>>Live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the cube covering ansible fest 2019 brought to you by red hat. >>Welcome back, everyone. It's theCUBE's live coverage of ansible fest here in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm John Furrier, with my cohost Stu Miniman We're here at Stephanie Chiras, the Vice President and  general manager of the REL Business Unit. Red Hat. Great to see you. We need to see to interview of all your, through your career at IBM. That one gets pulled back back in the fold. Yeah. So last time we chatted at red hat summit, REL8, how's it going? What's the update? >>Yeah, so we launched at summit was a huge opportunity for us to sort of show it off to the world. A couple of key things we really wanted to do there was make sure that we showed up the red hat portfolio. It wasn't just a product launch, it was really a portfolio launch. Um, feedback so far on relate has been great. Um, we have a lot of adopters on their early, it's still pretty early days when you think about it. It's been about, you know, a little over for four or five months. So I'm still early days. The feedback has been good. It's, you know, it's actually interesting when you run a subscription based software model because customers can choose to go to eight when they need those features and when they assess those features and they can pick and choose how they go. But we have a lot of folks who have areas of Reli that they're testing the feature function of. >>I saw a tweet you had, uh, on your Twitter feed, 28 years old, still growing up. Still cool. I mean, 20 years old is, yeah, it's out in the real world and adults, >>no, no. Lennox is run in the enterprises now and now it's about how do you bring new innovation in? When we launched drill eight, we focused really on two sectors. One was how do we help you run your business more efficiently and then how do we help you grow your business with innovation? One of the key things we did, um, which is probably the one that stuck with me the most was we actually partnered with the red hat management organization and we pulled in the capability of what's called insights into the product itself. So all carbon subscription six, seven, eight all include insights, which is a rules based engine built upon the data that we have from, you know, over 15 years of helping customers run large scale Linux deployments. And we leverage that data in order to bring that directly to customers. And that's been huge for us. And it's not only, it's a first step into getting into ansible. Right. >>I want to get your thoughts on where here at ansible Fest Day, one of our two day coverage, the red hat announced the ansible automation platform. Yep. I'll see you. That's the news. Why is this show so important in your mind? I mean you see the internal, you've seen the history of the industries. A lot of technology changes happening in the modern enterprise is now as things become modernized, both public sector and commercial, what's the most important thing happening? Why is this ansible fest so important this year? >>Um, to me it comes down to I'd say kind of two key things. Management and automation are becoming one of the key decision makers that we see in our customers. And that's really driven by they need to be efficient with what they have running today and they need to be able to scale and grow into innovation platforms. So management and automation is a core critical decision points. I think the other aspect is, you know, Linux started out 28 years ago proving to the world how open source development drives innovation. And that's what you see here at ansible fest. This is the community coming together to drive innovation. Supermodular able to provide impact, right from everything, from how you run your legacy systems to how you bring security to it, into how do you bring new applications and deploy them in a safe and consistent way. It spans the whole gambit. >>So Stephanie, you know, there's so much change going on in the industry. You talked about, uh, that you know what's happening in. I actually saw a couple of hello world, uh, tee shirts, uh, which were given out at summit in Boston this year. Uh, maybe help tie together how ansible fits into this. How does it help customers, you know, take advantage of the latest technology and, and, and, and move their companies along to be able to take advantage of some of the new features. >>Yeah. And, and so I really believe of course that, um, an open hybrid cloud, which is our vision of where people want to go. You need Linux. So Lennox sits at the foundation, but to really deploy it in an in, in a reasonable way, in a safe way, in a efficient way, you need management and automation. So we've started on this journey when we launched, we announced at summit that we brought in insights in, that was our first step included in, we've seen incredible uptick. So, um, when we launched, we've seen 87% increase since May. In the number of systems that are Linkedin, we're seeing 33% more increase in coverage of rules-based and hundred and 52% increase in customers who are using it. What that does is it creates a community of people using and getting value from it, but also giving value back because the more data we have, the better the rules get. >>So one interesting thing at the end of May, the engineering team, um, they worked with all the customers that currently have insights, linkedin and they did a scan for um, spectrum meltdown, which of course everyone knows about in the industry. Um, with the customers who had systems hooked up, they found 176,000 customer systems that were vulnerable to spectrum meltdown. What we did was we had an ansible playbook that could remediate that problem. We proactively alerted those customers. So now you start to see problems get identified with something like insights. Now you bring in ansible and ansible tower, you can effectively decide, do I want to remediate? I can remediate automatically. I can schedule that remediation for what's best for my company. So, you know, we've tied these three things together kind of in this step wise function. In fact, if you have a real subscription, you've hooked up to insights. >>If insights finds an issue, there's a fix it by and with ansible a playbook, now I can use that playbook and ansible tower. So really ties through nicely through the whole portfolio to be able to do everything and in it also creates collaboration to these playbooks. Can Be Portable, move across the organization. Do it once. That's the automation piece. Is that, yeah, absolutely. So now we're seeing automation. How do you look at it across multiple teams within an organization? So you could have a tower, a tower Admin, be able to set rules and boundaries for teams. I can have an RL rights, um, it operations person be able to create playbooks for the security protocols. How do I set up a system? Being able to do things repeatedly and consistently brings a whole lot of value in security and efficiency. >>Yeah. Uh, w one of the powers of ansible is that it can live in a heterogeneous environment and you've got your windows environment. You know, I've talked to vmware customers that are using it and, and, and of course in cloud help help us understand kind of the, the rel, you know, why rel plus ansible is a, you know, an optimal solution for customers in those heterogeneous environment. And what I would love, I heard a little bit in the keynote about kind of the roadmap where it's going. Maybe you can talk to about where, where are those, would those fit together? >>Yeah. Perfect. And I think your, your comment about heterogeneous world is, is Keith, that is the way we live. And um, folks will have to live in a heterogeneous as, as far as the eye can see. And I think that's part of the value, right? To bring choice. When you look at what we do with rail because of the close collaboration we have between my team and, um, the team that in the management, bu around insights, our engineering team is actively building rules. So we can bring added value from the sense of we have our red hat engineers who build rail creating rules to mitigate things, to help things with migration. So, um, you asked about brel aid and adoption, we put in in place upgrades of course in the product, but also there's a whole set of rules curated, supported by red hat that help you upgrade to relate from a prior version. So it's the tight engineering collaboration that we can bring. But to your point, it's, you know, we want to make sure that ansible and ansible tower and the rules that are set up bring added value to rail and make that simple. But it does have to be in a heterogeneous world. I'm going to live with neighbors in any data center. Right, >>of course. Yeah. One of the pieces of the announcement that talked about collections a, is there anything specific from, from your team that which should be pointed out about from a collections and the platform announcements? >>Election starts to start to grow. Um, and it brings out sort of that the simplicity of being pulled to it, pulled playbooks and roles and pull that all into one spot. We'll be looking at key scenarios that we pulled together that mean the most Eurail customers. Migration of course is one. We have other spaces of course, where we work with key ecosystem partners. Of course SAP running on rail has been a big focus for us in partnership with SAP. We have a playbook for installing SAP Hana on rel, so this collaboration will continue to grow. I think collections offers a huge opportunity for a simpler experience to be able to kind of do a automated solution if you will. Kind of on your floor automation for all. That's the theme here. That's right. Want to get your thoughts on the comment you made about the analytical analytics capability inside rail. >>This seems to be a key area for insights tying the two things together, so kind of cohesive but d decoupled. I see how that works. What kind of analytical capabilities are you guys serving up today and what's coming around the corner? Cause your environments are changing. A hybrid and multi-cloud are part of what everyone's talking about. Take care of the on premises first. Take care of the public cloud. Now hybrids, now an operating model has to look the same. This is a key thing. What kind of new capabilities of analytics do you see coming? So let me step you through that a little bit cause cause your point is exactly right. Our goal is to provide a single experience that can be on prem or off prem and provides value across both as, as you choose to deploy. So insights, which is the analytics engine that we use built upon our data. >>You can have that on-prem with rail. You can have it off prem with rail in the public cloud. So where we have data coming in from customers who are running rel on the public cloud. So that provides a single view. So if you, if you see a security vulnerability, you can scan your entire environment, which is great. Um, I mentioned earlier, the more people we have participating, the more value comes. So new rules are being created. So as a subscription model, you get more value as you go. And you can see the automation analytics that was announced today as part of the platform. So that brings analytics capabilities to my, you know, first to be able to see what, who's running, what, how much value they're getting out of analytics. That the presentation by JP Morgan Chase was really compelling to see the value that automation is delivering to them. >>For a company to be able to look at that in a dashboard with analytics automation, that's huge value. They can decide, do we need to leverage it here more? Do we need to bring it value value here? Now you combine those two together, right? It's it and being informed as the best. I want to get your reaction, Tony, we made a comment on our openings to align our opening segment around the JP Morgan comment, you know, hours, two minutes, two minutes, depending upon what the configuration is. Automation is a wonderful thing where we're pro automation, as you know, uh, we think it's gonna be a huge category, but we took a, um, uh, a survey and set our community and we asked our practitioners in our community members about automation and they came back with the following. I wanna get your reaction for major benefits. Automation focused efforts allows for better results. >>Efficiency, security is a key driver and all this. You mentioned that automation drives job satisfaction and then finally the Infrastructure Dev ops folks are getting re-skilled up the stack as the software abstraction. Those are the four main points of why is impacting enterprise. Do you agree with that? Could you have any comments on some of those points? No, I do. I agree. I think skills is one thing that we've seen over and over again. Um, skills is, skills is key. Um, we see it in Linux. We have to help write bridge window skills into Linux skills. I think automation that helps with skills development helps not only individuals but helps the company. Um, I think the second, second piece that you mentioned about job satisfaction, at the end of the day, all of us want to have impact and when you can leverage automation for one individual to have impact, right, that that is much broader than they could do before with manual tasks. >>That's just, that's just stu and I were talking also about the, one of the keynote key words that kept on coming out in the, in the keynote was scale scales driving a lot of change in the industry at many levels. Certainly software automation drives more value when you have scale because you're scaling more stuff. You can manually configure this stuff at scale. So software certainly is going to be a big part of that. But the role of cloud providers, the big cloud providers, I see IBM, Amazon, all the big enterprises like Microsoft, they're driving massive scale. So there's a huge change in, oh, the open source community around how to deal with scale. This is a big topic of conversation. What's your thoughts on this? Any general opinions on how the scale is in the open source equation? Is it more towards platforms, less tools, vice versa? >>Is there any trends you see? I think it's interesting because I think when I think of scale, I think both, um, volume, right? Or quantity as, as the hyperscalers do. I think also it's about complexity. I think. I think the public clouds have great volume that they have to deal with in numbers of systems, but they have the ability to customize leveraging development teams and leveraging open source software. They can customize, they can customize all the way down to the servers and the processor chips as we know, um, for most folks, right? They scale, but when they scale across on prem and off prem, it's adding complexity for them. And I think automation has value both in solving volume issues around scale, but also in complexity issues around scale. So even, you know, mid size businesses, if they want to leverage on prem and Off-prem to them, that's complexity scale. >>And I think automation has a huge amount of value to bring that abstracts away. The complexity automation provides the job satisfaction, but also the benefits of efficiency. Absolutely. And to me the greatest value of efficiency is now there's more time to bring in innovation. Right? It's a, it's a Stephanie, a last thing I was wondering, what feedback are you hearing from customers? You know, one of the things that struck me, we were talking about the JP Morgan is they made great progress, but he said they had about a year of working with the security of the cyber, the control groups to help get them through that knothole of allowing them to really deploy automation. So you know, usually something like ansible, you'd, oh, I can get a team, >>let me get it going, but oh wait, no, hold on. Corporate needs to make its way through what is, is that something you hear generally? Is that a large enterprise thing? You know, what, what, what are you hearing >>from your customers that you're talking about? I think, I think we see it more and more and it came up in the discussions today. The technical aspect is one aspect. The sort of cultural or the the ability to pull it in is a whole separate aspect. And you think that technology for right, all of us who are engineers, we think Coldwell, that's the tough bit, but actually the culture bit is just as hard. One thing that I see over and over again is the way companies are structured has a big impact. The more siloed the teams are, do they have a way to communicate? Because fixing that so that when you bring in automation, it has that ability to sort of drive more ubiquitous value across. But if you're not structured to leverage that, it's really hard if your it ops guys don't talk to the application folks. >>Bringing that value is very hard. So I think it is kind of going along in parallel, right? The technical capabilities is one aspect. How you get your organization structured to reap the benefits is another aspect. Um, and it's a journey that's, that's really what I see from folks. It is a journey. And um, I think it's inspiring to see the stories here when they come back and talk about it. But to me the most, the greatest thing about is just start, right? Just start wherever you are. And our goal is to try and help on ramps for folks wherever their journey is. >>It's a great option for people's careers and certainly the modernization of the enterprise and public sector and governments from how they procure technology to how they deploy it and consume it is radically changing a lens very quickly by the way to scale and these things are happening. Yeah, I've got to get your take, and I want to get your expert opinion on this because you've again been in the industry, you have so many different experiences. The cloud one dato was the era of compute storage. Startups can start at an airbnb start. All these companies are examples of, you know, cloud scale. But now as we started to get into the impact to businesses in the enterprise with hybrid cloud, there's a cloud 2.0 equation again. We mentioned observability was just network management, like white space, small category, which you know, companies going public. It's that important now kind of subsystem of cloud 2.0 automation seems to feel the same way we believe. What's your definition of cloud 2.0 cloud one Datto is simply stand up some storage and compete. Use the public cloud and cloud 2.0 enterprise. What does that mean to you? What does, how would you describe cloud 2.0 >>so my view is cloud one. Dot. Oh, was all about capability. Cloud two, Datto is all about experience and that is bringing a whole new way that we look at every product in the stack, right? It has to be a seamless, simple experience. And that's where automation and management comes in and spades. Um, because all of that stuff you needed in capability, having it be secure, having it be reliable, resilient, all of that still has to be there. But now you're now you need the, so to me it's all about the experience and how you pull that together and that's why we're hoping, you know, I'm thrilled here to be an ansible fest because the more I can work with the teams that are doing ansible and insights in the management aspect and the automation, it'll make the real experience better. Software drives it all. Absolutely. Absolutely. Thanks for sharing your insights on the queue. Pleasure coming back on. And great to see you. Great to be here. Good to see you about coverage here in Atlanta. I'm Sean first. Stu Miniman cube coverage here at ansible fest. More coverage after the short break. We'll be right back.