastructure that gave them more flexibility so they could be more responsive to their customers. >> Yeah. >> In the airline industry. And so what they were really looking for was really, truly a hybrid cloud solution. They wanted to be able to have some things run in their infrastructure, have some things run in the public cloud, and we worked with them over the last, little over a year now, Red Hat consulting, Red Hat training, the Red Hat engineering team, in really building a solution that leverage OpenStack, yes, but also a number of other capabilities in the Red Hat portfolio, Open Shift, so they can deploy these applications, containerized applications now both to the public cloud as well as to the private cloud, but also automation through Ansible, which we're hearing a lot about Ansible and products like Ansible here at the conference-- >> Well the Open Stock and Ansible communities are starting to really work well together, just like Kubernetes, you've got a lot of this collaboration happening at the project level not to mention when we actually productize it and take it to customers. >> Yeah, so it's been super super powerful and I think it's a good one where it really hit on what Margaret was saying, which was giving the guys in infrastructure an opportunity to be a part of this huge transformation that Cafe went through, 'cause they were a very very key part of it. >> Yeah. Well, I think we're seeing that also with the open innovation labs. So this is something, which is really an innovation incubation process, it's agile, scrum, whatever, and in those we're not just talking to the developers, we're actually combining developers, functional lines of business leaders, infrastructure, architects, who all come together in a very typical six week kind of agile methodology and what comes out of that, I don't know, I've seen it a couple times, it's magical is all I can say, but having those different perspectives and having those different people work together to innovate is so powerful and they all feel like they're moving that forward and you come out with pilots, and we've seen things where they come out with two apps at the end of six weeks or eight weeks, it's just incredible when they're all focused on that and you start to understand those different perspectives and to me that's open source culture, right? It's awesome. >> And, Margaret, I'd love to hear your perspective also on that hybrid cloud discussion because so many people look at OpenStack and be like, oh, that's private cloud. >> Margaret: Right. >> And, of course, every customer we talk to, they have a cloud strategy. And they're doing lots of SaaS, they've got public cloud, multiple, Red Hat, I know you play across all of them, big announcement with Microsoft last week, last year was Amazon big partnerships with, so is Kubernetes the story, or is Kubernetes a piece of the story, how do all these play together for customers? >> I think Kubernetes is one and so, especially when you look at the broader architectural level, OpenStack becomes obviously the private cloud and enables them to start to do things that are more cloud-native even in their own data center, or if it's hosted or management or more traditional infrastructure, but it really has to be fluid. And a lot of customers initially were saying that their strategy was cloud first, and they would say, "Oh, we're going to put "everything in the public cloud." And then you actually start going through the workloads, you start going through the cost, you start going through the data privacy, or whatever the criteria capabilities are, and that's just not practical, frankly. And so this hybrid reality with private cloud, traditional, and public is going to be the reality for a very very long time, if not forever. There's always going to be things that you want to have better control of. And so Kubernetes at the orchestration layer becomes really critical to be able to have that agility across all those environments, but you have other fabrics like that in your architecture too, we talked about Ansible, it allows you to have common automation and do those play books that you can use across all those different infrastructure, KVM, what's your virtualization fabric, and can KVM take you from traditional virtualization all through public cloud? The answer is yes. So we're going to see increasingly these kind of layers of the overall architecture that allows you to have that flexibility, that management that's still the consistency, which is what you need to keep your policies the same, your access controls, you security, your compliance, and your sanity, whereas before it was kind of Ad Hoc. People would be like, oh, we're just going to put this here, go to public cloud. We're going to do this here, and now people are finding standardizing on things like even Red Hat Enterprise Linux, that's my OS layer, and that allows me to easily do Linux containers in a secure way, et cetera, et cetera. So, doing hybrid cloud means both the agility but you got to have some consistency in order to have the security and control that you need. So it's a little bit different than what we were talking about a few years ago, even. >> And I think one of the things that we've learned in the services world is that we started this idea about 18 months ago, we called these journey adoption programs, which were really the fact that some of these transformations are big, they're not about a single project that's going to last four to six weeks, it's a journey that the customer's going to go on and so when we talk about hybrid cloud, we've actually created this adoption program which can really start with the customer in this whole discovery phase, really, what are you trying to accomplish from a business perspective then take them into a design phase, take them into a deployment phase, take them into an enablement phase, and then take them into a sustainment phase. And there's a number of different services that we'll do across consulting, training, even within Marco Bill Peters Organization, which is our customer experience and engagement organization, around what role a technical account manager can play and really help our customer in the operational phases. And so we've learned this from some of the very large deployments, like Verizon, where we've seen some very-- >> And it's cyclical, right? You can do that many times. >> We do. In fact, you absolutely do. And so we've created now a program, specifically, around hybrid clouded option to try and de-mistify it. >> Yeah. >> Because it is complex. >> Well, and the reality is, there's somewhere around 30% of organizations still do not actually have a clear cloud strategy. And we see that in our own research, our own experiences, but industry analysts come up with the exact same number. >> And Margaret, by the way, the other 70%, the ink still pretty-- >> Yeah. >> Still wet! (laughing) >> Yes, it is. I'll tell you, I love saying cloud first to people because they kind of giggle. It's like, yeah, that's our strategy but we know we don't really know what that means. >> Which cloud? >> Exactly. >> Exactly. >> All the clouds. >> Exactly. >> Alright, well Margaret and John, want to give you a final word, key takeaways you want to have or anything new to the show that you want to point out? >> I would just say we are still in early days. I think sometimes we forget that we, both in the open source communities, in the industry for a long time, tend to be 10 years ahead of where most people are and so when you hear jokes about, oh, is OpenStack still viable or is everything doing this, it's like right now we only have a very small percentage of actual enterprise workloads in the cloud and so we need to just now get to the point where we're all getting mature in this and really start to help our customers and our partners and our communities take this to the next level and work on inter-operability, and ease of use, and management. We're so mature now in technology, now let's put the polish on it, so that the consumption and the utilization can really go to the next level. >> Yeah, and I'll play off what Margaret said. I think it's very very key. When I look at where we've had the biggest success, as defined by, in that discovery phase, the customer lays out for us, here's what our business objectives were, did we achieve those business objectives, it's all about figuring out how we can create the solution and integrate into their environment today. So Margaret said I think very very well which is we have to integrate into these other solutions and every one of these big customer deployments has some Red Hat software, but it also has some other software that we're integrating into because customers have investments. So it's not about rip and replace, it's about integrate, it's about leverage, it's about time to market, and that's what most of the customers I've talked to, they're very worried about time to value, and so that's what we're trying to focus in, I think as a whole company, around Red Hat. >> Margaret: Agree. >> Absolutely. Summed it up very well. John Alessio, Margaret Dawson, thanks so much for joining us again. >> Thanks again. >> For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, watch more coverage here from OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. Thanks for watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: From Hell's Kitchen in New York City, it's theCUBE on the ground at Serverlessconf brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman here with theCUBE and we're at Serverlessconf in New York City in Hell's Kitchen. Happy to have on the program a first time guest, Linda Nichols, who is does Cloud Enablement Reader at Cloudreach. Linda, thanks so much for joining me. >> Thanks. >> Alright, so, it's the fifth one of these events, the first time we've been doing some interviews. I know I'm excited to be here. Tell our audience a little bit about yourself, Cloudreach and what brings you to the event. >> Sure, well, I'm at this event because I love this community. I'm really passionate about Serverless. I was at the event in Austin, I loved it, I had a great time. I submitted talks this time and they accepted mine. And I was so excited. Honestly, I would have come anyway, even if they hadn't invited me. So I work at Cloudreach, it's a company originally based in London, we have an office here in New York and we're a Cloud adoption company. So we're helping companies go from on-premises servers into the Cloud and then once they're in the Cloud, that's sort of where my team comes into play. Where we work with app-modernization, taking the software apps that are now in the cloud, and helping to break apart monoliths and modernize the apps using Serverless. >> Yeah, Linda, tell me a little bit about the community. Because you talked Cloud adoption, most companies I talk to, they're figuring out their Cloud strategy. Some of them are getting on board with containerization, coo-ver-net-tees is the latest hotness, so Serverless is still new, so tell us a little bit about that community, how long you've been a part of it and what is it that excites you so much about it? >> It's been about a year and I think as soon as I started kind of getting into it and creating apps on my own and kind of doing some things for clients, immediately the community was there. I was on Twitter, I was on Gitter, I was talking to Serverless framework people, asking questions and immediately people came back with answers. Yeah, they've really embraced me and everyone else really quickly. And I think that when new people come on the scene and they say, what is this? People in the community are like, we don't really know either, it changes every day. Every time I see a talk from someone, their definition of Serverless is different. And mine is changing, too, with every talk. >> I know we've had that discussion, kind of what is it, but what are the outcomes? What are you excited about? What's helping your users? Any proof points or roll outs or things that have- what has that game changer been? >> I think it's cheap and it's fast. Those are the two really important things, especially with a startup community. They don't have the money, they don't have the funding to really be having an entire development team. And now they can bring in one or two people and they can get something written and deployed really quickly. It's good for prototyping, non-profits, and now, for enterprises too. 'Cause now we're saying it's not just for non-profits, you can save money too. We've brought you into the cloud, you're more secure, you're saving money and now, we're going to save you more money and we're going to make your developers happy too. 'Cause they're having a great time. >> Yeah, I've been looking in the events, so far, and it seems like there's big focus on tooling, helping to understand really digging into it. Because, yes, fast, easy, let me get up, I can save some money, but, there's always the wait, but. Okay, we know we need to work on security. I need to make sure I have visibility. What have you been seeing? What are you impressed that you've seen so far? And what are some of the open things that you think the community still needs to work on? >> Well, one thing that's really interesting is you have the four Cloud platforms and they have similar products which are competing, but they still really are working together. IBM and Google are hanging out behind us, no pressure there really and they're all like, oh great, you have a new tool. That seems cool, it's like what we have. Maybe we can work on ours, make it better. So, they're kind of working together. I think the thing that, maybe, we have to work on is maybe a little bit of standardization, which I think is kind of starting to happen. Because people want to be able to use a hybrid system, or maybe they use multiple Cloud platforms and so standardizing some of the events and the services I think is going to kind of help that. >> Okay, Linda, I want to give you the last takeaway. For people that don't know about Serverless, haven't attended, and any tools or place of view, how do they get started, how do they get into the community that you love so much? >> I think, I would say, start with AWS Lambda, maybe. There's some tutorials on the site. A Cloud Guru has some great tutorials, I have to go give them a plug. And, just start building something. And once you start building, if you have a problem, reach out to the community, they'll help you. They'll answer your questions. >> Absolutely, A Cloud Guru, of course, puts on this event. Really, not only are they, they use the Serverless to be able to build their company, but dramatically, those price points, though. Less time and less money to get involved. Linda, thanks so much for joining us, really appreciate, great, great talking with you. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> Thank you so much for watching theCUBE. (electric bubbly music)