>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Ansible Fest 2020, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Everyone welcome back to theCUBEs, virtual coverage of Ansible Fest 2020. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, we're here virtual, we're not face to face obviously because of COVID. So we're doing a virtual event Ansible Fest coverage. We have Mary Johnston Turner, research Vice President of Cloud Management at IDC international data Corp. Mary great to see you, thanks for coming on for Ansible Fest 2020. >> Thanks for inviting me. >> So obviously Cloud Management, everything's Cloud native we're seeing that at VM world, we've got Re-invent coming up, Azure has got growth. The enterprises have gotten some religion on Cloud Native, COVID certainly is forcing that. What are you seeing from your research at IDC around the convergence of Cloud strategies. What's the data tell you, what's the research show? >> Well, obviously with COVID a lot of folks have pivoted or accelerated their move to the Cloud in many ways. And I think what's happening is that we're seeing many, many organizations recognizing they continue to have need for On-prem resources. They're building out edge, they've got remote work from home, they've got traditional VM workloads, They've got modern Cloud Native container-based workloads running On-Prem and in public Clouds and public Cloud services. So it's really kind of a striking world of connected Clouds is how I'm talking about it increasingly. And I think what that means from an operational perspective is that it's getting more and more challenging for organizations to maintain consistent configuration, stable APIs, security, compliance and conformance. And they're really starting to look at Automation as the way to deal with the increasing scale and velocity of change because that's one of the things that's happening. And I think COVID accelerated that is we've seen organizations stand up applications they never thought they were going to have to stand up and they not only stood them up very quickly, but then they continue to update them with great frequency often multiple times a day or a week. And and the infrastructure has had to pivot and the workloads have had to migrate. So it's really been a very challenging time for many organizations. And I think those that are coping the best with it are the ones who have been investing in Automation particularly Automation in CICD pipeline and code based environment. >> Yeah, you know, you're seeing the releases, obviously Automation has helped on the agile side, VMs and containers have been a great way to automate, how are customers looking at this? Because it seems to be Automation is like the first step towards everything as a service, right? So it's XAAS as it's says, as it's called in the industry. Services is ultimately the holy grail in all this because you get, when the Automation and services used to be Automation, Automation, Automation. Now you're hearing as a service, as a service, as a service as the top three priorities. So it seems to be a trajectory. How are customers getting first of all... Do you agree with that? And then how do customers think about this? Cause sometimes we're ahead of the customers. Automation is the first step. What's your take on this, and what are customers planning when it comes to Automation? Are they thinking as a service? What'd you hearing from the customers? >> Let's talk a little bit about what we mean by as a service. Cause that's a really interesting concept, right? And I've been hearing this conversation with folks as a service started a decade or more ago, taking things that particularly software that ran On-prem infrastructure or software. And putting it into share Data Centers where we could run Multi tenant Environments we could scale it, and each Cloud provider basically got that scale by investing in their own set of infrastructure Automation. So whether it was Azure or VMware or whoever, they build a whole repeatable, scalable environment that they could control. What's happening now is that we're seeing these control planes get stretched back to On-prem resources. And I think what's really happening is that the line about where does the thing physically have to run? Becomes more of a discussion around the physics of the matter, Latency, Data Volumes, transaction processing cost of installed equipment. And every organization is making its own choice about what's the right mix, in terms of where physically do things have to run, and how they want to manage them. But I think that we're starting to see a abstraction layer coming in between that. And a lot of that abstraction is Automation that's portable that can be applied across all these environments. And that can be used to standardize configurations, to maintain standard APIs, to deploy at very fast speed and consistency across all these different resources. And so Automation and the related management layer to me is that new abstraction layer that actually is going to allow most enterprises to stop worrying quite so much about (chuckles) what kind of as a service am I buying? And focus more on the economics and the performance and the physics of the infrastructure, and then maintain consistency with highly Automated, Repeatable, Programmable Style Environments that are consistent across all these different platforms. >> Yeah, that's a great point. It's great insight, I love that. It's almost, as you can almost visualize the boardroom. We need to change our business model as a service. Go do it, climb that hill, get it done, what are you talking about? What you're trying to manage workloads inside our enterprise and outside as they started looking at the workload aspect of it, it's not trivial to just say it, right? So your containers has barely filled the void here. How are customers and how are people getting started with this initial building block of saying okay, do we just containerize it? Cause that's another hand waving activity which has a lot of traction. Also you put some containers has got some goodness to it, are many people getting started with solving this problem? And what are some of the roadblocks of just managing these workloads inside and outside the enterprise? >> Well, again I think, yeah many organizations are still in the early stages of working with containers. Right now I think our research shows that maybe five to 10% of applications have been containerized. And that's a mix of lift and shift of traditional workloads as well as net new Cloud Native. Over the next couple of years almost enterprise has tell us to think a third of their workloads could be containerized. So it's ramping very, very quickly. Again, I think that the goal for many organizations is certainly containers allow for faster development, very supportive microservices, but increasingly it's also about portability. I talk to many organizations that say, yeah, one of the reasons I'm moving, even traditional workloads into containers is so that I have that flexibility. And again, they're trying to get away from the tight coupling of workloads to physical resources and saying I'm going to make those choices, but they might change over time or I might need to go what happens. I have to scale much faster than I ever thought. I'm never going to be able to do that my own data center, I'm going to go to the Cloud. So I think that we're seeing increasing investments in, Kubernetes and containers to promote more rapid scaling and increased business agility. And again, I think that means that organizations are looking for those workloads to run across a whole set of environments, geographies, physical locations, edge. And so they're investing in platforms and they count on Automation to help them do that. >> So your point here is that in five, 10% that's a lot of growth opportunity. So containers is actually happening now so you starting to see that progression. So that's great insight. So I've got to ask you on the COVID impact, that's certainly changed some orientation because hey, this project let's double down on this is a tailwind for us, work from home this new environment and these projects, maybe we want to wait on those, how do we come out of COVID? Some people have been saying, some spending in some areas are increasing, some are not, how are customers spending money on infrastructure with COVID impact? What are you seeing from the numbers? >> Well, that's a great question, and I do see one of the major things we do is track IT markets and spending and purchasing around the world. And as you might expect, if you go back to the early part of the year, there was a very rapid shift to Cloud, particularly to support work from home. And obviously there was a lot of investment in virtual desktops and remote work kinds of and collaboration very early on. But now that we're sort of maturing a little bit and moving into more of ongoing recovery resiliency sort of phase, we continue to see very strong spending on Cloud. I think overall it's accelerated this move to more connected environments. Many of the new initiatives are being built and deployed in Cloud environments. But again, we're not seeing a Whole Hog exit from On-prem resources. The other thing is Edge. We're seeing a lot of growth on Edge, both again there's sort of work from home, but also more remote monitoring, more support for all kinds of IOT and remote work environments, whether it's Lab Testing or Data Analysis or Contact Tracing. I mean, there's just so many different use cases. >> I'm going to ask you about Ansible and Red Hat. I see you've been following Ansible since the acquisition by Red Hat. How do you think they're doing Visa Vie the market, their competitors that have also been acquired? What's your take on their performance, their transition, their transformation? >> Well, this infrastructure is code or Automation is code market has really matured a lot over the last 10 or more years. And I think the Ansible acquisition was about five years ago now. I think we've moved from just focusing on trying to build elegant Automation languages, which certainly was an early initiative. Ansible offered one of the earlier human readable Python based approaches as opposed to more challenging programming languages that some of the earlier solutions had. But I think what's been really interesting to me over the last couple years with Red Hat is just what a great job they've done in promoting the community and building out that ecosystem, because at the end of the day the value of any of these infrastructures code solutions is how much they promote the connectivity across networks, Clouds, servers, security, and do that in a consistent, scalable way. And I think that's what really is going to matter going forward. And then that's probably why you've seen a range of acquisitions in this market over the last couple of years, is that as a standalone entity, it's hard to build those really robust ecosystems, and to do the analytics and the curation and the support at large scale. So it kind of makes sense as these things mature that they become fun homes with larger organizations that can put all that value around it. >> That's great commentary on the infrastructure as code, I totally agree. You can't go wrong by building abstraction layers and making things more agile. I want to get your take on some announcements that are going on here and get your thoughts on your perspective. Obviously they released with the private Automation hub and a bunch of other great stuff. I mean, bringing Automation, Kubernetes, and series of new features to the platform together, obviously continuation of their mission. But one of the things when I talked to the engineers is I say, what's the top three things, Ansible Fest, legal collections, collections, collections, so you start to see this movement around collections and the platform. The other thing is, it's a tool market and everyone's got tools we need a platform. So it's a classic tools. As you saw that in big data other areas where need start getting into platform, and you need management and orchestration you need Automation, services. What's your perspective on these announcements? Have they been investing aggressively? What does it mean? What's your take? And what does it mean? >> Yeah, I would agree that Red Hat has continued to invest very aggressively in Red Hat and in Ansible over the last few years. What's really interesting is if you go back a couple years, we had ASML engine, which included periodic, maybe every quarter or even longer than that distributions that pretty much all Ansible code got shipped on. And then we had tower which provided an API and a way to do some audit and logging and integration with source control. And that was great, but it didn't move fast enough. And we just got done talking about how everything's accelerated and everything's now connected Clouds. And I think a lot of what the Red Hat has done is really, approach the architecture for scale and ecosystem for scale. And so the collections have been really important because they provide a framework to not only validate and curate content but also to help customers navigate it and can quickly find the best content for their use cases. And also for the partners to engage, there's I think it's 50 plus collections now that are focused on partner content. And so it's I think it's really provided an environment where the ecosystem can grow, where customers can get the support that they need. And then with the Automation hub and the ability to support really robust source control and distribution. And again, it's promoting this idea of an Automation environment that can scale not only within a data center, but really across these connected environments. >> Great stuff. I want to get your thoughts cause I want to define and understand what Red Hat and Ansible, when they talk about curated content, which includes support for open shifts, versus pulling content from the community. I hear content I'm like, oh, content is that a video? Is that like, what is content? So can you explain what they mean when they say they're currently building out, aggressively building curated content and this idea of what does content mean? Is it content, is it code? >> Yeah, I think any of these Automation as code environments. You really have a set of building blocks that in the Ansible framework would be be modules and playbooks and roles. And those are relatively small stable pieces of code, much of it is actually written by third parties or folks in the community to do a very specific task. And then what the Ansible platform is really great at is integrating those modules and playbooks and roles to create much more robust Automations and to give folks a starting point, and ability to do, rather than having to code everything from scratch to really kind of pull together things that have been validated have been tested, get security updates when they need it that kind of thing. And so the customers can focus on essentially changing these things together and customizing them for their own environment as opposed to having to write all the code from step one. >> So content means what, in this context, what does content mean for them? >> It's Automation building blocks. It's code, it's small amounts of code that do very specific things (chuckles) and in a collections environment, it's tagged, it's tested, it's supported. >> It's not a research report like of a Cube video, it's like code, it's not content. >> Yeah, I know. But again, this is Automation as code, right? So it it's pieces of code that rather than needing an expert who understands everything about how a particular device or system works, you've got reusable pieces of code that can be integrated together, customized and run on a repeatable, scalable basis. And if they need to be updated cause an API changes or something, there's a chain that goes back to the the vendors who, again are part of the ecosystem and then there's a validation and testing. So that by the time it goes back into the collections, the customers can have some confidence that when they pull it down, it's not going to break their whole environment. Whereas in a pure community supported model, the contents made by the community, may be beautiful, but you don't know, and you could have five submissions that kind of do the same thing. How do you know what's going to work and what's going to be stable? So it's a lot of helping organizations get Automation faster in a more stable environment. >> We can certainly follow up on this train cause one of things I've been digging into is this idea of, open source and contribution, integrations are huge. The collections to me is super important because when we start thinking about integration that's one of Cloud native, supposedly strength is to be horizontally scalable, integrated, building abstraction layers as you had pointed out. So I've got to ask you with respect to open source. I was just talking with a bunch of founders yesterday here in Silicon Valley around as Cloud scales and certainly you seeing snowflake build on top of AWS. I mean, that's an amazing success story. You're starting to see these new innovations where the Cloud scale providers are providing great value propositions and the role open source is trying to keep pace. And so I got to ask you is still open source, let me say I believe it's important, but how does open source maintain its relevance as Cloud scale goes on? Because that's going to force Automation to go faster. Okay, and you got the major Cloud vendors promoting their own Cloud platforms. Yet you got the innovation of startups and companies. Your enterprises are starting to act like startups as container starts to get through this lift and shift phase. You'll see innovation coming from enterprises as well as startups. So you start to see this notion bring real value on top of these Clouds. What's your take on all this? >> Well, I think open source and the communities continue to be very, very important, particularly at the infrastructure layer, because to get all this innovation that you're talking about, you act, if you believe you've got a connected environment where folks are going to have different footprints and, and probably, you know, more than one public Cloud set of resources, it's only going to, the value is only going to be delivered if the workloads are portable, they're stable, they can be integrated, they can be secure. And so I think that the open source communities have become, you know, continue to be an incredibly important as a way to get industry alignment and shared innovation on the, on the platform and infrastructure and operational levels. And I think that that's, you know, going to be, be something that we're going to see for a long time. >> Well Mary, I really appreciate your insights, I got one final question, but I'll just give you a plug for the folks watching, check out Mary's work at IDC, really cutting edge and super important as Cloud management really is at the heart of all the, whether it's multicloud, on-premise hybrid or full Cloud lift and shift or Cloud native, management plays a huge important role right now. That's where the action is. You looking at the container growth as Mary you pointed out is great. So I have to ask you what comes next. What do you think management will do relative to Cloud management, as it evolves in these priority environments around Cloud, around on-premise as the operations start to move along, containers are critical. You talked about the growth is only five, 10%, a lot of headroom there. How is management going to evolve? >> Well, again, I think a lot of it is going to be is everything has to move faster. And that means that Automation actually becomes more and more important, but we're going to have to move from Automation at human speed to Automation at container and Cloud speed. And that means a lot is going to have to be driven by AI and ML analytics that can and observability solutions. So I think that that's going to be the next way is taking these, you know, very diverse sources of, of log and metrics and application traces and performance and end user experience and all these different things that tell us, how is the application actually running and how is the infrastructure behaving? And then putting together an analytics and Automation layer that can be a very autonomous. We have at IDC for doing a lot of research on the future of digital infrastructure. And this is a really fundamental tenant of what we believe is that autonomous operations is the future for a Cloud and IT. >> Final point for our friends out there and your friends out there watching who some are on the cutting edge, riding the big wave of Cloud native, they're at Cube calm, they're digging in, they're at service meshes, Kubernetes containers, you name it. And for the folks who have just been kind of grinding it out, an it operations, holding down the Fort, running the networks, running all the apps. What advice do you give the IT skillset friends out there that are watching. What should they be doing? What's your advice to them, Mary? >> Well, you know, we're going to continue to see the convergence of, of virtualized and container based infrastructure operations. So I think anyone out there that is in those sorts of roles really needs to be getting comfortable with programmatic code driven Automation and, and figuring out how to think about operations from more of a policy and scale scalability, point of view. Increasingly, you know, if you believe what I just said about the role of analytics driving Automation, it's going to have to be based on something, right? There's going to have to be rules. There's going to have to be policies is going to have to be, you know, configuration standards. And so kind of making that shift to not thinking so much about, you know, the one off lovingly handcrafted, handcrafted environment, thinking about how do we scale, how do we program it and starting to get comfort with, with some of these tools, like an Ansible, which is designed to be pretty accessible by folks with a large range of skillsets, it's human readable, it's Python based. You don't have to be a computer science major to be able to get started with it. So I think that that's what many folks have to do is start to think about expanding their skill sets to operate at even greater scale and speed. >> Mary, thanks so much for your time. Mary Johnston Turner, Vice President of Research at Cloud for Cloud management at IDC for the Ansible Fest virtual. I'm John Ferrier with theCUBE for cube coverage, cube virtual coverage of Ansible Fest, 2020 virtual. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE. Covering AnsibleFest 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back everyone it's theCUBE's live coverage here in Atlanta, Georgia for Red Hat's AnsibleFest. #AnsibleFest, check out all the commentary on Twitter. Of course, we're here for two days, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Mary Johnston Turner, Research VP Cloud Management International Data Corp IDC. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. >> So IT operations has been an evolving thing. AI and automation really changing the landscape of this data equation. IT operations used to be, "Hey, you go to IT ops, no problem." Now with the world changing to be more software-driven, software-led, a lot's changed. What's your take? What's your research say about the IT ops landscape? >> Well, I mean, you have to put it in the context of what's going on generally with IT, right? I mean, we're clearly seeing DevOps, you know it's either in production or in large scale testing and the majority of enterprises. We've got lots and lots of containers and Kubernetes usage, we've got multiple clouds in just about every enterprise you talk to. It's, you know, well over 90%. And what that all means is that there's just a lot of change on a lot of different levels. And so that's kind of really put stress on traditional, operational approaches on task-oriented automation. you know, siloed approaches to control and monitoring. And what we're really starting to see is now a move to how to become more integrated, more unified and more collaborative across all these teams. And that's actually kind of driving to me for a new generation of monitoring automation and analytics kind of all put together. >> It's interesting how management software has always been part of every IT conversation we've had in over the past decades. And, but recently if you look up the evolution of cloud and hybrid multi-cloud, you mentioned that. CloudOne, Dot, Amazon, public cloud, pretty straightforward to comprehend. Start-up start there. But this whole other cloud paradigm is shifting has taken these categories like network management, turned them into observability. Five companies go public and M&A activity booming. Automation similar kind of vibe to it here. It's got this management piece to it that used to be this white space. Now the aperture seems to be increasing. What's your take on this? Because we're trying to make sense of it. Customers are trying to figure it out, obviously. They've been doing configuration management. But now they got scale, they got some of the things you mentioned. What's this automation category look like or is it a category? >> I don't know if it's a category or not but it's certainly a thing, right? I think what we're seeing with automation is historically, it was very individual driven. It was, "I have a problem", right? I have to configure something or deploy something and I could whip up a script, you know, do a little code and it worked for me and it wasn't documented and that was great, you know. And I think what we're happening now with just the way applications are being architected, I mean, you're moving to very modular, microservices-based approach to applications, the way they're deployed. All the dependencies across all the different tiers from network to storage to public cloud to private cloud. It's really very, very difficult to rely on a bunch of ad hoc tools to do that. And so I think what's happened with automation is it's expanding up to become as much a business collaboration platform, as it is just sort of a task, feeds and speeds sort of control platform. We're kind of in the middle of that evolution. Even, you know, two years ago I don't think you saw the kinds of analytics, you know, and machine learning and AI that we're now starting to see come in as an overlay to the automation environment. >> Mary, one of the things we've been talking about for the last couple of years is that great buzz word of digital transformation. The real driver for that is I need to be a data driven organization, not just ad hoc things. So where does automation fit into that broader discussion of, you know, changing operational models like you were talking about? >> Well I think, you know done right, it can really be a platform for collaboration and accelerating digital transformation across the enterprise. Because rather than having, you know, each team have to do their own thing and then do a manual hand off or a big change control meeting, you know, these things just don't scale and move quick enough in today's environments. Particularly if you're trying to update your applications every five minutes, right? So, I think the collaboration, the different teams and also a creative environment where you can have more generalists too, right? you know, there's collaboration across IT ops and DevOps and sort of the lines start to blur. >> Yeah, you mentioned the word platform and we were talking to the Ansible team, they were very specific as to how they chose that for customers out there. You know, choosing a platform is a bit of a commitment. It's not just a tactical, "We're going to do this." What's your thoughts on the Ansible automation platform and what feedback do you have to customers as to how they're deciding which platforms and how many platforms that they'll develop on? >> Yeah, it's a really interesting conversation. I mean, I think one of the things that the Ansible team's really focusing on that's important is the modularity. The fact that you can plug and play and kind of grow over time. And also that it's a very software-driven paradigm with the automation artifacts under source control. Which again is kind of different for a lot of ops teams. They don't have that notion of Git and software development all the time. So I think that having a platform approach that still allows a fair amount of modularity integration, and it lets different parts of the organization decide over time how much they want to participate in a very curated, consistent integration. And at the same time, at least in the Ansible world, because of the way it's architected, they can still have modules that call out to other automation, you know, solutions that are in the environment. So it's not an all or nothing, and I think that's really, really important. And it's also a platform for analytics. I'm sorry, but data, you know, about what's going on with the automation. >> The data's critical, but we had mentioned earlier on our previous interview with Red Hat folks and Stu and I's intro about the cloud and how the complexity that is being introduced, and you mentioned some of those earlier, the complexities are there. Of the automation solutions that you've seen, which one's having the most impact for customers? >> Well that, what do you mean by impact? There's such a, such a range of them. If you look in certainly the configuration, infrastructure as code space, obviously Ansible, there's a couple others. If you look into the CI/CD space, right? I mean there's a whole set of very optimized CI/CD tools out there that are very important to the DevOps environment. And, again, you'll see integrations between the infrastructure and the CI/CD, and they're all kind of blurring. And then you've got very specific, almost domain controllers, whether they're for hardware or converged infrastructure-type platforms, or whether they're for public clouds. And those don't go away, right? You still need something that understands the lower level system. And so, I think what we're seeing is organizations trying to reduce the number of individual siloed automation tools they've got, but they're still probably going to have more than one to do the full stack with something, you know, acting as kind of a policy-driven control plane in analytics-driven control plane in the middle. >> So, you've still got to run the plumbing. >> Right, exactly. >> You've still got to run the system now. >> Yeah, I mean something like 70 to 80% of the customers we talk to that are using one or more of the big public clouds, they're also using a fair amount of control tooling that's provided by those cloud vendors. And those aren't going to go away, because, you know, it's just like a hardware system. You got to have the drivers, right? You got to have the core, but you've got to be able to again have the process flow across it that's really important. >> What's your take on the market place shaking out the winners and losers? Because I know you like to track the marketplace from a research standpoint. It just seems that all the events we go to at theCube, everyone's jockeying for the control plane. >> They are. >> Or something. The control plane of the data. We're the control plane for the management. So, the control plane, meaning horizontally scalable, much more platform-centric. You're starting to see kind of a systems thinking coming back into the enterprise versus the siloed IT, but this illustrious control plane, (Mary laughing) I mean, how many control planes can there be? What's your take on all this craziness? >> That's a good question. I mean again, I think there is a difference between sort of the driver level, right? Which it used to be, again, those scripts. They were kind of like drivers, right? That's almost becoming just the playing field. You've got to have those integrations. You've got to have a nice modular way to architect that. What really is going to be the control plane is the data. It's the metrics around what are you doing. It's the performance, it's the security, and being able to actually optimize a lot of the SLOs that go along with that. That's really where the, you know, being able to do a good thing with the data, and tie it to the business and the app is where the real control is going to be. >> Mary, how's Ansible doing as a business? We saw a lot of proof points in the keynote about the community growth, obviously, adoption is up. But, anything you can share about how, you know, they've been doing really about four years into the Red Hat acquisition? >> Well they're, I mean, they're growing pretty effectively. They, I think this whole category is growing, and so they're benefiting quite a lot from that. I think we are seeing really strong growth in the partner communities. Particularly here at this show we are seeing some really, you know, larger and larger scale partnerships, more and more investment. And I think that is really important, because ultimately for a technology like this to scale, it's got to become embedded in all kinds of solutions. So, I look at much as the partner adoption as a good sign as anything. >> Well it's, you know, I guess two things. One is, the whole market's growing. Is Ansible doing better or worse than that? And what is the impact of those cloud-native tooling that you mentioned is, you know, I looked there's kind of Red Hat, the Ansible traditional competition, which was more in the infrastructure management space and now, yes, they do containerization, and work more in the cloud environment. They're kind of spanning between those environments. >> Well, I think, you know, again I see most organizations using multiple tools. I think, from a revenue and growth rate, I can't really get into it, because, as you know, Ansible is actually part of Red Hat, and Red Hat doesn't report out numbers at that level. But we see certainly see a lot of adoption. And we see Ansible, you know, at least if not the primary, as one of the major tools in more and more organizations. And that's across compute, storage, network, very, very popular in the network space, and then growing. Probably not quite as strong, but growing interest in like security and IoT. >> It's interesting you mention the numbers and how Ansible is now part of Red Hat. When Red Hat bought Ansible a couple years ago, I think the year before Stu and I were talking about how configuration management automation was going to come. We kind of saw it, but one of the things that in the community and Red Hat had publicly talked about is, Red Hat didn't screw it up. They kind of got it right, they kept them alone. They grew organically and this organic growth is kind of a forcing function for these new things. Are you happy with what Red Hat has done here with Ansible and this platform? What's your take on this platform? Because platforms have to enable. Good things and value. >> I think you're right. Ansible grew very virally and organically for a long time, but you kind of hit a wall with that at some point. I think they rightly recognized that they needed to have the kind of tooling, the kind of metrics, the kind of hub and modularity that would allow it to go the next level. So, I'm actually really encouraged by this announcement, and I think it also, again, it positions it I think to make partner driven-solutions much more easily standardized. It opens up, probably more ways for people to contribute to the communities. So I think it's really positive. >> And as a platform, if it's enabling value, what kind of value propositions do you see emerging? 'Cause you've got the content collections, the automation hub, automation analytics. Is it just bolting onto RHEL as value? What is some of the value that you might see coming out of the Ansible automation platform? >> Oh, well I mean Ansible's always been very agnostic. It's always been its own business which certainly can compliment RHEL. There's RHEL rolls and all kinds of stuff. But that's not really the focal point for Ansible. Ansible really is about providing that modular consistent automation approach that can span all these different operational domains, and really reach into the business process. So, I think it's great for the Red Hat portfolio, but now as we start to see them building bridges into the bigger IBM portfolio, you know, we haven't had a lot of IBM/Ansible announcements yet, but I would expect that we're going to see more over time. I think the OpenShift Operator integrations are going to be important as part of the things that IBM is doing with OpenShift. So, I think there's more to come. >> Mary, I wonder what your research finds regarding open source consumption in general. You know, how many of the customers out there are just using the free community addition? You know, Red Hat's very clear, you know, they are not, the open source is not Red Hat's business model. It is the way that they work. >> Mary: It's a development model. >> It's their development model. So, any general comments about open source, and specifically around Ansible, kind of the community free edition versus paid. >> Well, it's obviously been an interesting week in open source world with, not Red Hat, but some other vendors getting a little bit of flack for some of the choices they've made about their business practices. I think, you know, there are many, many organizations that continue to get started with unpaid, unsupported open source. What typically happens is if it gets to a critical mass within a company, at some point they're going to say, either I have to invest a lot of people and time and do all the testing, hardening, integration, tracking the security updates you know, and they're still never going to get notified directly from intel when there's a problem, right? So, I think many organizations as they, if they decide this is mission critical then they start to look for supported editions. And we've done a lot of research looking at the benefits of getting that level of support and typically, it's just 50 to 60% improvements and, you know, stability, security, time-to-market because you're not having to do all that work. So, its a trade-off, but you'll always have some, particularly smaller organizations, individual teams that they're not going to pay for it. But I think its scale is when it really becomes valuable. >> Mary, final question for you, for the folks watching that couldn't make the event or industry insiders that aren't in this area. Why is this AnsibleFest more important this year than ever before? What's the big story? What's the top thing happening now in this world? >> I mean, there's great energy here this year. And I've gone to a couple of these over the years. First of all, it's the biggest one they've ever had. I think really though, it's the story of collaboration, building teams, automating end-to-end processes. And that's really powerful, because it's very clear that the community has stepped up from just saying, I can do a great job with network automation, or I can do a great job with cloud or with server. And they're really saying, this is about transforming the organization. Making the organization more productive, making the business more agile. And I think that is a big step for Ansible. >> You know, I think that is a huge point. I think that's something that's really important, because you know, we've talked about capabilities before. It does this, it does that to your point. This is kind of a testament to the operationalizing of DevOps. 'Cause people have always been the bottleneck. So this seems to be the trend. Is that what you're saying? >> Yeah, I think so. And I also see, again, this community talking so much about upscaling the people. Embracing things like unit testing and source control. And it's a maturation of the whole automation conversation among this community. And remember, this community is only what? Six, seven years old? >> Stu: 2012. >> Yeah, I mean it's really a very, very young community. So I think it's a really important pivot point, just in terms of the scale of the problems they can address. >> Solve for abstractions. Solving big problem, automation will be a great category. Mary, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Sharing your insights and your research and your analysis. I appreciate it. >> Okay, thank you. >> Mary Johnston Turner Research VP of Cloud Management at IDC, here inside theCUBE. Breaking down the analysis of Red Hat's Ansible position vis-a-vis the market trends. It's theCUBE, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (upbeat techno music)

live from san francisco extracting the signal from the noise it's the cute covering oracle openworld 2015 brought to you by oracle now your host John furrier okay welcome back everyone we are here live in San Francisco on Howard Street for oracle openworld special presentation of the cube so looking ankles flagship program we go out to the events and extract the system noise i'm john furrier founder of SiliconANGLE join my next to gas prakash ramamurthy senior vice president systems and cloud management basically management cloud at oracle and mary johnson Turner research vice president enterprise systems management IDC welcome to the cube thank you so I think take my glasses off to read read the intro there but I want to just get your take on it because we just had to admit on Lavery talk about the plowed and one question I didn't get to ask him was a success mark hurry was talk about the pipeline of customers already in motion on the cloud so I wanted to ask him which is great timing for you guys is how do they integrate it which he talked about but then how do they manage if this is a big issue and he you know ease of use is something that he was generally throwing around there so what is the status of the management cloud because that will be a differentiator like security and to end as a differentiator management certainly will be to me not just table stakes it's really differentiated absolutely i think we're here because we're launching it today actually the management cloud and the interesting thing is this which is today if you look at it whether it's on our cloud or on-premise the rate of innovation is very very robust right i mean you have a mobile phone you're seeing your apps getting refresh twice a week or or even faster than that so what it means is you need the next generation monitoring solution that can monitor all of that so our goal with oracle management flower is to help you manage and monitor your solutions independent of where they are deployed if you deploy it on oracle cloud you little come bake with it to be able to monitor it right from the get-go or if you still have it on premise we will allow you to monitor it and break down those data I low so it is very effective so like you said is very very critical that people look at what their challenges are today in terms of proactive monitoring and troubleshooting to get to the next generation solutions we are providing theory I want to ask you a question on the trends but before that I want to just say that one of things i love about doing the oracle shells are six year the cube here is that for an old-timer like me seen the client-server live the client-server Revolution which is now kind of almost a point in time now it's almost it's over now we're into the cloud cloud modern error it's interesting to see because the same same things keep coming up again it's like the platform's the tool is so I got to ask you the question on what is the key trends that are driving this new application space because if you look at the client-server one of the big things that really was huge was the application market mean that would grant it was siloed up by you know by vendors but now with open source this is a huge application boom right now that's gonna impact IT operations sure yeah I think that if you look at it there's been like you said a couple of generations of technology we had mainframes things changed really slow right then we had client server which was to give business units and developers more control and things started to speed up and change a little more quickly but now in our current and cloud native cloud based development real-time microservice open source-based kind of world the rating pays the change is almost constant you're seeing so many organizations that are moving to continuous delivery modes much of it hosted on public cloud or hybrid private public cloud and they're changing features and functions every day and that creates huge management challenges in terms of just trying to understand is the end-to-end application performing effectively are the end-users getting what they need are the business decision-makers really understanding the impact of those outages or upgrades and it's so it's very complex and then I think it's raising the set of requirements for a particular application performance monitoring and IT operations and log analytics I was Oracle addressing these trends because one of the things that people like tonight I'd like to put things into two camps rip and replace okay or evolutionary development and we're clearly on the McCloud evolutionary because Oracle has it's not gonna be it's not gonna go away right so you can say Oracle native is the cloud strategy to all the Oracle customers but yet now with open source there's net new applications that do you got cha vows to 20 years anniversary so there's new stuff going on IOT is a huge application market right now now I can run an IOT thing in the cloud somewhere else or maybe on Amazon or somewhere else but the other day I have run through my operational assistance assistance of engagements this is a record which is Oracle right so is it an Oracle native cloud and the cloud data mean it how do you see oracle addressing that dynamic are they well positioned well i think oracle has a pretty broad portfolio you know they've had again from a management perspective they had Oracle Enterprise Manager on Prem for many many years i think that the new offerings that are being announced today really are interesting that they extend Oracles of monitoring and analytics to a whole range of cloud-based solutions many of which may not necessarily have been born on the Oracle platforms so I think it's a good recognition of the need for heterogeneity and the need to recognize that it is going to be a very hybrid world for many many years so I think that those are all real you know positive factors and then the new releases and it was talking about the integrated pass perform as a service Enchantix connect those environments but on the management side what are you guys delivering because that's going to be the challenge Prakash to talk about the specific things that you guys are announcing and delivering the customers today so specifically we are delivering three services first one is around application performance monitoring that allows our customers to stay ahead of their customers and their problems and give them the best user experience and monitor that and troubleshoot that and then the second service is around managing your logs and extracting IT operational data and business data out of it today if you look at it the most common thing people do with the log is to archive them and put it away because they don't want that to interrupt their production systems but that has a ton of good information so we have that second service eight exhaust becomes gold exactly so today what happens is they just get put away they get archived and that has real nuggets of business information and IT information being able to collect all of that and use it for your rapid troubleshooting as well so that's the second service the set third one is around IT analytics I call those first two services kind of like the Fitbit for your applications you're constantly getting vitals out of it and white throw that away if you don't have an issue still use it to run some interesting capacity friends and forecasting and all of that so use your real data to forecast your IT health as opposed to using a spreadsheet with some random data that you collected in a point in time so that's what we are announcing three services application performance monitoring log analytics and long term trending and forecasting with IT analytic Isis plunks been doing some log files how they were born people's blunt their data exactly they are trying to kind of get into that how do you guys compared to things like splunk and other tools I know tableau is a new relationship that was announced for the data visualization yeah Larry kind of talked about that yesterday talk about that how people are using that data exhaust give me some examples so the most fundamental difference in what we are doing is this which is we do not differentiate the sources of data and the classes of data when we bring it to the cloud so it could be metric data but with that you can collect based on your monitoring your health of your applications which splunk doesn't do for example and then log data but collect all of that and correlate it together so that in essence what we want to do is this which is the enterprise's today don't have a really a data problem they'd have an insight problem which is they want to be able to just see the right amount of data when they have a problem not all the data when they have a problem depends how you look at the data problem they'll have a Jerry problems you define that as they get all this data so you're plenty of data that's the problem there's no dearth of data problem yeah so that's what I'm i know i know i just kind of making this fun was good comment because i like that because that's that is really not an issue the data is coming yeah and that's you know Brandon whole know the problem you guys have scale now with that but the I don't Linux is a big thing I wanna talk about that because it can be problematic I'm a talk to some customers all the time and they say if someone comes in here and sells me another dashboard I'm gonna shoot myself exactly so it's like because and I said what do you mean by that he goes well there's so many alarms going off I don't know what to pay attention to that's where we start to see machine learning from these tools can you share any color what your great wine Larry I'm it's exactly right which is one of the underpinnings for us is to be able to automatically generate baseline and detect anomalies the last thing I mean our product support our own public cloud and I hear from the guys who run the cloud saying don't just give me another alert tell me what I need to do with an alert because I need to be able to disposition the alert so what we want to do is to understand the normal behavior of your application and only alerts you when there's an anomaly okay so that's part of our machine learning and prioritisation learning some learning algorithms in volved understand some pattern recognition that's right things and only tell you what the outlier is and when and and ask determine what the outlier is that suppose you setting thresholds for us to know it because sometimes things change if you are an e-commerce application or the day before Thanksgiving would have a different pattern than the third week of January right me just that the way the world works so what I want to talk to you about Larry made a comment yes in the key no I just like to take a dig at work day but you know in the way he likes work day because you know it's competition and also highlights from the features that Oracle has but what work days actually losing some share to service now a company in here in Silicon Valley that is an itsm IT service management company and they have been very successful their developer program which actually is starting to nibble away at work shares market share because they're building these developers are building these really focused age are apps that is not flat point it's a tool I know like an offense report for example and works really really well but work day has a plethora of features and they don't always have the best in class features uh-huh so that brings up the whole developer angle what do you and you guys have a story there for developers api's how do you talk to the absolutely share absolutely we have a rest api that the developers can use to collect the data from there into their own dashboards if they want to and also for example you can automatically deploy our agents when you're using our Java cloud service so that monitoring gets baked into it so we have api's for both inputting data and torque loud and extracting data back from the cloud will have api's for you to take the events that we generate into your own event dashboard that you have I'm a developer have a team like I could do some stuff filled my own kind of visualization UI and just have JSON endpoints come right into the absolution absolutely maybe I know she smirked when I said service now you will share some insight it's a this dynamic because this is kind of what's happening on the cloud these tools are popping up yeah well yeah and again I think what we're talking about today is to be able to monitor and analyze and optimize a lot of those different tools and deliver them via cloud platform and I think that we are finding that DevOps organizations are very interested in cloud-based solutions that help them do this better cheaper or faster so I think that you know I think it's an opportunity service now has currently been a pioneer in the delivery of system management as a cloud based model and I think it's interesting that Oracle is actually choosing to enter that market in in a different place yeah I mean actually I just a strength and you got the systems of record a on the right and and really talk from your really you know to Prakash this point really focusing on data because managing effectively managing the performance and operation of applications and complex environments it's all it is a huge data problem and you've got data coming from so many sources so many formats and being able to take that in rapidly to transform it normalize it and make it digestible for humans it's something that is really important in these complex environments and yes I think it's going to be interesting to see I think it's a great try or agree with you I think it's a great strategy by focusing on the data you have a lot of range and I wrote a blog post in 2007 now I'm going way back date is a new developer kit and now that's actually happening you look at data people are playing with the data like a developer place with function calls if you will so we're seeing now is a data rich environment hence the not not a problem of having enough data laying around the problem is how do you use the data you're getting all the products yeah inside is a huge problem and that's only an accelerated by faster performance machines in easy-to-use environment like I'd better analytics because you you want if the user knows what the problem is that they're looking for there are a lot of tools that will help you find it yeah but if you do not know what the problem is and to guide them towards the problem is is where where there's real opportunity and there's a real pain point in these enterprises especially now that you and I don't tolerate a downtime so you never cut anybody slack saying oh the website is slow but they've been innovating I'm gonna give them some slack nobody does that yeah yeah so and because now everything is measurable now for the first time in the history of business everything is measurable that's right and that's like just mind-blowing to me but i think is a huge app i only get your thoughts on the application market because I just see a massive tsunami coming of third-party developers and I'm not sure Oracle can handle that I didn't that's my personal opinion counter that I mean I people want to know can Oracle handle an ecosystem of third-party developers absolutely we have shown that before with with Java and I think you see every one of four services having open api's we are coating third-party developers we will be continuing to support them and I think we'll be able to handle it and we need to do that as a part of this ecosystem yeah I mean it's a platform yeah so you have to enable absolutely and that's the open message exactly all right so gosh what's your advice for the people at oracle openworld here and the people watching let's start with the people here on site if they catch this video when are we putting up some snippets before you even get off the set here so one what session should they attend what's where should I get more information what sessions and breakouts and then presentations they goes I have a keynote tomorrow at 11am that I would love for them to attend and outside of that there are some hands-on labs here that they should go look at the products and people who are remote they should go to cloud.oracle.com / management where we have all the services listed and take a look at it and we are really really going to be putting out a very differentiated solution than what is available in the marketplace and I would love for them to check it out and give us feedback for the folks watching online and customers in general when they squint through all the activities a lot of bombs dropping here at Oracle I mean a lot of announcements this is pretty pretty unprecedented what should they look for what are the if you at the point of someone to 11 point data point within your world that's going to get their attention and have them dive in deep what should they look at if they're having issues with their applications today if they're hearing about their application issues first from their customers and not by themselves they should be looking at our solutions to see how they can get ahead of the customers and that's what that's one precise message they can take back