>> Welcome. My name is Richard Henshall. I'm a senior manager for product management, for Ansible Automation Platform. Think to yourself, how did you adapt to the changes this year? How was your team forced to adapt? And were you prepared and had you been automating already? Talking for the Ansible team, we're ready to move forward. Now we suspect that sentiment is shared by many of us here. We just had a good lesson in why being able to adapt quickly is so important. The previous ways of working may not always be available to us, and we have to change the way we focus and look at things. And this is why I have such a strong belief in the power that automation can gift us. And if we remind ourselves of what the goal of automation is, and to put it very simply, to perform work with minimal human interaction On one hand, this sounds great, no work. But it can also seem very impersonal. And the reality is automation cannot be achieved without knowledge and experience. Because what needs to be automated is what we learn. So much of what we do is specific to our circumstances, to our business or our own personal backgrounds. So how we approach automation is also important. And that's why this year's message "Automate to connect" is relevant to the times we find ourselves in. As a rhetorical question, and of course, all of these are rhetorical questions. I'm sat in a room at my house, staring at a camera. I would next ask you why we need to connect? And what do we connect for? Do we connect to share knowledge, to learn from others, to work on common goals and objectives? Reality is it should be all of these. Any intent when we connect from our work perspective, needs to be about collaboration. Collaboration is essential when we approach how we deal with change. Because when we talk about change, we often see it explained as people process and technology. But when we're forced to change, the unexpected circumstances, you can't always be prepared. You're not always given the time to plan and prepare the way you'd like. So having a way to connect, to build relationships and to collaborate is more important than ever. Back in the days when I was learning my trade, middleware engineering before the endless video calls, presentations and spreadsheets, the most difficult relationship to improve was between us in engineering and the network team. And it wasn't because of the skills it wasn't because we didn't like each other, at least I'd like to think so. And it wasn't for lack of trying. It's because the network team, they're on a different floor, big security door, magnetic locks, special key cards that you needed to have access for. It was aggressively protected so they couldn't be interfered with. It wasn't this opportunity to build the relationships in the same way that we could when we could go and collaborate with the Linux Windows or storage teams. You couldn't wander off and discuss a problem, just have a chat, they were locked away. Now, maybe they like that and sometimes it's good to be locked away, but it forms a barrier. And it's a barrier to collaboration. And so with this group, collaboration required meetings, it required planning and this made it harder. And when something's hard, it makes it easier not to do it. And additionally, we didn't have a platform to help us. So ask yourself, does that sound familiar to your circumstance? What we needed to connect those relationships and we've seen this time and time again, is that for automation we need a consistent technology foundation to connect. With the foundation encourages simplicity for collaboration foundation to connect the people, process and technology and a foundation to help us build trust in those relationships. If we'd had that foundation, that platform, we could have been successful much faster. 'Cause it's important we understand that success depends on trust between groups. To be successful in adapting to change we need to know we trust when the situation may not be perfect. It might be different offices, could be different countries, probably different languages, maybe even different objectives between these different groups. It might be a global pandemic, which is a phrase I never thought I would say in a keynote, but connecting with your colleagues, collaborating and therefore participating in the work that's done. Working as a wider team, enables you to see a broader perspective. Because how else do we trust? Unless we understand each other. How do we trust what we can create? Who has created it? Is he up to standard? And how do we trust what's running where? And who's been running it that we can scale with the correct control? And how do we trust that we can engage removing friction and complexity. And we can do all these things by being given the opportunity to participate, to be included in the overall process. Ultimately, how do we participate to achieve our goals? And what goals do we choose? Your goals are your business challenges automate what makes both your business and IT successful because participation is key to that process. And the more people you can bring together to connect, the more benefit you can achieve. If we've connected and collaborated, we trust what's being produced because automation can be a selfish act. I, the individual do something to make my job easier, but you should think of automation as a gift of knowledge and experience. How can you automate your job to make your colleagues' lives easier? So as we assume and know that participation enables collaboration, how do we help you to collaborate? Well with Ansible, the language of collaboration. And to collaborate, we need to connect. And for that, we have the Ansible Automation Platform. Everything I've described so far is drawn from our collective experience with customers. When Ansible the tool was released, it started as a way to perform automation in a simpler way. As your needs changed, we added more domains and then your needs changed again. As complexity and scale surfaced, a different set of challenges for us to look after. Not only did you do the automation, you need to do more automation as you achieve some successes. And afterwards you have to manage all that automation. To be successful we have deserved that it's not just what you do, it's how and where you do it. It's not just about the tool. It's about the structure, the framework. A focal point and a user experience in maintaining your automation assets. And this is why we focused all of our product offerings into Ansible Automation Platform, a single offering for enterprise grade automation. We've supported your changes in the past, and we've been working to support your changes for the future, help you adapt and connect. Now, if Ansible is the language of collaboration, collections, Ansible content collections are the building blocks of how you simplify the connection of your trusted technologies. Last year, we launched collections as a way to improve the management of content distributed within the Ansible project and the Ansible products. The teams involved were busy working on making this happen over the last 12 months. Working with our community and partners to migrate over 4000.5 modules. This work including this summer with the Ansible collections, 1.0 release. Last Ansible Fest we unveiled certified platforms with the Ansible certified partner program. End to end support for Ansible content between Red Hat and our trusted partners. We now have over 50 certified platforms focused on curated enterprise technology domains. The platforms that you use and rely upon because connecting these domains is connecting your teams. I'm talking about connecting teams. I'm sure that your planning has started already working on cloud native adoption. Key to that cloud native journey and story are containers. And that brings its own set of changes to the way that we work. And we want to support you as you adapt to these changes. I assume most of you are aware that OpenShift is Red Hat's intuivating container orchestration platform based on Kubernetes. And I'd like to announce the release of certified Ansible content collections of Red Hat OpenShift. Whether it be for augmenting provisioning, customizing cluster nodes, or data operations. Collections gives us the perfect opportunity to deliver these use cases and more. Because we know Red Hat customers have chosen and trust Ansible Automation and OpenShift platforms to drive transformation programs. But the connection between these two platforms and the teams that deliver these has always been very implementation efforts. We know that we need to move away from that implementation effort and move to product integration. The reality of evolving tech is it's never all or nothing. If you're fortunate, you can deploy your cloud native application entirely on OpenShift. But what happens, we need to manage across clusters or access existing infrastructure like networks or databases. We're excited to bridge traditional container and edge through Ansible Automation. Perhaps the only automation and container platform solution that is truly agnostic Ansible just doesn't care whose platform you're running on. The new Ansible resource operator, which we deployed as part of Red Hat advanced cluster management is our answer. We're making the Ansible Automation platform a first class provider inside ACM. To enable call outs to automation assets deployed on the automation platform and to make it easily accessible to container management workflows and connect two industry leading technology platforms. Enabling this integration with our customers to identify and enforce policies, applied governance models consistently across multiple clusters, as a deploy and scale complex applications across hybrid multi cluster environments. In the future, the resource operator will be available for any OpenShift deployed service to integrate to the Ansible Automation Platform. And to find out more about this, be sure to checkout Matt Jones' "Future of Ansible Automation Talk" as well as the ACM breakout sessions. Now, as collections are about connecting technology and product integrations are about connecting process. We still need to think about connecting people. How do we ensure that users can find trusted content? So while many users are happy to get content from Ansible galaxy, we know that many enterprises are far less comfortable with that situation. And certainly not comfortable uploading private developed content themselves. We also know that galaxy isn't the only source of content for you to use. There are other source control, repositories, other locations, perhaps even file shares where you allow your teams to collaborate and connect. With all these different sources it can be hard for your users, your internal communities to connect and trust they're using approved content. So we want to connect teams, help them collaborate, have shared goals and ensure trust in how they automate. We need to fill that gap. And that's why last year we launched the automation hub on cloud@redhat.com. As a trusted source for download downstream certified Ansible content supported as part of ground sports automation platform subscription. And this is where you access the collections for those 50 certified platforms I mentioned earlier. But that was only part one of the plan. So while we can provide a location for trusted content that doesn't bring together content from other sources. Before, I mentioned collections were introduced to help the management of automation content. By adopting collections, you provide a path for automation developers to bring content together in a common location, allow multiple teams to increase their time to value in the automation adoption journeys. But to connect internal communities of practice, we need to provide a focal point for all things related to automation content. And that's why we're pleased to announce that the private version of automation hub will be released to the content and knowledge management component of the Ansible Automation Platform. Your privately hosted location for all your Ansible content, to allow you to curate which content is available from which sources, whether it's from Red Hat, the Ansible community, or develop internally. You now have the control over which content you trust. Finally, this year we launched our third hosted service and no additional cost to platform customers. The automation services catalog. The purpose of this service was to allow you to connect your business users with rules-based governance and a simplified user experience to the automation creator deployed via the platform. We're announcing a tech preview launch with the connected technology security connect to your own prem platform environments. It's based on a technology that's part of our future plans. And again, if you attend Matt Jones' "Future of Ansible Automation Talk", you'll hear more about what we're planning in this area. Because this year has been somewhat challenging, automation and Ansible have become more important to many individuals and organizations. So I could leave you with one set of thoughts to adapt and to change as we face, keep things simple, participate in making automation happen and understand the problems to be solved, but always try and keep it simple. Evolve and scale as you connect your teams, as you would grow and expand your automation, grow and expand the scale you're working at as you move forward. And collaborate to break down the silos and domains that build and build your automation that makes change possible. Whether you're an Ansible expert or someone looking for some way to start, we have sessions we hope will inspire you to make your own changes and sessions that will give you the knowledge of how to adapt for the future. Thank you and happy automating.