(gentle music) >> We're back at the Seaport in Boston. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Paul Gillin. Tracie Zenti is here. She's the Director of Global Partner Management at Microsoft, and Tom Anderson is the Vice President of Ansible at Red Hat. Guys, welcome to theCube. >> Hi, thank you. >> Yep. >> Ansible on Azure, we're going to talk about that. Why do I need Ansible? Why do I need that kind of automation in Azure? What's the problem you're solving there? >> Yeah, so automation itself is connecting customers' infrastructure to their end resources, so whether that infrastructure's in the cloud, whether it's in the data center, or whether it's at the edge. Ansible is the common automation platform that allows customers to reuse automation across all of those platforms. >> And so, Tracie, I mean, Microsoft does everything. Why do you need Red Hat to do Ansible? >> We want that automation, right? We want our customers to have that ease of use so they can be innovative and bring their workloads to Azure. So that's exactly why we want Ansible. >> Yeah, so kind of loaded questions here, right, as we were sort of talking offline. The nature of partnerships is changing. It's about co-creating, adding value together, getting those effects of momentum, but maybe talk about how the relationship started and how it's evolving and I'd love to have your perspective on the evolving nature of ecosystems. >> Yeah, I think the partnership with Red Hat has been strong for a number of years. I think my predecessor was in the role for five years. There was a person in there for a couple years before that. So I think seven or eight years, we've been working together and co-engineering. Red Hat enterprised Linux. It's co-engineered. Ansible was co-engineered. We work together, right? So we want it to run perfectly on our platform. We want it to be a good customer experience. I think the evolution that we're seeing is in how customers buy, right? They want us to be one company, right? They want it to be easy. They want be able to buy their software where they run it on the cloud. They don't want to have to call Red Hat to buy and then call us to buy and then deploy. And we can do all that now with Ansible's the first one we're doing this together and we'll grow that on our marketplace so that it's easy to buy, easy to deploy, easy to keep track of. >> This is not just Ansible in the marketplace. This is actually a fully managed service. >> That's right. >> What is the value you've added on top of that? >> So it runs in the customer account, but it acts kind of like SaaS. So Red Hat gets to manage it, right? And it's in their own tenant. So they get in the customer's own tenant, right? So with a service principle, Red Hat's able to do that management. Tom, do you want to add anything to that? >> Yeah, the customers don't have to worry about managing Ansible. They just worry about using Ansible to automate their infrastructure. So it's a kind of a win-win situation for us and for our customers. We manage the infrastructure for them and the customer's resources themselves and they get to just focus on automating their business. >> Now, if they want to do cross-cloud automation or automation to their hybrid cloud, will you support that as well? >> 100%. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah. >> We're totally fine with that, right? I mean, it's unrealistic to think customers run everything in one place. That isn't enterprise. That's not reality. So yeah, I'm fine with that. >> Well, that's not every cloud provider. >> No (laughing) that's true. >> You guys over here, at Amazon, you can't even say multicloud or you'll get thrown off the stage. >> Of course we'd love it to all run on Azure, but we want our customers to be happy and have choice, yeah. >> You guys have all, I mean, you've been around a long time. So you had a huge on-prem state, brought that to the cloud, and Azure Stack, I mean, it's been around forever and it's evolved. So you've always believed in, whatever you call it, Hybrid IT, and of course, you guys, that's your call of mission. >> Yeah, exactly. >> So how do you each see hybrid? Where's the points of agreement? It sounds like there's more overlap than gaps, but maybe you could talk about your perspective. >> Yeah, I don't think there are any points of disagreement. I think for us, it's meeting our customers where their center of gravity is, where they see their center of management gravity. If it's on Azure, great. If it's on their data center, that's okay, too. So they can manage to or from. So if Azure is their center of gravity, they can use automation, Ansible automation, to manage all the things on Azure, things on other cloud providers, things in their data center, all the way out to their edge. So they have the choice of what makes the most sense to them. >> And Azure Arc is obviously, that's how Azure Stack is evolving, right? >> Yeah, and we have Azure Arc integration with Ansible. >> Yeah. >> So yeah, absolutely. And I mean, we also have Rell on our marketplace, right? So you can buy the basement and you could buy the roof and everything in between. So we're growing the estate on marketplace as well to all the other products that we have in common. So absolutely. >> How much of an opportunity, just go if we go inside? Give us a little peak inside Microsoft. How much of an opportunity does Microsoft think about multi-cloud specifically? I'm not crazy about the term multicloud, 'cause to me, multicloud, runs an Azure, runs an AWS, runs on Google, maybe runs somewhere else. But multicloud meaning that common experience, your version of hybrid, if you will. How serious is Microsoft about that as a business opportunity? A lot of people would say, well, Microsoft really doesn't want. They want everything in their cloud. But I'd love to hear from you if that is good. >> Well, we have Azure Red Hat OpenShift, which is a Microsoft branded version of OpenShift. We have Ansible now on our marketplace. We also, of course, we have AKS. So I mean, container strategy runs anywhere. But we also obviously have services that enhance all these things. So I think, our marketplace is a third party marketplace. It is designed to let customers buy and run easily on Azure and we'd want to make that experience good. So I don't know that it's... I can't speak to our strategy on multicloud, but what I can speak to is when businesses need to do innovation, we want it to be easy to do that, right? We want it to be easy to buy, defined, buy, deploy, manage, and that's what we're trying to accomplish. >> Fair to say, you're not trying to stop it. >> No, yeah, yeah. >> Whether or not it evolves into something that you heavily lean into or see. >> When we were talking before the cameras turned on, you said that you think marketplaces are the future. Why do you say that? And how will marketplaces be differentiated from each other in the future? >> Well, our marketplace is really, first of all, I think, as you said off camera, they're now. You can buy now, right? There's nothing that stops you. But to me, it's an extension of consumerization of IT. I've been in IT and manageability for about 23 years and full automation is what we and IT used to always talk about, that single pane of glass. How do you keep track of everything? How do you make it easy? How do you support? And IT is always eeking out that last little bit of funding to do innovation, right? So what we can do with consumerization of IT is make it easier to innovate. Make it cheaper to innovate, right? So I think marketplaces do that, right? They've got gold images you can deploy. You're also able to deploy custom images. So I think the future is as particularly with ours, like we support, I don't remember the exact number, but over a hundred countries of tax calculation. We've got like 17 currencies. So as we progress and customers can run from anywhere in the world and buy from anywhere in the world and make it simple to do those things that used to take maybe two months to spin up services for innovation and Ansible helps with that, that's going to help enterprises innovate faster. And I think that's what marketplaces are really going to bring to the forefront is that innovation. >> Tom, why did Ansible, I'm going to say one, I mean, you're never done. But it was unclear a few years ago, which automation platform was going to win in the marketplace and clearly, Ansible has taken a leading position. Why? What were the factors that led to that? >> Honestly, it was the strength of the community, right? And Red Hat leaning into that community to support that community. When you look out at the upstream community for Ansible and the number of participants, active participants that are contributing to the community just increases its value to everybody. So the number of integrations, the number of things that you can automate with Ansible is in the thousands and thousands, and that's not because a group of Red Hat engineers wrote it. That's because our community partners, like Microsoft wrote the user integrations for Ansible. F5 does theirs. Customers take those and expand on them. So the number of use cases that we can address through the community and through our partners is immense. >> But that doesn't just happen. I mean, what have you done to cultivate that community? >> Well, it's in Red Hat's DNA, right? To be the catalyst in a community, to bring partners and users together, to share their knowledge and their expertise and their skills, and to make the code open. So anybody can go grab Ansible from upstream and start doing stuff with it, if they want. If they want to mature on it and management for it and support all the other things that Red Hat provides, then they come to us for a subscription. So it's really been about sort of catalyzing and supporting that community, and Red Hat is a good steward of these upstream communities. >> Is Azure putting Ansible to use actually within your own platform as opposed to being a managed service? Are you adopting Ansible for automation of the Azure Platform? >> I'll let you answer that. >> So two years ago, Microsoft presented at AnsibleFest, our fall conference, Budd Warrack, I'm butchering his last name, but he came on and told how the networking team at Microsoft supports about 35,000 access points across hundreds of buildings, all the Microsoft campuses using Ansible to do that. Fantastic story if you want to go on YouTube and look up that use case. So Microsoft is an avid user of the Ansible technology in their environment. >> Azure is kind of this really, I mean, incredible strategic platform for Microsoft. I wonder if you could talk about Azure as a honeypot for partners. I mean, it seems, I mean, the momentum is unbelievable. I mean, I pay attention to their earnings calls every quarter of Azure growth, even though I don't know what the exact number is, 'cause they won't give it to me but they give me the growth rates and it's actually accelerating. >> No lie. (Tracie laughing) >> I've got my number. It's in the tens of billions. I mean, I'm north of 35 billion, but growing at the high 30%. I mean, it's remarkable. So talk about the importance of that to the ecosystem as a honey pot. >> Paul Satia said it right. Many times partners are essential to our strategy. But if you think about it, software solves problems. We have software that solves problems. They have software that solves problems, right? So when IT and customers are thinking of solving a problem, they're thinking software, right? And we want that software to run on Azure. So partners have to be essential to our strategy. Absolutely. It's again, we're one team to the customer. They want to see that as working together seamlessly. They don't want it to be hardware Azure plus software. So that's absolutely critical to our success. >> And if I could add for us, the partners are super important. So some of our launch partners are like F5 and CyberArk who have certified Ansible content for Ansible on Azure. We have service provider partners like Accenture and Kindra that are launching with us and providing our joint customers with help to get up to speed. So it really is a partner play. >> Absolutely. >> Where are you guys taking this? Where do you want to see it go? What are some of the things that observers should pay attention to as marketers of success and evolution? >> Well, certainly for us, it's obviously customer adoption, but it is providing them with patterns. So out of the box patterns that makes it easy for them to get up and running and solve the use cases and problems that they run into most frequently. Problems ain't the right word. Challenges or opportunities on Azure to be able to automate the things. So we're really leaning into the different use cases, whether it's edge, whether it's cloud, whether it's cloud to edge, all of those things. We want to provide users with out of the box Ansible content that allows 'em to just get up and automating super fast, and doing that on Azure makes it way easier for us because we don't have to focus on the install and the setting up and configuring it. It's all just part of the experience >> And Tracie, for Microsoft, it's world domination with a smile. (all laughing) >> Of course. No, of course not. No, I think it's to continue to grow the co-engineering we do across all of the Red Hat products. I can't even tell you the number of things we work on together, but to look forward strategically at what opportunities we have across our products and theirs to integrate like Arc and Ansible, and then making it all easy to buy, making it available so that customers have choice and they can buy how they want to and simplify. So we're just going to continue to do that and we're at that infancy right now and as we grow, it'll just get easier and easier with more and more products. >> Well, bringing the edge into the equation is going to be really interesting. Microsoft with its gaming, vector is amazing, and recent, awesome acquisitions. All the gamers are excited about that and that's a huge edge play. >> You'll have to bring my son on for that interview. >> Yeah. >> My son will interview. >> He knows more than all of us, I'm sure. What about Ansible? What's ahead for Ansible? >> Edge, so part of the Red Hat play at the Edge. We've getting a lot of customer pull for both industrial Edge use cases in the energy sector. We've had a joint customer with Azure that has a combined Edge platform. Certainly, the cloud stuff that we're announcing today is a huge growth area. And then just general enterprise automation. There's lots of room to run there for Ansible. >> And lots of industries, right? >> Yeah. >> Telco, manufacturing. >> Retail. >> Retail. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. There's so many places to go, yeah, that need the help. >> The market's just, how you going to count it anymore? It's just enormous. >> Yeah. >> It's the entire GDP the world. But guys, thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Yeah. >> Great story. Congratulations on the partnership and the announcements and look forward to speaking with you in the future. >> Yeah, thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> You're very welcome. And keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante for Paul Gillin. This is theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022. We'll be right back at Seaport in Boston. (gentle music)

>> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube covering Red Hat Summit 2017. Brought to you by Red hat. >> I'm joined by my co-host, Stu Miniman. Stu, this is day one of the conference: 20 keynotes, six general sessions, people from 70 countries gathered here in Boston, Massachusetts. You are a Red Hat Summit veteran. Thoughts, impressions of the first day. What has struck you really? >> So first of all, it's like Red Hat itself. The company just keeps growing. It's just one of those, you know, strong progress. We talked a little bit over the intro this morning with Dave Vellante as, what is it, 60 quarters consecutively that the company has had revenue growth. It's like, I've worked for a lot of tech companies. It's like, I remember when I worked for (mumbles) when they were doing it (mumbles). They have a miss and the stock kind of drops. IBM, you know, has had quarter and quarter and things like this, but with all of these waves and look, Red Hat's not the biggest company out there, but they are an important player in many changes in the ecosystem. This is one of my favorite developer shows that we cover at the show. Of course, Open Source, we used to say, okay, software's leaving the world and Open Source is eating software. Red Hat's right in the middle of this. I think most people agree. There is really only one way to Red Hat. There's not going to be a Red Hat of something else. There's no one else to really capture that. They got involved at a certain point in time where they could have that model, but they've extended it. They understand what they're doing. They're getting involved in a lot of interesting technologies and there's a lot of people, like most conferences that we go to, there's a lot of passionate people that are really interested, very tech savvy group here, going into all of these breakouts. Many came yesterday for some things. They're coming for a whole week to just dig in, do demos. Down on the show floor, they've got little coating challenges and VR things. I mean there's just a lot of pieces of the show and we only get to see a part of it, but I've enjoyed the customers, the executives, and only one day of three that we're covering so far. >> It is early days in the summit, but where would you say that we are in terms of the maturity of the cloud? We heard from Jim Whitehurst, the CEO, he's going to be on the program tomorrow. He talked about how cloud strategy really is the #1 thing on customers' mind. The cloud is not new and we are really evolving and is maturing, where are we? >> Right, a couple of stats from the keynote this morning. It was 84% of customers have a cloud strategy. Now those of us in the analyst world, we might say, "Well, let's see whether they really have a strategy "they understand," and 59% have a multi-cloud environment which doesn't surprise us. Most people, the joke we used to have was, you had two types of customers, those that were using Amazon and those that didn't realize that some group was using Amazon, reminds me of a comment I made earlier, about like Linux itself. There was always, 15 years ago, big companies would be like, "oh, no, we're a Unix shop," or "we're looking at windows." No, no, no, there's the guy in the corner. He's been using Linux for awhile and that's been a big driver, so cloud absolutely is maturing. I loved, it was an interesting discussion we had with Paul Cormier towards the end of the day. We were seeing Ramgji from Google talking about how we've got the infrastructure and we've got the applications. And I'm an infrastructure guy, but I knew from day one, the reason you build infrastructures is because of your application. If I can just buy SaaS, I don't care about the infrastructure underneath it. The SaaS provider sure does. We talked a lot to SaaS providers as to how they're building their solution. If I'm using infrastructure as a service, you know, there's some I need to understand the infrastructure and there's plenty of infrastructure here, everything from, there's the storage and networking teams, Open Source is permeating every corner of the environment, so it's maturing, but in many ways it's gotten more complex. Cloud was supposed to, many of us thought, simplify the environment, but boy, it seems that many of the things that we had in previous ways as it gets more mature, gets a little bit more complex. Red Hat tries to take those pieces together, build them into solutions. We've talked about there's Red Hat Linux. Enterprise Linux is the platform that can live in many environments. Open Shift is something that allows to encapsulate all of those services, things like containers, we're working with our cloud data applications, and how I want to build them, Open Shift's going to help and you know Cooper Netties goes into the mix so Red Hat is places strategic bets, and, you know, has a strong position in the number place and has big partners. It's really interesting to see. We've had a couple on already, and we'll have many on through the week from key providers in the infrastructure and cloud players out there. >> I think the theme of this year's conference is the power of the individual, and it really is. I mean, we heard from Sam Ramji who said, "This is the age of the developer." Developers have more respect, more veneration, than ever before and yet we also heard from Sandra Rivera, it is also harder than it has ever been before to be a developer because there is just so much data and it's hard to know the difference between the good data and the bad data and where you find the right insights to make decisions that drive the business on that data and if you're a developer, you might not have the business savvy to do that, so it's a real balance here that the companies and developers themselves are trying to strike. Are they doing a good job? I mean, is it still too early? >> It's funny. When you say that it makes me think of in the machine-learning space, it's how do we get the data to train the machine to understand what is good or not, and you know, I wish they'd done that for us when we all went to college because in my job, it's always like, okay, what data can we trust? Well, if you remember from Princess Bride, it was like, with Versini, it was like, well, I know a vendor told me information, so therefore, I know I can't trust that data, but if I take someone else's data, you know, it gets very confusing as it, what I'm saying, is any single piece of data a lot of times you know you can throw that out because maybe it's good, maybe it's not, but how do I get, understand the trends, understand what's going on. I love talking to practitioners here that when they're talking about their business and the impact it's had. We had one of the customers on today was like, "Look, I deployed this, and I have like $6 million "worth of savings in my business year every year. I mean, that's hard information, hard to argue with it. Now are there other solutions that might do that? Sure, but yeah, it's challenging to understand what's good data, what's not good data. As an industry, you know, whether that's the kind of the people or the machines themselves. >> I think the other question that we're all grappling with here is that, and you talked about this earlier, just talking about the evolution of Red Hat that you've seen in coming to this summit all these years. This is a company founded in 1993. Today it has a market cap of $15 billion, 2.4 billion in revenue, nearly 8,000 employees. Can a big company, and it's a big company now, can it innovate, can it truly innovate and we heard in the keynote one of the things that Jim Whitehurst was trying to do was to cultivate a startup mindset. Is that possible? >> Yeah, it's a great question, and I know, Rebecca, you and I've been talking about this throughout the week so far as to big companies have challenges because there are the structure and the organization and what drives the business. What's interesting about Red Hat, of course, is that sure they have products, but underneath it, it's all Open Source, so community is in their DNA. As Paul Cormier said, he's like "We couldn't "buy a company and do it closed-source again." They did that a couple years ago, it didn't go well. They were going to transition it, but it's been a case study that's been written up. (talking over each other) >> Me and Jim in the room alone, yes. >> Absolutely, so what's interesting is Red Hat is more like a community in many ways. As Jim Whitehurst spoke, is the open organizations so they act more like an Open Source community than they do a company, of course, that being said, they're profitable, they have employees, they have benefits, they have locations all around the world so it's been interesting to see how Red Hat adopts certain technologies, contributes to them. You know, it would be interesting to see who else Jim Whitehurst tomorrow and say okay, you know, what is a product that was developed by Red Hat versus a project that was taken in by Red Hat, something I've seen over the last three or four years, a lot of acquisitions they made, it was, let's take Open Stack for example. There is a big survey that's done twice a year that said what are people using and what are they interested in with Open Stack, and it felt like that was the buying guide for Red Hat because it was like, "Oh, okay, here's the sent-to-us stuff, "that was pretty interesting. "Well, we can't buy Konica, we'll buy Sento West," and that comes under the umbrella. "Oh, there's this storage management piece "that actually is open source that people "are using for Open Stack, well let me buy that one, too." So Red Hat has become inquisitive, but it's to get deeper engagement in the community. They are all Open Source so always there is that balance in big companies of what do I do with R & D and what do I do with M & A? And Red Hat has done both. I think they've done a good job of moving the industry forward. Innovation is a lot of times a buzz word, but they do some good stuff. They contribute a lot. People here are very positive about what's going on. Just because they haven't created the next flying car or things like that. >> But they're on that. We heard here that they're thinking about it. I mean, I think that's also, I didn't mean to ask the question insinuating that they're not innovating, but I do think that particularly at a time where we are seeing Microsoft years of no growth, Intel, stalled growth, you know, what is Red Hat's secret sauce, and also what is going to the breaking point for these other lagging enterprise companies? When will we see some new ideas and fresh perspective? >> Yeah, it's interesting 'cause we write this whole, the shift of what's happening with cloud, the wave of the machine-learning, the augmented intelligence or artificial intelligence, how much is that going to ding the traditional companies, especially the infrastructure companies. Red Hat touches it, but they're much broader. Their growth, they're an Open Source company. It's interesting. I've seen a lot of other companies, the Open Sourced-based ones, "Oh, we're not "an Open Source company. "We're an enterprise software company," or "software company." I'm sure we asked Red Hat if they were a software company, they will say well, of course, like everything we deliver is software, but at their DNA, they are Open Source, and that kind of sets them apart from the pack even though there are other examples Dave Vellante went through this morning of other companies that are heavily involved in Open Source, struggling with that how do we monetize Open Source. >> Well, is it a problem with the business model? Why is it so challenging? >> It's a great question. The first time I interviewed Jim Whitehurst, it's like "Jim, why aren't there more billion dollar Open Source companies," and his answer was, you know, Not being flippy," he's like, "Look, selling free is hard." >> Yeah, that's a great point, but I think that we should, we need to dig a little deeper and hopefully we can get to the bottom of that by day three. >> Absolutely, and I tell ya, I'm sitting here listening to, you know, we'll be doing the Cloud Foundry Summit in June there, which is pivotal as making a lot of money with that, but most of the other companies not doing so much. We were just a Docker Con. A couple weeks ago, Docker Company seems to be growing, doing well. They just changed their CEO today so hot news out on SiliconANGLE.com. Ben Golub, the CEO, I just interviewed him a couple weeks ago and now he's moving the board, but they're bringing the Chairman of the Board to be CEO, so we look at all these companies: Cloudera just IPO'd. Hortonworks is a public company. These companies that have Open Core or Open Source as a major piece of what they're doing, none have had the just measured growth and success that Red Hat does, so you know, Red Hat has a case study. It still seems to be one that stands alone category by themselves, but you know, partnering and growing and doing great, and it's exciting to cover. >> Day two, anything you're particularly excited about? >> Yeah, so I got a taste of the AWS-enhanced partnership talking about how Open Shift is going to have deeper integration and we talked a little bit with Paul Cormier so I suspect Jim Whitehurst will be talking to him about it. We have one of the main guys involved in that from Red Hat side will be on our program tomorrow. So the keynote tomorrow, I'll be watching here. Maybe there'll be a special guest during the keynote talk about that announcement some, but you know, obviously a space we watch real closely. We had Optum, one of the customers on today, he said, "I use Open Shift and I'm using Amazon and want to do it most and this is a game-changer for me," so we think this is really interest to watch, really, you talked about maturity early in this segment here, the maturity of hybrid cloud. If Amazon starts to get deeper into the data centers, partnering with companies like Red Hat and like VMware, that will help them to stave off some of the competition that's coming at them. (mumbles) to Microsoft and Google who's getting Cooper Netties everywhere. Lots more to dig in with. There's some announcements today but a lot more to come and you know, more customers, more partners, more Red Hatters. >> That's great, great. Well, we are looking forward to being back here tomorrow bright and early. Thank you for joining us. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We'll see you back here tomorrow. (innovative tones)