(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to Chicago theCUBE is live on the floor at AnsibleFest 2022, the first in-person Ansible event that we've covered since 2019. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. John, great to be here. There's about 1400 to 1500 people here in person, the partner ecosystem is growing and evolving, and that's going to be one of the themes of our next conversation. >> CloudScale is continuing to change the ecosystem, and this segment with AWS is going to be awesome. >> Exactly, we've got one of our alumni back with us, Stefanie Chiras joins us again, senior vice president, partner ecosystem success at Red Hat. and Manasi Jagannatha is also here Global Alliance Manager at AWS. Ladies, welcome to the program. >> Both: Thank you. >> Manasi: Nice to be here. >> Stefanie: Yeah. >> So some exciting news that came out. First of all was great to see you on stage. >> Thank you. >> In front of a live audience. The community is, you talked about this before we went live. The Ansible is nothing, if not the community. So I can only imagine how great that felt to be on stage in front of live bodies announcing the next step with Ansible and AWS. Tell us about that. >> I mean, you can't compete with the energy that comes from a live event. And I remember the first AnsibleFest I came to, it's just this electric feeling born out of the community, born out of collaboration and getting together feeds that collaboration in a way that like nothing else. >> Lisa: Can't do it by video alone. >> You cannot. And so it was so fun cuz today was big news. We announced that Ansible will be available through the AWS marketplace, the next step in our partnership journey. And we've been hearing like most of our announcements, we do these because customers ask for them. And that's really what is key. And the combination of what Red Hat brings to the table and what AWS brings to the table. That's what underpins this announcement this morning. >> Talk about it from a customer demand perspective and how you are not only meeting customers where they are, but you're speaking their language. >> Manasi: Yeah. >> Yeah, there's a couple of aspects and then I want to pass it to Manasi because nothing speaks better than a customer experience. But the specifics I think of what come together is this is where technology, procurement, experience, accessibility all come together. And it took both of us in order to do that. But we actually talked about a great example today, the TransUnion. >> So we have TransUnion, they are a credit reporting company and they're a giant customer. They use RHEL, they use AWS services. So while they were transitioning to the cloud, the first thing they wanted to know was compliance, right? Like, how do we have guardrails around compliance? That was a key feature for them. And then the other piece was how do we scale without increasing the complexity? And then the critical piece was being able to integrate with the depth of AWS services without having to do it over and over again. So what TransUnion did was they basically integrated Ansible automation platform with the AWS Cloud Control API that gave them the flexibility To basically integrate with what, 200 plus services? And it's amazing to see them grow over time. >> What's interesting is that Amazon, obviously cloud has been awesome. We've been covering it since the beginning. DevOps infrastructures code was the dream. Now it's app says code, you have configuration code before that. As cloud goes next level here, we're starting to see a lot more higher level services on AWS being adopted by customers. And so I want to get into how the marketplace deal works. So what's in it for the customer? Because as they bring Ansible across the enterprise and edge, now we're seeing that develop. If I'm the customer, am I buying it through the marketplace? What's the mechanics of the deal? Can I just tap into the bill, explain the marketplace workflow or how it works? >> Yeah, I'd love to do that. So customers come to the marketplace for three key benefits, right? Like one is the consumption based model, pay as you go, you can get hourly, annual, and spot instances. For some services you even get per second billing, right? Like, that's amazing, that's one. And then the other piece is John and Stefanie, as you know, customers would love to draw down on their EDPs, right? Like they want a single- >> EDPs, explain that with acronym. >> It's enterprise discount program. So they want a single bill where they can use third party services and AWS services and they don't have to go through the hustle of saying, "Hey, let me combine all these different pieces." So combining that, and of course the power of Ansible, right? Like customers love Ansible, they've built playbooks. The beauty of it is whatever you want to build on AWS, there is most likely a playbook or a module that already exists. So they can just tap into that and build into- >> Operationally it's a purchasing through marketplace. >> And you know, I mean, being an engineer myself, we always often get caught up in the technology aspect. Like what's the greatest technology? And everyone, as Manasi said, everyone loves the technology of Ansible, but the procurement aspect is also so important. And this is where I think this partnership really comes together. It is natively, Ansible is now, natively integrated into AWS billing. So one bill, you go and you log in. Now you have a Red Hat subscription, you get all the benefits from Red Hat that comes along with that subscription. But the like Ansible is all about simplicity. This brings simplicity to that procurement model and it allows you to scale within your AWS cloud environment that you have set up. And as Manasi mentioned, pull in those other native services from AWS. It's Great. >> It's interesting one of the things that buzzword Lisa and I were just talking as in the industry is the word multiplayer. I've heard people say that's multiplayer software, kind of a gaming analogy. But what you guys are doing is setting up, once they go with Ansible in the marketplace, they're just buying as things get more collaborative off the marketplace. So it kind of streamlines, if I get this right. >> Stefanie: Yep. >> The purchasing process. So they're already in, they just use it's on the bill. Is that kind of how it works? >> Yep. >> Absolutely done, yeah. >> So it the customer has a partnership with us more on the technology side and this particular case and with AWS and the procurement side, it brings that together. >> So multiplayer software, is it multiplayer software? >> We like to talk about multi-partner solutions and I think this provides a new grounding for other partners to come in and build upon that with their services capabilities, with their other technology capabilities. So well clearly in my world, we talk about multi-partner. (both laughs) >> Well, what you're doing is empowering the developers. I know that Red Hat is one of its goals is let's make things much more seamless, much smoother for the developers as the buyer's journey has changed. And John, you've talked about that quite a bit. You're empowering those buyers to actually have a much simpler, streamlined process and to be able to start seeing automation become democratized across organizations. >> Yeah, and one of the things I love about the announcement as well is it pulls in the other values of Ansible automation platform in that simplicity model that you mentioned with like things like certified collections, certified collections that have been built by partners. We have built certified collections, to go along with this offering as well as part of the AWS offering that pulls in these other partner engagements together. And as you said, democratizes not only what we've done together, but what we've done with other partners together. >> Lisa: Right. >> Yeah. >> Can you kind of talk kind of about the depths of the partnership, the co-engineering, and sort of the evolution and the customer involvement in the expansion of the partnership? >> Yeah, I'd love to walk you through that. So we've had a longstanding partnership coming up on 15 years now Stefanie, can you believe it? >> Stefanie: Yeah. (laughs) >> 15 years we've been building, to give you some historical context, right? In back in 2008 we launched RHEL and in 2015 we supported SAP workloads on RHEL. And then the list goes on, right? Like we've been launching Graviton instances, Arm instances, Nitro. The key to be noted here is that every new instance Launch, RHEL has always been supported on day one, right? Like that's been our motto. So that's one. And then in 2021, as you know, we launched Rosa Red Hat OpenShift service on AWS. And that's helped customers with their modernization journey to AWS. So that's been context historically around where we were and where we are today. And now with Ansible, it just gives customer another tool in their arsenal, right? And then the goal is to make sure we meet customers where they are, give them all the Red Hat products that they love using on their hybrid workloads. >> Sounds like a lot is coming maybe at re:Invent too, coming up. >> Yeah. >> What's next? >> This is the beginning, right? We'll continue to grow and based upon not only laying the building blocks for what customers can build with, and you mentioned Lisa, right? We follow this journey that Manasi talked about because of what customers ask for. So it's always a new adventure to determine what'll come next based upon what we hear from our joint customers. >> On that front though, Stefanie, talk about the impact of the broader ecosystem that this is just scratching the surface. >> One of the things, and we've been going through a whole transformation at Red Hat about how we engage with the ecosystem. We've done organizational shifts, we've done a complete revamp of how we engage with the ecosystem. One of our biggest focus is to make sure that the partnerships that we have with one partner bring value to the rest of our partners. No better example than something like this when we work with AWS to create accessibility and capability through a procurement model that we know is important to customers. But that then serves as a launch point for other partners to build certified collections around or now around validated content, which we talked about today at AnsibleFest, that allows other partners to engage. And we're seeing a huge amount in services partners, right? Automation is so pervasive now as customers want to go out and scale. We're seeing services partners really come in and help customers go from, it's always challenging when you have a broad set of IT. You have cloud native over here, you have bare metal over here, you have virtual, it's complex. >> John: Yeah. >> There's sometimes an energy activation barrier to get over that initial automation. We're seeing partners come in with really skilled services capabilities to help customers get over that hump to consolidate with an automation plan. It gets them better equipped to do day one automation and day two automation. And that's where Ansible automation platform is going. It's not just about configuration management, it's about day two management as well. >> Talk about those barriers a little bit more and how Ansible and AWS together are helping customers really knock those out of the park. Another baseball reference for you. We see that a lot of organizations, the skills gap, which we've talked about already on the conversation today, but Ansible as being a facilitator of helping organizations to attract talent, to retain talent, but also customers that maybe don't know where to start or don't know how to determine the ROI that automating processes will bring. How can this partnership help customers nock those out of the park? >> So I'll start and then I'll pass it to Manasi here. But I think one of the key things in this particular partnership is just plain old accessibility. Accessibility, which public cloud has taught the world a new way to get fast access that consumption based pricing. Right you can get your hands on it, you can test it out, you can have a team go in and test it out, and then you can see it's built for scale. So then you can scale it as far as you want to go forward. We clearly have an ecosystem of services partners, so does AWS to help people then sort of take it to the next level as they want to build upon it. But to me the first step is about accessibility, getting your hands dirty. You can build it into those committed spend programs that you may have with AWS as well to try new things. But it's a great test bed. >> Absolutely. And then to add to what Stefanie said, together Red Hat and AWS, we have about a hundred thousand partners combined, right? Like resellers, sis, GSI, distributors. So the reach the combined partnership has just amplifies. >> Yeah, it's huge news. I think it's a big deal because you operationalize the heavy lifting of procurement for all your joint customers and the scale piece is huge. So congratulations. I think it's going to make a lot of money for Ansible. So good call there. My question is, as we hear here, the next level's edge. So AWS has been doing a ton of hybrids since outpost announcement years ago. Now you got all kinds of regional expansions, you've got local zones, you've got all kinds of new edge activity. So are there dots connecting here with the edge with Red Hat Ansible? >> Do you want- >> Yeah, so I think we see two trends with our customers, right? Like mainly I'm specifically talking about our RHEL customer base on AWS. We have almost hundreds to thousands of customers using RHEL on AWS. These are 90% of fortune 500 companies use RHEL, right? So with that customer base, they are looking to expand your point into the edge. There's outposts, there are so many hybrid environments that they're trying to expand in. So just adding Ansible, RHEL, Rosa, OpenShift, that entire makes, just gives customers that the plethora of products they need to run their workloads everywhere, right? Like we have certifications outpost, we have certifications with OpenShift, right? So it just completes the puzzle, if you- >> So it's a nice fit. >> Yeah. >> It is a really nice fit. And I love Edge and Edge once you start going distributed, this automation aspect is key for all the reasons, for security reasons to make sure you do it the same way every single time. It's just pervasive in it. But things like the Cloud Control API allow it to bridge into things like Outpost. It allows a simple way, one clean way to do API and then you can expand it out and get the value. >> So this is why you are on stage and you said that Ansible's going to expand the scope to be more enterprise architecture. >> Stefanie: That's right. >> That's essentially what you're getting at. This is now a distributed computing fabric at cloud scale on AWS. >> Stefanie: That's right. >> Did I get that right? >> Yep, and it touches all the different deployments you may have, on-prem, virtual, cloud native, you name it. >> So how do the people turn into architects? Cuz this is, again, we had this earlier conversation with Tom, multi-tool players, a baseball analogy I used. It's like signifies the best player, your customers are becoming multiple tool players or operators. The new operator is now the top talent. They got to run Ansible, they got to automate, they got to provide services to the cloud native developers. So this new role is emerging, it's not a cloud architect but it's, if it's going to be system architecture wide, what's this new person look like that's going to run all this? >> I think it's an interesting question. We were talking yesterday, actually, Tom and I were talking with the partners. We had Partner Day, the first ever at AnsibleFest yesterday, which was great. We got a lot of insight. They talked a lot about this platform focus, right? Customers are looking to create that platform so that the developers can come in and build upon it without compromising what they want to do. So I do think there's a move in that direction to say how do you create these platforms at a company that no compromises, but it provides that consistency. I would say one thing in partnerships like this, I think customer expectations on the partner ecosystem to have it be trusted is increasing. They expect us as we've done to have our engineers roll up their sleeves together to come to the table together. That's going to show up in our curated content. It's going to show up in our validated content. Those are the places I think where we come up from the bottom through our partnership and we help bridge that gap. >> John: Awesome. >> And trust was brought up a number of times this morning during the keynote. We're almost out of time here, but I think it's one of those words that a lot of companies use. But I think what you're showing is really the value in it from Ansible's perspective from AWS's perspective and ultimately the value in it for the customer. >> Stefanie: Yes. >> So I got to ask you one final question. >> Stefanie: Absolutely. >> And maybe as as reinvent is around the corner, what's next for the partnership? Obviously big news today, Manasi, looking down down the pipe- >> Stefanie: Big news today. >> What are some of the things that you think are going to become next that you can share? >> I mean at this point, and I'll pass it to Manasi to close us out, but we are continuing to follow, to meet our customers where they want to be. We are looking across our portfolio for different ways that customers want to consume within AWS. We'll continue to look at the procurement models through the partner programs that Manasi and the team have had. And to me the next step is really bringing in the rest of the ecosystem. How do we use this as a grounding step? >> Yeah, absolutely. So we are always listening to customer feedback and they want more Red Hat products in the marketplace. So that's where we'll be. >> In the marketplace. >> Congratulations great deal. >> Yes great work there guys. And customers always want more. That's the thing. But that's what keeps us going. So we love it. >> Absolutely. >> Thank you so much for joining John and me on the program today. It's been great to have you. And congratulations again. >> It's a pleasure. >> Thank you. >> For our guests and for John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Live from Chicago at AnsibleFest 2022. This is only day one of our coverage. We'll be back after a short break for more. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the Seaport in Boston. This is day two of theCUBES's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022 different format this year for Red Hat Summit. You know we are used to the eight to 9,000 people big conferences, but this is definitely and a lot of developers this is definitely a smaller, more intimate, more abbreviated keynotes which I love that new style they've really catering to the virtual audience as well as the physical audience, a lot of good stuff going on last night in the Seaport, which a lot of fun Stephanie Chiras is here is the Senior Vice President of Partner Ecosystem Success at Red Hat. >> Yeah. >> On the move again, Stephanie love to see you. >> yeah. Thank you. It's great to be here with you and now in a little different bit of a role. >> Yeah, I'm happy that we're actually in Boston and we can meet face to face. >> Yes. >> We don't have to get in a plane, but you know we'll be on a lot of planes in the next few months. >> Yeah. >> But look, a new role for you in ecosystems. You are interviewing all the partners, which is very cool. So you get a big observation space as my friend Jeff Jonas would like to say. And so, but I'd like to observe the partner ecosystem in this new era is different. >> It's very different. >> I mean just press release is going back it's really deep engineering and really interesting flywheel approaches. How is the cloud and the hybrid cloud ecosystem and partner ecosystem different today? >> I think there's a couple of things, I think first of all cloud accelerating all the innovation, the whole cloud motion pulls in a cloud partner in addition to many of the other partners that you need to deploy a solution. So this makes almost every deployment a multi-partner deployment. So that creates the need not just for one on one partnerships between companies and vendors but really for a multi-partner experience. Right, how does an ISV work with a distributor work with a cloud vendor? How do you pull all of that together and I think at Red Hat, our view of being a platform company, we want to be able to span that and bring all of those folks together. So I see this transition going from a world of partnerships into a world of a networked ecosystem. And the real benefit is when you can pull together one ecosystem with another ecosystem, build that up and it really becomes an ecosystem of ecosystems. >> Well and I'm a fan, you're a multi tool star, so it may kind of makes you dangerous because you can talk tech in your technical roles. You've been a GM so you understand the business and that's really what it takes in the part of ecosystem. It can't be just technology and just engineering integration, it's got to be a business model associated with that. Talk about those two dimensions. >> And I think what we're seeing in the ecosystem is there are partners that you build with there are partners you service with, there are partners you sell with some do all three, some do two out of three. How do you work those relationships at the end of the day every partner in the ecosystem wants to bring their value to the customer. And their real goal is how do you merge those values together and I think as you know, right, I come from the technology and the product space. I love moving into this space where you look for those value and that synergy of value to bring better technology, a better procurement experience is often really important and simplicity of deployment to customers, but partners span everything we do. We develop with them, we build with them, we deploy with them, we service with them and all has to come together. >> So how do you make this simple for customers? I mean you're describing an increasingly complex environment. How do you simplify this? >> So a couple of things one, spot onto your point Paul, I think customer expectations now are more aggressive than they've ever been that the ecosystem has done pre-work before they show up. The customer doesn't want to be the one who's pulling together this from one vendor, this from another vendor and stitching it together themselves. So there's a number of things I think we've stepped in to try and do digital engagement for certification and deployment, the creation of operators on OpenShift is one way that technology from partners can be done and enabled more easily and quickly with Red Hat platforms. I think in addition, you've seen. >> Can you go a little deeper on that? >> Sure. >> Explain that a little bit more what does that mean? Yeah, First off, we have a digital experience where partners can come in, they can certify and test their applications to run it on Red Hat platforms themselves. So it's a bit of a come one, come all. We also have an engineering team and a developer team to work side by side with them to build those into solutions. We've done things again to supplement that with capabilities of what we call validated patterns things we've done in the market with customers, with partners, we pull together a validated pattern, we put it onto GitHub so anyone can get access to it. It becomes kind of a recipe for deployment that's available for partners to come in and augment on top of that or customers can come in and pull it up GitHub and build off of it. So I feel like there's different layers in the sort of build model that we work with partners and you want to be able to on-ramp any partner wherever they want to influence their value. It could be at the base certification level, it could be even with RHEL 9 was a good one, right. RHEL 9 was the first version of RHEL that we deployed based upon the CentOS Stream model. CentOS Stream is an upstream version of RHEL very tightly tied into the development model but it allowed partners to engage with that code prior to deployment everything from hardware partners to ISV partners, it becomes a much more open way for them to collaborate with us, so there's so much we can do. >> What's the pitch to partners. I mean I know hybrid cloud is fundamental to your value proposition. I mean most people want hybrid cloud even though the cloud guys might not admit it, right, but so what's the pitch, how do you approach partners there's got to be a common theme there pitch me. >> I think one of the things when it comes to the Red Hat ecosystem is the ecosystem itself has to bring value. Yes, we at Red Hat want to bring value, we want to come in and make it easy and simple for you to access our technology when want to make it easy and simple to engage side by side in front of a customer. But at the end of the day the value of the Red Hat ecosystem is not only Red Hat, it's our partnerships with others. It's our partnerships with the hyperscalers, it's our partnerships with ISVs, it's our work in open source communities. So it's not about Red Hat being this sort of epicenter of the ecosystem. The value comes from the collective ecosystem as it stands, and I think we've made a number of changes here at the beginning of the year in order to create a end to end team within Red Hat that does everything from the build to the sell with all the way from end to end. And I think that's bringing a new layer of simplicity for our engagement with their partners, and it's allowing us to stitch together and introduce partners to partners. >> But you are a dot connector in a sense. >> Absolutely. >> And you can't do it all, I mean nobody can. >> Yeah. But especially Red Hat your strategy is not to do it all by design, so where's the big white spaces where you feel as though your strengths need to be complimented by the partners? >> Oh, I think you caught it spot on. We don't think we can do it all, we're a platform company, we know the value of hybrid cloud is all about bringing a flexibility of an ecosystem together. I think the places where we're really doubling down on is simplicity. So the Ansible announcement that we did right with Ansible automation platform on Azure. With that announcement, it brings in certified collections of ecosystem partners on that deployment. We do the work with Azure in order to do that deployment of Ansible automation platform, and then it comes with a set of certified collections that have been done with other partners. And I think those are the pieces where we can really double down on bringing simplicity. Right, so if I look at areas of focus, that's a great space, and I think it is all about connecting the dots, right, it's about connecting our work with Azure with our work with other ISV partners to pull that together and show up to a customer with something that's fast time to value. >> With so many partners to manage, how do you make sure you're not playing favorites. I guess how do you treat all partners equally or do you even try? >> We absolutely try. I think any partnership is a relationship, right, so it is what Red Hat brings to the table, it's also what the partner brings to the table. Our goal is to understand what the value is the partner wants to deliver to the customer. We focus on that and bringing that to the forefront of what we deploy. We absolutely in a hybrid world it's about choice and flexibility. Certainly there are partners and we made some announcements of course, this week, right yesterday and today with some we're continued to deepen our partnerships with those folks who are doubling down with us where their strategy is very well aligned with us. But our goal is to bring a broad ecosystem that offers customers choice. That's what hybrid cloud's all about. >> I remember years ago, your colleague Bob Pitino, I went down and met him in his office and he schooled me, he was awesome and we did a white board on alternative processors. >> Yeah. >> You guys were doing combat duty in the power division at the time. But basically he helped me understand the trend that is absolutely come true which is alternative processors. It's not just about the CPU anymore, it's about all the CPU and GPU and NPU and accelerators and all these other connected parts. You guys obviously are in the middle of that, you've got relationships with ARM, NVIDIA, Intel, we saw on stage today. Explain the importance and the trends that you see of these alternative processors and accelerators and what that means for customers in terms of the applications that they're now going to be able to tap. >> Yeah, so you know I love this topic when it comes. So one of the spaces is edge, right, we talked about edge today. Edge to me is the epitome of kind of a white space and an opportunity where ecosystem is essential. Edge is pulling together unique hardware capabilities from an accelerator all the way out to new network capabilities and then to AI applications. I mean the number of ISVs building AI applications is just expanding. So it's really that top to bottom ecosystem story, and our work with the telco comes in, our work with the ARM partners, the NVIDIA of the world, the accelerators of the world comes in edge. And then you pull it up to the applications as well. And then to touch in, we're seeing edge be deployed a lot in industries and industry verticals, right. A lot of edge deployments are tailored for a retail market or for a financial services sector. Again, for us, we rely very much on the ecosystem to go into industry verticals where platform companies. So our goal is to find those key partners in those industry verticals who speak the speak, talk the language, and we partner with them in order to support them and so this whole edge space pulls all of that together I think even out to the go to market with industry alignment. >> It's interesting to partner, so we're talking about Silicon, we could talk about that all day long. >> Yes. >> And then it spans and that we had Accenture on we had Raj yesterday. And it was interesting 'cause you think Accenture's like deep vertical industry expertise which it is but Raj's role is really cross industry, and then to tap into that industry expertise you guys had an announcement yesterday with those guys and obviously the GSIs are a key player. >> Absolutely. >> We saw a bunch of 'em last night out and about. >> Yeah. >> So talk about the importance of those relationships. >> I think we are in the announcement with Accenture is a great one, right. We're really doubling down because customers are looking to them, they're looking to the Accentures of the world to help them move into this hybrid world. It's not simple, it's not simple to deploy and get that value of the flexibility. So Accenture has built a number of tools in order to help customers on that journey which we talked about yesterday it really is a continuum of how customers adopt for their cloud space. And so us partnering with them offers a platform underneath, give them technology capabilities and Accenture is able to help customers and guide them along that journey and add a new layer of simplicity. So I think the GSI are critical in this space. >> Yeah. >> You talked about the number of companies developing AI, new AI tools right now. And it seems like there's just the pace of innovation is amazing, the number of startups is unprecedented. How do you decide who makes it into your partner system? What bars do they have to jump over to become a Red Hat partner? >> I think our whole partner structure is layered out quite honestly a bit in tiering, depending upon how much the partner is moving forward with Red Hat, how strategically we aligned our et cetera. But there is definitely a tier that is a come one come all, get your technology to work with Red Hat. We do that digitally now in the world of digital it's much easier to do that to give accessibility but there is definitely a tier that is a come one come all and participate. And then above that, it comes into tierings. How deeply do we go to do joint building to do co-creation and how do we sort of partner even on things like we have ARO and ROSA as you know which is OpenShift built with AWS with Azure those provide very deep technical engagements to bring that level of simplicity, but I would say it spans all the layers, right. We do have a dedicated engineering team to work with the ecosystem partners. We have a dedicated digital team to reach out and proactively right, invite folks to participate and encourage them through the thing and through the whole path. And we've done some things on enablement, we just made early March, we made enablement free for all our partners in order to learn more and get more skilled in Red Hat. Skills and skill creation is just critical for partners, and we want to start there right. >> So we started this conversation with how cloud ecosystems are different. And I think AWS as the mother of all ecosystems, so does Microsoft too but they've had it for a while. And I got felt like last decade partners were kind of afraid, all right, we're going to partner with a cloud vendor, but they're going to eat our lunch. I noticed last year at Reinvent that whole dynamic is changing and I think the industry's realizing this is not a zero sum game. That there's just so much opportunity especially when you start thinking about the edge. So you guys use the term hybrid, right, and John and I wrote a piece prior to Reinvent last year, we said there's something new brewing, we've got on-prem connecting to the clouds, it's going across clouds. People call that multi-cloud, but multi-cloud has been like multi-vendor. It really hasn't been a sort of strategy or a technical layer. And now you're talking the edge and we see the hyperscaler spending a hundred billion dollars a year on infrastructure. And now we see companies like yours and your ecosystem building on top of that. They're not afraid of it anymore, they're actually looking at it as a gift and so we coined this term called Supercloud which is a abstraction layer, and it rises above highs all the complexity of the underlying primitives and APIs and people kind of wince at the term Ashesh called it Metacloud which I like it's kind of fun. But do you feel like that's happening in the ecosystem? Is that a real trend or is that just my imagination? >> I think it's definitely a real trend and it's coming from customers, right, that's what customers want. So customers want the ability to choose are they going to self-manage their applications within a public cloud. There's much more than just technology in the public cloud too right. There's a procurement experience that they provide a simplicity of our relationship. They may choose one of the hyperscalers. They pick a procurement experience, they deepen that relationship, they leverage the services. And I think now what you're seeing is customers are demanding it. They want to be a part of that, they want to run on multiple clouds. And now we're looking at cloud services you've seen our strategy double down on cloud services. I think that kind of comes back together to a customer wants simplicity. They expect the ecosystem to work together behind the scenes. That's what capabilities like ARO are or OpenShift on Azure and OpenShift on AWS. That's what we can provide. We have an SRV team, we jointly support it with those partners behind the scenes but as you said, it's no longer that fear, right. We've rolled up our sleeves together specifically because we wanted to show up to the customer as one. >> Yeah, and by the way, it's not just traditional technology vendors, it's insurance companies, it's banks, it's manufacturers who are building out these so-called super clouds. And to have a super cloud, you got to have a super PaaS and OpenShift is the supers of all PaaS So Stephanie cheers, thanks so much for coming back to theCUBE, >> Oh it's my pleasure. it great to see you again. >> Thank you for the time. >> All right, and thank you for watching keep it right there this is day two of Red Hat Summit 2022 from the Seaport in Boston. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(bright music) >> Okay, we're back in theCUBE. We said we were signing off for the night, but during the hallway track, we ran into old friend Stu Miniman who was the Director of Market Insights at Red Hat. Stu, friend of theCUBE done the thousands of CUBE interviews. >> Dave, it's great to be here. Thanks for pulling me on, you and I hosted Red Hat Summit before. It's great to see Paul here. I was actually, I was talking to some of the Red Hatters walking around Boston. It's great to have an event here. Boston's got strong presence and I understand, I think was either first or second year, they had it over... What's the building they're tearing down right down the road here. Was that the World Trade Center? I think that's where they actually held it, the first time they were here. We hosted theCUBE >> So they moved up. >> at the Hines Convention Center. We did theCUBE for summit at the BCEC next door. And of course, with the pandemic being what it was, we're a little smaller, nice intimate event here. It's great to be able to room the hall, see a whole bunch of people and lots watching online. >> It's great, it's around the same size as those, remember those Vertica Big Data events that we used to have here. And I like that you were commenting out at the theater and the around this morning for the keynotes, that was good. And the keynotes being compressed, I think, is real value for the attendees, you know? 'Cause people come to these events, they want to see each other, you know? They want to... It's like the band getting back together. And so when you're stuck in the keynote room, it's like, "Oh, it's okay, it's time to go." >> I don't know that any of us used to sitting at home where I could just click to another tab or pause it or run for, do something for the family, or a quick bio break. It's the three-hour keynote I hope has been retired. >> But it's an interesting point though, that the virtual event really is driving the physical and this, the way Red Hat marketed this event was very much around the virtual attendee. Physical was almost an afterthought, so. >> Right, this is an invite only for in-person. So you're absolutely right. It's optimizing the things that are being streamed, the online audience is the big audience. And we just happy to be in here to clap and do some things see around what you're doing. >> Wonderful see that becoming the norm. >> I think like virtual Stu, you know this well when virtual first came in, nobody had a clue with what they were doing. It was really hard. They tried different things, they tried to take the physical and just jam it into the virtual. That didn't work, they tried doing fun things. They would bring in a famous person or a comedian. And that kind of worked, I guess, but everybody showed up for that and then left. And I think they're trying to figure it out what this hybrid thing is. I've seen it both ways. I've seen situations like this, where they're really sensitive to the virtual. I've seen others where that's the FOMO of the physical, people want physical. So, yeah, I think it depends. I mean, reinvent last year was heavy physical. >> Yeah, with 15,000 people there. >> Pretty long keynotes, you know? So maybe Amazon can get away with it, but I think most companies aren't going to be able to. So what is the market telling you? What are these insights? >> So Dave just talking about Amazon, obviously, the world I live in cloud and that discussion of cloud, the journey that customers are going on is where we're spending a lot of the discussions. So, it was great to hear in the keynote, talked about our deep partnerships with the cloud providers and what we're doing to help people with, you like to call it super cloud, some call it hybrid, or multi-cloud... >> New name. (crosstalk) Meta-Cloud, come on. >> All right, you know if Che's my executive, so it's wonderful. >> Love it. >> But we'll see, if I could put on my VR Goggles and that will help me move things. But I love like the partnership announcement with General Motors today because not every company has the needs of software driven electric vehicles all over the place. But the technology that we build for them actually has ramifications everywhere. We've working to take Kubernetes and make it smaller over time. So things that we do at the edge benefit the cloud, benefit what we do in the data center, it's that advancement of science and technology just lifts all boats. >> So what's your take on all this? The EV and software on wheels. I mean, Tesla obviously has a huge lead. It's kind of like the Amazon of vehicles, right? It's sort of inspired a whole new wave of innovation. Now you've got every automobile manufacturer kind of go and after. That is the future of vehicles is something you followed or something you have an opinion on Stu? >> Absolutely. It's driving innovation in some ways, the way the DOS drove innovation on the desktop, if you remember the 64K DOS limit, for years, that was... The software developers came up with some amazing ways to work within that 64K limit. Then when it was gone, we got bloatware, but it actually does enforce a level of discipline on you to try to figure out how to make software run better, run more efficiently. And that has upstream impacts on the enterprise products. >> Well, right. So following your analogy, you talk about the enablement to the desktop, Linux was a huge influence on allowing the individual person to write code and write software, and what's happening in the EV, it's software platform. All of these innovations that we're seeing across industries, it's how is software transforming things. We go back to the mark end reasons, software's eating the world, open source is the way that software is developed. Who's at the intersection of all those? We think we have a nice part to play in that. I loved tha- Dave, I don't know if you caught at the end of the keynote, Matt Hicks basically said, "Our mission isn't just to write enterprise software. "Our mission is based off of open source because open source unlocks innovation for the world." And that's one of the things that drew me to Red Hat, it's not just tech in good places, but allowing underrepresented, different countries to participate in what's happening with software. And we can all move that ball forward. >> Well, can we declare victory for open source because it's not just open source products, but everything that's developed today, whether proprietary or open has open source in it. >> Paul, I agree. Open source is the development model period, today. Are there some places that there's proprietary? Absolutely. But I had a discussion with Deepak Singh who's been on theCUBE many times. He said like, our default is, we start with open source code. I mean, even Amazon when you start talking about that. >> I said this, the $70 billion business on open source. >> Exactly. >> Necessarily give it back, but that say, Hey, this is... All's fair in tech and more. >> It is interesting how the managed service model has sort of rescued open source, open source companies, that were trying to do the Red Hat model. No one's ever really successfully duplicated the Red Hat model. A lot of companies were floundering and failing. And then the managed service option came along. And so now they're all cloud service providers. >> So the only thing I'd say is that there are some other peers we have in the industry that are built off open source they're doing okay. The recent example, GitLab and Hashicorp, both went public. Hashi is doing some managed services, but it's not the majority of their product. Look at a company like Mongo, they've heavily pivoted toward the managed service. It is where we see the largest growth in our area. The products that we have again with Amazon, with Microsoft, huge growth, lots of interest. It's one of the things I spend most of my time talking on. >> I think Databricks is another interesting example 'cause Cloudera was the now company and they had the sort of open core, and then they had the proprietary piece, and they've obviously didn't work. Databricks when they developed Spark out of Berkeley, everybody thought they were going to do kind of a similar model. Instead, they went for all in managed services. And it's really worked well, I think they were ahead of that curve and you're seeing it now is it's what customers want. >> Well, I mean, Dave, you cover the database market pretty heavily. How many different open source database options are there today? And that's one of the things we're solving. When you look at what is Red Hat doing in the cloud? Okay, I've got lots of databases. Well, we have something called, it's Red Hat Open Database Access, which is from a developer, I don't want to have to think about, I've got six different databases, which one, where's the repository? How does all that happen? We give that consistency, it's tied into OpenShift, so it can help abstract some of those pieces. we've got same Kafka streaming and we've got APIs. So it's frameworks and enablers to help bridge that gap between the complexity that's out there, in the cloud and for the developer tool chain. >> That's really important role you guys play though because you had this proliferation, you mentioned Mongo. So many others, Presto and Starbursts, et cetera, so many other open source options out there now. And companies, developers want to work with multiple databases within the same application. And you have a role in making that easy. >> Yeah, so and that is, if you talk about the question I get all the time is, what's next for Kubernetes? Dave, you and I did a preview for KubeCon and it's automation and simplicity that we need to be. It's not enough to just say, "Hey, we've got APIs." It's like Dave, we used to say, "We've got standards? Great." Everybody's implementation was a little bit different. So we have API Sprawl today. So it's building that ecosystem. You've been talking to a number of our partners. We are very active in the community and trying to do things that can lift up the community, help the developers, help that cloud native ecosystem, help our customers move faster. >> Yeah API's better than scripts, but they got to be managed, right? So, and that's really what you guys are doing that's different. You're not trying to own everything, right? It's sort of antithetical to how billions and trillions are made in the IT industry. >> I remember a few years ago we talked here, and you look at the size that Red Hat is. And the question is, could Red Hat have monetized more if the model was a little different? It's like, well maybe, but that's not the why. I love that they actually had Simon Sinek come in and work with Red Hat and that open, unlocks the world. Like that's the core, it's the why. When I join, they're like, here's a book of Red Hat, you can get it online and that why of what we do, so we never have to think of how do we get there. We did an acquisition in the security space a year ago, StackRox, took us a year, it's open source. Stackrox.io, it's community driven, open source project there because we could have said, "Oh, well, yeah, it's kind of open source and there's pieces that are open source, but we want it to be fully open source." You just talked to Gunnar about how he's RHEL nine, based off CentOS stream, and now developing out in the open with that model, so. >> Well, you were always a big fan of Whitehurst culture book, right? It makes a difference. >> The open organization and right, Red Hat? That culture is special. It's definitely interesting. So first of all, most companies are built with the hierarchy in mind. Had a friend of mine that when he joined Red Hat, he's like, I don't understand, it's almost like you have like lots of individual contractors, all doing their things 'cause Red Hat works on thousands of projects. But I remember talking to Rackspace years ago when OpenStack was a thing and they're like, "How do you figure out what to work on?" "Oh, well we hired great people and they work on what's important to them." And I'm like, "That doesn't sound like a business." And he is like, "Well, we struggle sometimes to that balance." Red Hat has found that balance because we work on a lot of different projects and there are people inside Red Hat that are, you know, they care more about the project than they do the business, but there's the overall view as to where we participate and where we productize because we're not creating IP because it's all an open source. So it's the monetizations, the relationships we have our customers, the ecosystems that we build. And so that is special. And I'll tell you that my line has been Red Hat on the inside is even more Red Hat. The debates and the discussions are brutal. I mean, technical people tearing things apart, questioning things and you can't be thin skinned. And the other thing is, what's great is new people. I've talked to so many people that started at Red Hat as interns and will stay for seven, eight years. And they come there and they have as much of a seat at the table, and when I talk to new people, your job, is if you don't understand something or you think we might be able to do it differently, you better speak up because we want your opinion and we'll take that, everybody takes that into consideration. It's not like, does the decision go all the way up to this executive? And it's like, no, it's done more at the team. >> The cultural contrast between that and your parent, IBM, couldn't be more dramatic. And we talked earlier with Paul Cormier about has IBM really walked the walk when it comes to leaving Red Hat alone. Naturally he said, "Yes." Well what's your perspective. >> Yeah, are there some big blue people across the street or something I heard that did this event, but look, do we interact with IBM? Of course. One of the reasons that IBM and IBM Services, both products and services should be able to help get us breadth in the marketplace. There are times that we go arm and arm into customer meetings and there are times that customers tell us, "I like Red Hat, I don't like IBM." And there's other ones that have been like, "Well, I'm a long time IBM, I'm not sure about Red Hat." And we have to be able to meet all of those customers where they are. But from my standpoint, I've got a Red Hat badge, I've got a Red Hat email, I've got Red Hat benefits. So we are fiercely independent. And you know, Paul, we've done blogs and there's lots of articles been written is, Red Hat will stay Red Hat. I didn't happen to catch Arvin I know was on CNBC today and talking at their event, but I'm sure Red Hat got mentioned, but... >> Well, he talks about Red Hat all time. >> But in his call he's talking backwards. >> It's interesting that he's not here, greeting this audience, right? It's again, almost by design, right? >> But maybe that's supposed to be... >> Hundreds of yards away. >> And one of the questions being in the cloud group is I'm not out pitching IBM Cloud, you know? If a customer comes to me and asks about, we have a deep partnership and IBM will be happy to tell you about our integrations, as opposed to, I'm happy to go into a deep discussion of what we're doing with Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. So that's how we do it. It's very different Dave, from you and I watch really closely the VMware-EMC, VMware-Dell, and how that relationship. This one is different. We are owned by IBM, but we mostly, it does IBM fund initiatives and have certain strategic things that are done, absolutely. But we maintain Red Hat. >> But there are similarities. I mean, VMware crowd didn't want to talk about EMC, but they had to, they were kind of forced to. Whereas, you're not being forced to. >> And then once Dell came in there, it was joint product development. >> I always thought a spin in. Would've been the more effective, of course, Michael Dell and Egon wouldn't have gotten their $40 billion out. But I think a spin in was more natural based on where they were going. And it would've been, I think, a more dominant position in the marketplace. They would've had more software, but again, financially it wouldn't have made as much sense, but that whole dynamic is different. I mean, but people said they were going to look at VMware as a model and it's been largely different because remember, VMware of course was a separate company, now is a fully separate company. Red Hat was integrated, we thought, okay, are they going to get blue washed? We're watching and watching, and watching, you had said, well, if the Red Hat culture isn't permeating IBM, then it's a failure. And I don't know if that's happening, but it's definitely... >> I think a long time for that. >> It's definitely been preserved. >> I mean, Dave, I know I read one article at the beginning of the year is, can Arvin make IBM, Microsoft Junior? Follow the same turnaround that Satya Nadella drove over there. IBM I think making some progress, I mean, I read and watch what you and the team are all writing about it. And I'll withhold judgment on IBM. Obviously, there's certain financial things that we'd love to see IBM succeed. We worry about our business. We do our thing and IBM shares our results and they've been solid, so. >> Microsoft had such massive cash flow that even bomber couldn't screw it up. Well, I mean, this is true, right? I mean, you think about how were relevant Microsoft was in the conversation during his tenure and yet they never got really... They maintained a position so that when the Nadella came in, they were able to reascend and now are becoming that dominant player. I mean, IBM just doesn't have that cash flow and that luxury, but I mean, if he pulls it off, he'll be the CEO of the decade. >> You mentioned partners earlier, big concern when the acquisition was first announced, was that the Dells and the HP's and the such wouldn't want to work with Red Hat anymore, you've sort of been here through that transition. Is that an issue? >> Not that I've seen, no. I mean, the hardware suppliers, the ISVs, the GSIs are all very important. It was great to see, I think you had Accenture on theCUBE today, obviously very important partner as we go to the cloud. IBM's another important partner, not only for IBM Cloud, but IBM Services, deep partnership with Azure and AWS. So those partners and from a technology standpoint, the cloud native ecosystem, we talked about, it's not just a Red Hat product. I constantly have to talk about, look, we have a lot of pieces, but your developers are going to have other tools that they're going to use and the security space. There is no such thing as a silver bullet. So I've been having some great conversations here already this week with some of our partners that are helping us to round out that whole solution, help our customers because it has to be, it's an ecosystem. And we're one of the drivers to help that move forward. >> Well, I mean, we were at Dell Tech World last week, and there's a lot of talk about DevSecOps and DevOps and Dell being more developer friendly. Obviously they got a long way to go, but you can't have that take that posture and not have a relationship with Red Hat. If all you got is Pivotal and VMware, and Tansu >> I was thrilled to hear the OpenShift mention in the keynote when they talked about what they were doing. >> How could you not, how could you have any credibility if you're just like, Oh, Pivotal, Pivotal, Pivotal, Tansu, Tansu. Tansu is doing its thing. And they smart strategy. >> VMware is also a partner of ours, but that we would hope that with VMware being independent, that does open the door for us to do more with them. >> Yeah, because you guys have had a weird relationship with them, under ownership of EMC and then Dell, right? And then the whole IBM thing. But it's just a different world now. Ecosystems are forming and reforming, and Dell's building out its own cloud and it's got to have... Look at Amazon, I wrote about this. I said, "Can you envision the day where Dell actually offers competitive products in its suite, in its service offering?" I mean, it's hard to see, they're not there yet. They're not even close. And they have this high say/do ratio, or really it's a low say/do, they say high say/do, but look at what they did with Nutanix. You look over- (chuckles) would tell if it's the Cisco relationship. So it's got to get better at that. And it will, I really do believe. That's new thinking and same thing with HPE. And, I don't know about Lenovo that not as much of an ecosystem play, but certainly Dell and HPE. >> Absolutely. Michael Dell would always love to poke at HPE and HP really went very far down the path of their own products. They went away from their services organization that used to be more like IBM, that would offer lots of different offerings and very much, it was HP Invent. Well, if we didn't invent it, you're not getting it from us. So Dell, we'll see, as you said, the ecosystems are definitely forming, converging and going in lots of different directions. >> But your position is, Hey, we're here, we're here to help. >> Yeah, we're here. We have customers, one of the best proof points I have is the solution that we have with Amazon. Amazon doesn't do the engineering work to make us a native offering if they didn't have the customer demand because Amazon's driven off of data. So they came to us, they worked with us. It's a lot of work to be able to make that happen, but you want to make it frictionless for customers so that they can adopt that. That's a long path. >> All right, so evening event, there's a customer event this evening upstairs in the lobby. Microsoft is having a little shin dig, and then serves a lot of customer dinners going on. So Stu, we'll see you out there tonight. >> All right, thanks you. >> Were watching a brewing somewhere. >> Keynotes tomorrow, a lot of good sessions and enablement, and yeah, it's great to be in person to be able to bump some people, meet some people and, Hey, I'm still a year and a half in still meeting a lot of my peers in person for the first time. >> Yeah, and that's kind of weird, isn't it? Imagine. And then we kick off tomorrow at 10:00 AM. Actually, Stephanie Chiras is coming on. There she is in the background. She's always a great guest and maybe do a little kickoff and have some fun tomorrow. So this is Dave Vellante for Stu Miniman, Paul Gillin, who's my co-host. You're watching theCUBEs coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022. We'll see you tomorrow. (bright music)

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

[Voiceover] - Live from Washington D.C. It's theCUBE covering dot next conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to the district everybody. This is Nutanix NEXTconf, hashtag NEXTconf. And this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Stephanie Chiras is here. She's the Vice President of IBM Power Systems Offering Management, and she's joined by Raja Mukhopadhyay who is the VP of Product Management at Nutanix. Great to see you guys again. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah thank you. Thanks for having us. >> So Stephanie, you're welcome, so Stephanie I'm excited about you guys getting into this whole hyper converged space. But I'm also excited about the cognitive systems group. It's kind of a new play on power. Give us the update on what's going on with you guys. >> Yeah so we've been through some interesting changes here. IBM Power Systems, while we still maintain that branding around our architecture, from a division standpoint we're now IBM Cognitive Systems. We've been through a change in leadership. We have now Senior Vice President Bob Picciano leading IBM Cognitive Systems, which is foundationally built upon the technology that's comes from Power Systems. So our portfolio remains IBM Power Systems, but really what it means is we've set our sights on how to take our technology into really those cognitive workloads. It's a focus on clients going to the cognitive era and driving their business into the cognitive era. It's changed everything we do from how we deliver and pull together our offerings. We have offerings like Power AI, which is an offering built upon a differentiated accelerated product with Power technology inside. It has NVIDIA GPU's, it has NVLink capability, and we have all the optimized frameworks. So you have Caffe, Torch, TensorFlow, Chainer, Theano. All of those are optimized for the server, downloadable right in a binary. So it's really about how do we bring ease of use for cognitive workloads and allow clients to work in machine learning and deep learning. >> So Raja, again, part of the reason I'm so excited is IBM has a $15 billion analytics business. You guys talk, you guys talked to the analysts this morning about one of the next waves of workloads is this sort of data oriented, AI, machine learning workloads. IBM obviously has a lot of experience in that space. How did this relationship come together, and let's talk about what it brings to customers. >> It was all like customer driven, right? So all our customers they told us that, look Nutanix we have used your software to bring really unprecedented levels of like agility and simplicity to our data center infrastructure. But, you know, they run at certain sets of workloads on, sort of, non IBM platforms. But a lot of mission critical applications, a lot of the, you know, the cognitive applications. They want to leverage IBM for that, and they said, look can we get the same Nutanix one click simplicity all across my data center. And that is a promise that we see, can we bring all of the AHV goodness that abstracts the underlying platform no matter whether you're running on x86, or your cognitive applications, or your mission critical applications on IBM power. You know, it's a fantastic thing for a joint customer. >> So Stephanie come on, couldn't you reach somewhere into the IBM portfolio and pull out a hyper converged, you know, solution? Why Nutanix? >> Clients love it. Look what the hyper converged market is doing. It's growing at incredible rates, and clients love Nutanix, right? We see incredible repurchases around Nutanix. Clients buy three, next they buy 10. Those repurchase is a real sign that clients like the experience. Now you can take that experience, and under the same simplicity and elegance right of the Prism platform for clients. You can pull in and choose the infrastructure that's best for your workload. So I look at a single Prism experience, if I'm running a database, I can pull that onto a Power based offering. If I'm running a BDI I can pull that onto an alternative. But I can now with the simplicity of action under Prism, right for clients who love that look and feel, pick the best infrastructure for the workloads you're running, simply. That's the beauty of it. >> Raja, you know, Nutanix is spread beyond the initial platform that you had. You have Supermicro inside, you've got a few OEMs. This one was a little different. Can you bring us inside a little bit? You know, what kind of engineering work had to happen here? And then I want to understand from a workload perspective, it used to be, okay what kind of general purpose? What do you want on Power, and what should you say isn't for power? >> Yeah, yeah, it's actually I think a power to, you know it speaks to the, you know, the power of our engineering teams that the level of abstraction that they were able to sort of imbue into our software. The transition from supporting x86 platforms to making the leap onto Power, it has not been a significant lift from an engineering standpoint. So because the right abstractions were put in from the get go. You know, literally within a matter of mere months, something like six to eight months, we were able to have our software put it onto the IBM power platform. And that is kind of the promise that our customers saw that look, for the first time as they are going through a re-platforming of their data center. They see the power in Nutanix as software to abstract all these different platforms. Now in terms of the applications that, you know, they are hoping to run. I think, you know, we're at the cusp of a big transition. If you look at enterprise applications, you could have framed them as systems of record, and systems of engagement. If you look forward the next 10 years, we'll see this big shift, and this new class of applications around systems of intelligence. And that is what a lot-- >> David: Say that again, systems of-- >> Systems of intelligence, right? And that is where a lot of like IBM Power platform, and the things that the Power architecture provides. You know, things around better GPU capabilities. It's going to drive those applications. So our customers are thinking of running both the classical mission critical applications that IBM is known for, but as well as the more sort of forward leaning cognitive and data analytics driven applications. >> So Stephanie, on one hand I look at this just as an extension of what IBM's done for years with Linux. But why is it more, what's it going to accelerate from your customers and what applications that they want to deploy? >> So first, one of the additional reasons Nutanix was key to us is they support the Acropolis platform, which is KVM based. Very much supports our focus on being open around our playing in the Linux space, playing in the KVM space, supporting open. So now as you've seen, throughout since we launched POWER8 back in early 2014 we went Little Endian. We've been very focused on getting a strategic set of ISV's ported to the platform. Right, Hortonworks, MongoDB, EnterpriseDB. Now it's about being able to take the value propositions that we have and, you know, we're pretty bullish on our value propositions. We have a two x price performance guarantee on MongoDB that runs better on Power than it runs on the alternative competition. So we're pretty bullish. Now for clients who have taken a stance that their data center will be a hyper converged data center because they like the simplicity of it. Now they can pull in that value in a seamless way. To me it's really all about compatibility. Pick the best architecture, and all compatible within your data center. >> So you talked about, six to eight months you were able to do the integration. Was that Open Power that allowed you to do that, was it Little Endian, you know, advancements? >> I think it was a combination of both, right? We have done a lot from our Linux side to be compatible within the broad Linux ecosystem particularly around KVM. That was critical for this integration into Acropolis. So we've done a lot from the bottoms up to be, you know, Linux is Linux is Linux. And just as Raja said, right, they've done a lot in their platform to be able to abstract from the underlying and provide a seamless experience that, you know, I think you guys used the term invisible infrastructure, right? The experience to the client is simple, right? And in a simple way, pick the best, right for the workload I run. >> You talked about systems of intelligence. Bob Picciano a lot of times would talk about the insight economy. And so we're, you're right we have the systems of records, systems of engagement. Systems of intelligence, let's talk about those workloads a little bit. I infer from that, that you're essentially basically affecting outcomes, while the transaction is occurring. Maybe it's bringing transactions in analytics together. And doing so in a fashion that maybe humans aren't as involved. Maybe they're not involved at all. What do you mean by systems of intelligence, and how do your joint solutions address those? >> Yeah so, you know, one way to look at it is, I mean, so far if you look at how, sort of decisions are made and insights are gathered. It's we look at data, and between a combination of mostly, you know we try to get structured data, and then we try to draw inferences from it. And mostly it's human beings drawing the inferences. If you look at the promise of technologies like machine learning and deep learning. It is precisely that you can throw unstructured data where no patterns are obvious, and software will find patterns there in. And what we mean by systems of intelligence is imagine you're going through your business, and literally hundreds of terabytes of your transactional data is flowing through a system. The software will be able to come up with insights that would be very hard for human beings to otherwise kind of, you know infer, right? So that's one dimension, and it speaks to kind of the fact that there needs to be a more real time aspect to that sort of system. >> Is part of your strategy to drive specific solutions, I mean integrating certain IBM software on Power, or are you sort of stepping back and say, okay customers do whatever you want. Maybe you can talk about that. >> No we're very keen to take this up to a solution value level, right? We have architected our ISV strategy. We have architected our software strategy for this space, right? It is all around the cognitive workloads that we're focused on. But it's about not just being a platform and an infrastructure platform, it's about being able to bring that solution level above and target it. So when a client runs that workload they know this is the infrastructure they should put it on. >> What's the impact on the go to market then for that offering? >> So from a solutions level or when the-- >> Just how you know it's more complicated than the traditional, okay here is your platform for infrastructure. You know, what channel, maybe it's a question for Raja, but yeah. >> Yeah sure, so clearly, you know, the product will be sold by, you know, the community of Nutanix's channel partners as well as IBM's channels partners, right? So, and, you know, we'll both make the appropriate investments to make sure that the, you know, the daughter channel community is enabled around how they essentially talk about the value proposition of the solution in front of our joint customers. >> Alright we have to leave there, Stephanie, Raja, thanks so much for coming back in theCUBE. It's great to see you guys. >> Raja: Thank you. >> Stephanie: Great to see you both, thank you. >> Alright keep it right there everybody we'll be back with our next guest we're live from D.C. Nutanix dot next, be right back. (electronic music)