>> Live, from Las Vegas! It's theCUBE! Covering the VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. We're in Las Vegas, and you're watching theCUBE's exclusive coverage of VMworld 2018. I'm Stu Miniman joined by my cohost Justin Warren, and happy to welcome to the program for the first time, James Labocki, who's a director of product management with Red Hat. And joining him is CUBE alum, Rob Young, who's the lead manager of virtualization product management strategy, also with Red Hat, wearing the shadow man logo. Rob, James, thank you so much for joining us. >> Great to be here >> Thanks for having us. >> Alright, so Rob, we touch base with Red Hat at a number of shows, you know, Red Hat Summit. We spoke with you last year at VMworld. Give us the update, Red Hat's got a nice booth here at the show, A lot of things going on, Red Hat plays in a lot of the multi-cloud environments that I hear VMware talking about, so, talk about your presence here. >> So, Red Hat has done quite a bit of growing over the course of the last year that we talked. We are focused on not only where our customers are today, but also on how our portfolio needs to evolve to where they aspire to be. And by that, I mean, RHEL is still the foundation of our business. We have Red Hat Virtualization, we have OpenStack Platform, we have the OpenShift, as you know, and what we're learning from our customers and the market, is that, on top of RHEL, customers have not only a footprint in the virtualization world, but they have an aspiration to evolve along with the market to more of a containerized world that is managed, orchestrated, delivered via Kubernetes, and we feel that our portfolio is well positioned with the pillars of our business from infrastructure to application middleware all the way through management, to allow them to act on those aspirations, not in the future but right now. So that's where we are. Our strategy is build around that vision and around that level of enablement and market dynamic, right now, so we're excited, would you agree? >> Yeah absolutely. A lot of interest in OpenShifted option, whether that's on the Vmware platform itself, out on the public clouds, and then on KVR, KVM based hypervisors with Red Hat Virtualization OpenStack Platform as well. >> Yeah it's interesting because, I've watched this adoption of containerization in the marketplace. What's the line I hear from Red Hat? It's like, Linux is containers, containers are Linux. >> Hey you got that good. >> Yeah I got the t shirt too. But, you know, here at VMworld, some people are still trying to understand that virtualization versus containers and, "How do I stack things?" "How do I do that?" What do you hear from customers? Where is their head at? Talk to us about, you know, it's pervasive in the product line so how do you think about it internally too? >> Yeah absolutely so, I think containers are absolutely Linux and Linux is fundamental to containers, so I think one of the most interesting paradigms that we're seeing, or one of the interesting trends we're seeing is that as people are beginning to adopt containers, they're also beginning to realize that they're looking to simplify their environments as they do that. And so it's presenting a lot of new opportunities and reinvigoration of other technologies. So things like traditional virtualization that they have in place today, they're looking at, maybe bringing along KVM and starting to orchestrate containers and virtual machines with Kubernetes in a consistent manner across both on-premise and public cloud providers. So, we're really excited to be involved in projects around that. We're helping drive the adoption of that. And with that reinvigoration of KVM as a hypervisor, based on that work, to bring a common orchestration layer we're seeing even reinvigoration of the ecosystem around KVM with partners of ours like Trilio, Maxta, Veeam, and so on and so forth, which have been kind of discussed in... >> Yeah, Sorry. >> Well I was just going to add to what Dave said. What we see also happening is that the Linux market 25 years ago was open-source, contributor laden. Red Hat was fully engaged there, we are seeing that very same dynamic happening in the Kubernetes environment. We actually see that as very much the equivalent of what Linux was 25 years ago, so we are contributing upstream to the Kubernetes project, but our goal really is not only to stabilize and build out Kubernetes, but also to bring the virtualization aspect that we had brought into KVM and to virtualization into the Kubernetes project and community so that we can get rid of an additional layer of complexity around the hypervisor allowing containers to be managed and deployed and to have the same isolation levels that you have with VMs now. So all that is in process now. We've got upstream work going on and we're leading a lot of those contributions in the Kubernetes community, specifically via the Kubert project so anyway... >> Leads nicely into what I wanted to ask about which was, Red Hat has a long history of open-source, and open-source is a really important part of containers in general. What are you seeing for enterprises in their adoption of open-source? I mean clearly you've watched it go from something which was once verboten, to now it's pretty much de facto. So what are you seeing customers using open-source for in this new cloud and container world? >> Yeah so I think, you know, the typical pattern we see is a lot of times previously people would look at open-source as a way to commoditize and reduce cost. That was the beginning of open-sources right, with the UNIX to Linux migrations and things of that nature. Now, open-source and really Linux is at the forefront of a lot of the innovation happening, so customers are using both those, basically, techniques inside of their environments to embrace open-source. So at one point, they're using their Linux skills to commoditize things inside their environment or reduce cost. They're also looking at it as the basis of containers, microservices, machine learning, so on and so forth, so really this common skillset of Linux is kind of on both sides, and it's really rooted in the open-source knowledge and methodologies that our customers need to be able to... >> You hit the nail right on the head when you mentioned that everything that has to do with the new modernization of the data center built on containers is open-source, and Red Hat's participation in the community is we already have credibility in the Linux world and the OpenStack world and the KVM world and the Kubernetes world as well, and what we're seeing on the customer side, specifically enterprise and public sector is, they are embracing open-source. They've actually got strategies that named open-source as part of the criteria for proof of concepts and things like that, and we believe we've been preparing for this moment for the last 25 years, for the market to really see this as an open opportunity, not only for open-source and communities, but also to enable their development staffs to extend and participate in those projects to their advantage, so it's a really good thing, for a Red Hat market. >> Yeah it's certainly encouraging to see it. Having watched it develop, it's been really nice seeing that actually get used with enterprises, and seeing that Red Hat is there, the whole way through that and as a trusted partner I'm sure gives them a lot of confidence. >> One thing I would add is just, it's not just about the ability to deliver open-source and to use it, although delivering that with along lifecycle is something that is a core competency of Red Hat as a company, but also the ability to actually affect change in those communities and get contributions back in is really key. And then, even advising customers on how to do that is something that we're, it's just to say, "Hey we do open-source," but actually providing that lifecycle around it is a whole nother story. >> Red Hat has a lot of experience living in a lot of different environments, just Linux is pervasive in the data center and in the cloud. When you talk about multi-cloud, customers need to figure out how to deal with these multi-could environments and you know, multi-cloud, multi-hypervisor, how does Red Hat help customers through this journey? >> So there's, we have a really good story there and really good enablement. There are basically four footprints that you can deploy an application on, physical, virtual; public, and private cloud, and red hat portfolio deploys nicely there, RHEL, VMs, OpenStack, OpenShift, containers, you name it. So our approach is, not only do we allow the deployment there, but also the management of it as well, and we agree with you wholeheartedly, workloads are portable, they're mobile, people are going to move them between clouds, on site, they're going to burst into clouds, so our solution to that is the management console that we provide with CloudForms, and our management vision going forward for software as a service and some other things that we're doing, is all about that heterogeneous environment. Multiple hypervisor, multiple cloud providers, multiple OSs as well, so, you know, we want people to see Red Hat as a platform to stabilize on, not a solution where they have to go out and cobble together a solution. They should be able to do everything with our product in a portfolio from a single management console, including that heterogeneous environment with multiple hypervisor, multiple cloud. So that's how we approach it and we're building on that concept, not only with CloudForms, but also with the new CoreOS Tectonic Platform that we just, acquired, that'll be part of OpenShift, and then going forward our management business unit is working on software as a service, consumption based model that allows customers to do the same thing from their phone as an example. It's that vision that we've already executed on, but it's only going to get bigger going forward. >> One thing I would add is, one thing that's fundamental to our vision is that we're actually delivering a consistency across all those footprints so, it's not one version of Kubernetes for public cloud, another version for on-premise, a different automation tool here and a different automation tool there, it's consistent right? Ansible automation across bare metal on-premise, virtualization, private, public cloud, OpenShift with the foundation of RHEL, consistent across all those for one version of Kubernetes across all of them. So I think that's a big key differentiator as opposed to some of the other visions where you have one version on public cloud, one version on private, different disparate tools tools for each of those. We really believe in simplifying that from a complexity standpoint. >> Well Rob and James, really appreciate you giving us the update on Red Hat. We'll be back with lots more coverage from VMworld 2018. For Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching theCUBE.

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

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

>> 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)