>> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back here on theCUBE, joined by Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls, as we wrap up our coverage here of the Red Hat Summit here in 2019. We've been here in Boston all week, three days, Stu, of really fascinating programming on one hand, the keynotes showing quite a diverse ecosystem that Red Hat has certainly built, and we've seen that array of guests reflected as well here, on theCUBE. And you leave with a pretty distinct impression about the vast reach, you might say, of Red Hat, and how they diversified their offerings and their services. >> Yeah, so, John, as we've talked about, this is the sixth year we've had theCUBE here. It's my fifth year doing it and I'll be honest, I've worked with Red Hat for 19 years, but the first year I came, it was like, all right, you know, I know lots of Linux people, I've worked with Linux people, but, you know, I'm not in there in the terminal and doing all this stuff, so it took me a little while to get used to. Today, I know not only a lot more people in Red Hat and the ecosystem, but where the ecosystem is matured and where the portfolio is grown. There's been some acquisitions on the Red Hat side. There's a certain pending acquisition that is kind of a big deal that we talked about this week. But Red Hat's position in this IT marketplace, especially in the hybrid and multi-cloud world, has been fun to watch and really enjoyed digging in it with you this week and, John Walls, I'll turn the camera to you because- >> I don't like this. (laughing) >> It was your first time on the program. Yeah, you know- >> I like asking you the questions. >> But we have to do this, you know, three days of Walls to Miniman coverage. So let's get the Walls perspective. >> John: All right. >> On your take. You've been to many shows. >> John: Yeah, no, I think that what's interesting about what I've seen here at Red Hat is this willingness to adapt to the marketplace, at least that's the impression I got, is that there are a lot of command and control models about this is the way it's going to be, and this is what we're going to give you, and you're gonna have to take it and like it. And Red Hat's just on the other end of that spectrum, right? It's very much a company that's built on an open source philosophy. And it's been more of what has the marketplace wanted? What have you needed? And now how can we work with you to build it and make it functional? And now we're gonna just offer it to a lot of people, and we're gonna make a lot of money doing that. And so, I think to me, that's at least what I got talking to Jim Whitehurst, you know about his philosophy and where he's taken this company, and has made it obviously a very attractive entity, IBM certainly thinks so to the tune of 34 billion. But you see that. >> Yeah, it's, you know, some companies say, oh well, you know, it's the leadership from the top. Well, Jim's philosophy though, it is The Open Organization. Highly recommend the book, it was a great read. We've talked to him about the program, but very much it's 12, 13 thousand people at the company. They're very much opinionated, they go in there, they have discussions. It's not like, well okay, one person pass this down. It's we're gonna debate and argue and fight. Doesn't mean we come to a full consensus, but open source at the core is what they do, and therefore, the community drives a lot of it. They contribute it all back up-stream, but, you know, we know what Red Hat's doing. It's fascinating to talk to Jim about, yeah you know, on the days where I'm thinking half glass empty, it's, you know, wow, we're not yet quite four billion dollars of the company, and look what an impact they had. They did a study with IDC and said, ten trillion dollars of the economy that they touch through RHEL, but on the half empty, on the half full days, they're having a huge impact outside. He said 34 billion dollars that IBM's paying is actually a bargain- >> It's a great deal! (laughing) >> for where they're going. But big announcements. RHEL 8, which had been almost five years in the works there. Some good advancements there. But the highlight for me this week really was OpenShift. We've been watching OpenShift since the early days, really pre-Kubernetes. It had a good vision and gained adoption in the marketplace, and was the open source choice for what we called Paths back then. But, when Kubernetes came around, it really helped solidify where OpenShift was going. It is the delivery mechanism for containerization and that container cluster management and Red Hat has a leadership position in that space. I think that almost every customer that we talked to this week, John, OpenShift was the underpinning. >> John: Absolutely. >> You would expect that RHEL's underneath there, but OpenShift as the lever for digital transformation. And that was something that I really enjoyed talking to. DBS Bank from Singapore, and Delta, and UPS. It was, we talked about their actual transformation journeys, both the technology and the organizational standpoint, and OpenShift really was the lever to give them that push. >> You know, another thing, I know you've been looking at this and watching this for many many years. There's certainly the evolution of open source, but we talked to Chris Wright earlier, and he was talking about the pace of change and how it really is incremental. And yet, if you're on the outside looking in, and you think, gosh, technology is just changing so fast, it's so crazy, it's so disruptive, but to hear it from Chris, not so. You don't go A to Z, you go A to B to C to D to D point one. (laughing) It takes time. And there's a patience almost and a cadence that has this slow revolution that I'm a little surprised at. I sense they, or got a sense of, you know, a much more rapid change of pace and that's not how the people on the inside see it. >> Yeah. Couple of comment back at that. Number one is we know how much rapid change there is going because if you looked at the Linux kernel or what's happening with Kubernetes and the open source, there's so much change going on there. There's the data point thrown out there that, you know, I forget, that 75% or 95% of all the data in the world was created in the last two years. Yet, only 2% of that is really usable and searchable and things like that. That's a lot of change. And the code base of Linux in the last two years, a third of the code is completely overhauled. This is technology that has been around for decades. But if you look at it, if you think about a company, one of the challenges that we had is if they're making those incremental change, and slowly looking at them, a lot of people from the outside would be like, oh, Red Hat, yeah that's that little Linux company, you know, that I'm familiar with and it runs on lots of places there. When we came in six years ago, there was a big push by Red Hat to say, "We're much more than Linux." They have their three pillars that we spent a lot of time through from the infrastructure layer to the cloud native to automation and management. Lots of shows I go to, AnsiballZ all over the place. We talked about OpenShift 4 is something that seems to be resonating. Red Hat takes a leadership position, not just in the communities and the foundations, but working with their customers to be a more trusted and deeper partner in what they're doing with digital transformation. There might have been little changes, but, you know, this is not the Red Hat that people would think of two years or five years ago because a large percentage of Red Hat has changed. One last nugget from Chris Wright there, is, you know, he spent a lot of time talking about AI. And some of these companies go buzzwords in these environments, but, you know, but he hit a nice cogent message with the punchline is machines enhance human intelligence because these are really complex systems, distributed architectures, and we know that the people just can't keep up with all of the change, and the scope, and the scale that they need to handle. So software should be able to be helping me get my arms around it, as well as where it can automate and even take actions, as long as we're careful about how we do it. >> John: Sure. There's another, point at least, I want to pick your brain about, is really the power of presence. The fact that we have the Microsoft CEO on the stage. Everybody thought, well (mumbles) But we heard it from guest after guest after guest this week, saying how cool was that? How impressive was that? How monumental was that? And, you know, it's great to have that kind of opportunity, but the power of Nadella's presence here, it's unmistakable in the message that has sent to this community. >> Yeah, you know, John, you could probably do a case study talking about culture and the power of culture because, I talked about Red Hat's not the Red Hat that you know. Well, the Satya Nadella led Microsoft is a very different Microsoft than before he was on board. Not only are they making great strides in, you know, we talk about SaaS and public cloud and the like, but from a partnership standpoint, Microsoft of old, you know, Linux and Red Hat were the enemy and you know, Windows was the solution and they were gonna bake everything into it. Well, Microsoft partnered with many more companies. Partnerships and ecosystem, a key message this week. We talked about Microsoft with Red Hat, but, you know, announcement today was, surprised me a little bit, but when we think about it, not too much. OpenShift supported on VMware environments, so, you know, VMware has in that family of Dell, there's competitive solutions against OpenShift and, you know, so, and virtualization. You know, Red Hat has, you know, RHV, the Red Hat Virtualization. >> John: Right, right, right. >> The old day of the lines in the swim lanes, as one of our guests talked about, really are there. Customers are living in a heterogeneous, multi-cloud world and the customers are gonna go and say, "You need to work together, before you're not gonna be there." >> Azure. Right, also we have Azure compatibility going on here. >> Stu: Yeah, deep, not just some tested, but deep integration. I can go to Azure and buy OpenShift. I mean that, the, to say it's in the, you know, not just in the marketplace, but a deep integration. And yeah, there was a little poke, if our audience caught it, from Paul Cormier. And said, you know, Microsoft really understands enterprise. That's why they're working tightly with us. Uh, there's a certain other large cloud provider that created Kubernetes, that has their own solution, that maybe doesn't understand enterprise as much and aren't working as closely with Red Hat as they might. So we'll see what response there is from them out there. Always, you know, we always love on theCUBE to, you know, the horse is on the track and where they're racing, but, you know, more and more all of our worlds are cross-pollinating. You know, the AI and AI Ops stuff. The software ecosystems because software does have this unifying factor that the API economy, and having all these things work together, more and more. If you don't, customers will go look for solutions that do provide the full end to end solution stuff they're looking for. >> All right, so we're, I've got a couple in mind as far as guests we've had on the show. And we saw them in action on the keynotes stage too. Anybody that jumps out at you, just like, wow, that was cool, that was, not that we, we love all of our children, right? (laughing) But every once in awhile, there's a story or two that does stand out. >> Yeah, so, it is so tough, you know. I loved, you know, the stories. John, I'm sure I'm going to ask you, you know, Mr. B and what he's doing with the children. >> John: Right, Franklin Middle School. >> And the hospitals with Dr. Ellen and the end of the brains. You know, those tech for good are phenomenal. For me, you know, the CIOs that we had on our first day of program. Delta was great and going through transformation, but, you know, our first guest that we had on, was DBS Bank in Singapore and- >> John: David Gledhill. >> He was so articulate and has such a good story about, I took outsourced environments. I didn't just bring it into my environment, say okay, IT can do it a little bit better, and I'll respond to business. No, no, we're going to total restructure the company. Not we're a software company. We're a technology company, and we're gonna learn from the Googles of the world and the like. And he said, We want to be considered there, you know, what was his term there? It was like, you know, bank less, uh, live more and bank less. I mean, what- >> Joyful banking, that was another of his. >> Joyful banking. You don't think of a financial institution as, you know, we want you to think less of the bank. You know, that's just a powerful statement. Total reorganization and, as we mentioned, of course, OpenShift, one of those levers underneath helping them to do that. >> Yeah, you mentioned Dr. Ellen Grant, Boston Children's Hospital, I think about that. She's in fetal neuroimaging and a Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School. The work they're doing in terms of diagnostics through imaging is spectacular. I thought about Robin Goldstone at the Livermore Laboratory, about our nuclear weapon monitoring and efficacy of our monitoring. >> Lawrence Livermore. So good. And John, talk about the diversity of our guests. We had expats from four different countries, phenomenal accents. A wonderful slate of brilliant women on the program. From the customer side, some of the award winners that you interviewed. The executives on the program. You know, Stefanie Chiras, always great, and Denise who were up on the keynotes stage. Denise with her 3D printed, new Red Hat logo earrings. Yeah, it was an, um- >> And a couple of old Yanks (laughing). Well, I enjoyed it, Stu. As always, great working with you, and we thank you for being with us as well. For now, we're gonna say so long. We're gonna see you at the next Red Hat Summit, I'm sure, 2020 in San Francisco. Might be a, I guess a slightly different company, but it might be the same old Red Hat too, but they're going to have 34 billion dollars behind them at that point and probably riding pretty high. That will do it for our CUBE coverage here from Boston. Thanks for much for joining us. For Stu Miniman, and our entire crew, have a good day. (funky music)

>> Narrator: From Chicago, it's The Cube. Covering Veritas Vision Solution Day 2018. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to the Windy City everybody. You're watching The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're goin' out to the events, we extract a signal from the noise. We're here at the Veritas Vision Solution Days in Chicago. We were just a few weeks ago we were at the iconic Tavern on the Green in New York City. We're here at the Palmer House Hotel, beautiful hotel right in downtown Chicago near the lake. It's just an awesome venue, it's great to be here. Arista Thurman III is here, he's the principle computer engineer at the Argonne National Labs. Great to see you, thanks for coming on The Cube. >> Yah, good to be here, thanks. >> So tell the audience about Argonne National Labs. What do you guys all about? >> About science, so we're all about the advancement of science. We do a lot of different experiments from technology for batteries and chemistry. The project we're working on is the advanced photon source, which is a light source that's used to collect data in experiments with a photon source. >> OK, so you're an IT practitioner, >> Arista Thurman: That is correct. >> Serving scientists. >> Arista Thurman: Yes. >> What's that like? Is that like an IT guy serving doctors? Are they kind of particular? >> Arista Thurman: A little bit. >> There's some challenges there, but yah it's great. So basically you have a unique customer base, and they have additional requirements. So, it's not like a normal customer base. They're very smart people. They have a lot of demands and needs, and we do our best to provide all the services they require. >> Yah, so given that they're technical people, they may not be IT people but they have an affinity to technology. First of all, it must be hard to BS them, right? (laughter) >> Arista Thurman: No doubt, no doubt. >> They'd cut through that, so you got to be straight with them. And they're probably pretty demanding, right? I mean, they have limited resources and limited time and limited budgets, and they're probably pounding you pretty hard. Is that the case, or are they more forgiving? >> They're great people to work with, but there can be some challenges. I mean, it's unique in the idea that they work on multiple platforms. So it's from Unix to Linux to Mac. Multiple computers in their offices, multiple data requirements. And a lot of things happen without a lot of process and planning. Some things are ad hoc. So, it puts a little bit of strain sometimes on you to try to make everything happen in the amount of time they have. And everything is There's some challenges with regard to how to get things done in a timely fashion when you don't know what's going to happen with some of these experiments. >> I mean I imagine, right? They can probably deal with a lot of uncertain processes because that's kind of their lives, right? You must have to cobble things together for them to get them a solution sometimes, is that the case? >> We do sometimes. I think it's all about getting enough funding and enough resources to take care of all the different experiments. >> Dave Vellante: A balancing act. >> Yah. >> Dave Vellante: Ya so you look after, compute and storage. >> Arista Thurman: Yes. >> Right, so talk about what's happening generally there and then specifically data protection. >> So in general, my primary focus is Linux. Linus administration, Red Hat Linux. And we've seen a lot of data growth over the last five years and we've got projection for more growth as we are planning for an upgrade. So we're going to change our bmine and make it more efficient. Have a better light source and that's all planned in the next two to three years. And so, there's a lot of extra projects on top of our normal workload. We have a lot of equipment that probably needs to be refreshed. There's resources and with IT and any kind of data management things change. So whatever we're doing today, in the next three years we'll be doing something different because things change with regard to CPU speeds, performance of IO networking, storage requirements. All those things are continually growing exponentially. And when scientists want to do more experiments and they get new resources in, it's going to require more resources for us to maintain and keep them operational at the speeds and performance they want. >> Yah, we do hundreds of events with The Cube. We do about 130 events this year, and a lot of them are so-called "big data" orientation. And when you go to those data oriented events, you hear a lot of, sort of the roots of that. Or at least similarities to the scientific technical computing areas and it's sort of evolved into big data. A lot of the disciplines are similar. So, you're talking about a lot of data here. Sometimes it's really fast data, and there's a lot of variety, presumably, in that data. So how much data are we talking about? Is it huge volumes? Maybe you could describe your data environment. >> Primarily we have things broken up into different areas. So we have some block storage, and that provides a lot of our virtual the back-end for our virtualization environments which is either Microsoft or Red Hat RHV. I would estimate that's somewhere in a petabyte range. And then we also have our NAS file systems which spread across multiple environments providing NFS version three and four and also to Windows clients CIFS and some of the Mac clients also utilize that. And that's at about a little less than a petabyte. We also have high performance computing and that's a couple petabytes, at least. And all those numbers are just estimates because we're constantly growing. >> Any given time it's changing. But you're talking about multiple petabytes. So how do you back up, how do you protect multiple petabytes? >> Well I think it has to, it's all about a balancing act 'cause it's hard to back up everything in that same time window. So we have multiple backup environments providing resources for individual platforms. Like for Windows we'd do something a little different than we'd do for Linux. And we have different retention policies. Some environments need to be retained, retention is three years and some is six months, some three months, and so you have to have a system of migrating your storage to faster discs and then layer off the tape for long term retention. It's a challenge that we're constantly fighting with. >> How do you use Veritas? You're a customer obviously? >> Yah, we've been a Veritas customer for many years and we utilize Veritas in our virtualization environments. They kind of help us out with central platform. We've actually explored other things but the most cost effective thing to us at this point has been Veritas. We utilize them to back up primarily our NAS and our black files, our black file systems that provide most of the virtualization. >> Why Veritas? What is it about them that you have an affinity for? There's a zillion other backup software vendors out there, why Veritas? >> I think we have invested a lot in Veritas over the years. Predating my time at Argonne we've been using Veritas. In my previous career, in Sun Microsystems we also had some kind of relationship with Veritas. So it's easy and I think, like I mentioned earlier, we explored other things but it wasn't cost effective to make that kind of change. And it's been a reliable product. It does require work but it has been a reliable product. >> So, you'd mentioned your Linux, Red Hat Linux. >> Arista Thurman: Yes. >> So you saw this IBM announced it's going to buy Red Hat for 34 billion dollars. What were your thoughts when you heard that news? >> I was like, "Wow, what is going to happen now?" I was like, "How is that going to impact us?" Is it going to change our licensing model? Or is it going to be a good thing, or a bad thing? Right now we just don't really know. We're just kind of waiting and seeing. But it's like, OK, I mean that's a big deal. It is a biggest deal certainly from IBM. Their biggest previous deal was I think Cognos at five billion, so this dwarfs that. The deal of course doesn't close probably till the second half of 2019. So it's going to take a while. But look, IBM is known when it buys software companies, saw this with SPSS, you've seen it with other companies that it buys, it often times will change the pricing model. How do you license Red Hat? Do you have an enterprise license agreement? Do you know offhand? >> We do have an agreement with them. >> Dave Vellante: Lock that in. Lock that long term in now before the deal goes down. >> One of my counterparts is in charge of that part of it. So I'm sure we'll be having that conversation shortly. >> Yah, interesting. Well listen, Arista thanks very much for coming on The Cube, really appreciate your insight. >> Thank you. >> It's great to meet you, all right, you're welcome. Thanks for watching everybody, it's a wrap from Chicago. This has been The Cube, Veritas Vision Days. Check out SiliconAngle.com for all the news. TheCube.net is where you'll find these videos and a lot of others. You'll see where The Cube is next. Wikibon.com for all the research. Thanks for the team here, appreciate your help on the ground. We're out from Chicago, this is Dave Vellante. We'll see ya next time.

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE covering OpenStack Summit North America, 2018, Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stew Miniman here with theCUBE's coverage of OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. My co-host is John Troyer. Happy to welcome to the program, we have Berna Devrim, who is the Senior Director of Product Marketing of Platform at Red Hat. And we are thrilled to have a customer on, Nico Wellner, who's a Unix Systems Engineer with Finanz Informatik out of Germany. Thank you both so much for joining. Alright, Berna let's start with you. Just give, your first time on the program I believe, so a little bit about your background. You've been with Red Hat less than a year so tell us your role there. >> Yeah, yeah I've been at Red Hat for nine, 10 months now. I've very very excited to be here in the Open Source community development model. It's a very unique opportunity, as I've been leading the platform's marketing, which includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as well as Red Hat Virtualization, and Red Hat OpenStack platform, of course, which is why we are here at OpenStack summit. >> Great. We've got Rhel, and RHV, and RHOSP, and lots of other "LMNOP's." So Nico, give us a little bit about your background. Tell us about your organization and then lets get into the mini case study we'll do with you. >> It's an honor for me to be here. Thank you very much for this. I working for Finanz Informatiks, as you said, and it's a centralized IT service provider in the S Finance Group in Germany, for savings banks and state banks. We always have about 400 institutes. Savings banks, individual savings banks. On our systems we are supporting more than 120 million accounts, bank accounts, nearly half of them online accounts. We also develop the software for the savings banks for our customers, not savings banks only. Also, assurances and state banks. We operate the applications we developed previously. It's a huge and amazing company with a lot of different groups and systems. >> Well, we're really glad you could make it here. With GDPR banging down the door in just a couple of days we expect everybody in Europe to be pretty busy getting ready for that. Tell us your role inside the organization. What's your team do? Your title has Unix in it, so what's that entail? Give us the scope of what you cover. >> I'm assistant engineer, as you said and I'm working in the department. We are integrating and operating the Unix systems, which are AIX, we have a huge AIX, and why-mite and a huge Lenox, and why-mite in our data centers. On these Lenox systems, we started with OpenStack in 2014, with testing, and went into production in 2015, half a year later. We integrated OpenStack. We operated and served for our customers internally on the OpenStack platform. We host one of our core applications, it's the internet banking for our customers, as I said for about 50 millions account. We have multiple OpenStack Clouds. My department is responsible for the clouds and for operating them well. >> Nico I wonder if we step back for a second and what led to you going down this path. Was the company figuring out its cloud strategy? Obviously financial institutions, we understand there's governance, compliance, security is a huge concern. What does Cloud mean to your team? What led you to OpenStack? Let's start with kind of that problem statement that you had. >> Yeah, it was the main reason we introduced OpenStack was the time to market was our applications, it was our environment. And it's a plummet process. Took a long time normally and the environment. With OpenStack we could dramatically increase the time to deploy the systems from days or weeks to minutes. So we solved one huge problem with OpenStack. What was another reason was vendor lock-in. We wanted to avoid vendor lock-in. So we decided for OpenStack because it's a huge open source software, great community, and very stable, in our case. So it's OpenStack for us. >> So Berna, I've actually had the opportunity to interview quite a few Red Hat customers. I remember three years ago we were actually in the other hallway here talking to FICO about their role out of Red Hat OpenStack. I hear some similar themes, but you've got access to way more customers than I do. What are you hearing from customers in general? Is this kind of the typical? Is speed and agility at the top of the list when it comes to their Cloud environment? >> Exactly Stew, just like Nico said, actually. Our customers tell us all the time that it is about speed and agility. But it's also about different types of use cases and the workloads that they're actually looking at in their environments. Very popular ones, the use cases are. For example, scale-out IS, as well as they have test environments for the clouds needs applications, for example. Also we do see that big data analytics, NFV also. So there are many different types of use cases we see from our customers. We also have been hearing that they are actually using Open Shift on top of the Red Hat OpenStack platform. Majority of them are either deploying it or planning to deploy containers. So we do see a lot of different, but similar, aspects as well. >> Yeah. Nico have you started to go down that path with containers, Kubernetes, all that stuff yet? >> Not so far. We plan to do so. In general will use containers, we are planning to. But we already started the process, but it would take a little bit. I'm saying that we're not sure if start with OpenStack, containers on OpenStack or plain, but I think that with OpenStack could be a great way to do so. Because one of the reasons is our OpenStack environment is very reliable. This is important for us, very important for us and our customers. Over the years, as I said, since 2015 we had no outage due to OpenStack and the whole environment is great for us. >> That's great. So where are you now in your Red Hat OpenStack deployment? You have an OpenStack in production and now you're already a Red Hat customer in other products and you're now going out with Red Hat OpenStack platform, is that correct? >> Yes that's correct, yeah. >> I'm kind of curious. One of the conversations around OpenStack is the component nature of it and that many OpenStack deployments are different. So as you're now deploying Red Hat and you were already on OpenStack, are the skills transferable? Do you find the the processes transferable? Do you feel that this was a good investment, no up time for three years now and now you're moving to this new platform. Do you and your team feel like you're able to properly instrument and maintain and operate it? >> I think it's the best platform for us for infrastructure and management, Lenix and why-mite. We want to in-wolf it furthermore. >> Stew: And the skills will still transfer? The skills you've known for years will still transfer to the new OpenStack? >> Yes we have only a few people working actively on the design and the architecture, and operating for OpenStack. It's turned out that we could do fine with them. Now we have huge experience with OpenStack, feel comfortable with it. We are planning to increase the OpenStack environment, slightly I think. But scale out works great for us. The OpenStack itself, in our case, we could very flexible do a systems releases, which is one important thing for us. I think the OpenStack itself is the best platform for us and our application tools. >> That's great. Berna I was at Red Hat Summit and the interesting thing there for me was the portfolio, the breadth of portfolio, right? One of the messages was clear. You've always depended on Red Hat Enterprise Lenix, and that's still there and containers are Lenix. There was lot of multi-cloud talk and stuff like that, and OpenStack was part of the mix. Can you talk a little bit about OpenStack as part of the Red Hat portfolio and what you all are bringing to the table, and how you're thinking of open shift on OpenStack and that sort of thing? >> Yeah, exactly. As you pointed out Red Hat is all about open hybrid cloud. Within that Red Hat OpenStack platform plays a big role, of course as you can imagine. What we are trying to do at OpenStack platform is to help our customers like Nico get towards the digital transformation. With that comes, again, the need for speed and agility. What we are enabling with OpenStack platform is we would like to call it powering the digital transformation through enabling our customers to accelerate their businesses by simplifying their applications and delivery as well as the services delivery, which then, of course, moves towards innovation, fast innovation at the speed of the business. At the same time, we are trying to enable IT teams to be empowered so that they can actually do the innovations at their own pace without worry, with all of the Red Hat portfolio, as you pointed out. Yeah. >> Nico, we'd love to hear your take on digital transformation. I think back, five years ago we were talking about financial institutions, oh well we need to go mobile. Well it's much more than that for most companies that I talk to. Do you consider a digital transformation in your company? How does that relate to what IT does to what the business does, to what your users need? >> It's one of our core tasks in our company to help our customers for digital transformation. Finanz Informatik itself sees itself to be the best partner for our customers to do this transformation. With leading technologies like OpenStack and a special case was Red Hat OpenStack, of course, which is a product which enables us to be flexible, secure, and fast with our environment, and to drive this process of digital transformation in the S Finance Group, Savings Finance Group. >> Alright, so you've been at this for three or four years now with OpenStack, I'd love to get what learnings you've had for peers of yours that might be earlier in their journey. What have you learned? What advice might you give them? Let's start there. >> Overall I would say the OpenStack environment is very reliable. More reliable as I thought at the beginning. But it's turned out it's really good. From the automation perspective it's a really nice, let's say tool, for our environment. I found OpenStack is a great project with a lot of software components you can combine. We have a flexible platform. We can add some components we do not have today, but are part of OpenStack community of OpenStack product at all, to enable additional functionalities to the environment, let's say for containers, for object solid, and something like that, and new services for our customers to decrease the time to market. >> Okay. One of the things that this show we're seeing is looking beyond where we've been. I think the keynote this word, people are asking to do more and in more places. Everything from containers, and edge, and server lists, and the like. What's interesting you these days as you look down the road? Different technologies that are in your roadmap in the future, inside or outside OpenStack? >> For our company, we are in the process to integrate new needs for our customers and we are planning to do a lot of big data. Maybe OpenStack could be part of the white platform forward for the future we are planning. I think it will be much more diverse in future because right now we do have one application running on it, one co-application. It's a co-application where we partnered for us. But we will maybe will spread it or enable it for other applications, because of the great experience we've made with it. >> Nico and Berna, thank you so much for giving us the updates on where you stand with OpenStack and all of your deployment. We'll be back here with lots more coverage here at OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver for John Troyer. I'm Stew Miniman. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners! (electronic music) >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and my co-host John Troyer, you're watching SiliconANGLES' production of theCUBE here at VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas. Happy to welcome to the program two first-time guests, but from a company we've talked to many times. Rex Backman and Rob Young, both with Red Hat. Rex is the senior principal marketing manager and Rob is the senior manager of Red Hat product management, gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us, we're happy to be here! >> So sorry, tripping over, sometimes, titles and things like that, just like acronyms go out there, sometimes. So you know, I go back, I started working with Red Hat before Red Hat Advanced Server came out, which became Red Hat Enterprise Server, then, when we talk about virtualization, it used to be RHEV, R-H-E-V, and now it's RHV! >> Yup, making it simpler! >> Sometimes the people stay in the same place and, you know, the badges change, other times things change a lot. So why don't we start with Rob, tell us a bit about how long you've been at Red Hat, your role there? >> So I've been with Red Hat now for two years, almost to the date. I come from an open source pedigree, so I worked with companies like MySQL, MongoDB, to develop not only the open source model but a community around those products, and a commercialized version that people trust in running their data centers. >> Alright, and Rex, yourself? >> I'm fairly new to Red Hat, joined about three months ago. Virtualization background, really, from the world of Microsoft. So happy to be at Red Hat, we've got a strong offering with RHEV, and we just want to help get people more educated on it and the opportunities we have to help solve their problems. >> Alright, it's always an interesting dynamic. You talk, you know, virtualization, we spent a decade, you know, VMware's ascendancy and the threat of Microsoft, you know, KVM and RHEV and everything were going to be there. There's a nice Red Hat booth on the show floor. Always, customers have had Linux sitting as guests in there and lots of those, I'm sure you probably have stats for me as to how much of that's been Red Hat over the years, but tell us about the relationship, you know, VMware, Red Hat, virtualization? >> So we see the relationship with VMware and other, you know, companies and partners within our ecosystem as very positive. If you look at the workloads that are running on VMware primarily, a lot of those are Red Hat Enterprise Linux, applications that are running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so we see it as a very positive relationship. And moving ahead, we see a challenge in maintaining a virtualization footprint within VMware, within the market, because of the evolution of the market. And we see that virtualization is becoming more of a commodity-based feature and the challenges that it poses to partners like VMware, going forward, to evolve along with that model in the market. >> Well, if virtualization is a commodity, and it's becoming a commodity, what's the Red Hat approach with KVM et al in terms of, it is, parts of it are commodity, but certainly, the stack and the system it plugs into is not. >> Yeah. >> I would say, it's also very foundational. Virtualization is everywhere, and I think the value that Red Hat brings to it is, you know, the capabilities we have in our team, the capabilities we derive from the open source model. And then virtualization with RHEV, bundled in with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it's foundational. And then if you bring in other aspects of the Red Hat stack, around manageability, cloud, things of that nature, I think we have a strong offering, a good offering that people can choose from. And I think that's really important for us, is our customers have choice. And us, we differentiate ourselves on the open source model, primarily. >> Rob, it keeps becoming a more and more complex world. We've been watching, for years, it was the pull of cloud against the data center, now we're even seeing Edge pulling at the cloud. But let's go back to the data center. What's Red Hat's viewpoints, what are you hearing from customers, what do they need in the data center, and how are they viewing that these days? >> So what we see in the modern data center, one, the workloads that we see around Mode One applications or Legacy applications, that footprint is not going away. It's going to continue to have a bare metal footprint as well as a virtualized and private cloud. So what we're doing, and what our customers are asking us for, is a transition from pure virtualization or bare metal to virtualization to hybrid cloud. And what we're doing now, with our engineering efforts, not only upstream but also from a proprietary and configuration standpoint, all open source by the way, is we are giving customers the option to standardize on that virtualization platform built on KVM that shares components with hybrid cloud technologies from Mode Two. So what we see, from our customers, is that they're maintaining a Mode One, but buying and planning for Mode Two. And that's how we see the on-premise data center market heading at this point. >> Okay, I'd like you to unpack that for our audience. Because, big discussion this week is, public cloud, yeah sure, it has virtualization, but it's not VMware. So now we've got this one option, VMware and AWS starting to roll out, are you saying that my data center can really be compatible with the public clouds and, you know, the Red Hat pieces on both sides, or is it native to what AWS and Google are doing? How does that dynamic work? >> So the way we're approaching it is, we look at it, not only as a software solution, but also as a paradigm shift in more openness, APIs, things are more generic. So if you want to plug into a common framework for management, as an example, or deployment, you can easily do that via the open APIs that are available in the open source community. So as an example, we provide a management solution called Cloud Forms. And with that platform, it's part of the Red Hat stack and solution, we allow customers to manage not only the virtualized environment but also, their hybrid or private clouds, but also AWS as well. So if they've got instances running on AWS, they can manage it through one pane of glass. And this is our strategy going forward, but it's not tomorrow, this is happening today with our Red Hat Stack platform. >> Rex, you've got a background in networking, networking front and center, and networking and security even more than ever, that I've seen at VMworld. How does that fit into Red Hat's whole story? >> You know, if you look at the world of virtualization, obviously, we've gone from the story of server virtualization, network virtualization, storage virtualization, and those are the antes into the game now, and I think, Red Hat, with what we provide, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, obviously the foundation started with, you know, the knowledge that our R&D team brings from their open source background around RHEV and server virtualization. But also, now, network virtualization capabilities, and also, what Red Hat has around storage. So I think we cover those three antes into the game of virtualization, and then, you know, it adds to the equation Rob was talking about, which is the whole Red Hat Stack, which I think is a good story, and a choice for our customers. >> I think, actually, 2017 is actually a really interesting year for virtualization. We're at an interesting era, right? 10 years ago you had some market dominance, you're looking at Microsoft and VMware like we talked about, we had Zen and KVM came up, and they were a little scary for people, right? They were developing, they weren't as mature of a stack. I do think, now, that the average admin in an average, you know, IT estate, is actually dealing with the fact that, oh, I could actually manage multiple hypervisors, look at a mixed estate, it's not as scary anymore, the technology is more mature, more manageable. Can you talk a little bit about that scenario of a mixed estate? Like, if you have, part of your data center is running VMware, what kinds of use cases and what kinds of management scenarios would you, as you start to add Red Hat virtualization to the mix? >> So the dynamic that we see and play right now is, there's a huge install-base on VMware. And a lot of customers, a lot of clients, a lot of partners are looking at that relationship now and deciding if they should invest elsewhere in other solutions. So what we provide is the ability to manage those environments, the clients for hyper-V, for VMware, for Red Hat, all within one pane of glass. But it allows customers who want the choice to manage that heterogeneous environment built on multiple hypervisors, but it allows them to evaluate if, maybe, the Red Hat solution is better for them. And if we can help them with V to V migrations as well, workload migration, mobility, I think that's the perfect scenario for Red Hat, an open source company, and choice. >> And I think some of the customers, you know, public case studies that we've promoted, some of the attributes that they've been looking at that shifted them over towards the Red Had side was performance, you know, was very important. Scalability was very important. So I think, it depends, customer to customer. >> I was actually wondering about, so do we see re-platforming as people are re-architecting? Are these green field opportunities? I imagine, again, it's all across the board. But have you seen any particularly common patterns of people standing up, maybe a new business-critical app on a new platform, maybe they're re-architecting it to be a little bit more cloud-native, any particular directions like that? >> I think, some of the things I've seen recently is an enterprise IT organization has decided to go down an open source path for their world. And then that kind of is a strong point for us. Mountain Health is a company that there's some news on, from last week, is an example of that. British Airways is another customer like that. And, you know, as Rob said. It's large companies, big brands, down to commercial companies as well, or governments, or education. So I think it could be performance, it could be open source, open source is definitely one of the drivers though. >> Yeah, and what we're seeing there with open source is, the more trust is built in open source, the more enterprise adoption, and the cost-effectiveness of working with a development team that's worldwide, a QE team that's worldwide, really helps to build the stability of the products that companies like Red Hat build subscription models around. So there's no vendor lock-in, as well, for proprietary licensing models. And we find that many customers are very open to that discussion, as opposed to, you know, the alternatives. >> One of the other discussions we've been having at VMworld for the last couple years is this whole containers discussion. VM versus containers, is it containers inside VMs, Red Hat Summit, there was huge discussion, there was the super popular t-shirt, on one side it said, Linux is containers, and on the other side it said, Containers are Linux. So where do you see that discussion? What do you think about how VMware's been looking at things? There was a big announcement about VMware and, through the pivotal activity, kind of embracing Kubernetes, Red Hat's, I'm sure, saying, welcome to the party, right? (laughing) >> So there's an interesting dynamic with containers, because containers, Kubernetes, you know, you name the project, is purely an open source play. And if you look at the projects, the contributors, most of this is going to be built on an open source model. So proprietary software companies, like VMware, are going to be challenged to adapt and evolve how they develop, how they contribute, their presence within those communities. Now, Red Hat is uniquely positioned in that our model has been, for the last 25 years, that we're purely open source. Everything we do is out in the community. And it lends itself very naturally, not only the way we've done commercialization of Linux, but we're doing that now with containers as well. And if you look at the dynamic in the market, a lot of people believe that there's VM or containers, and this is really a symbiotic or complimentary relationship. 85% of the workloads for containers runs within a virtualized environment, and containers and virtualization fill gaps for each other that's just a natural complement, and just because Red Hat is already comfortable operating in the open source environment in this way, we think we're just in a very good position to lead in both areas. >> You mentioned open source commercialization. And Jim Whitehurst, the CO of Red Hat, has been on theCUBE, Stu and I talked with him at the last Open Stack Summit. I was super impressed by his insight and grasp into the economics of open source and how Red Hat has been able to build a model like that. Can you talk at all about data centers, or IT spend in general, and capex, opex, where it's going in a more open source driven world? Where do you put your money then? >> So do you want to answer? (laughs) >> I'll take a stab at it. >> Can you now invest your money, that's a little better. >> Yeah, I think it's really interesting. And I'm going to answer this question from the perspective of a three-month Red Hat employee, but with, you know, a lot of experience in the industry with proprietary companies, if you will. I think the value, the commercialization of what Red Hat has done, there's the upstream aspects of open source and the programs available there. And then there's the downstream commercialization of what Red Hat has done, which is wrapping the value of a Red Hat subscription around that open source project. And I think what we see in our customers in terms of budget spend, you know, more on the opex side than the capex side, in our case, is looking at that price point. Because some of our customers, well, many of our customers, if not all of our customers, there is a price sensitivity. I think a lot of our customers right now, maybe this might be a crazy thing to say, may not be as price-sensitive as they used to be. Now it's more about innovation, agility, speed to market. But still, the economics is important. And I think the value Red Hat provides and the uniqueness in the model that Jim and his crew cracked early on to start Red Hat, is the ability to provide that Red Hat subscription at value for open source, and, what we see is that, most of the time, in cases, it's an attractive price point and that's how we win customers. So I think, long-winded answer to your question is, I think there's a strong future. You see more and more companies adopting open source in their programs. I think Red Hat is the leader of that and in good shape! >> Rob, why don't you just give us the final word. Conversations you're having at the show, how are people here in the VMware community embracing, is it an open source discussion, is it the innovation, and kind of, the new features, what's bringing them by to talk to Red Hat? >> I think it's a mixture. So what we're seeing is a lot of interest in Red Hat Solutions, the Red Hat Stack. And I think customers are now looking at Red Hat as a good enough alternative to more pricey alternatives, or more pricey options. And if you look at what we've done from a strategic standpoint is, much like we've done with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we are now using Enterprise Linux as a foundational support pillar, so to speak, for the Red Hat Stack. If you look at the APIs that we generated, a lot of the interest I'm getting, the question I'm getting not only from customers, but from folks out on the show floor, other vendors, is, what's your API look like? Can I learn more about it? And to me, that's the leading edge of a wave of, maybe that partner's looking a little more red (laughs) in the days to come. So, just, my opinion. >> Absolutely, I know John Troyer and I have been talking for a few years now, that API economy, something that's been coming into this world, and that intersection between what all the Linux admins have known for a long time as to their operational model matches a lot of what we're seeing in the cloud. So Rob Young, Rex Backman, really appreciate you joining us. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2017. You're watching theCUBE. (futuristic music)