(bright upbeat music) >> Oh welcome here to theCUBE's coverage, continuing coverage of AnsibleFest 2021. It's a pleasure to have you with us today and also to join us today is Stephen Elliott, who is the Group Vice President of Management Software and DevOps at IDC. Stephen Good to see you today, thanks for being here on theCUBE. >> Hey thanks John, it's great to be here. >> You bet, good no, thank you again for the time. Well let's just jump right in, I know this is right in your sweet spot. You know, talk about IT automation. You've done a lot of research on this, but let's just talk about overall if you will. Give us that 30-foot perspective of what you're seeing in terms of your research, when we talk about IT automation these days, and configuration management. >> Sure, yeah. Yeah I know, I mean, it's been fascinating to watch with COVID the acceleration of the investments in automation across the board. And really our enterprise IT inquiry that we've taken, it really is just fascinating to see. Whether it's network automation, looking at self-service configuration, looking at provisioning, looking at a patch. I mean, you name the manual toil that enterprise IT organizations are, you know, looking to automate, and we're just finding tremendous investment themes across those areas. I think on top of that, there's been a lot of acceleration of this idea of DevOps, of driving automation across development and operations teams, and in certainly realizing that it's really hard to hire great people. And so we're seeing that companies are utilizing automation as a way to drive your career development, training across teams, and then certainly as a way to augment their teams to help these teams scale when they have difficulties hiring more and more staff. >> Yeah well let's take that first one, that last point first here, I think that's a certainly invaluable point, and that we've heard a lot about labor all over in all sectors right about, you know, finding the right talent for the task. So, in terms of this process, IT automation, and you're talking about maybe some companies being so much short handed or trying to fine-tune their labor needs or whatever. Tell me a little bit more about that in terms of automation and how this helps that process rather than hinders it. >> Yeah, you know, it's interesting, sometimes when IT executives talk about automation, they talk about staff replacement. And actually for the lean forward companies, for most companies that make these investments. That's not the case at all. It's actually an augmentation strategy where they realize, look it's really hard to find great talent. We have an opportunity to take the talent we have, apply new skills, look at automation as a way to get existing teams more productive, as well as an opportunity to learn new skills across teams. You know, whether it's development, operations, site reliability engineering, IT ops, et cetera, networking, you know, we're seeing organizations have a much more impact, you know, much more impactful opportunity to do staff development. And so this helps with scale, it also just helps give organizations, you know, the opportunity to move people across teams, particularly if you've decided that there's one type of automation that you want to utilize, one type of configuration language. It makes things very interesting when you have, you know, an operations person who might want to become a site reliability engineer, or, you know, a DevOps team that understands they have to utilize automation, maybe they want to utilize it, you know, a common framework for that. So, we're seeing executives really look at this as, this isn't about staff replacement at all, it's actually quite the opposite. It's about retention, it's about career training and development, it's about, you know, being able to share staff across teams, and then certainly, you know, this whole notion of augmentation and increasing productivity have organizations realize that, you know, with these generally net new models, you know, containers, microservices, public cloud, DevOps, software defined infrastructure, you know, agile, all these different organizational constructs, and types of technology architectures are driving up complexity. So the ability to simplify that through automation, the ability to drive higher returns on investment through automated processes and workflows, you know, it's really striking a chord with executive teams. >> And this is obviously I think just part of this natural trend, right? As the complexity, the networks and operations has increased, finding efficiencies through automation, that's just kind of this natural flow. Has it been pande-- or how has it been pandemic driven to a certain respect then? You touched on that earlier with your first comments, but what have you seen let's say over the past year at how companies have been reacting to that environment into their business operations? >> Yeah, I know it's been interesting from the C-suite down particularly, where CEOs have really started to realize that often their business architecture is in fact their technology architecture. And the pandemic has forced the C-suite to change their customer engagement models more often than not. So many, you know, B2B companies now had to become B2C. And so, you know, many companies had to pull back, or scale back their operations in the case of, you know, hotel, lodging, airlines. Where they really had to realize, wow, you know, we've got to figure out something because, you know, we're not going to fill capacity. So, you had a lot of CEOs and CIOs recognize that their technology architecture in fact can help make these adjustments. And part of that is driving automated, you know, work streams, whether it's through, you know, new digital services, whether it's through, you know, faster provisioning of infrastructure for their DevOps and development application teams, whether it's driving higher levels of system reliability, which as we all know, you know, customers are pretty impatient. So if digital services aren't working, you're going to move on to something else pretty quickly and give, you know, a competitor, you know, revenue opportunity. So, I think a lot of those swim lane, you know, a lot of those tailwinds, I should say, have really struck a chord in the C-suite and has really driven investments that are driving, you know, core modernization, application modernization, customer engagement models, and business models that, you know, were around 24 months ago. We're finding that the focus on reliability of systems, you know, across the applications to involve systems and networks that are, you know, public-private are really, you know, having that transparency. These things are the foundation. You know, you think about building a house, these are foundational capabilities that from an operations perspective, from a development perspective have really helped shape a lot of the thinking and investment themes that the C-suite now, because COVID accelerated a lot of these modernization projects have really driven, you know, positive outcomes for. >> When you talk about impatience, there's also kind of a, I guess, a queasiness you might say, or some anxiety about any kind of change, you know, and as you're talking about these automated processes, and bringing the whole new realm of opportunity at the business. And so also introduces maybe some angst, I would think a little bit, or what are you telling and what do you see in clients? And what kind of advice are you giving them in terms of their IOT automation decisions and about deploying these really massive changes in some respects to how they conduct the business? >> Yeah I know it's a great question, and we get that quite often. What we advise are a couple of starting points. You know first and foremost, most organizations are automating something somewhere. And particularly with DevOps teams, development, SREs, operations, infrastructure platform teams, networking teams. You know, these teams have a lot of opportunity to automate their toil. And so you have to start somewhere. So pick a use case that, you know you can win, you can get great benefits and a high return on that investment. And as you sort of go through that at the team or departmental level, start then to think about what are additional processes, you know, across your peer group. You know, maybe you're a networking you should be talking to operations, maybe an Ops talking to the DevOps teams and development, et cetera. And really start to highlight some additional ways that you can utilize that singular platform and reach across, you know, your peer groups to drive your more integrated, more automated processes. And these are types of use cases that run the gamut. So from a development standpoint, these would be, you know application release, it would look at CICD, you know, pipeline deployments, et cetera. Of course, you know, manual, moving from manual automated testings, or hot button issue. But from an operational perspective, many of those processes interlock, right with provisioning, with security mechanisms and processes. And then of course, you know, the involvement of the network in terms of, you know, configuration, which is a common issue. So things like configuration, provisioning, self-service, you know, the interlock of security mechanisms. A lot of these are pretty common themes regardless of the team, you know, and regardless of the outcome that's, you know, required. So I think first and foremost, start small, but think big. Secondly think about a potential platform play as it relates to automation. The third piece is make sure you get the right peer groups involved and the key stakeholders. You know, this isn't something you just flip the switch and boom, you know, you're successful. This will take a little bit of time and it's impactful in terms of the team, impactful in terms of the processes and of course, you know, the technology. So having a strong leader and, you know, set of key stakeholders who can drive this to fruition, can really, you know, not only get great wins from the business perspective, but also really drive, you know, a continuous improvement model and drive that theme of automation, you know, particularly as it relates to agile and DevOps and site reliability engineering. It can really play an important role in helping scale out those successes that many of those teams are already sort of built. So it's the extension of the investment but at the same time, it just makes for, you know, a continual cycle of improvement opportunities for these teams to drive further automation across their particular processes. >> Well, this is obviously based on a lot of the AnsibleFest coverage, I talked about that off the, on the outset of the interview. And so let's just focus on Red Hat for a little bit here. First off, give me your take, give me your 2 cents on Red Hat in terms of, you know, how they're doing, and obviously some big announcements, you know, port works and then some on the Ansible Platform. So, first off give me a little idea on Red Hat, and then let's drill down to the news they're making on their announcements. >> Sure, yeah it's interesting, you know, Red Hat Ansible is continuously doing very well in the marketplace. Both from an adoption perspective, as well as just, you know, continuing to get more net new logos. In addition to that, you know, post the Red Hat IBM acquisition, IBM continues to take advantage of Ansible across its portfolio. So, you know, we're seeing further reach into the market into accounts that are both IBM and Red Hat related. I think another piece too, we've recently did some work around, you know, business value of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. And a lot of those customers really talked to us about this notion of, you know, starting small, but also thinking more broadly across what type of returns they could get from the platform as well as, you know, it's not just about cost reduction, right? It's really about cost containment, it's about acceleration of your pipelines, it's about driving higher levels of system reliability. So, the other thing we found our customers are really recognizing, it's a balance of business and technical metrics that they want to sort of choose to drive and measure their success. But also at the same point, it's a recognition on the part of Red Hat and their product and development teams they'd really listen to a lot of customers, gotten, you know, features in and really started to think about this breadth of how automation can support, not just operations, but development. You know, this idea of autonomous automation, you know, being able to empower different sets of personas or customers to drive, you know, faith and trust in a product to say, hey, we want to automate a particular piece of a process. And we're just going to, you know, build up the policy, inherently use the templates and boom turn it on and, you know, set it and forget it. So that, that's, you know, a coming wave where customers are starting to, you know, work with Red Hat and particularly the Ansible Platform to understand what does that mean? You know, how do we execute that? And then, you know, as we get more comfortable with turning on that more autonomous perspective, you know, how can we then spread that idea out to different teams? So, you know, we're seeing a lot of these themes and as we talk to customers, you know, hearing a lot of good feedback with regards to, you know, Red Hat and IBM taking advantage of the technology, as well as more importantly customers getting, you know, significant value and returns from the platform itself. >> Right, well Stephen, I appreciate the insights. Certainly it's an interesting future awaiting off course the world of IT automation, a lot more intelligence, right? A lot more autonomy, a lot more challenges, but I'm sure Red Hat is very much up to that. And thank you for being with us here today on theCUBE. >> Hey thank you John it great to be here. >> You bet, Stephen Elliot joining us from IDC talking about Red Hat and Ansible and we'll continue with more coverage a little bit later on theCUBE. Thanks for joining this segment with Stephen Elliott. (bright upbeat music)