(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to San Francisco, "theCUBE" is live, our day two coverage of VMware Explore 2022 continues. Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. Dave and I are pleased to welcome Jason Collier, principal member of technical staff at AMD to the program. Jason, it's great to have you. >> Thank you, it's great to be here. >> So what's going on at AMD? I hear you have some juicy stuff to talk about. >> Oh, we've got a ton of juicy stuff to talk about. Clearly the Project Monterey announcement was big for us, so we've got that to talk about. Another thing that I really wanted to talk about was a tool that we created and we call it, it's the VMware Architecture Migration Tool, call it VAMT for short. It's a tool that we created and we worked together with VMware and some of their professional services crew to actually develop this tool. And it is also an open source based tool. And really the primary purpose is to easily enable you to move from one CPU architecture to another CPU architecture, and do that in a cold migration fashion. >> So we're probably not talking about CPUs from Tandy, Radio Shack systems, likely this would be what we might refer to as other X86 systems. >> Other X86 systems is a good way to refer to it. >> So it's interesting timing for the development and the release of a tool like this, because in this sort of X86 universe, there are players who have been delayed in terms of delivering their next gen stuff. My understanding is AMD has been public with the idea that they're on track for by the end of the year, Genoa, next gen architecture. So can you imagine a situation where someone has an existing set of infrastructure and they're like, hey, you know what I want to get on board, the AMD train, is this something they can use from the VMware environment? >> Absolutely, and when you think about- >> Tell us exactly what that would look like, walk us through 100 servers, VMware, 1000 VMs, just to make the math easy. What do you do? How does it work? >> So one, there's several things that the tool can do, we actually went through, the design process was quite extensive on this. And we went through all of the planning phases that you need to go through to do these VM migrations. Now this has to be a cold migration, it's not a live migration. You can't do that between the CPU architectures. But what we do is you create a list of all of the virtual machines that you want to migrate. So we take this CSV file, we import this CSV file, and we ask for things like, okay, what's the name? Where do you want to migrate it to? So from one cluster to another, what do you want to migrate it to? What are the networks that you want to move it to? And then the storage platform. So we can move storage, it could either be shared storage, or we could move say from VSAN to VSAN, however you want to set it up. So it will do those storage migrations as well. And then what happens is it's actually going to go through, it's going to shut down the VM, it's going to take a snapshot, it is going to then basically move the compute and/or storage resources over. And once it does that, it's going to power 'em back up. And it's going to check, we've got some validation tools, where it's going to make sure VM Tools comes back up where everything is copacetic, it didn't blue screen or anything like that. And once it comes back up, then everything's good, it moves onto the next one. Now a couple of things that we've got feature wise, we built into it. You can parallelize these tasks. So you can say, how many of these machines do you want to do at any given time? So it could be, say 10 machines, 50 machines, 100 machines at a time, that you want to go through and do this move. Now, if it did blue screen, it will actually roll it back to that snapshot on the origin cluster. So that there is some protection on that. A couple other things that are actually in there are things like audit tracking. So we do full audit logging on this stuff, we take a snapshot, there's basically kind of an audit trail of what happens. There's also full logging, SYS logging, and then also we'll do email reporting. So you can say, run this and then shoot me a report when this is over. Now, one other cool thing is you can also actually define a change window. So I don't want to do this in the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday. So I want to do this later at night, over the weekend, you can actually just queue this up, set it, schedule it, it'll run. You can also define how long you want that change window to be. And what it'll do, it'll do as many as it can, then it'll effectively stop, finish up, clean up the tasks and then send you a report on what all was successfully moved. >> Okay, I'm going to go down the rabbit hole a little bit on this, 'cause I think it's important. And if I say something incorrect, you correct me. >> No problem. >> In terms of my technical understanding. >> I got you. >> So you've got a VM, essentially a virtual machine typically will consist of an entire operating system within that virtual machine. So there's a construct that containerizes, if you will, the operating system, what is the difference, where is the difference in the instruction set? Where does it lie? Is it in the OS' interaction with the CPU or is it between the construct that is the sort of wrapper around the VM that is the difference? >> It's really primarily the OS, right? And we've not really had too many issues doing this and most of the time, what is going to happen, that OS is going to boot up, it's going to recognize the architecture that it's on, it's going to see the underlying architecture, and boot up. All the major operating systems that we test worked fine. I mean, typically they're going to work on all the X86 platforms. But there might be instruction sets that are kind of enabled in one architecture that may not be in another architecture. >> And you're looking for that during this process. >> Well usually the OS itself is going to kind of detect that. So if it pops up, the one thing that is kind of a caution that you need to look for. If you've got an application that's explicitly using an instruction set that's on one CPU vendor and not the other CPU vendor. That's the one thing where you're probably going to see some application differences. That said, it'll probably be compatible, but you may not get that instruction set advantage in it. >> But this tool remediates against that. >> Yeah, and what we do, we're actually using VM Tools itself to go through and validate a lot of those components. So we'll look and make sure VM Tools is enabled in the first place, on the source system. And then when it gets to the destination system, we also look at VM Tools to see what is and what is not enabled. >> Okay, I'm going to put you on the spot here. What's the zinger, where doesn't it work? You already said cold, we understand, you can schedule for cold migrations, that's not a zinger. What's the zinger, where doesn't it work? >> It doesn't work like, live migrations just don't work. >> No live, okay, okay, no live. What about something else? What's the oh, you've got that version, you've got that version of X86 architecture, it-won't work, anything? >> A majority of those cases work, where it would fail, where it's going to kick back and say, hey, VM Tools is not installed. So where you would see this is if you're running a virtual appliance from some vendor, like insert vendor here that say, got a firewall, or got something like that, and they don't have VM Tools enabled. It's going to fail it out of the gate, and say, hey, VM Tools is not on this, you might want to manually do it. >> But you can figure out how to fix that? >> You can figure out how to do that. You can also, and there's a flag in there, so in kind of the options that you give it, you say, ignore VM Tools, don't care, move it anyway. So if you've got less, some VMs that are in there, but they're not a priority VM, then it's going to migrate just fine. >> Got It. >> Can you elaborate a little bit on the joint development work that AMD and VMware are doing together and the value in it for customers? >> Yeah, so it's one of those things we worked with VMware to basically produce this open source tool. So we did a lot of the core component and design and we actually engaged VMware Professional Services. And a big shout out to Austin Browder. He helped us a ton in this project specifically. And we basically worked, we created this, kind of co-designed, what it was going to look like. And then jointly worked together on the coding, of pulling this thing together. And then after that, and this is actually posted up on VMware's public repos now in GitHub. So you can go to GitHub, you can go to the VMware samples code, and you can download this thing that we've created. And it's really built to help ease migrations from one architecture to another. So if you're looking for a big data center move and you got a bunch of VMs to move. I mean, even if it's same architecture to same architecture, it's definitely going to ease the pain of going through and doing a migration of, it's one thing when you're doing 10 machines, but when you're doing 10,000 virtual machines, that's a different story. It gets to be quite operationally inefficient. >> I lose track after three. >> Yeah. >> So I'm good for three, not four. >> I was going to ask you what your target market segment is here. Expand on that a little bit and talk to me about who you're working with and those organizations. >> So really this is targeted toward organizations that have large deployments in enterprise, but also I think this is a big play with channel partners as well. So folks out there in the channel that are doing these migrations and they do a lot of these, when you're thinking about the small and mid-size organizations, it's a great fit for that. Especially if they're kind of doing that upgrade, the lift and shift upgrade, from here's where you've been five to seven years on an architecture and you want to move to a new architecture. This is really going to help. And this is not a point and click GUI kind of thing. It's command line driven, it's using PowerShell, we're using PowerCLI to do the majority of this work. And for channel partners, this is an excellent opportunity to put the value and the value add and VAR, And there's a lot of opportunity for, I think, channel partners to really go and take this. And once again, being open source. We expect this to be extensible, we want the community to contribute and put back into this to basically help grow it and make it a more useful tool for doing these cold migrations between CPU architectures. >> Have you seen any in the last couple of years of dynamics, obviously across the world, any industries in particular that are really leading edge for what you guys are doing? >> Yeah, that's really, really interesting. I mean, we've seen it, it's honestly been a very horizontal problem, pretty much across all vertical markets. I mean, we've seen it in financial services, we've seen it in, honestly, pretty much across the board. Manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, we have seen kind of a strong interest in that. And then also we we've actually taken this and presented this to some of our channel partners as well. And there's been a lot of interest in it. I think we presented it to about 30 different channel partners, a couple of weeks back about this. And I got contact from 30 different channel partners that said they're interested in basically helping us work on it. >> Tagging on to Lisa's question, do you have visibility into the AMD thought process around the timing of your next gen release versus others that are competitors in the marketplace? How you might leverage that in terms of programs where partners are going out and saying, hey, perfect time, you need a refresh, perfect time to look at AMD, if you haven't looked at them recently. Do you have any insight into that in what's going on? I know you're focused on this area. But what are your thoughts on, well, what's the buzz? What's the buzz inside AMD on that? >> Well, when you look overall, if you look at the Gartner Hype Cycle, when VMware was being broadly adopted, when VMware was being broadly adopted, I'm going to be blunt, and I'm going to be honest right here, AMD didn't have a horse in the race. And the majority of those VMware deployments we see are not running on AMD. Now that said, there's an extreme interest in the fact that we've got these very cored in systems that are now coming up on, now you're at that five to seven year refresh window of pulling in new hardware. And we have extremely attractive hardware when it comes to running virtualized workloads. The test cluster that I'm running at home, I've got that five to seven year old gear, and I've got some of the, even just the Milan systems that we've got. And I've got three nodes of another architecture going onto AMD. And when I got these three nodes completely maxed to the number of VMs that I can run on 'em, I'm at a quarter of the capacity of what I'm putting on the new stuff. So what you get is, I mean, we worked the numbers, and it's definitely, it's like a 30% decrease in the amount of resources that you need. >> That's a compelling number. >> It's a compelling number. >> 5%, 10%, nobody's going to do anything for that. You talk 30%. >> 30%. It's meaningful, it's meaningful. Now you you're out of Austin, right? >> Yes. >> So first thing I thought of when you talk about running clusters in your home is the cost of electricity, but you're okay. >> I'm okay. >> You don't live here, you don't live here, you don't need to worry about that. >> I'm okay. >> Do you have a favorite customer example that you think really articulates the value of AMD when you're in customer conversations and they go, why AMD and you hit back with this? >> Yeah. Actually it's funny because I had a conversation like that last night, kind of random person I met later on in the evening. We were going through this discussion and they were facing exactly this problem. They had that five to seven year infrastructure. It's funny, because the guy was a gamer too, and he's like, man, I've always been a big AMD fan, I love the CPUs all the way since back in basically the Opterons and Athlons right. He's like, I've always loved the AMD systems, loved the graphics cards. And now with what we're doing with Ryzen and all that stuff. He's always been a big AMD fan. He's like, and I'm going through doing my infrastructure refresh. And I told him, I'm just like, well, hey, talk to your VAR and have 'em plug some AMD SKUs in there from the Dells, HPs and Lenovos. And then we've got this tool to basically help make that migration easier on you. And so once we had that discussion and it was great, then he swung by the booth today and I was able to just go over, hey, this is the tool, this is how you use it, here's all the info. Call me if you need any help. >> Yeah, when we were talking earlier, we learned that you were at Scale. So what are you liking about AMD? How does that relate? >> The funny thing is this is actually the first time in my career that I've actually had a job where I didn't work for myself. I've been doing venture backed startups the last 25 years and we've raised couple hundred million dollars worth of investment over the years. And so one, I figured, here I am going to AMD, a larger corporation. I'm just like, am I going to be able to make it a year? And I have been here longer than a year and I absolutely love it. The culture at AMD is amazing. We still have that really, I mean, almost it's like that underdog mentality within the organization. And the team that I'm working with is a phenomenal team. And it's actually, our EVP and our Corp VP, were actually my executive sponsors, we were at a prior company. They were one of my executive sponsors when I was at Scale. And so my now VP boss calls me up and says, hey, I'm putting a band together, are you interested? And I was kind of enjoying a semi-retirement lifestyle. And then I'm just like, man, because it's you, yes, I am interested. And the group that we're in, the work that we're doing, the way that we're really focusing on forward looking things that are affecting the data center, what's going to be the data center like three to five years from now. It's exciting, and I am having a blast, I'm having the time of my life. I absolutely love it. >> Well, that relationship and the trust that you will have with each other, that bleeds into the customer conversations, the partner conversations, the employee conversations, it's all inextricably linked. >> Yes it is. >> And we want to know, you said three to five years out, like what? Like what? Just general futurist stuff, where do you think this is going. >> Well, it's interesting. >> So moon collides with the earth in 2025, we already know that. >> So we dialed this back to the Pensando acquisition. When you look at the Pensando acquisition and you look at basically where data centers are today, but then you look at where basically the big hyperscalers are. You look at an AWS, you look at their architecture, you specifically wrap Nitro around that, that's a very different architecture than what's being run in the data center. And when you look at what Pensando does, that's a lot of starting to bring what these real clouds out there, what these big hyperscalers are running into the grasps of the data center. And so I think you're going to see a fundamental shift. The next 10 years are going to be exciting because the way you look at a data center now, when you think of what CPUs do, what shared storage, how the networking is all set up, it ain't going to look the same. >> Okay, so the competing vision with that, to play devil's advocate, would be DPUs are kind of expensive. Why don't we just use NICs, give 'em some more bandwidth, and use the cheapest stuff. That's the competing vision. >> That could be. >> Or the alternative vision, and I imagine everything else we've experienced in our careers, they will run in parallel paths, fit for function. >> Well, parallel paths always exist, right? Otherwise, 'cause you know how many times you've heard mainframe's dead, tape's dead, spinning disk is dead. None of 'em dead, right? The reality is you get to a point within an industry where it basically goes from instead of a growth curve like that, it goes to a growth curve of like that, it's pretty flat. So from a revenue growth perspective, I don't think you're going to see the revenue growth there. I think you're going to see the revenue growth in DPUs. And when you actually take, they may be expensive now, but you look at what Monterey's doing and you look at the way that those DPUs are getting integrated in at the OEM level. It's going to be a part of it. You're going to order your VxRail and VSAN style boxes, they're going to come with them. It's going to be an integrated component. Because when you start to offload things off the CPU, you've driven your overall utilization up. When you don't have to process NSX on basically the X86, you've just freed up cores and a considerable amount of them. And you've also moved that to where there's a more intelligent place for that pack to be processed right, out here on this edge. 'Cause you know what, that might not need to go into the host bus at all. So you have just alleviated any transfers over a PCI bus, over the PCI lanes, into DRAM, all of these components, when you're like, but all to come with, oh, that bit needs to be on this other machine. So now it's coming in and it's making that decision there. And then you take and integrate that into things like the Aruba Smart Switch, that's running the Pensando technology. So now you got top of rack that is already making those intelligent routing decisions on where packets really need to go. >> Jason, thank you so much for joining us. I know you guys could keep talking. >> No, I was going to say, you're going to have to come back. You're going to have to come back. >> We've just started to peel the layers of the onion, but we really appreciate you coming by the show, talking about what AMD and VMware are doing, what you're enabling customers to achieve. Sounds like there's a lot of tailwind behind you. That's awesome. >> Yeah. >> Great stuff, thank you. >> It's a great time to be at AMD, I can tell you that. >> Oh, that's good to hear, we like it. Well, thank you again for joining us, we appreciate it. For our guest and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCUBE Live" from San Francisco, VMware Explore 2022. We'll be back with our next guest in just a minute. (upbeat music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. >> Hi everybody, Dave Vellante here with Stu Miniman. We're here to unpack the recent acquisition that IBM announced of Red Hat. $34 billon acquisition financed with cash and debt. And Stu, let me get us started. Why would IBM spend $34 billion on Red Hat? Its largest acquisition to date of a software company had been Cognos at $5 billion. This is a massive move. IBM's Ginni Rometty called this a game changer. And essentially, my take is that they're pivoting. Their public cloud strategy was not living up to expectations. They're pivoting to hybrid cloud. Their hybrid cloud strategy was limited because they didn't really have strong developer mojo, their Bluemix PaaS layer had really failed. And so they really needed to make a big move here, and this is a big move. And so IBM's intent, and Ginni Rometty laid out the strategy, is to become number one in hybrid cloud, the undisputed leader. And so we'll talk about that. But Stu, from Red Hat's perspective, it's a company you're very close to and you've observed for a number of years, Red Hat was on a path touting a $5 billion revenue plan, what happened? Why would they capitulate? >> Yeah Dave, on the face of it, Red Hat says that IBM will help it further its mission. We just listened to Arvin Krishna from IBM talking with Paul Cormier at Red Hat, and they talked about how they were gonna keep the Red Hat brand alive. IBM has a long history with open source. As you mentioned, I've been working with Red Hat, gosh, almost 20 years now, and we all think back to two decades ago, when IBM put a billion dollars into Linux and really pushed on open source. So these are not strangers, they know each other really well. Part of me looks at these from a cynicism standpoint. Somebody on Twitter said that Red Hat is hitting it at the peak of Kubernetes hype. And therefore, they're gonna get maximum valuation for where the stock is. Red Hat has positioned itself rather well in the hybrid cloud world, really the multicloud world, when you go to AWS, when you go to the Microsoft Azure environment, you talk to Google. Open source fits into that environment and Red Hat products specifically tie into those environments. Remember last year, in Boston, there's a video of Andy Jassy talking about a partnership with Red Hat. This year, up on stage, Microsoft with Azure partnering deeply with Red Hat. So Red Hat has done a nice job of moving beyond Linux. But Linux is still at its core. There definitely is concern that the operating system is less important today than it was in the past. It was actually Red Hat's acquisition of CoreOS for about $250 million earlier this year that really put a fine point on it. CoreOS was launched to be just enough Linux to live in this kind of container and Kubernetes world. And Red Hat, of course, like we've seen often, the company that is saying, "We're going to kill you", well you go and you buy them. So Red Hat wasn't looking to kill IBM, but definitely we've seen this trend of softwares eating the world, and open sources eating software. So IBM, hopefully, is a embracing that open source ethos. I have to say, Dave, for myself, a little sad to see the news. Red Hat being the paragon of open source. The one that we always go to for winning in this space. So we hope that they will be able to keep their culture. We've had a chance, many times, to interview Jim Whitehurst, really respected CEO. One that we think should stay involved in IBM deeply for this. But if they can keep and grow the culture, then it's a win for Red Hat. But still sorting through everything, and it feels like a little bit of a capitulation that Red Hat decides to sell off rather than keep its mission of getting to five billion and beyond, and be the leading company in the space. >> Well I think it is a bit of a capitulation. Because look, Red Hat is roughly a $3 billion company, growing at 20% a year, had that vision of five billion Its stock, in June, had hit $175. So while IBM's paying a 60% premium off of its current price, it's really only about 8 or 9% higher than where Red Hat was just a few months ago. And so I think, there's an old saying on Wall Street, the first disappointment is never the last. And so I think that Red Hat was looking at a long slog. They reduced expectations, they guided lower, and they were looking at the 90-day shot clock. And this probably wasn't going to be a good 'nother couple of years for Red Hat. And they're selling at the peak of the market, or roughly the peak of the market. They probably figured, hey, the window is closing, potentially, to do this deal. Maybe not such a bad time to get out, as opposed to trying to slog it out. Your thoughts. >> Yeah, Dave, I think you're absolutely right. When you look at where Red Hat is winning, they've done great in OpenStack but there's not a lot of excitement around OpenStack. Kubernetes was talked about lots in the announcement, in the briefings, and everything like that. I was actually surprised you didn't hear as much about just the core business. You would think you would be hearing about all the companies using Red Hat Enterprise Linux around the world. That ratable model that Red Hat really has a nice base of their environment. It was talking more about the future and where Kubernetes, and cloud-native, and all of that development will go. IBM has done middling okay with developers. They have a strong history in middleware, which is where a lot of the Red Hat development activity has been heading. It was interesting to hear, on the call, it's like, oh well, what about the customers that are using IBM too say, "Oh well, if customers want that, we'll still do it." What about IBM with Cloud Foundry? Well absolutely, if customers wanna still be doing it, they'll do that. So you don't hear the typical, "Oh well, we're going to take Red Hat technology "and push it through all of IBM's channel." This is in the IBM cloud group, and that's really their focus, as it is. I feel like they're almost limiting the potential for growth for Red Hat. >> Well so IBM's gonna pay for this, as I said, it's an all cash deal. IBM's got about 14 and a half billion dollars on the balance sheet. And so they gotta take out some debt. S&P downgraded IBM's rating from an A+ to an A. And so the ratings agency is going to be watching IBM's growth. IBM said this will add 200 basis points of revenue growth over the five year CAGR. But that means we're really not gonna see that for six, seven years. And Ginni Rometty stressed this is not a backend loaded thing. We're gonna find revenue opportunities through cross-selling and go-to-market. But we have a lot of questions on this deal, Stu. And I wanna sorta get into that. So first of all, again, I think it's the right move for IBM. It's a big move for IBM. Rumors were that Cisco might have been interested. I'm not sure if Microsoft was in the mix. So IBM went for it and, as I said, didn't pay a huge premium over where their stock was back in June. Now of course, back in June, the market was kind of inflated. But nonetheless, the strategy now is to go multi-cloud. The number one in the multi-cloud world. What is that multi-cloud leadership? How are we gonna measure multi-cloud? Is IBM, now, the steward of open source for the industry? To your point earlier, you're sad, Stu, I know. >> You bring up a great point. So I think back to three years ago, with the Wikibon we put together, our true private cloud forecast. And when we built that, we said, "Okay, here's the hardware, and software, "and services in private cloud." And we said, "Well let's try to measure hybrid cloud." And we spent like, six months looking at this. And it's like, well what is hybrid cloud? I've got my public cloud pieces, and I've got my private cloud pieces. Well there's some management layers and things that go in between. Do I count things like PaaS? So do you save people like Pivotal and Red Hat's OpenShift? Are those hybrid cloud? Well but they live either here or there. They're not usually necessarily helping with the migration and moving around. I can live in multiple environments. So Linux and containers live in the public, they live in the private, they don't just fly around in the ether. So measuring hybrid cloud, I think is really tough. Does IBM plus Red Hat make them a top leader in this hybrid multi-cloud world? Absolutely, they should be mentioned a lot more. When I go to the cloud shows, the public cloud shows, IBM isn't one of the first peak companies you think about. Red Hat absolutely is in the conversation. It actually should raise the profile of Red Hat because, while Red Hat plays in a lot of the conversations, they're also not the first company that comes to mind when you talk about them. Microsoft, middle of hybrid cloud. Oracle, positioning their applications in this multi-cloud world. Of course you can't talk about cloud, any cloud, without talking about Amazon's position in the marketplace. And SAS is the real place that it plays. So IBM, one of their biggest strengths is that they have applications. Dave, you know the space really well. What does this mean vis-à-vis Oracle? >> Well let's see, so Oracle, I think, is looking at this, saying, alright. I would say IBM is Oracle's number one competitor in the enterprise. You got SAP, and Amazon obviously in cloud, et cetera, et cetera. But let me put it this way, I think Oracle is IBM's number one competitor. Whether Oracle sees it that way or not. But they're clearly similar companies, in terms of their vertical integration. I think Oracle's looking at this, saying, hey. There's no way Oracle was gonna spend $34 billion on Red Hat. And I don't think they were interested in really spending any money on the alternatives. But does this put Canonical and SUSE in play? I think Oracle's gonna look at this and sort of message to its customers, "We're already number one in our world in hybrid cloud." But I wanna come back to the deal. I'm actually optimistic on the deal, from the standpoint of, I think IBM had to make a big move like this. Because it was largely just bumping along. But I'm not buying the narrative from Jim Whitehurst that, "Well we had to do this to scale." Why couldn't they scale with partners? I just don't understand that. They're open. This is largely, to me, a services deal. This is a big boon for IBM Services business. In fact, Jim Whitehurst, and Ginni even said that today on the financial analyst call, Jim said, "Our big constraint was "services scale and the industry expertise there." So what was that constraint? Why couldn't they partner with Accenture, and Ernie Young, and PwC, and the likes of Deloitte, to scale and preserve greater independence? And I think that the reason is, IBM sees an opportunity and they're going hard after it. So how will, or will, IBM change its posture relative to some of those big services plays? >> Yeah, Dave, I think you're absolutely right there. Because Red Hat should've been able to scale there. I wonder if it's just that all of those big service system integrators, they're working really closely with the public cloud providers. And while Red Hat was a piece of it, it wasn't the big piece of it. And therefore, I'm worried on the application migration. I'm worried about the adoption of infrastructure as a service. And Red Hat might be a piece in the puzzle, but it wasn't the driver for that change, and the move, and the modernization activities that were going on. That being said, OpenShift was a great opportunity. It plays in a lot of these environments. It'll be really interesting to see. And a huge opportunity for IBM to take and accelerate that business. From a services standpoint, do you think it'll change their position with regard to the SIs? >> I don't. I think IBM's gonna try to present, preserve Red Hat as an independent company. I would love to see IBM do what EMC did years ago with VMware, and float some portion of the company, and truly have it at least be quasi-independent. With an independent operating structure, and reporting structure from the standpoint of a public company. That would really signal to the partners that IBM's serious about maintaining independence. >> Yeah now, look Dave, IBM has said they will keep the brand, they will keep the products. Of all the companies that would buy Red Hat, I'm not super worried about kinda polluting open source. It was kinda nice that Jim Whitehurst would say, if it's a Red Hat thing, it is 100% open source. And IBM plays in a lot of these environments. A friend of mine on Twitter was like, "Oh hey, IBM's coming back to OpenDaylight or things like that." Because they'd been part of Cloud Foundry, they'd been part of OpenDaylight. There's certain ones that they are part of it and then they step back. So IBM, credibly open source space, if they can let Red Hat people still do their thing. But the concern is that lots of other companies are gonna be calling up project leads, and contributors in the open source community that might've felt that Red Hat was ideal place to live, and now they might go get their paycheck somewhere else. >> There's rumors that Jim Whitehurst eventually will take over IBM. I don't see it, I just don't think Jim Whitehurst wants to run Z mainframes and Services. That doesn't make any sense to me. Ginni's getting to the age where IBM CEOs typically retire, within the next couple of years. And so I think that it's more likely they'll bring in somebody from internally. Whether it's Arvin or, more likely, Jim Kavanaugh 'cause he's got the relationship with Wall Street. Let's talk about winners and losers. It's just, again, a huge strategic move for IBM. Frankly, I see the big winners is IBM and Red Hat. Because as we described before, IBM was struggling with its execution, and Red Hat was just basically, finally hitting a wall after 60-plus quarters of growth. And so the question is, will its customers win? The big concern I have for the customers is, IBM has this nasty habit of raising prices when it does acquisitions. We've seen it a number of times. And so you keep an eye on it, if I were a Red Hat customer, I'd be locking in some attractive pricing, longterm. And I would also be calling Mark Shuttleworth, and get his take, and get that Amdahl coffee cup on my desk, as it were. Other winners and losers, your thoughts on some of the partners, and the ecosystem. >> Yeah, when I look at this and say, compare it to Microsoft buying GitHub. We're all wondering, is this a real game changer for IBM? And if they embrace the direction. It's not like Red Hat culture is going to just take over IBM. In the Q&A with IBM, they said, "Will there be influence? Absolutely. "Is this a marriage of equals? No. "We're buying Red Hat and we will be "communicating and working together on this" But you can see how this can help IBM, as to the direction. Open source and the multi-cloud world is a huge, important piece. Cisco, I think, could've made a move like this. I would've been a little bit more worried about maintaining open source purity, if it was somebody like Cisco. There's other acquisitions, you mentioned Canonical and SUSE are out there. If somebody wanted to do this, the role of the operating system is much less important than it is today. You wouldn't have seen Microsoft up on stage at Red Hat Summit this year if Windows was the driver for Microsoft going forward. The cloud companies out there, to be honest, it really cements their presence out there. I don't think AWS is sitting there saying, "Oh jeez, we need to worry." They're saying, "Well IBM's capitulated." Realizing that, "Sure they have their own cloud, "and their environment, but they're going to be "successful only when they live in, "and around, and amongst our platform of Amazon." And Azure's gonna feel the same way, and same about Google. So there's that dynamic there. >> What about VMware? >> So I think VMware absolutely is a loser here. When I went back to say one of the biggest strengths of IBM is that they have applications. When you talk about Red Hat, they're really working, not only at the infrastructure layer, but working with developers, and working in that environment. The biggest weakness of VMware, is they don't own the applications. I'm paying licenses to VMware. And in a multi-cloud world, why do I need VMware? As opposed to Red Hat and IBM, or Amazon, or Microsoft, have a much more natural affinity for the applications and the data in the future. >> And what about the arms dealers? HPE and Dell, in particular, and of course, Lenovo. Wouldn't they prefer Red Hat being independent? >> Absolutely, they would prefer that they're gonna stay independent. As long as it doesn't seem to customers that IBM is trying to twist everybody's arms, and get you on to Z, or Power, or something like that. And continues to allow partnerships with the HPEs, Dells, Lenovos of the world. I think they'll be okay. So I'd say middling to impact. But absolutely, Red Hat, as an independent, was really the Switzerland of the marketplace. >> Ginni Rometty had sited three growth areas. One was Red Hat scale and go-to-market. I think there's no question about that. IBM could help with Red Hat's go-to-market. The other growth vector was IBM's products and software on the Red Hat stack. I'm less optimistic there, because I think that it's the strength of IBM's products, in and of themselves, that are largely gonna determine that success. And then the third was Services. I think IBM Services is a huge winner here. Having the bat phone into Red Hat is a big win for IBM Services. They can now differentiate. And this is where I think it's gonna be really interesting to see the posture of Accenture and those other big guys. I think IBM can now somewhat differentiate from those guys, saying, "Well wait, "we have exclusive, or not exclusive, "but inside baseball access to Red Hat." So that's gonna be an interesting dynamic to watch. Your final thoughts here. >> Yeah, yeah, Dave, absolutely. On the product integration piece, the question would be, you're gonna have OpenAPIs. This is all gonna work with the entire ecosystem. Couldn't IBM have done more of this without having to pay $34 billion and put things together? Services, absolutely, will be the measurement as to whether this is successful or not. That's probably gonna be the line out of them in financials, that we're gonna have to look at. Because, Dave, going back to, what is hybrid, and how do we measure it? What is success for this whole acquisition down the line? Any final pieces to what we should watch and how we measure that? >> So I think that, first of all, IBM's really good with acquisitions, so keep an eye on that. I'm not so concerned about the debt. IBM's got strong free cash flow. Red Hat throws off a billion dollars a year in free cash flow. This should be an accretive acquisition. In terms of operating profits, it might take a couple of years. But certainly from a standpoint of free cash flow and revenue growth, I think it's gonna help near-term. If it doesn't, that's something that's really important to watch. And then the last thing is culture. You know a lot of people at these companies. I know a lot of people at these companies. Look, the Red Hat culture drinks the Kool-Aid of open. You know this. Do they see IBM as the steward of open, and are they gonna face a brain drain? That's why it's no coincidence that Whitehurst and Rometty were down in North Carolina today. And Arvin and Paul Cormier were in Boston today. This is where a lot of employees are for Red Hat. And they're messaging. And so that's very, very important. IBM's not foolish. So that, to me, Stu, is a huge thing, is the culture. Dave, IBM is no longer the navy suit with the red tie, and everybody buttoned down. People are concerned about like, oh, IBM's gonna give the Red Hat people a dress code. Sure, the typical IBMer is not in a graphic tee and a hoodie. But, Dave, you've seen such a transformation in IBM over the last couple of decades. >> Yeah, definitely. And I think this really does, in my view, cement, now, the legacy of Ginny Rometty, which was kinda hanging on Watson, and Cognitive, and this sort of bespoke set of capabilities, and the SoftLayer acquisition. It, now, all comes together. This is a major pivot by IBM. I think, strategically, it's the right move for IBM. And I think, if in fact, IBM can maintain Red Hat's independence and that posture, and maintain its culture and employee base, I think it does change the game for IBM. So I would say, smart move, good move. Expensive but probably worth it. >> Yeah, where else would they have put their money, Dave? >> Yeah, right. Alright, Stu, thank you very much for unpacking this announcement. And thank you for watching. We'll see you next time. (mellow electronic music)