>>From the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston. It's the cube covering IBM thing brought to you by IBM. >>Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman and we're here with the cubes coverage of IBM. Thank you. 2020. The global experience reaching all of the participants of the event where they are. I'm happy to welcome back one of our cube alumni, Mike Farris, who is the vice president of corporate development and strategy at red hat. Mike, it's great to see you. Likewise too. Happy to be here. All right, so what Mike, uh, you know, lots of things to talk about a few weeks back. Uh, of course the management changes happened. Uh, we're fresh off of a red hat summit. Uh, I, I had a pleasure really talking to a lot of your peers, uh, your new boss, uh, and uh, you know, many of the customers. Uh, but for our, I think audience, right? Bring us up to speed. Uh, you know, back in 2019, it, uh, the, the largest software acquisition ever, uh, completed with IBM buying red hat and there've been some management changes, uh, some people, uh, switching roles. >>And, and you've got a new title, so, uh, bring her audience speed. Sure. Absolutely. So it's, it's been an exciting several, several months as we've gone through this. Of course. Um, we knew things were going to happen, things were announced clearly with Jenny's retirement quite a while ago. Um, but certainly, you know, the Arvin announcement and then as well as having both Jim Whitehurst become president. Okay. Oh, Cormier becoming CEO of red hat. You know, it's been an exciting several months trying to try to go through this and understand, you know, what would change and frankly, what would not change. Um, I'll say from red hats perspective, having been with red hat for coming up, you're on 20 years, uh, not a lot is really changed. We're still focused on our mission of being the owner leading enterprise open source software company, uh, focusing on both taking our, our platforms, both red hat enterprise Linux and now OpenShift a Ford in the market, partnering around middleware components, hardening around our management, uh, as well as our storage elements. >>So, you know, our mission hasn't changed and that's kind of one of the key aspects of this. I'll say that certainly, you know, with Arvind now as CEO of IBM and Jim Whitehurst is president of IBM along with Oh for me or being, you know, CEO of red hat and we've got a really strong leadership group in place at IBM that understands what red hat is, what we mean to the customer and just as importantly what we mean to the open source community. Uh, and, and that type of action and, and, and drive is certainly something that, that we think, you know, that leadership in place will help to ensure that the value we've delivered to customers, frankly from day one back when we launched red hat enterprise Linux or red hat advanced server, frankly, uh, it's something that, that we'll be able to continue to do and drive in the community and with the customers as we move forward. >>Yeah. Mike, it's interesting when we look out, uh, on the, the ecosystems and happening out there, we understand for customers sometimes it might be challenging to say, Hey, I listened to 10 different vendors and they all say the same words. I've got multi hybrid cloud, digital modernization, things like that. Well, with our hat as a, as an analyst firm, we kind of say, okay, everybody does things a little bit different. Do you know if you look at the big cloud players, they are all playing different games. When we looked at the IBM strategy pre acquisition of red hat and red hat, they line up pretty well, you know, red hat. Yeah, very much. At summit it was open hybrid cloud. Uh, when I look at IBM, maybe a little bit more talk of multicloud than hybrid. Well, but hybrid is long bend a piece of it. >>So yeah. Okay. Give us a little bit of the inside, you know, with your strategy hat on it. How much had it been okay. Strong alignment, obviously IBM and red hat decades. Um, but you know, there are some places where, uh, you need to make sure that people understand that, you know, red sat still please markers with all the clouds. And of course IBM has services that span many places, but they also have, you know, products and services that are, uh, it was particular to IBM thing. Absolutely. And I think, you know, it's important to note, and this is well established that, you know, one of the core, uh, justifications and reasons for the acquisition was really around red hats. A physician, not just an open source, but in the hybrid cloud. Um, we've been talking about that for sure many years in fact, before most of the vendor's name has predicted up. >>Um, uh, but just as importantly, I think if you look back at Marvin Krishna's announcements on frankly the day that he was named CEO, uh, you know, he starts talking about things like IBM's focus being hybrid. Yeah. AI. And how did those things come together and who were the participants in that value being delivered? Certainly from red hat's perspective is, as we've said, we've been talking about hybrid and delivering on hybrid for many years now. Now that's being, being pushed as part of the IBM overall message. Um, and so certainly being able to leverage that value and extend it throughout the ecosystem that IBM brings throughout the software that IBM has and their services. You know, certainly we think we've got a, a good opportunity to really take that message broader in the market. Um, you know, with again, with, with both Paul and Jim, president and CEO of red hat working together and we'll be able to take that and leverage that capability throughout all of IBM generally. >>Yeah. I'm glad you brought up the AI piece because one of the things that really struck me, thumb it often we're talking about plot worms and we're talking about infrastructure. And while that is my background, we understand that the reason infrastructure exists is because my Apple, that application and one of the most important piece of applications or data. So, you know, red hat of course has a strong history with hi guys, uh, to applications and data. You, you've got an operating system as you know, one of the core pieces of what you're doing. And when I think about IBM and its strengths, well the first thing I probably think of is services. But the second thing I think of was all of the businesses productivity, uh, the databases, you know, all these applications that IBM has. I read it over the years, uh, wondering if we can just click down one notch and you talk about, uh, you know, hybrid cloud and AI and everything. >>How are IBM and red hat helping customers build all of those new applications go through those transformations, uh, to really be modern enterprises? Yeah, so certainly if you look at red hat's history where we focused very much on building the platforms and again, whether that was red hat, enterprise, Linux open shift or J boss, you know, our focus has been how can we make a standardized platform, it will work across the industry regardless of use case or industry verdict. IBM, you know, has both platforms as well as a lot of investment in capabilities in the higher level value services as well as the specializations. And use of these applications and platforms for specific vertical industries. And a lot of what they've been able to bring to the table with your investments in Watson and AI as well as a lot of their data services has certainly start to come to fruition. >>And when we start taking these two in combination and applying, for example, a focus on developers, developer tools, being able to bring a value to not just uh, the operations folks, but also the developer side and really put a lot of the AI capabilities cross that we're starting to see, you know, accelerated value, accelerated use. And then if you layer that on top of a hybrid approach, you know, we've got a very strong message that crosses everything from, you know, existing applications to net new applications before developing from their DevOps cycle all the way through their operation cycle at the bottom end where they're, they're actually trying to do boy cross multiple platforms, multiple infrastructures, and keep everything consistently managed, secured and operated. And that's, that's really the overall message that we're seeing as we talk about this together with IBM. All right. So, Mike, you touched on some of the products that that red hat, uh, offers in the portfolio. >>Uh, it was, it was a real focus at summit, not really to talk about the announcements, you know, a week before a summit two came out. Yeah. Uh, OpenShift bar dog four wasn't a big w blob. Uh, you know, give us the update on really the red hat portfolio and you know, where are those points? You know, IBM is helping red hat scale. Yeah. So certainly you've touched on some of the big ones, right? Well, OpenShift itself with the four dot. Four release brings a lot of new capabilities, uh, that are being brought forward to those customers. I have a better management, better capabilities and what they can do from monitoring service, et cetera. Um, but certainly also things like what we're doing with OpenShift virtualization, which was another announcement. There were, we're actually doing, you know, bringing a game, changing capability to the market, uh, and enabling customers that have both existing, uh, virtual virtualized environments and also new or, or migrated or transformed a container, native environments and running those on the same platform. >>With the same management infrastructure, we see that as huge to be able to simplify the management capabilities, understand cost and be able to control those environments in a much more consistent way. Uh, secondly, uh, you know, one of the big things that's been happening is really around advanced container management. What we're calling an ACM. Uh, this is, this is a good example of how red hat and IBM have worked together, uh, to bring existing IBM capabilities and what they had called a multi cluster management or MCM and bring those not just into red hat yes. Part of our platforms, but also have red hat take the step of open sourcing that and making it part of the industry standard through open source community. So being able to take that type of value that IBM had matured, take it through red hat into the open source community, but simultaneously deliver it to our customers. >>Yeah. Open shift and make it part of the platform. It's something we really see as, as a huge value add. Mmm. We're also doing a lot more with hyperscalers, especially in the space of OpenShift managed services. Uh, you saw some of those last week and I would encourage everyone to go out and, and look at the Paul Cormier and Scott Guthrie announcements that we did. There was a keynote, a video that you can go review. Uh, but, but certainly, uh, certainly the focus on how do we work with these hyperscalers inclusive of IBM, uh, to make open shift and much more fluid deployment option, have it more, more service oriented, a both on premise and off premise so the customers can actually, uh, work together better in it. Yeah. A red hat I think has always done a really good job of highlighting those partnerships. It's way easy on the outside to talk about the competitive nature of the industry. >>And I remember a few years ago, a red hat made, you know, a strong partnership with AWS. You mentioned, you know, Scott Guthrie from Microsoft. Well, okay. Not Satya Nadella. Okay. Love it last year, but Microsoft long partner. Oh, okay. Of course, with IBM back to the earliest days, uh, and with red hat or, uh, you know, in the much more recent days, uh, there was those partnerships. So critically important. ACM definitely an area, uh, we want to watch it. It was really question we had had, if you look at last year, Microsoft announced Azure, uh, there are lots of solutions announced as to how am I going to manage in this multicloud world. Um, because it's not, my piece is everywhere. It's now I need to manage a lot of things that are out of my control from different vendors and hopefully we learned a lot of the lessons from the multi-vendor era that will be fixed in the multi cloud era. >>Oh, absolutely. And you know, arc was part of our discussion with Scott Guthrie last week or Paul's discussion and you'll see a demo of that. But I would also expect that you'll see more things coming from us markers as well. Right. You know, this is about building a platform, a hybrid platform that works in a multicloud world and being able to describe that in a very consistent way. Manage it. You were at entitled it in a very consistent way of across all the vendors, inclusive of both self and managed services, only one option. And so we're very focused on doing that. Um, IBM, certainly AXA assisting in that, helping grow it. But overall this focus is really about red has perspective about making that hybrid, right? the leading hybrid platform, the leading Coobernetti's. Okay. uh, in the industry. And that's, that's really where starting from with OpenShift. >>All right. So, so Mike, we started out the discussion talking about some of the changes and you know, where red hat stays, red hat and where the company is working together. Obviously the leadership changes. Oh, we're a big piece. Uh, congratulations you, you got, you know, a new role. I've seen quite a few people, uh, with some new titles. Uh, you know, w which is always nice to see. Uh, the, the people that have been working for a long time. The other area where seems from the outside there coordinated effort is around the covert response. So, you know, I've seen the, the public letters from, from Arvin Krishna of course. red hat and Paul Cormier's letter. Well, he is there. Uh, IBM was one of the first companies that we had heard from, uh, that said, Hey, you know, we're not going to RSA conference this year. >>We're moving digital, uh, with the events. So no real focus on them boys. And then of course boarding customers. Yeah. How does that covert response happen? And am I right from the outside that it looks like there, there is a bit of United right attack, this global pandemic response. It is a, you know, I think there's two levels to this. Certainly between red hat and IBM were well coordinated. Um, within, within red hat we have, uh, we have teams that are specifically dedicated to making sure, yeah, our associates and more importantly, uh, our customers and the overall communities are well-served through this. As you said earlier in the interview, uh, certainly we hold back on any significant product announcements at summit, including with some of our partners merely because we wanted to maintain this focus on how can we help everyone through this very unfortunate experience. >>Um, and so, you know, as obviously a lot of us, all of us are sitting at home now globally. Uh, the focus is very much how do we stay connected or we keep the business flowing as much as possible through this and, and, and keep people safe and secure in their environments and make sure that we serve both the customers and the associates. Yes. Awesome away. So there's a lot of sensitivity and we want to make sure that, you know, the industry and the overall world knows, uh, that we're very focused on keeping people healthy and moving forward as we, as we work through this together as a world. Yeah. Well, Mike Ferris, thank you so much for the update. It's been been a pleasure catching up. Great. Thanks dude. Appreciate it. All right. Stay tuned for lots more coverage from IBM. Think 20, 20. The global digital experience. Okay. To a minimum. And thank you. We're watching. Thank you.