>> From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020 brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back, I'm Stuart Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat summit 2020, 7th year we've been covering the event of course, one of the differentiators this year is it is a virtual event. We're bringing a Red Hat executives, customers and partners from where they are around their globe to this digital event and really happy to bring back one of our cube alumni is also one of the keynote speakers. He's got a new role but lots of technology to share. Matt Hicks, the SVP of product and technologies with Red Hat. Matt, thank you so much for joining us. Normally we'd all get together. You and I are even geographically relatively close to each other, but of course today as we've said many times, we are together apart. So thanks so much for joining us. >> Hey, thanks for having me. >> All right, so compared to some say it, the company that owns Red Hat, IBM, you're a relatively short timer with Red Hat you only been there for 14 years, Matt, but we, we've talked to many times OpenShift. One of the big things we talk about with you over the last few years, you're one of the founding members of that team, but before we get into it, you've got a new role, the product pieces we said you're kind of stepping up, filling in for the shoes that Paul has, As Paul now says steps up to the CEO role. So tell us a little bit about what that means for you and your your organization. >> Yeah, sure, so you're right. I used to run an engineering for Red Hat and now I have the scope of engineering and the business and our support organization so previous role and it's a great opportunity. I'm excited about emission I've been at Red Hat 14 years. I was actually at IBM prior. So the combination asking pretty significant there. But it's, it's just the neat opportunity. I love being able to, to focus on the entire portfolio for example how it's impacting customers. Especially right now this is tricky time right now for a lot of customers I think Red Hat we're doing our best to make sure we have that value them just to sort of get through the crisis bench form. >> Yeah, absolutely Matt. We usually, when we're looking at a keynote, it's celebrating some new announcement, talking about the culmination of these things and there's a real effort of course, to set a nice balanced tone here. Of course you've got lots of critical companies that rely on Red Hat technologies, on your partner solutions to make sure things work. So, bring us in a little inside basically the organization and how you're helping your customers. I know in these challenging times. >> Yeah, I know this year didn't make a big push and PR who fluff hall all the work. Really proud of that work, but it just, it wasn't the right time to have that focus on product releases. That said, if you look at our customer base there pretty split right now. We have a large part of our customer base they are folks centers weathering the storm right now, and a lot of that work is it's cost savings, it's efficiency it's actually I'm doubling down on their data centers where they've got to go back to things that they own and down that side we'vethrown a whole host of efforts setback from extending our support services. We've gone through extending our product life cycle so customers don't get and then having to do an upgrade right now. We're working with Ansible and with RHEL just in and how we can help customers save and get through it sort of in the way that they want. On the other side though take some industries, whether they're developing a vaccine or shipping, they say there exploding like they need to scale and push and we're making sure that we didn't hold back any technology. 'Cause the toughest thing would be to say, "Well, okay, let's take in OpenShift." We have new serverless capabilities or pipelines. We didn't want it take any of those pieces away from the customer that might be needing to scale 500% right now, but it, it is it's a challenging time. We sort of have helping customers is either end of a really, really wide spectrum. And the good news though we have I think we have good solutions on both album through, but it is a unique experience for me. And as long as I've been in then sure I haven't quite seen as much of AI, I divide. >> Yeah, it's really Matt, I think back to I was working in the tech vendor community back when 9/11 happened and some of the rallying of the community but this has a personal impact for everyone, it's 9/11, it was kind of everybody went home for a day and then rally the troops. You didn't make a big deal of it, but you made sure you helped those customers. Today, this has such a wide impact and yeah, as you said but very unique time that we're living in here. One of the messages you talked about in your keynote is was really emphasizing message we've heard for Red Hat for a number of years. Talking about how your solution really everywhere. Even more than ever. Some of the stories you hear about where technology is accelerating, of course things like work from home. But also customers that are doing digital transformations or I've been looking at cloud adoption, sometimes those things, they need to move through some of the last few steps even faster because they can't touch the gear or they can't access stuff. Or I need to got that automation going even faster so that we can leverage it. So help us walk through a little bit. Yow know where are your technology pieces are OpenShift some of the other technologies that are so critically important for customers today. >> Yeah, you touched on a lot of areas and I would say we probably saw this start and certainly been amplified and just worldwide importance with Telecom. Telecom providers as they've pushed towards things like 5G it's it's not the traditional like you have one data center type thing play and that's what you think troll and whether you call this edge or anything else that relate. You have these multiple tiers of infrastructure and they run it massive scale. And so they wanted one technology platform that could run it was close to the user as possible. And I run into a bunch of different form factors and footprints and also and that's where we really started working with the Telecom providers on OpenShift and taking some of the experience. We certainly work a lot with them with OpenStack for networks, but as things got closer to the edge that pushed to OpenShift was pretty prevalent. We are now seeing you mentioned it where I think customers, a lot of customers are being forced into the digital transformation journey right now I really like, well, everyone's home. How do you serve your customers with this? And they're really that last mile of changes is coming very quick to them. And I think we're seeing a lot of similarities with that technology based, right. The same challenges that the telecom providers had can be applied to other industries, whether it's manufacturing, others in this generally we call it like it's that edge focused area you don't have and infrastructure that runs in one place, you're having to aggregate a lot of it we call this our hybrid cloud work and OpenShift is really Red Hats hybrid cloud. >> Yeah, so often we talk about some of the hype that goes around certain words. I think about cloud-native we've been talking about cloud for so many years out of close partners with all the various solutions out there. When things need to get done, how does it help businesses? How does it help IT reacts to the business and how do we make sure we stay in business? So how was that conversation of cloud-native changed and where's Red Hat sitting in that discussion? >> Yeah, I think not the best circumstance, but I think one of the things that's been really prevalent is when you see this pull back in some way basis to data centers, that conversation about did I build my apps to a standard that I've got it costs, can I move them to a lower cost center structure for me? Like right now, in a week for two weeks. Yeah, that's becoming pretty critical where, we've believed in that model for a long time of whether it's cloud native services building them to a platform that gives you that flexibility that has become a pain point for customers right now. And one of the nice things we've seen this in some government services where if they're built on OpenShift even on premise, they're on the other side of that, where they're having to scale these services massively, they're able to take the same app, same platform, go out to public cloud providers actually help fulfill that scale. Customers, I think that built to that pattern. If they're contracting for a bit or doubling down on their data center, they have the same thing. They can pull back from the public cloud if they need to, but that, that app affordability has gone from being real like secondary, tertiary concern to being a critical aspect of cost savings or just a lot of enterprises right now and in a shockingly short period of time. >> It's interesting when you talk about engineering groups and how they're building product. Most of the development teams I talked to, we're distributed before this event happened. And yes, there's some adjustments that need to happen. I think Red Hat has some almost unique capabilities compared to some others out there. Because, not only do you have your development teams, but of course everything that Red Hat is doing is open source. So I'd love to hear your viewpoint as to, as you think about your product roadmap and what's going to happen in 2020, how do the communities and there's been a number of course key acquisitions that Red Hat has done over the years. Talk a little bit about that dynamic and how much this affects what's happening and how this helps Red Hat both put together the products and the portfolio that it offers. >> Yeah, I think you're right, We're, we are incredibly lucky just business model wise and even as a starting where on the engineering team over half of our engineering team is remote to begin with. And then on top of that, we work with open source communities where we're still just the minority presence in most of those. And so you're working with team members that you've never met. So you could say, the bulk of the work that we did was really distributed. So it wasn't just a huge system shock. Everybody stay productive, stay from home. The second part, that was great our strategy overall, it really doesn't change for us because we're, we're seeing a lot of pressure applied to it where customers maybe a three year plan to get there is becoming their six months plan. But in terms of running infrastructure in these combinations being able to run it in your data center, being able to scale off public clouds and do that consistently, that hasn't changed for us. We are refining areas of making sure that we contributed really double down on infrastructure, mission critical infrastructure like telecom's right now because they're certainly going through the scale there going to push for things like 5G we want to make sure we're doing everything we can for that. Well, we were already working pretty closely with them, so not a huge strategy shift for us. It's okay, how can we just really focus these on the value that customers need right now. We're excited about if you look in the efficiency areas in these combinations, what we're doing with Ansible it's pretty critical to users. Like if you take a real user that's running a data centers worth a year and they need to remotely be able to manage it, control it, optimize it to see you can't get people there. great solutions around around and so we're, we're really pushing down that path. Then if you look at other areas, like with OpenShift, some of the management work group I've been doing, or the scaling areas, if you go through serverless models or pipelines, if you're in the shipping industry or you're in pharmaceuticals working on vaccines, they have massive scaling needs right now. And so they're pushing very hard on and that's what a new technology has reached. All right, there is one technology area that I'd love to get your view. Well, you talked a little bit about in the keynote, definitely plenty of breakouts and we actually have you've interviews digging into of course, current eddies, the latest is going on with OpenShift and a big piece is the virtualization with OpenShift virtualization. As I mentioned at the beginning, you're one of the founding members of the OpenShift team. So as you look at, bare metal virtualization painters were at VMs public cloud on premises. Give us your viewpoint as to where we are in 2020 and how some of that journey has changed over time and how Red Hat might have a slightly different view of how things should be built and where the future should go compared to others in the industry. >> Yeah, really excited about this area because if you look at Red Hat sort of view on this is that we can run Kubernetes sort of as the thing that directly runs on Linux and Bare-metal and for us that's OpenShifting RHEL and it's, it's very powerful because if you look at what virtualization came from, it was machines got really, it's strong and so we needed to carve them up into smaller pieces, make it manageable, that's what Linux containers do is they take a machine they carve them up into these units and let you use all of the power on the physical hardware and we know this world from RHEL for us, that's what Linux does it lights up hardware. So I think the norm in the industry for the last yours years was people would still carve up machines with virtualization, then they would run containers on top and virtualization was sort of your main substrate and there were some challenges with that. The containers it's harder for them to move across those boundaries like BMS isolated for a reason we actually think, and it was an upstream project called KubeVert. Again, we saw this in the telcos pretty early where they were putting OpenShift on bare metal on gear itself, and they were driving to run virtualization inside. And then really you have the flexibility of containers carving up the hardware and we need to bring VMs in. We can run VMs inside of it containers and that it's the opposite of how most people think about it. But it, it gives you the best of both worlds. 'Cause we look at Kubernetes it is sort of that next generation infrastructure layer and you can fit VMs very nicely into that. That's what we're doing with container-native virtualization it gives you a good cost benefits on that. And also if you're going from a virtualized world to a container world you're optimizing towards that destination with OpenShift it's just, it is neat technology 'cause I think most customers they still have a ton of VMs out there. So even if they're bought off on an OpenShift path how do they bring VMs into that story? And so that as of now that's something we're enabling them to be able to do. Cool technology, I mean I'm excited about that. And again, it has a great telco focus for us right now, but I think this is one where it'll have broad reach cross enterprise users to just that are already down this journey and need to accelerate it for cost savings. That's great solution there. >> Yeah, definitely from what I've learned, it's pretty empowering to really help that application development team understand really those cloud native architectures if you will. One of the challenges of VMs was used to just kind of stick the application in there. I think about it anymore and that does not meet where really companies are going. It's all right, Matt, I got to ask you the last question. Since you own product and technologies, talk about some of the tough areas. Where is Red Hat really working with the community to help really improve things for the ecosystem and for customers as you look out through the rest of the 2020? >> Yeah, I think looking out for the rest of 2020 it's sort of, it's picking focus areas because that the most challenging thing the nice part especially at Red Hat too, there is a ton of goodwill. What can we jump in help can we do and when we looked at it, a lot of our customers, they're doing awesome thanks. And they're sort of in the middle of the crisis. So a big part of our focus then making sure we help them. One of my friends favorite stories, it's close to really like Red Hats ethos is a Medtronic, they're a ventilator. They manufacture ventilators, they open source there are ventilator designs so that companies like Ford or Telsa could actually they're retooling their factories to build them Medtronics open sources so they can actually get the designs to build. When we see those things it's just awesome. Like those are great like that is what for us opens spaces is build on and we are really doubling down to make sure that whether it is a support case or bug or problem where we have to jump in and give them engineering expertise to help them scale. That has been our focus probably for most of 2020. In doing that well, I think our challenge our hard part is just bringing focus from all of them, little things we can do, to what are the things that are going to have the most impact right now, which is, it's tough but we have a lot of them. Like on the technology side, we have the virtualization areas. Some of the, the workaround cork is like, how do we bring Java workloads into this Kubernetes world? Like really good things there, but I'm sure what we know right now we'll unfortunately it probably change again and another couple of months. We just have to he really flexible, keep prioritizing focus on it. >> Right, well Matt Hicks taking a new leadership role is always challenging especially in these times. So I want to wish you the best of luck and of course thank you to the team. We always really appreciate the partnership with Red Hat to be able to share this content with the communities. Always good to talk to you man. >> Sounds good, it's great talking to you too. And maybe next year we'll be back to the in person. >> Absolutely. All right, watch more coverage for Red Hat summit 2020 I'm Stuart Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)