>> live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the queue covering your red. Have some twenty nineteen brought to you by bread. >> Welcome back to the Cube. Continuing coverage here read. Had some twenty nineteen day three of our three days of covering some nine thousand attendees, great keynotes, great educational sessions and a couple of great guests for you to meddle. And John Walls were joined by Marco Bill Peter, who is the senior vice president of customer experience and engagement at Red Hat. Good to see you, Marco. Thanks for having the job on the keynote stage this morning. And Dr Christoph back, who was the head of infrastructure from Hilty and Christof. Thank you for being here is Well, thankyou. Hailing from from election Stein. And we think you're the first guest alum were to check our database, But But we've set a new record today. So thanks for adding to our having. First off, let's talk about Hilty. I'm sure people don't stay healthy. I've seen them, but this building probably wouldn't be here without you. Have imagined half the city wouldn't be here without you. But just tell folks at home a healthy a little bit about where you fit into the construction. >> Lt was founded in the nineteen forties in principality of a Lichtenstein as and is now today leading supplier for the construction industry. We provide tours, consumables, services and software solutions for professional construction companies. Daddy's from hammer drills, two anchors to calculation software and overall complete services for the industry. That's what hell is doing. >> So you did a very good job this morning on the keynote of painting that picture about about the scope of your work and the necessity of your work, the vitality of it. Because construction projects, as we all know, how very strict deadlines. Sometimes they have unique needs. They have immediate needs emergency needs, and you're in the center of all that. And so your technology is central to your general operation. >> Absolutely yes. I mean, with twenty five thousand or twenty nine thousand employees, twenty five thousand users in our system, basically, everybody's using everyday ASAP or the fast majority of users. We have ten thousand concurrent users every day on our system. That deal with customer requests with orders with quotes, but also, of course, with complaints with repair handling and so on. In >> just a few. Yeah, just >> so Marco, I hear ASAP and, you know, bring me back to when? Oh, well, you know, Lennox was that stuff that sat on little sidelines. We're well past that. You've got so many customers that run their business, you know, mission critical around the globe. Just give give, give us a little bit of background on the partnership with Hilty and Red Hat and Solutions like asap. >> Yes, sure. Yeah. The Department of Hilty goes back to, I think, two thousand seven for me. Personally, I started working with Hilton for another company in ninety three. So I know where the hell did Quite well, actually studied in the same town next to Lichtenstein, Son of the mail. And And it's it's amazing to see the journey kind of two thousand nine going all s ap mission critical on rail and now actually moved to Asa P s for Han. And yes, Hill is one ofthe declines. But it kind of talks that we can handle this mission. Critical applications are mission critical customers and built this good relationship to make sure they have these these courage to actually do this Bold jumps limited The last six months. >> Christoph, you know you've got a broad, you know, roll at the at the company way talked to so many companies on becoming a tech company on becoming a software company. Well, software is critical, but at the end of the day, you know, infrastructure and running your business is core. You know, you're not going to become a fully digital software. You have real stuff in the physical world that lots of people and lots of, you know, physical things that need to go to a little bit about that balance. And now the company has been changing over those last ten years. >> I was excited to be open with you. I was really excited when our executive board a couple of years ago, besides tools, consumables and services also added software into a strategic pillar for Hilty. Um, and while I believe that software will be an interesting pillar for us, well will generate additional revenue, will generate additional sales from early. Also in the consumables and tools and services piece software becomes more and more important when you look at the journey off building a building like this. As you mentioned John, I mean it starts with specifying it starts with the planning on CD, and it ends at the end with with Asset Management. Where are the tours and so on. So it's a complete life cycle through out the building off off throughout the construction of ah building. You >> know, Marco had mentioned that you made this decision to migrate Ohana last year right? Twenty eighteen or or where he might be rated last year? Isn't last year's decision made before that? Talk about that a little bit, if you would please and where Red Hat fit into that? Because that that's that's not a small decision, right? I mean, that's a That's a very calculated and I wouldn't not risky, but it's It's just a big move. Yeah, and so the confidence that you had a CZ well, that red hat was your partner to make that happen. >> Absolutely. I mean, the announcement of SAPI to support Hana as thie only database after twenty twenty five voice one off the factors to push us into that direction, that that was then clear for us that we want to go there. And it was also pretty clear for us that in our size it was not that easy to move in twenty twenty three or something like that in that direction, but that we have to be the first movers to be fully supported by ASAP and >> all >> these Parkins because later on, they will be busy with migrating all the big shots. So Wade took the decision to move first and soon, and that allowed us to be in the focus off all thes attached partners ASAP. But also read had also tell emcee for storage and HP for for servers. That meant that we had confidence that we have full attention from all these providers and partners to help us to migrate. On the other hand, it was clear the the the journey we started in two thousand nine has indicated by Marko that we moved to an open software that we move to commodity hardware. Intel based server hardware was a move that had paid off in the past, and we didn't want to go away from that and move again to a proprietary hardware or software solutions. So it was very clear that we want to do that jointly with red hat on commodity and until based service and That's how we went there, Right? >> So, Christophe, big theme, we hear not only at this show, but almost every show we go to is today customers. It's, you know, the hybrid and multi cloud world I see ASAP at all of the Big Cloud shows that that that we cover well, we're just cloud fit into your over discussion, you know, at your company. And then, you know, we can drill down to the specifics of that sapien red hat. But it's what do you have? A cloud strategy, as it were? >> Oh, yes, you know, we moved fairly soon to Amazon with all our customer facing workload. So when you go to hilton dot com or any of our Web pages, you typically land on a ws powered website because that one gave us the flexibility off operating systems off databases of whatever we needed. That was that was available there with our internal workload. However, So all the software we use Internet eternally toe run the company. We have a world that is split between ASAP, which runs entirely on Red hat, um, and the rest of the workload. Witches to a large degree, windows based workload so there. We decided a few years ago to Movinto Microsoft Azure platform to move the internal workload into Azure as it is mainly Windows based. >> So Marco actually want one a depart from healthy for a second. Just give us a little bit of a broad view. You know, we've talked to you many times. You talked about the stage. You know, the customer experiences a critical piece of red hats mission out there When I talk to customers today, One of the biggest changes they've seen the last few years is I'm managing a lot of stuff that's not in my environment. It's the stuff I'm responsible for it and something goes wrong. I'm absolutely getting a call, but you know, it's not my network. It's not my servers. It's not my piece there, but I have to do all of them, you know, got imagine. That's been a transformation for red Hat in the partnerships, and you're everywhere, so it just gets a little context. Yeah, I >> mean, you described it very well, right? I mean, I think the last two years before, I think it was just like some use cases in the public club. But today. The harder cloud is here, right? And everybody does it right. It's not like just one company from a customer experience to stand behind. Like I mentioned it on the state gets harder. Right? And you gonna have these partnerships, right? One partnership, right. We can talk about the azure. We have people in enrichment, right? Think about it today. And then everything changed with start having on stage here. But we have support people in micro for the last two or three years, right? Same diff ASAP as an example, right? We have people. We actually build a fairly large teeming, involved off to be close of us. Time together. I want to do that speed ASAP. A cloud bead on regular bear closes in general. Yes, That challenges. You mentioned networking, right? It gets tricky, right? And he shifted from, but it's unavoidable, right? It shifted from, like, okay, we own and control the stacked kind of too. Yes, you need to know you're open source after and to have really partnerships. Right? And I think the announcement Microsoft, too have this managed services offering that we do joint. It's That's what we're driving so that we can do this better together with partners. >> Marco is great to hear you that but Christoph, he's not listening. Tell us to reality. You've worked with Red Hat for ten years. You're going to cloud how they doing? How's the ecosystem, the vendors in general? They're all up on stage, holding hands. I mean, it's it's seamless and nobody ever point fingers. I'm sure >> to be very, very honest with you. I mean, I appreciate it last year, hearing that redhead will be offered in Azure. I mean, that was not possible to mention those two company names in one sentence in the past, at least for us as customers, and that that was a bold statement last year that those two parties will suddenly join. That fits very well in our strategy, because we believe internal workload for Hilton should run in in In Azure seeing on last Tuesday, Microsoft and Red Hat shaking hands and movie. Even beyond that one was, for me, them almost the most exciting event here, or the most exciting statement that I saw here during these few days because that reemphasized the close relationship that those two have, and that exactly fits our road map. That's exciting. >> And, you know, we heard that, you know, again from from both CEO Saying customers really kind of brought us together. They made this deal work because we kept hearing that they love us and they love you, and they like us together. So So we got that. We understand that. So? So Marco customers drove that to a certain degree. You've got a customer here who made this big Hana jump, which is you say small guy. You know, I would beg to differ little bit that you had him before the big guys did. But what, like an initiative like that? What is that doing for you? What? Red hat. In terms of carrying that over to other customers. Now, you've learned from one you've seen what they've gone through. What kind of confidence does that give you? What kind of interest does it give you about how to approach this game? >> Absolutely. You know what we learned from give you one example right? If you moved his heart ever closer Christopher Hilty uses systems have twelve terabytes memory. Think about it that fairly large systems and that foot train tried to actually test our softer with that footprint and then even think about the next. Next journey is in if you want to do this in the cloud. What does that mean? If you take a twelve terabyte image and running in a double? Yes. And so that is, since my team also does quality assurance and product security. That's for them as well as in. Okay, we've seen what tilted can do work. How do we actually make this more robust? How do we test you are there? And how do we do that in this journey? It's, I think I'm pretty proud of how we actually learn from these instances, and health is not the only one. It's just one the republic. But yet it's every time. I think that's the only survived is into industry. If you really learn continuously and also applied right. I mean our whole setup involved or we shifted completely and not just from the people. They have theirs. So we have people that do open. Chief. There were people do Lennox and performance, but also from structure. I really be sure that they were set up for success and know what the next they have customers is obviously every casting off. A message we will do will go through a journey license over the next ten years. >> Kristoff obviously being on stage, you know it is good for the company, but coming to Red Hat Summit one. Just give our audience that if they hadn't come to it. Some of the value is, too what you place in some, the activities that have excited you most here this week. >> I mean, one thing is, of course, hearing about latest technologies, new releases, off software, off new possibilities and opportunities for us as customers from Red Hat. But also, it's great to see how on the floor out there other partners customers on DH fingers mingle around the ecosystem that created that was created around open software about, ah, not only operating system, but also about containers about all these those different technologies, which I have an important role for all of us in nineteen the future. >> Sure. Well, good week, that's for sure. Very nice job you get on the Kino stage to both of you and good luck with the partnership on down the road. And again, I would make the difference that way. little guys got in early hilt. He's no small fry in inner world, that's for sure. Thanks for the time, Krystof. Marco. Thank you. Thank you very much. Back with more. We're live here in Boston and we're covering the red hat. Summer twenty nineteen on the

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, It's the Cube. Covering Red Hat Summit 2018. Brought to you buy, Red Hat. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We're live here in the Cube in San Francisco, California, Monscone West, Cube's exclusive coverage of Red Hat Summit 2018. I'm John Furrier, co-host. With John Troyer, he's my analyst co- host, he's the co -founder of Tech Reckoning Advisory and Community Development Firm. My next guest is Marco Bill-Peter, Senior vice-president of Customer Experience and Engagement at Red Hat. Welcome back to the Cube. Good to see you. So, you guys have a great track record with customer support. You guys use gold standard in open source, you've done it well, very reliable. It's a changing world. You know, Open Shift now, certainly the center piece, west, new acquisition. A lot of things happening with in the portfolio. Cloud native new capabilities are on the horizon. So, you've got to figure it out. So, what's the support strategy? What do you guys do? How are you looking? I'm sure it's challenging but never too much of a challenge for you guys. You're smart, what's the support strategy? >> I think the recipe it is really like not getting stuck in a wave, right? And be open to, you know I think Jim Whitehurst and his keynote talk quite a bit about, you used to do all plan, describe and execute. That thing just doesn't work, right? Because supporting customers on Linux, supporting them when they move to Open Shift or even application, is a whole different piece. So, as a leader you got to be flexible as in okay, here we do it this way, let's put more money in this. Let's say Open Shift support, Open Shift kind of, what's the customer experience there, right? Kind of figure out how it works. There's a lot of things that scare me in the daily business as in like okay, we can't do that. But I think Red Hat is really good in reconfiguring, Jim talked about that in a keynote as well, reconfiguring the organization. And so, we move for example, quality assurance into my organization and combining that with support. All of them give some more opportunities realizing, oh this product maybe not ready yet for the market, right? We can not support that. Or, you augmented with, I wouldn't call it AI capabilities, but more like those capabilities. All of the sudden stuff gets done automatically. >> And multi cloud is again, just like multi vendor environment, but it's a little bit different obviously. But multiple clouds you have different architectures. You guys do some progressive things. What's new, architecturally within the support group? Because you have deals announced here with IBM and Microsoft, one of them is a joint, I think integrated program where guys are teaming up. >> Microsoft is interesting. >> We've teamed last three, four years, right? With he first deal and gone further. You're like funny, right? I've been at Red Hat so long and you put people on premise. It's kind of funny. But it's good, right? And that's where you got to glue together. Sometimes it's people. Sometimes it's also more having the data, right? I mean if you go multi cloud. Difference between multi vendor, multi cloud. Multi vendor, you just call the vendor and tell them hey you handle it. Here, I'll put data, you handle it. Or maybe you do it a bit better. But, multi cloud is, well it's running there, how do you get access to that? Then the whole privacy laws comes in. So you got to be more instrumentation, you know, telemetry-- >> You're using tech to help you guys out. That's what you're referring by AI. >> I actually think that the next ten years you will see support changing quite a bit. >> John: In what way? >> But also you have to staff this up, right? You need to upscale your folks as well as technology. >> That doesn't go away. But I think you've got to go more that you really need deep skills. If you want to support Open Shift you've got to, either you understand it from the middle side, from the application side or from the bottom from the infrastructure. You need both skill sets. So you need really highly skilled people. But one the other hand if it's really like real time and people don't have patience to wait two weeks, especially if you're in the cloud. More and more tooling. I see the vision as in it would be less and less based on the scale but I think it's less people involved more and more automation, tooling. >> You kind of see it now with boss, kind of just tip of the iceberg. But you've got automation built into the culture of Red Hat. You've put coral west. They want to automate everything. >> You see Insights, right? We launched Insights three years ago out of support. They take support data, find out what's really happening, create rules that if you match it the customer systems say you have this and this issue. And now it's in the incentive stage of the strategy as in we can automate it, but you can automate it. you have a problem, you want to have it solved. >> You're presenting a support service. >> Exactly, and eventually, we'll not even tell you, in maybe hindsight we'll tell you, hey, you had this network issue or configured the wrong way, we fixed it have a good day. >> Well it came up in Cooper Netty's conversation we had last week in Copenhagen, we were in Denmark for CubeCon around things Cooper Netty's defacto standing, so great stuff, that's certainly great. Istio service mesh is atopic that's highly discussed. And one of the thing that comes up is the automation the down side is potentially it fixes things. So, you could have a memory leak for instance, that you never know gets fixed. But it just crashes every day and reboots itself. So, the new kinds of instrumentation that's emerging. So this is really the though job. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> How do you get in there-- >> Also have automation-- >> And you as the central provider, right, are pulling in data from across the world and across the customer base. So how do you take that, sift it to be more proactive about decision making and support. >> So we capture all this support data. And you know it's fascinating, we have some AI capabilities, some machine learning capabilities go through there. But it's fascinating, sometimes we see new issues coming up. What we do is then, we go well let's look who is exposed to that, just to get a footprint. And then you actually inform customers, hey, you had this and this issue or you have this. It's really a different, I want to get more proactive or I want to get more automated. With the automation I just want to be, right, so we installed, over the last, I would say 18 months, like a bot, simple bot basically, his name is Edmond. And he works on support cases. And we started slow, very slow. We didn't let it go as in total machine or anything. But now, I gave some stats earlier today. In one used case it's 25 percent faster solving a customer issue using Edmond. And he participates in 11 percent of all support cases. >> Wow. >> Edmond is a busy guy. >> And the game is changing too. I mean in the old days, first lines support, second lines support, offline support, then escalation. These things are older IT mechanisms. With this you're talking about completely doing away with, in essence first line support. But also first line support might come in, from say a Microsoft or an IBM. You've got to be ready for anything. >> Actually I think it's not just first line support. And it's not replacing them. It's helping them. It's really making them faster, right? I think the frustration piece is, like, customer opens his support case, some data is missing, right? So, you have a que it gets to that. Engineering looks and oh, there's data missing. Edmond sees that and says hey, I need this data. Based on all the support cases we fixed similar issues, this is the data we need. So Edmond gets the data ready, engineer looks and in some cases Edmond actually closes it out. >> Closes it out. >> Tells the customer here there's a better solution, do it this way. >> Yeah, that's fascinating. >> I'd love to pull the camera back a little bit, right? You are not the SVP of support. You're the SVP of customer experience and engagement, right? That's an entirely different role in some ways, in that you're responsible for customer success at some level. >> That is correct, yeah. >> Talk a little bit about reconfiguring organization to be that-- >> So I think maybe dive in a little bit on the customer success. So we have a organization, they call technical account. It's part of the customer success organization. That's a human business but it's fascinating, right. We put these claims on clients and have them work together. They understand the business. It's an old business but trust me, having still a human in there understanding, okay this is customer x, y, z. That's the business objective, I talked about this today as well, not to forget, hey this customer actually wants to do whatever, whatever on the like an SIP to actually take that further to actually support case and doing that the team helps quite a bit. And then also the commitment, right? We don't want just to do support cases and then that's why you renew with Red Head, we want to make sure you actually get value out of it and that's why you want to renew. So that's why we configured different. It's bigger, right? It's bigger as in really making sure the product is correct. So that's why quality assurance is in my team, this support. That's why I run internal IT for the engineering team. We run the stuff that we sell actually earlier. And some of my team is like, Marco why do we have to do that? Because we learn and I much rather have you feel the pain than the customer feel the pain. That's why we configure different than, I've been 12 a half years right on this and it's still exciting that we are still able to change around-- >> I think the quality assurance piece is still big too cause you're in there as well. Looking at the QA. >> Yeah. >> Making sure that's good too. You're testing out the products and doing QA all within the mindset of customer experience. >> Exactly, and you've got to move that being agile, is more you see developers actually submitting test cases. Tests, so that's the component testing and the basic tests. What we got to do more, is what you mentioned, if somebody does less with Open Shift to contain all that, that thing together, if some service software defines storage, that thing together to bring together that's the hard drive. So I want to move more and more. That we take used spaces from customers, we'll close it. This is how we do it. X, y, z, customer and apply that. >> At the end of the day it's the same game different playing field. The customer wants choice, best possible solution experience, for them. You guys got to enable that, and then support it, make it happen. >> Yeah. >> And with cloud. >> And you see how, I don't know if you saw the demo yesterday when they show basically I think or Amazon was slower and every traffic that routed. This is reality as well, right? I mean if you look at one press release we did yesterday, I just find it a fascinating story. They're kitchen appliances. I don't know if you saw that. But they have over a million kitchen appliances or cooking appliances connected to the internet. It's a German, Swiss company when they got to upgrade the system so they get recipes done, they actually spin up instances in Alibaba in Asia and I think in Amazon in the U.S. They spin it up, they scale out all the appliances connect then they shrink it together. How do you support these customers a whole different case. >> That's great for the customer. >> Yeah. >> But more of a challenge for you guys. >> Then again with preparation of the right integration testing before, with the right set up that we know this is what the customer is doing this weekend. Amadeus as well, talked at the keynote, we worked long time with Amadeus. >> You're a smart team. >> As part of your customer role, you were involved with the Innovation awards. They were up on stage this morning. What struck me was they were both about time to value. And speed of deployment as well as scale. Often these were global companies, we had Amadeus on yesterday, spanning the globe. Huge number of transactions. Anything stand out to you in those Innovation Awards this year? Perhaps, that's been different in previous years? I think that the scale is actually interesting that you say. I think we have much quicker now. I think that's awesome, technology matures. I think we used to have more smaller work projects in getting to a certain scale. But I just goes faster. I think the controlled piece is probably a bit more accepted. This whole containerization is not magic anymore. I think a lot is being moved, is coming from the development side but also from the Linux side. So I think there's a less struggle of that. But I do still see some cultural struggles. You talk to customers, maybe not the Innovation Award winners. but even them they say, hey it took us a long time to convince internal structures, how we change things around. >> Talk about the open source role because you mentioned, before we came on how you guys are all in the open, an open source. Is there like a project that you're part of that supports centric? Is there certain things you're picking out over the source? As you guys do the QA and build you own stuff. >> Yeah we do a lot. We submit a lot to open. There's very few. We don't share data. We can't share customer data for obvious reasons. But tooling, most of the tooling we share if it's data collectors. We re an open source road. There' not much that we don't, there's nothing proprietary. Engineers, that's why they're coming to write. That's the configuration. They want to see, hey how does this stuff get applied. They own the packages, then some stuff is shared. If it's tied to the customer portal, the AI pieces maybe the open source parts of it but-- >> What's it like this year, for the folks who are watching who couldn't make it? What's the vibe here at Red Hat Summit 2018? What's the hallway conversations like? What's some of the dinners? What are you talking about? What's the chatter? >> I think the big chatter for me is kind of like this Open Shift, containers, agile development. You know the agile development comes back and back and really like how do we do this right? And tech connects obviously, how do you take application develop them or how do you take applications put them in a container. And then you see these demos. With multi cloud. >> New applications is not stand alone Linux anymore. >> Yeah. We have containers and tend to be able to run public cloud or multi cloud on premise. The options are endless. And I think that's the strengths from Red Hat. We prove that with Linux we can have a solid API. We don't screw up the applications. And if we can guarantee that across the four footprints, that's Paul's vision five, six years ago. I think we are there. >> You talked about a bit of cultural shift. How can Red Hat help it's customers come up to speed? That's a little bit...but be more agile. >> It's a good example. I think we do a lot of these sessions. I actually think that our sales motion, they are pretty aware with open sources, what the culture is. They do a lot of these sessions with customers. Jim Whitehurst is actually awesome. When he comes to clients. We did a C level event at a bank, based in Zurich and it was in a Swiss bank. And I think that they got like 140 C level, CIO groups. And Jim did a talk about the open organization about breaking down the barriers. I think that's a role that we play. Well some is Red Hat's role, but we go to do that stuff. Because we can share part of it in how we are configured, how we are different. >> I think that kind of thing is high on every CIO's list of agendas. >> And everything in the open is proving that open is winning. Open beats closed pretty much every time and is now pretty standard operating wise we're starting to see but operational wise, not just for software development. >> I actually think that from practice and how to run the company. Some stuff is transparency, right? If you work in a company that you're not transparent with your associates, can you really do this in 2018? >> No. >> And so I think those are elements that I think we do well to have had. And we got to keep internal as well, reminding ourselves, these core principles from open source are really important. >> Hiring, so you're bringing new Red Hatters in? >> At the rate we are hiring it's actually big concerns. How do we maintain this culture, right. This talk is not always polite but it's the way we function. >> You guys are humble. You're playing the long game, I love that about you. So congratulations Marco. Thanks for coming on the Cube show. >> Thanks very much. >> Thanks. >> It's the Cube Live here in San Francisco for Red Hat Summit 2018 here in Moscone West. I'm John Furrier and John Troyer. Stay with us for more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live, from Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat. (light techno music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Red Hat Summit here in beautiful Boston, Massachusetts. I am your host, Rebecca Knight. I'm here with my co-host, Dave Vellante. Joining us is Marco Bill-Peter. He is the vice president of customer experience and engagement at Red Hat. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> So I want to start out by talking about your management philosophy, and your philosophy really of what you do. Because that is just so core to the Red Hat experience for customers. I noticed that you changed the name, it's no longer Customer Support, it is Customer Experience and Engagement. Do you want to talk a little bit about why you made that switch? >> Yeah, I think, well yes, it would be awesome, yeah. I mean the name reflects actually, in my opinion, also the business model from Red Hat, which is you take an open-source development model, you develop the products, you actually sell them as a subscription. But there's no license behind it, which is the amazing business model, right? That there's no lock-in, right? The customer can buy it, they can use it, if we don't provide the value, then shame on us, they can move on. And so that's where the customer experience has to be good. That they really see, hey, I got something from Red Hat, I'm coming back, I will renew this. And the engagement is as well, it's the part, one is like, experience was great and engagement is, we got to engage them, right? Because shame on us if we didn't engage a customer in during their journey during that year of subscription life that they have, or three-year, whatever it is. That is the, I think it's the business model, but it's also my philosophy, which is, I used to work for proprietary companies and running support or customer success functions. There you make the money on the license and the maintenance is, basically, I always call it janitorial services. This way our model is different, so that's why I also report through Paul Cormier, it's integrated in technologies. It's maybe not the philosophy, but it's our philosophy really, the customer, it's not a joke, it's customer is in the center. And if they are successful, yes, they will come back, they will buy more, they will renew. But it's an honest model. And so that's why we changed the name for various reasons. I also, we looked at other functions at Red Hat, and said, "Which one is really about customer experience?" And security, for example, is in my team, right? It's not just support, because security is a big element of our value that we provide. And so that's why we expanded the team, changed the name to kind of reflect that. >> You mention Paul Cormier and we're actually, he's going to be joining us later today too. And he was talking about how the design process is really led by customers in this new era of cloud computing. >> Marco: Yeah. >> Talk a little bit about what it's like to collaborate with customers in these products. >> Yeah, it's really good. I can give you an example from the innovation award winners this week. We have, like, for example, British Columbia, the government of British Columbia, and they start on this journey and they wanted to create this, I would say, exchange for partners that they have, companies to kind of provide some services and make it easier for them. And they started on a journey and it didn't go well. And shame on whoever was involved in that. But then we got involved. I was like, okay, that's what you're trying to solve. We got one of my guys actually flew out there, spent a few weeks out there. He was like, oh, this is the problem, let's build it differently. Then Ashesh Badani from the open-shift team got involved and we realized, okay, what they're trying to do is this, change the product, adjust it. There's one example from last year's innovation award winner. We had Betfair. It's a horse-race company in England. Same thing, they wanted to really innovate a data center in a complete, like, software-defined way. And having that collaboration with us directly and the upstream communities, but then also with partners, like in that case it was a software-defined network provider, to get involved and really build the solutions. It's a whole different way. And if you go back a few years when we just did Linux, that maybe didn't really happen because it was more Linux was driven by the community. And now I think it's honestly good to see because it's customers involved, there's still a lot of partners involved and there is a strong community and that whole thing working together is pretty cool to see. >> There's a saying that I like. It's customer satisfaction is one thing, customer loyalty is everything. And you live in a world where customer loyalty really is everything. Describe, you mentioned before your previous company, what's the innovation experience and total customer experience like now and how do you innovate versus the way a traditional company might innovate in customer experience? >> I think traditional companies, they innovate around, since it's a maintenance budget, we've got to save costs, right? That's their take. It's like, save costs, deflect cases, deflect customers basically, right? And our model is the opposite, right? If I start deflecting customers that's kind of the negative of engagement, right? So pushing back customers that actually they see value if they have interaction so that's where we look at it completely different. We innovate around, you know, like two years ago when we talked about we presented Red Hat insights, the tooling that basically out of our customer support cases we provide back to our customers a connection that they know, hey, this might happen. That's one piece that, you saw it probably at the keynote today, it's integrated in our products now, right? And so that's one piece we innovate around. Support is not seen as an afterthought. It's like, how do we build this into our tooling? So insights was a good example as an innovation. We did a lot of workflow changes, which sounds very technical but really to provide more value back to the customers. So it's called a knowledge center support approach that you really basically take what customers provide you, rephrase that and provide it back as a documentation. If you run into this situation, and it can be a support situation, but it can also an innovation situation, they want to build something new, you provide that back in the form of documentation customer form. >> One of the other things that's changed in the last two years is this explosion of artificial intelligence, some people call it cognitive, and we saw the kickoff video this morning how, and we talked about this a little bit a couple of years ago, how you're going to use data to improve customer experiences and now we're here. How are you using data and insights and analytics to improve the customer service? >> Analytics, I think, we started in a way in a traditional way, right? You have data and then you've got to figure out the data and then you kind of just create rules out of it. If this and this happen you do this. Call it AI, sounds cool, but basically it's rules matching. This happens, that. Now I think it's detecting the trends more automatically that's more done in, I would say, in more real AI. That's where we are. I would say the last year we spent more time figuring out, hey, how do we, instead of trying manually find the trends to actually automatically find them. And I think there is, I just gave an interview a few weeks in Japan where AI is a really hot topic, I think we're just scratching the surface. You saw it in autonomous driving but I think in support there's so much more to do in this area as well. >> When I asked you, you know, about juxtaposing Red Hat versus, say, a traditional software company it would seem like cutting costs was in conflict with innovating for customer experience but when I hear you speak about AI, is it possible there's a relationship between the two? That you can actually improve customer service and cut costs? >> Absolutely, but you want to do it in a good way. You want to do it in a way that it provides value back to the customer. If you do it an way, hey, we've cut out this and this things, then the customer just gets a lousy experience. That doesn't, I think that doesn't even work for a traditional company or proprietary company any more. That whole old, no, there's other companies that do autodeflection, right? But I think if you actually optimize the experience in a way that also the customer sees, hey, this is actually great value, right? If you just optimize things and the customer experience is great, you might actually create a situation where customer doesn't see value, right? Like in the old days, we had a lot of customers saying, hey, I never had the support case, why should I pay you guys? So, you know, obviously you can talk about that's great you didn't have a support case, but a customer paying a few millions and they only had one support case is a tough recovery. Today, not AI, but a lot of data is we can tell the customer, yeah, you had one support case, but look at all the tools you used in the customer portal, all the interactions you have. We have a nice dashboard we can present back to a customer. And, I'll give you, if you have a minute >> Yeah, please. a story quickly of a CTO from a bank that, a few years we met, and then he said, "Oh, Red Hat, you guys are good." That was in a bar. "You guys are good but, you know, I don't really need "your support, Marco. "My guys, they know how to do things." And so, I was like, okay. So in the evening I went back to the hotel, looked at the dashboard and then realized his story was maybe not as realistic. Next day, I see him again and show him the dashboard. And support was involved. There was documentation in use. I showed him back, I was like look at this, this is the value we provide you. And out of that came a whole different discussion, as in we do it annually now, and we looked at this data and he sees trends. He sees like, "Oh, my Latin America bank, "they still use this and this. "My North America team does that and that." And it's a whole different discussion. It's awesome, right, that they realize from the data we have there is a lot of value that he can change his operation. That's a short example. >> I want to talk to you about security. You mentioned this earlier in our conversation. The era of cloud computing is maturing and we are seeing now customers caring more about compliance and governance and management. What are the big concerns that you're hearing from customers? >> Obviously the big concern is still the traditional vulnerabilities, right? If there is a security hole, how do we fix it? How quickly fix it? Do we have the right data that we provide back as a customer realizes, is this a security hole I need to worry about or not. And that's what we do, we kind of focus on, we have a pretty large security team, I think, for the size we are because of the open-source model. So they're involved in a lot of the communities. So we provide fast response and we also provide response not just with a security fix but also with information about, hey, this is why you should worry or this is why you shouldn't worry. 'Cause sometimes the press creates this frenziness about, hey, pick your favorite name of a security hole, Heartbleed, et cetera. And for some customers it doesn't really matter because in their environment this is not a real scenario, right? And so we provide the patch, we provide data or documentation, but then also tooling that they can figure out are we exposed or not. That's one of the things. The other problem is in containers, right? You have these containers. You build the containers from everywhere. To actually realize, hey, is this container also compliant with security is a big topic. We just released, released, or we will release this week, it's not a secret, the container catalog, with actually a scoring that actually says, yes, this container is quality A, B. Kind of a freshness score. >> Ah, a ratings system. >> Yeah, rating. And this is a huge effort for every company and we do it as well, as in how do we keep these containers updated, right? Because you, if you build a container from application to middleware down to the operating system, you've got to worry about a lot of security. >> It's a fresh date. >> Yeah, it's like expiration date. >> A sell-by date. >> And that's what we do actually. We have an expiration date but depending on security hole, that just changes. >> So we were talking to John Hodgson who was at the keynote as well and he was telling us, and he mentioned this in the keynote, that he went from 17 developers in 2009 to 1,600 today. He was talking about that a lot of them are kids right out of college and we were talking about how you have to treat millennials differently and give them flexible time. And, Rebecca, you were talking about a new way to work at the beginning of our segments today. So how is that new way to work affect the customer experience and what are you guys doing in that regard? >> I mean obviously, like you say, right, there's a whole new generation coming and I actually think the new generation, they're actually a pretty sensitive customer experience. I think they're growing up in a different age of like digital age so, and social media as well, so actually I was worried that the new generation maybe, but I have to say, I think contrary, right? So that's good. So I don't think customer experience will suffer. What will change is, like, you can't have people, you know, we don't have it, but like call centers, if you have a little farm for everybody. That just ain't going to fly anymore, right? And so that's where we got to adjust. We don't do call centers, but we got to just adjust, like, how is the office done, where is it, and things like that. But it's, I think, I'm not too worried about that. >> And mobile is huge for you guys obviously, right? The mobile trend. And there's a lot of talk in Silicon Valley about, you know, what's next beyond mobile. How we, this is not how we're going to interface with our two thumbs in the future. It's going to be voice and, you have to be careful not to over-rotate either, right, because you could ruin the customer experience. Do you do that type of advanced, you know, research in total customer experience? >> Yeah, we do research. We actually also research how do they interact with us. You know, mobile is always a topic but our customers aren't engaging as mobile. You know, like it's, I mean-- >> You say they're not? >> They're not, no. >> They're out there. >> You know, our portal is all mobile enabled so you could go with it, but mostly it's still laptops, notebooks, et cetera, that they're using to engage us. So we haven't really invested a lot in that, but we invest in the digital experience, right, so make it easier, provide the tooling, don't force a customer to jump through, like, hoops to find something out. Give them the tool to find out. They want to self-solve a lot, right? Which goes back in the old discussion, is that deflection? But if a self-solve tool helps you, I think customers see, hey, this is value from Red Hat. >> If they can do it themselves, yeah. >> Marco: If they can and they can learn something, right? That part is good. >> Well thank you so much for joining us, Marco Bill-Peter, who is the vice-president, customer experience and engagement, at Red Hat. I'm Rebecca Knight, for Dave Vellante, thank you so much for joining us and we'll be back after this break. (light techno music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's the CUBE. Covering your Red Hat Summit 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> And welcome back to our coverage here on the CUBE Red Hat Summit 2019. We're at the BCEC in Beantown, Boston, Massachusetts playing host this week to some 9000 strong attendees, pack keynotes. Just a great three days of programming here and educational sessions. Stu Miniman and I'm John Walls. We're joined by Mike Piech, who's the VP and general manager of Middleware at Red Hat. Mike, good to see you today. >> Great to be back. >> And Mark Little, VP of engineering Middleware at Red Hat. Mark, Good to see you as well, sir. >> You too. >> Yeah. First of, let's just talk about your ideas at the show here. Been here for a few days. As we've seen on the keynote stage, wide variety of first off, announcements and great case studies, great educational sessions. But your impressions of what's going on and some of the announcements we've heard about this week. >> Well, sure. I mean definitely some very big announcements with RHEL 8 and OpenShift 4. So as Middleware we're a little bit more in sort of gorilla mode here while some of the bigger announcements take a lot of the limelight. But nevertheless those announcements and the advances that they represent are very important for us as Middleware. Particularly OpenShift 4 as sort of the next layer up from OpenShift which the developers sort of touch and feel and live and breathe on a daily basis. We are the immediate beneficiaries of much of the advances in OpenShift and so that's something that, we as the Middleware guys sort of make real for the enterprise application developer. >> I'd say, probably for me, building on that in a way, one of the biggest announcements, one of the biggest surprises is gotta be the first keynote where we had Satya from Microsoft on stage with Jim announcing the collaboration that we're doing. I never believed that would ever happen and that's, that's fantastic. Has a benefit for Middleware as well but just for Red Hat as a whole. Who would've thought it? >> John: Who would have thought it, right? Yeah, we actually just had Marco Bill-Peter on and he was talking about, he's like "Look, we've actually had some of our support people up in Redmond now for a couple of years." And we had Chris Wright on earlier and he says "You know, sometimes we got to these shows and you get the big bang announcement. It's like, well, really we're working incrementally along the way and open source you can watch it. Sure sometimes you get the new chipset or there's a new this or that. But you know, it's very very small things." So in the spirit of that, maybe, you know, give us the updates since last time we got together. What's happening in the Middleware space as you said. If we build up the stack, you know, we got RHEL 8, we got OpenShift 4 and you're sitting on top. >> Yeah. Well one aspect that's an event like this makes clear in almost a reverse sort of way. We put a lot of effort particularly in Mark's team in getting to a much more frequent and more incremental release cycle and style, right. So getting away from sort of big bang releases every year, couple of years, to a much more agile incremental again sort of regime of rolling out functionality. Now, one of the downsides of that is that you don't have these big grand product announcements to make a big deal about in the same way as RHEL just did with 8 for example. So we need to rethink how we sort of (Laughs) >> absence the sort of big .0 releases, you know how we sort of batch up interesting news and roll it out at a large event like this. Now one of the things that we have been working on is our application environment narrative. Right now, the whole idea of the story here is that many people talk about Cloud-Native and about having lot's of different capabilities and services in a cloud environment. And as we've sort of gone through the, particularly the last year or so, it's really become apparent from what our customers tell us and from what we really see as the opportunities in the cloud-native world. The value that we bring is engineering all these pieces together, right? So that it's not simply a list of these disparate, disconnected, independent services but rather Middleware in the world of cloud native re-imagined. It is capabilities that when engineered together in the right way they make for this comprehensive, unified, cohesive environment within which our customers can develop applications and run those applications. And for the developer, you get developer productivity and then at runtime, you're getting operational reliability. So there really is a sort of a dual-sided value proposition there. And this notion of Middleware engineered together for the cloud is what the application environment idea is all about. >> Yeah. I'd add kinda one of the things that ties into that which has been big for us at least at summit this year is an effort that we kicked off or we announced two months ago called Quakers and as you all know a lot of what we do within Middleware, within Red Hat is based on Java and Java is still the dominant language in the enterprise but it's been around for 20 years. It developed in a pre-cloud era and that made lots of assumptions on the way in which the Java language and the JVM on which it runs would develop which aren't necessarily that conducive for running, in a cloud environment, a hybrid cloud environment and certainly public cloud environment based on Linux containers and Kubernetes. So, we've been working for a number of years in the upstream open JDK community to try and make Java much more cloud-native itself. And Quakers kind of builds on that. It essentially is what we call a kub-native approach where we optimize all of the Middleware stack upfront to work really really well in Kubernetes and specifically on OpenShift. And it's all Java though, that's the important thing. And now if people look into this they'll find that we're showing performance figures and memory utilization that is on a per with some of the newer languages like Go for instance, very very fast. Typically your boot time has gone from seconds to tens of milliseconds. And people who have seen it demonstrated have literally been blown away cause it allows them to leverage the skills that they've had invested in their employees to learn Java and move to the cloud without telling them "You guys are gonna have to learn a completely new language and start from scratch" >> All right, so Mark, if I get it right cause we've been at the Kubernetes show for a bunch of years but this is, you're looking at kinda the application side of what's happening in those Kubernetes environment >> Mark: Yeah. So many times we've talked about the platforms and the infrastructure down but it's the the art piece on top. Super important. I know down the DevZone people were buzzing around all the Quaker stuff. What else for people that are you know, looking at that kinda cloud-native containerization space? What other areas that they should be looking at when it comes to your space? >> Well, again, tying into the up environment thing, hopefully, you know, you'll have heard of knative and Istio. So knative is, to put it in a quick sentence is essentially an enabler for serverless if you like. It's where we're spinning containers really really quickly based on events. But really any serverless platform lives and dies based on the services in which your business logic can then rely upon. Do I have a messaging service there? Do I have a transaction service or a database service? So, we've been working with, with Google on knative and with Microsoft on knative to ensure that we have a really good story in OpenShift but tying it into our Middleware suite as well. So, many of our Middleware products are now knative enabled if you like. The second thing is, as I mentioned, Istio which is a sidecar approach. I won't go into details on that but again Istio the aim behind that is to remove from the application developer some of the non-functional business logic that they had to put in there like "How do I use a messaging service? How do I secure this endpoint and push it down the infrastructure?" So the security servers, the messaging servers, the cashing servers et cetera. They move out of the business logic and they move into Istio. But from our point of view, it's our security servers that we've been working on for years, it's our transactional servers that we've been working on for years. So, these are bullet-proof implementations that we have just made more cloud-native by embedding them in a way in Istio and like I said, enabling them with knative. >> I think we'd mentioned that Chris Wright was on earlier and one of the things he talked about was, this new data-eccentric focus and how, that's at the core so much of what enterprise is doing these days. The fact that whenever speed is distributed, they are and you've got so many data inputs come in from, so to a unified user trying to get their data the way they wanna see it. You might want it for a totally other reason, right? I'm just curious, how does that influence or how has that influenced your work in terms of making sure that transport goes smoothly? Because you do have so much more to work with in a much more complex environment for multiple uses that are unique, right? >> (Mike) Yeah. >> It's not all the same. >> Huge, huge impact for sure. The whole idea of decomposing an application into a much larger number of much smaller pieces than was done in the past has many benefits probably one of the most significant being the ability to make small changes, small incremental changes and afford a much more trial and error approach to innovation versus more macro-level planning waterfall as they call it. But one of the implications of that is now you have a large number of entities. Whether they be big or small, there's a large number of them running within the estate. And there's the orchestration of them and the interconnection of them for sure but it's a n-squared relationship, right. The more these entities you have, the more potential connections between each of them you have to somehow structure and manage and ensure are being done securely and so on. So that has really driven the need for new ways of tying things together, new ways essentially of integration. It has definitely amplified the need for disciplines, EPI management for example. It has driven a lot of increase demand for an event-driven approach where you're streaming in realtime and distributing events to many receivers and dealing with things asynchronously and not depending on round-trip times for everything to be consistent and so on. So, there's just a myriad of implications there that are very detailed technical-level drive some of the things that we're doing now. >> Yeah, I'll just add that in terms of data itself, you've probably heard this a number of times, data is king. Everything we do is based on data in one way or another, So we as Red Hat as a whole and Middleware specifically, we've had a very strong data strategy for a long time. Just as you've got myriad types of data, you can't assume that one way of storing that data is gonna be right for every type of data that you've got. So, we've worked through the integration efforts on ensuring that no sequel data stores, relational data stores^, in-memory data caching and even the messaging services as a whole is a way of sto^ring data in transit, that allows you to, in some ways it allows you to actually look at it in an event-driven way and make intelligent decisions. So that's a key part of what anybody should do if they are in the enterprise space. That's certainly what we're doing because at the end of the day people are building these apps to use that data. >> Well, gentlemen, I know you have another engagement. We're gonna cut you loose but I do wanna say you're the first guests to get applause. (guests laugh) >> From across all the way there. People at home can't hear but, so congratulations. You've been well received already. >> I think they're clearly tuned in to the renaissance of the job in here. >> Yes. >> Thank you both. >> Thanks for the time. >> Mark: Thanks so much. >> We appreciate that. Back with more, we are watching a Red Hat summer 2019 coverage live on the CUBE. (Upbeat music)