(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)