>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas. It's The Cube covering VMworld 2017 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to The Cube on day three of our continuing coverage of Vmworld 2017. I'm Lisa Martin, our cohost for this segment is John Troyer and we're excited to be joined by Rob Young, who is a Cube alumni, and the manager of product and strategy at RedHat. Welcome back to the Cube, Rob. >> Thanks, Lisa, it's great to be here. >> So RedHat and VM where you, you get a lot of customers in common. I imagine you've been to many, many Vmworlds. What are you hearing from some of the folks you were talking to on during the show this week? >> So a lot of the interest that we're seeing is how RedHat can help customers, VMware or otherwise, continue to maintain mode one applications, like Z applications while planning for mode two, more cloud based deployments. And we're seeing a large interest in open source technologies and how that model could work for them to lower cost, to innovate more quickly, deliver things in a more agile way. So there's a mixture of messages that we're getting, but we're receiving them loud and clear. >> Excellent. You guys have a big investment in OpenStack. >> Yes we do, and even back in the early days when OpenStack was struggling as a technology, we recognized that it was an enabler for customers, partners, large enterprises that wanted to create, maintain their own private clouds or even to maintain a hybrid cloud environment where they maintained and managed controlled some aspect of it while having some of it, some of the work loads on a public cloud environment as well, so RedHat has invested heavily in OpenStack to this point. We're now in our 11th version of RedHat/OpenStack platform and we continue to lead that market as far as OpenStack development, animation, and contributions. >> Rob, we were with the Cube at the last Openstack summit in Boston, big Redhat presence there obviously, I was very impressed with the maturity of the Openstack market and community, I mean we're past the hype cycle now, we're down to real people, real uses, real people using it, a lot of varied people with strong business critical investment in Openstack in many different use cases. Can you kind of give us a picture of the state of the Openstack market and the userbase now that we are past that hype cycle. >> So I think what we're witnessing now in the market is a thirst for Openstack, one because it's a very efficient architecture, it's very extensible, there's a tremendous ecosystem around the Redhat distribution of Openstack, and what we're seeing from enterprises, specifically in the telecom industry is that they see Openstack as away to lower their costs, raise their margins in a very competitive environment, so anywhere you see an industry where there's very heavy competition for customers, that type of thing, Openstack is going to play a role, if it's not already doing so, it's going to be there at some point because of the simplification of what was once complex, but also In the cost savings can be realized by managing your own cloud within a hybrid cloud environment. >> You mentioned Telco, and specifically Openstack and the value for companies that need to compete for customers, besides Telco, what other industries are really primed for embracing Openstack technologies? >> So we're seeing across many industries, finance and banking, healthcare, public sector, anywhere where there is a emphasis on the move to opensource and to open compute environments, open APIs we're seeing a tremendous growth in traction, and because Redhat has been later than Linux, many of these same customers, who trust for Redhat Enterprise Linux and now looking to us for the very same reason on Openstack platform, because we much like we have done with Enterprise Linux, we have adopted an upstream community driven project we have made it safe to use within an environment, in an enterprise way, in a supported way as well, via subscription, so many industries, many versicles, we expect to see more, but primary use cases in FE, in Telco, healthcare, banking, public sector are among the top dogs out there. >> IS there a customer story that sort of stands out in you mind as a hallmark that showcases the success of working with Redhat and Openstack? >> Well there are many customers, many partners out there that we work with, if you look at four out of the five large Telcos, Orange, Ericsson, Nokia, others that we've recently done business with, would be really good examples, of not only customer use cases, but how they're using Openstack to allow their customers to have better experience with their cell networks with their billing with their availability, that type of thing, and we had two press announcements that came out in May, one of them is an educational institution of a consortium of very high profile Northeast learning institutions, public institutions that are now standardized on Openstack and are contributing, and we've also got Oakridge, forgive me, it escapes me, but there's a case study out there on the Redhat website that was posted on May 8th that depicts how they're using our product and how others can do the same. >> Rob, switching over a little bit to talking a little bit more about the tech and how the levers get pulled, we're talking about cloud, another term past the hype cycle, it's a reality, but when you're talking about cloud you're talking about scale, we mentioned Linux and Openstack and Redhat, built on a foundation of Linux, super solid super huge community, super rich, super long history, but can you talk about scale up, scale out, data center, public cloud, private, how are you seeing enterprises of various seizes address the scale problem and using technologies like the Redhat cloud stack to address that? >> So there's a couple of things, there's many aspects to that question, but what we have seen from Openstack, is when we first got involved with the project, it was very much bounded by the number of servers that you needed to deploy an Openstack infrastructure on, what we're done as a company is we've looked at the components and we have unshackled them from each other, so that you can scale individual storage, individual network, individual high availability on the number of servers that best for your needs, so if you want to have a very large footprint with many nodes of storage, you can do that, if you want to scale that just when peak season hits you can do that as well, but we have led the community efforts to deshackle the dependencies between components, so from that aspect we have scaled the technology, now scaling operational capabilities and skillsets as well, we've also led the effort to create open APIS for management tools, we've created communities around Openstack and other Opensource technologies. >> Automation a big part of that. >> Automation as well. So if you look at Anserable, Redhat has a major stake in Anserable, and it is predominately the management scripting language of choice, or the management platform of choice, so we have baked that in our products, we have made it very simple for customers to not only deploy things like openstack but Openshift Cloudforms, other management capabilities that we have, but we've also added APIs to these products, so that if you choose not to use a Redhat solution, you can easily plugin a third party solution, or a homegrown solution, into our framework for our stack so that you can use our toolset, single pane of glass to manage it all. >> So with that, can you tell us a little bit about the partner ecosystem that Redhat has, and what you've done to expand that to make your customers successful in Openstack environments? >> Absolutely, as you're aware, Redhat Enterprise Linux, we certified most of the hardware, all of of the hardware OEMs on Redhat Enterprise Linux, we have a tremendous ecosystem around Enterprise Linux for Openstack, this is probably one of the most exciting aspects of Redhat right now, if you look at the ecosystem and the partners that are around Openstack on its own, we've got an entire catalog of hundreds of partners, some at a deeper level than others, integration wise, business wise whatever, but the ecosystem is growing and it's not because of Redhat's efforts, we have customers and partners that are coming to us, we need a storage solution, we're using Netapp as an example, you need to figure out a way to integrate with these guys, and certify, and make sure that it's something that we've already invested in is going to work with your product as well as it works with our legacy stuff, so the ecosystem around openstack is growing, we're also looking at growing the ecosystem around Openshift, around Rethat virtualization as well, so I think you'll see a tremendous amount of overlap in those ecosystems as well, which his a great thing for us, the synergies are there, and I think it's only going to help us multiply our efforts in the market. >> Go on John. >> So Rob, taking again partnerships, I've always been intrigued at the role of Opensource Upstream, the Opensource community, and the people who then take that Opensource and then package for customers and do the training enablement, so can you maybe talk a little bit about some of the Opensource training partners, and how the role of Redhat in translating all that upstream code into a product that is integrated and has training and is available for consumption for the IT side. >> Sure, so at Redhat we partner not only with opensource community member and providers, but also with proprietary, so I just wanted to make sure everybody understands, we're not exclusive to who we partner with. Upstream, we look for partners that have the opensource spirit in mind, so everything that they're asking us to either consider as a component within our solution or to integrate with we want to make sure that they are to the letter of the law, contributing their code back, and there's no strings attached, really the value comes in, are they providing value to their customers, with the contribution, and also to our combined customers, and what we're seeing in our partnerships, is that many of our partners even proprietary partners such as Microsoft for example, are looking at opensource in a different way, and they're providing opensource options for their customers and consumption based models as well, so we hope that we're having a positive impact in that way, because if you look at our industry, it's really headed towards the opensource openAPI open model and the proprietary model still has a time and place I believe, but I think it's going to diminish over time, and opensource is going to be the way people do business together. >> One of the things that you were talking about reminded me of one of the things that Michael Delft said yesterday, during the keynote with Pat Gelsinger, and that was about innovation, and that you really got companies to be successfully innovating with their customers, and that sounds like that definitely one of the core elements of what you're doing with customers, he said customers and partners are bringing us together to really drive that innovation. >> Yeah, I couldn't agree more, and it's an honor to be mentioned in the same breath as Michael Delft by the way, but what we see is because of the opensource model, you can release early and often, and you can fail early, and what that does is it encourages innovation, so its not only corporations like Redhat that are contributing to upstream projects, Openstack as an example, or Linux as an example, or KBM as an example, there's also college students, there's people out there who work for Bank of America, across the plains all over the world, and the one thing that unites us is to recognize the value of our contributions to an opensource community, and we think that really helps with agile development, agile delivery, and if you look a tour project deliveries for Openstack as an example, Openstack releases a major version of its product every six months, and because of contributions that we get from our community, we're able to release our, in testing, it's not just, contributions come in many forms, testing is a huge part of that, because of the testing we get from a world wide community, we're able to release shorty after a major version of upstream Openstack because that innovation in a pure waterfall model, its not even possible, in an opensource model, it's just a way of life. >> So as we're kind of wrapping up VM World day three, what are some of the key takeaways for you personally from the event and that Redhat has observed in the last couple of days here in Las Vegas? >> So there's a couple of observations that have been burned into my brain, one is we believe at Redhat, that virtualization as a model will remain core, not only to legacy application, Mode one, but also to Mode two, and the trend that we see in the model, for mode two virtualization is going to be a commodity feature, people are going to expect it to be baked into the operating system, or into the infrastructure where they're running the operating system where their application's on, so we see that trend, and we suspected, but coming to VMware this week helped confirm that, and I say that because the folks I've talked to after sessions, at dinner, in the partner pavilion, so I really se that as a trend, the other thing I see is that there's a tremendous thirst within the VMware customer base to learn more about opensource and learn more about how they can leverage this, not only to lower their total cost of ownership, and to to replace VMware, but how they can compliment what they've already invested in with faster more agile based Mode two development, and that's where we see the market from a Redhat standpoint. >> Thanks Dan, well there's a great TEI study that you guys did recently, Total Economic Impact on virtualization that you can find on the website, and Rob we thank you for sticking around and sharing some of your insights and innovations that Redhat is pioneering, and we look forward to having you back on the show. >> It's great to be here, thanks. >> Absolutely, and for my co-host John, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching the Cube continuing coverage, day three of VMware 2017