>>mhm Yes. Hello and welcome back to the cubes coverage of red hat summit 2021 virtual. I'm john for your host of the cube and cube coverage here with matt Hicks. Executive vice president of products and technologies at red hat cuba lum I've been on many times, knows the engineering side now running all the process of technologies matt. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on remote. I wish we were in real real life in person. I RL but doing it remote again. Thanks for coming on. >>Hey, thanks thanks for having me today. >>Hey, so what a year you know, um, I was just talking to a friend and another interview with the red hat colleagues. Chef on your team in 2019 I interviewed Arvin at IBM right before he bought red hat and you smile on his face and he wasn't even ceo then um, he is such a big fan of cloud native and you guys have been the engine underneath the hood if you will of IBM this transformation huge push now and with Covid and now with the visibility of the post Covid, you're seeing cloud Native at scale with modern applications just highly accelerated across the board In almost every industry, every vertical. This is a very key trend. You guys at the, at the center of it always have been, we've been covering you for many years, interesting time and so now you guys are really got the, got the formula at red hat, take us through the key transit you see on this wave for enterprises and how is red hat taking that, taking that through? >>Yeah, no, absolutely. It has been, it's been a great ride actually. I remember a couple years ago standing on stage with Arvin prior to the acquisition. So it's been uh, it's been a world one but I think if we look at Really would emerge in 2020, we've seen three trends that we hope we're gonna carry through in 2021 just in a better and better year for that. That the first is open hybrid cloud is really how customers are looking to adapt to change. They have to use what they have um assets they have today. On premise, we're seeing a lot of public cloud adoption that blend of being hybrid is just, it is a reality for how customers are having to deliver a edge computing I think is another area I would say uh the trend is really not going to be a fad or a new, you know, great texture. Um the capabilities of computing at the edge, whether that is automotive vehicles, radio access network capabilities to five G. It's pretty astounding at this point. So I think we're gonna see a lot of pushing edge computing for computing, getting closer to users. Uh but then also the choice aspect we're seeing with Ceos, we often talk about technology is choice, but I think the model of how they want to consume technology has been another really strong trend in 2020. Uh We look at this really is being able to deliver a cloud managed services in addition to technology that ceos around themselves. But those, those will probably be the three that stand out to me at least in 2020 we've seen, >>so matt take us through in your minds and red hats, perspective the workloads that are going to be highlighted in this cloud native surge that's happening. We're seeing it everywhere. You mentioned edge industrial edge to consumer Edge to lightweight, edge, massive new workloads. So take us through how you see kind of the existing workloads evolving and potentially new workloads that emerging. >>Yeah. So I think um you know first when you talk about edge workloads a big umbrella but if you look at data driven workloads, especially in the machine learning artificial intelligence spectrum of that, that's really critical. And a reason that those workloads are important is five G. Aside for now when you're running something at the edge you have to also be able to make decisions pretty well at the edge. And that that is that's where your data is being generated and the ability to act on that closely. Whether that's executing machine learning models or being able to do more than that with A I. That's going to be a really really critical workload. Uh huh. Coupled to that, we will see I think five G. Change that because you're going to see more blending in terms of what can you draw back to uh closer to your data center to augment that. So five G will shift how that's built but data driven workloads are going to be huge then I think another area will see is how you propagate that data through environment. Some Kafka has been a really popular technology will actually be launching a service in relation to that. But being able to get that data at the edge and bring it back to locations where you might do more traditional processing, that's going to be another really key space. Um and then we'll still have to be honest, there is still a tremendous amount of work loads out there that just aren't going to get rebuilt. And So being able to figure out how can you make them a little more cloud native? You know, the things your companies have run on for the last 20 years, being able to step them closer to cloud native, I think it's going to be another critical focus because he can't just rewrite them all in one phase and you can't leave them there as well. So being able to bridge shadow B T to >>what's interesting if folks following red hat, No, no, you guys certainly at the tech chops you guys have great product engineering staff been doing this for a long time. I mean the common Lennox platform that even the new generation probably have to leave it load limits on the server anymore. You guys have been doing this hybrid environment in I T for I T Sloan for decades. Okay. In the open, so, you know, it's servers, virtualization, you know, private, public cloud infrastructures and it's been around, we've been covering it in depth as you know, but that's been, that's a history. But as you go from a common Lennox platform into things with kubernetes as new technologies and this new abstraction layers, new control plane concept comes to the table. This need for a fully open platform seems to be a hot trend this year. >>How do you >>describe that? Can you take a minute to explain what this is, this is all about this new abstraction, this new control plane or this open hybrid cloud as you're calling? What is this about? What does it mean? >>Yeah, no, I'll do a little journey that she talked about. Yeah. This has been our approach for almost a decade at this point. And it started, if you look at our approach with Lennox and this was before public clouds use migrants existed. We still with Lennox tried to span bare metal and virtualized environments and then eventually private and public cloud infrastructure as well. And our goal there was you want to be able to invest in something, um, and in our world that's something that's also open as in Lennox but be able to run it anywhere. That's expanded quite a bit. That was good for a class of applications that really got it started. That's expanded now to kubernetes, for example, kubernetes is taking that from single machines to cluster wide deployments and it's really giving you that secure, flexible, fast innovation backbone for cloud native computing. And the balance there is just not for cloud native, we've got to be able to run traditional emerging workloads and our goal is let those things run wherever rail can. So you're really, you're based on open technologies, you can run them wherever you have resources to run. And then I think the third part of this for us is uh, having that choice and ability to run anywhere but not being able to manage. It can lead to chaos or sprawl and so our investments in our management portfolio and this is from insights the redhead advanced cluster management to our cluster security capabilities or answerable. Our focus has been securing, managing and monitoring those environments so you can have a lot of them, you can run where you want, but she just sort of treat it as one thing. So you are our vision, how we've executed up to this point has really been centered around that. I think going forward where you'll see us um really try to focus is, you know, first you heard paul announced earlier that we're donating more than half a billion dollars to open. I would cloud research and part of this reason is uh running services. Cloud native services is changing. And that research element of open source is incredibly powerful. We want to make sure that's continuing but we're also going to evolve our portfolio to support this same drive a couple areas. I would call out, we're launching redhead open shift platform plus and I talked about that combination from rail to open shift to being able to manage it. We're really putting that in one package. So you have the advanced management. So if you have a huge suites of cloud native real estate there, you can manage that. And it also pushes security earlier into the application, build workflows. This is tied to some of our technology is bolstered by the stack rocks acquisition that we did. Being able to bring that in one product offering I think is really key to address security and management side. Uh we've also expanded Redhead insights beyond Rehl to include open shift and answerable and this is really targeted it. How do we make this easier? How do we let customers lean on our expertise? Not just for Lennox as a service, but expand that to all of the things you'll use in a hybrid cloud. And then of course we're going to keep pushing Lennox innovation, you'll see this with the latest version of red hat enterprise, like so we're gonna push barriers, lower barriers to entry. Uh But we're also going to be the innovation catalyst for new directions include things like edge computing. So hopefully that sort of helps in terms of where, where we started when it was just Lennox and then all the other pieces were bringing to the table and why and some new areas. Uh We're launching our investment going forward. >>Yeah, great, that's great overview. Thanks for taking the time to do that. I think one of the areas I that's jumping out at me is the uh, advanced cluster management work you guys are doing saw that with the security peace and also red hat insights I think is is another key one and you get to read that edge. But on the inside you mentioned at the top of this interview, data workloads pretty much being, I mean that pretty much everything, much more of an emphasis on data. Um, data in general but also, you know, serve abilities a hot area. You know, you guys run operating system so you know, in operating systems you need to have the data, understand what's being instrumented. You gotta know that you've got to have things instrument and now more than ever having the data is critical. So take us through your vision of insights and how that translates. Because he said mentions in answerable you're seeing a lot more innovations because Okay I got provisions everything that's great. Cloud and hybrid clouds. Good. Okay thumbs up everyone check the box and then all of a sudden day too As they call day two operations stuff starts to, you know, Get getting hairy, they start to break. Maybe some things are happening. So day two is essentially the ongoing operational stability of cloud native. You need insights, you need the data. If you don't have the data, you don't even know what's going on. You can't apply machine learning. It's kind of you if you don't get that flywheel going, you could be in trouble. Take me through your vision of data driven insights. >>Yeah. So I think it's it's two aspects. If you go to these traditional traditional sport models, we don't have a lot of insight until there's an issue and I'm always amazed by what our teams can understand fix, get customers through those and I think that's a lot of the success red hats had at the same note, we want to make that better where if you look at real as an example, if we fixed an issue for any customer on the planet of which we fix a lot in the support area, we can know whether you're going to hit that same issue or not in a lot of cases and so that linkage to be able to understand environments better. We can be very proactive of not just hey apply all the updates but without this one update, you risk a kernel panic, we know your environment, we see it, this is going to keep you out of that area. The second challenge with this is when things go do break or um are failing the ability to get that data. We want that to be the cleanest handshake possible. We don't want to. Those are always stressful times anyway for customers being able to get logs, get access so that our engineering knowledge, we can fix it. That's another key part. Uh when you extend this to environments like open shift things are changing faster than humans can respond in it. And so those traditional flows can really start to get strained or broken broken down with it. So when we have connected open shift clusters, our engineering teams can not only proactively monitor those because we know cooper net is really well. We understand operators really well. Uh we can get ahead of those issues and then use our support teams and capabilities to keep things from breaking. That's really our goals. Finding that balance where uh we're using our expertise in building the software to help customers stay stable instead of just being in a response mode when things break >>awesome. I think it's totally right on the money and data is critical in all this. I think the trust of having that partnership to know that this pattern recognition is gonna be applied from the environment and that's been hurting the cybersecurity market people. That's the biggest discussion I had with my friends and cyber is they don't share the data when they do, things are pretty obvious. Um, so that's good stuff there and then obviously notifications proactive before there's a cause or failure. Uh great stuff. This brings up a point that paul come here, said earlier, I want to get your reaction to this. He said every C. I. O. Is now a cloud operator. >>That's a pretty bold >>statement. I mean, that's simply means that it's all cloud all the time. You know? Again, we've been saying this on the queue for many years, cloud first, whatever people want to call it, >>what does that actually >>mean? Cloud operator, does that just mean everything's hybrid? Everything's multiple. Cloud. Take me through an unpacked what that actually means? >>Yeah. So I think for the C I O for a lot of times it was largely a technology choice. So that was sort of a choice available to them. And especially if you look at what public clouds have introduced, it's not just technology choice. You're not just picking Kafka anymore. For example, you really get to make the choice of do I want to differentiate my business by running it myself or is this just technology I want to consume and I'm going to consume a cloud, native service and other challenges come with that. It's an infrastructure, not in your control, but when you think about a ceo of the the axes they're making decisions on, there are more capabilities now and I think this is really crucial to let the C i O hone in on where they want to specialist, what do they want to consume, what do they really want to understand, differentiate and Ron? Um and to support this actually, so we're in this vein, we're going to be launching three new managed cloud services and our our focus is always going to be hybrid in these uh but we understand the importance of having managed cloud services that red hat is running not the customers in this case. So one of those will be red hat open shift streams for Patrick Kafka. We've talked about that, that data connectivity and the importance of it and really being able to connect apps across clouds across data centers using Kafka without having to push developers to really specialize in running. It is critical because that is your hybrid data, it's going to be generated on prim, it's going to be generated the edge, you need to be able to get access to it. The next challenge for us is once you have that data, what do you do with it? And we're launching a red hat open shift data science cloud service and this is going to be optimized for understanding the data that's brought in by streams. This doesn't matter whether it's an Ai service or business intelligence process and in this case you're going to see us leverage our ecosystem quite a bit because that last mile of AI workloads or models will often be completed with partners. But this is a really foundational service for us to get data in and then bring that into a workflow where you can understand it and then the last one for us is that red hat open shift api management and you can think of this is really the overseer of how apps are going to talk to services and these environments are complex, their dynamic and being able to provide that oversight up. How should my apps be consuming all these a. P. S, how should they be talking? How do I want to control? Um and understand that is really critical. So we're launching these, these three and it fits in that cloud operator use, we want to give three options where you might want to use Kafka and three Scale technologies and open data hub, which was the basis of open shift data sides, but you might not want to specialize in running them so we can run those for you and give you as a C. I. O. That choice of where you want to invest in running versus just using it. >>All right, we're here with matt Hicks whose executive vice president prospect technology at red hat, matt, your leader at red hat now part of IBM and continues to operate um in the red hat spirit, uh innovating out in the open, people are wearing their red hat uh hoodies, which has been great to see. Um I ask every executive this question because I really want to get the industry perspective on this. Um you know, necessity is the mother of invention as the saying goes and, you know, this pandemic was a challenge for many In 2020. And then as we're in 2021, some say that even in the fall we're gonna start to see a light at the end of the tunnel and then maybe back to real life in 2022. This has opened up huge visibility for CSOS and leaders and business in the enterprise to say, Hey, what's working, what do we need? We didn't prepare for everyone to be working at home. These were great challenges in 2020. Um, and and these will fuel the next innovations and achievements going forward. Um again necessity is the mother of all invention. Some projects are gonna be renewed and double down on some probably won't be as hybrid clouds and as open source continues to power through this, there's lessons to be learned, share your view on what um leaders in in business can do coming out of the pandemic to have a growth strategy and what can we learn from this pandemic from innovation and and how open source can power through this adversity. >>Yeah. You know, I think For as many challenging events we had in 2020, I think for myself at least, it it also made me realize what companies including ourselves can accomplish if we're really focused on that if we don't constrain our thinking too much, we saw projects that were supposed to take customers 18 months that they were finishing in weeks on it because that was what was required to survive. So I think part of it is um, 2020 broke a lot of complacency for us. We have to innovate to be able to put ourselves in a growth position. I hope that carries into 2021 that drives that urgency. When we look at open source technologies. I think the flexibility that it provides has been something that a lot of companies have needed in this. And that's whether it could be they're having to contract or expand and really having that moment of did the architectural choices, technology choices, will they let me respond in the way I need? Uh, I'm biased. But first I think open models, open source development Is the best basis to build. That gives you that flexibility. Um, and honestly, I am an optimist, but I look at 2021, I'm like, I'm excited to see what customers build on sort of the next wave of open innovation. I think his life sort of gets back to normal and we keep that driving innovation and people are able to collaborate more. I hope we'll see a explosion of innovation that comes out and I hope customers see the benefit of doing that on a open hybrid cloud model. >>No better time now than before. All the things are really kind of teed up and lined up to provide that innovation. Uh, great to have you on the cube. Take a quick second to explain to the folks watching in the community What is red hat 2021 about this year? And red hat someone, I'll see. We're virtual and we're gonna be back in a real life soon for the next event. What's the big takeaway this year for the red hat community and the community at large for red hat in context of the market? >>You know, I think redhead, you'll keep seeing us push open source based innovation. There's some really exciting spaces, whether that is getting closer and closer towards edge, which opens up incredible opportunities or providing that choice, even down to consumption model like cloud managed services. And it's in that drive to let customers have the tools to build the next incredible innovations for him. So, And that's what summit 2021 is going to be about for us, >>awesome And congratulations to, to the entire team for the donation to the academic community, Open cloud initiative. And these things are doing to promote this next generation of SRS and large cloud scale operators and developers. So congratulations on that props. >>Thanks john. >>Okay. Matt Hicks, executive vice president of products and technology. That red hat here on the Cube Cube coverage of red hat 2021 virtual. I'm John Ferrier. Thanks for watching. Yeah.