(upbeat electronic music) >> Narrator: Live from San Francisco, it's The Cube, covering Red Hat Summit 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. We are here live, The Cube in San Francisco, Moscone West for the Red Hat Summit 2018 exclusive coverage. I'm John Furrier, the cohost of The Cube. I'm here with my cohost, John Troyer, who is the co-founder of Tech Reckoning, an advisory and community development firm. Our next guest is Jonathan Donaldson, Technical Director, Office of the CTO, Google Cloud. Former Cube Alumni. Formerly was Intel, been on before, now at Google Cloud for almost two years. Welcome back, good to see you. >> Good to see you too, it's great to be back. >> So, had a great time last week with the Google Cloud folks at KubeCon in Denmark. Kubernetes, rocking the world. Really, when I hear the word de facto standard and abstraction layers, I start to get, my bells go off, let me look at that. Some interesting stuff. You guys have been part of that from the beginning, with the CNCF, Google, Intel, among others. Really created a movement, congratulations. >> Yeah, thank you. It really comes down to the fact that we've been running containers for almost a dozen years. Four billion a week, we launch and collapse. And we know that at some point, as Docker and containers really started to take over the new way of developing things, that everyone is going to run into that scalability wall that we had run into years and years and years ago. And so Craig and the team at Google, again, I wasn't at Google at this time, but they had a really, let's take what we know from internally here and let's take those patterns and let's put them out there for the world to use, and that became Kubernetes. And so I think that's really the massive growth there, is that people are like, "Wow, you've solved a problem, "but not from a science project. "It's actually from something "that's been running for a decade." >> Internally, that's called bore. That's tools that Google used, that their SRE cyber lab engineers used to massively provision manage. And they're all software engineers, so it's not like they're operators. They're all Google engineers. But I want to take a minute, if you can, to explain. 'Cause you're new to Google Cloud. You're in the industry, you've been around, you helped form the CNCF, which is the Cloud Native Foundation. You know cloud, you know tech. Google's changed a lot, and Google Cloud specifically has a narrative of, they're one big cloud and they have an application called Google stuff and enterprises are different. You've been there now for almost a year or more. >> Jonathan: Little over a year, yeah. >> What's Google Cloud like right now? Break the myths down around Google Cloud. What's the current status? I know personally, a lot of cloud DNA is coming in from the industry. They've been hiring, making some great progress. Take a minute to explain the Google Cloud. >> Yeah, so it's really interesting. So again, it comes back from where you started from. So Google itself started from a scale consumer SAS type of business. And so that, they understood really well. And we still understand, obviously, uptime and scalability really, really well. And I would say if you backtrack several years ago, as the enterprise really started to look at public clouds and Google Cloud itself started to spin up, that was probably not, they probably didn't understand exactly all of the things that an enterprise would need. Really, at that point in time, no one cloud understood any of the enterprise specifically. And so what they did is they started hiring in people like myself and others that are in the group that I'm in. They're former CIOs of large enterprise companies or former VPs of engineering, and really our job in the Office of the CTO for Google Cloud is to help with the product teams, to help them build the products that enterprises need to be able to use the public cloud. And then also work with some of those top enterprise customers to help them adopt those technologies. And so I think now that if you look at Google Cloud, they understand enterprise really, really well, certainly from the product and the technology perspective. And I think it's just going to get better. >> I interviewed Jennifer Lynn, I had a one-on-one with her. I didn't publish it, it was more of a briefing. She runs Product Management, all on security side. >> Jonathan: Yeah, she's fantastic. >> So she's checking the boxes. So the table stakes are set for Google. I know you got to do some basic things to catch up to get in the cloud. But also you have partnerships. Google Next is coming up, The Cube will be there. Red Hat's a partner. Talk about that relationship with Red Hat and partners. So you're very partner-centric with Google Cloud. >> Jonathan: We are. >> And that's important in the enterprise, but so what-- >> Well, there tends to be two main ares that we focus on, from what we consider the right way to do cloud. One of them is open source. So having, which again, aligns perfectly with Red Hat, is putting the technologies that we want customers to use and that we think customers should use in open source. Kubernetes is an example, there's Istio and others that we've put out that are examples of those. A lot of the open source projects that we all take for granted today were started from white papers that we had put out at one point in time, explaining how we did those things. Red Hat, from a partner perspective, I think that that follows along. We think that the way that customers are going to consume these technologies, certainly enterprise customers are, through those partners that they know and trust. And so having a good, flourishing ecosystem of partners that surround Google Cloud is absolutely key to what we do. >> And they love multicloud too. >> They love multicloud. >> Can't go wrong with it. >> And we do too. The idea is that we want customers to come to Google Cloud and stay there because they want to stay there, because they like us for who we are and for what we offer them, not because they're locked into a specific service or technology. And things like Kubernetes, things like containers, being open sourced allows them to take their tool chains all the way from their laptop to their own cloud inside their own data center to any cloud provider they want. And we think hopefully they'll naturally gravitate towards us over time. >> One of the things I like about the cloud is that there's a flywheel, if you will, of expertise. Like I look at Amazon, for instance. They're getting a lot of metadata of the kinds of workloads that are on their cloud, so they can learn from that and turn that into an advantage for them, or not, or for their customers, and how they could do that. That's their business decision. Google has a lot of flywheel action going on. A lot of Android devices connected in the Google system. You have a lot of services that you can bring to bear in the cloud. How are you guys looking at, say, from a security standpoint alone, that would be a very valuable service to have. I can tap into all the security goodness of Google around what spear phishing is out there, things of that nature. So are you guys thinking like that, in terms of services for customers? How does that play out? >> So where we, we're very consistent on what we consider is, privacy is number one for our customers, whether they're consumer customers or whether they're enterprise customers. Where we would use data, you had mentioned a lot of things, but where we would use some data across customer bases are typically for security things, so where we would see some sort of security impact or an attack or something like that that started to impact many customers. And we would then aggregate that information. It's not really customer information. It's just like you said, metadata, themes, or trends. >> John Furrier: You're not monetizing it. >> Yeah, we're not monetizing it, but we're actually using it to protect customers. But when a customer actually uses Google Cloud, that instance is their hermetically sealed environment. In fact, I think we just came out recently with even the transparency aspects of it, where it's almost like the two key type of access, for if our engineers have to help the customer with a troubleshooting ticket, that ticket actually has to be opened. That kind of unlocks one door. The customer has to say, "Yes," that unlocks the other door. And then they can go in there and help the customer do things to solve whatever the problem is. And each one of those is transparently and permanently logged. And then the customer can, at any point in time, go in and see those things. So we are taking customer privacy from an enterprise perspective-- >> And you guys are also a whole building from Google proper, like it's a completely different campus. So that's important to note. >> It is. And a lot of it just chains on from Google proper itself. If you understood just how crazy and fanatical they are about keeping things inside and secret and proprietary. Not proprietary, but not allowing that customer data out, even on the consumer side, it would give a whole-- >> Well, you got to amplify that, I understand. But what I also see, a good side of that, which is there's a lot of resources you're bringing to bear or learnings. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> The SRE concept, for instance, is to me, really powerful, because Google had to build that out themselves. This is now a paradigm, we're seeing a cloud scale here, with the Cloud Native market bringing in all-new capabilities at scale. Horizontally scalable, fully synchronous, microservices architecture. This future is a complete game-changer on functionality at the different scale points. So there's no longer the operator's room, provisioning storage here. >> And this is what we've been doing for years and years and years. That's how all of Google itself, that's how search and ads and Gmail and everything runs, in containers all orchestrated by Borg, which is our version of Kubernetes. And so we're really just bringing those leanings into the Google Cloud, or learnings into Google Cloud and to our customers. >> Jonathan, machine learning and AI have been the big topic this week on OpenShift. Obviously that's a big strength of Google Cloud as well. Can you drill down on that story, and talk about what Google Cloud is bringing on, and machine learning on OpenShift in general? Give us a little picture of what's running. >> Yeah, so I think they showed some of the service broker stuff. And I think, did they show some of the Kubeflow stuff, which is taking some machine learning and Kubernetes underneath OpenShift. I think those are very, very interesting for people that want to start getting into using AutoML, which is kind of roll-your-own machine learning, or even the voice or vision APIs to enhance their products. And I think that those are going to be keys. Easing the adoption of those, making them really, really easy to consume, is what's going to drive the significant ramp on using those types of technologies. >> One of the key touchpoints here has been the fact that this stuff is real-world and production-ready. The fact that the enterprise architecture now rolling out apps within days or weeks. One of those things that's now real is ML. And even in the opening keynote, they talked about using a little bit of it to optimize the scheduling and what sessions were in which rooms. As you talk to enterprises, it does seem like this stuff is being baked into real enterprise apps today. Can you talk a little bit about that? >> Sure, so I certainly can't give any specific examples, because what I think what you're saying is that a lot of enterprises or a lot of companies are looking at that like, "Oh, this is our new secret sauce." It always used to be like they had some interesting feature before, that a competitor would have to keep up with or catch up with. But I think they're looking at machine learning as a way to enhance that customer experience, so that it's a much more intimate experience. It feels much more tailored to whomever is using their product. And I think that you're seeing a lot of those types of things that people are starting to bake into their products. We've, again, this is one of these things where we've been using machine learning for almost 10 years inside Google. Things like for Gmail, even in the early days, like spam filtering, something just mundane like that. Or we even used it, turned it on in our data centers, 'cause it does a really good job of lowering the PUE, which is the power efficiency in data centers. And those are very mundane things. But we have a lot of experience with that. And we're exposing that through these products. And we're starting to see people, customers gravitate to grab onto those. Instead of having to hard code something that is a one to many kind of thing, I may get it right or I may have to tweak it over time, but I'm still kind of generalizing what the use cases are that my customers want to see, once they turn on machine learning inside their applications, it feels much more tailored to the customer's use cases. >> Machine learning as a service seems to be a big hot button that's coming out. How are you guys looking at the technical direction from the cloud within the enterprise? 'Cause you have three classes of enterprise. You have the early adopters, the power, front, cutting-edge. Then you have the fast followers, then you have everybody else. The everybody else and fast followers, they know about Kubernetes, some might not even, "What is Kubernetes?" So you have kind of-- >> Jonathan: "What containers?" >> A level of progress where people are. How are you guys looking at addressing those three areas, because you could blow them away with TensorFlow as a service. "Whoa, wowee, I'm just trying to get my storage LUNs "moving to a cloud operation system." There's different parts of this journey. Is there a technical direction that addresses these? What are you guys doing? >> So typically we'll work with those customers to help them chart the path through all those things, and making it easy for them to use and consume. Machine learning is still, unless you are a stats major or you're a math major, a lot of the algorithms and understanding linear algebra and things like that are still very complex topics. But then again, so is networking and BGP and things like OSPF back a few years ago. So technology always evolves, and the thing that you can do is you can just help pull people along the continuum there, by making it easy for them to use and to provide a lot of education. And so we work with customers on all ends of the spectrum. Even if it's just like, "How do I modernize my applications, "or how do I even just put them into the cloud?" We have teams that can help do that or can educate on that. If there are customers that are like, "I really want to go do something special "with maybe refactoring my applications. "I really want to get the Cloud Native experience." We help with that. And those customers that say, "I really want to find out this machine learning thing. "How can I actually make that an impactful portion of my company's portfolio?" We can certainly help with that. And there's no one, and typically you'll find in any large enterprise, because there'll be some people on each one of those camps. >> Yeah, and they'll also want to put their toe in the water here and there. The question I have for you guys is you got a lot of goodness going on. You're not trying to match Amazon speed for speed, feature for feature, you guys are picking your shots. That is core to Google, that's clear. Is there a use case or a set of building blocks that are highly adopted with you guys now, in that as Google gets out there and gets some penetration in the enterprise, what's the use, what are the key things you see with successes for you guys, out of the gate? Is there a basic building? Amazon's got EC2 and S3. What are you guys seeing as the core building blocks of Google Cloud, from a product standpoint, that's getting the most traction today? >> So I think we're seeing the same types of building blocks that the other cloud providers are, I think. Some of the differences is we look at security differently, because of, again, where we grew up. We do things like live migration of virtual machines, if you're using virtual machines, because we've had to do that internally. So I think there are some differences on just even some of the basic block and tackling type of things. But I do think that if you look at just moving to the cloud, in and of itself is not enough. That's a stepping stone. We truly believe that artificial intelligence and machine learning, Cloud Native style of applications, containers, things like service meshes, those things that reduce the operational burdens and improve the rate of new feature introduction, as well as the machine learning things, I think that that's what people tend to come to Google for. And we think that that's a lot of what people are going to stay with us for. >> I overheard a quote I want to get your reaction to. I wrote it down, it says, "I need to get away from VPNs and firewalls. "I need user and application layer security "with un-phishable access, otherwise I'm never safe." So this is kind of a user perspective or customer perspective. Also with cloud there's no perimeters, so you got phishing problems. Spear phishing's one big problem. Security, you mentioned that. And then another quote I had was, "Kubernetes is about running frameworks, "and it's about changing the way "applications are going to be built over time." That's where, I think, SRE and Istio is very interesting, and Kubeflow. This is a modern architecture for-- >> There's even KubeVirt out there, where you can run a VM inside a container, which is actually what we do internally too. So there's a lot of different ways to slice and dice. >> Yeah, how relevant is that, those concepts? Because are you hearing that as well on the customers? 'Cause that's pain point, but also the new modern software development's future way to do things. So there's pain point, I need some aspirin for that. And then I need some growth with the new applications being built and hiring talent. Is that consistent with how you guys see it? >> So which one should I tackle? So you're talking about. >> John Furrier: VPN, do the VPNs first. >> The VPNs first, okay. >> John Furrier: That's my favorite one. >> So one of the most, kind of to give you the backstory, so one of the most interesting things when I came to Google, having come from other large enterprise vendors before this, was there's no VPNs. We don't even have it on our laptop. They have this thing called BeyondCorp, which is essentially now productized as the Identity-Aware Proxy. Which is, it actually takes, we trust no one or nothing with anything. It's not the walled garden style of approach of firewall-type VPN security. What we do is, based upon the resource you're going to request access for, and are you on a trusted machine? So on one that corporate has given you? And do you have two-factor authentication that corporate, not only your, so what you have and what you know. And so they take all of those things into awareness. Is this the laptop that's registered to you? Do you have your two-factor authentication? Have you authenticated to it and it's a trusted platform? Boom, then I can gain access to the resources. But they will also look for things like if all of a sudden you were sitting here and I'm in San Francisco, but something from some country in Asia pops up with my credentials on it, they're going to slam the door shut, going, "There's no way that you can be in two places at one time." And so that's what the Identity-Aware Proxy or BeyondCorp does, kind of in a nutshell. And so we use that everywhere, internally, externally. And so that's one of the ways that we do security differently is without VPNs. And that's actually in front of a lot of the GCP technologies today, that you can actually leverage that. So I would say we take-- >> Just rethinking security. >> It's rethinking security, again, based upon a long history. And not only that, but what we use internally, from our corporate perspective. And now to get to the second question, yeah. >> Istio, Kubeflow, is more of the way software gets run. One quote from one of the ex-Googlers who left Google then went out to another company, she goes, she was blown away, "This is the way you people ship software?" Like she was a fish out of water. She was like, "Oh my god, where's Borg?" "We do Waterfall." So there's a new approach that opens doors between these, and people expect. That's this notion of Kubeflow and orchestration. So that's kind of a modern, it requires training and commitment. That's the upside. Fix the aspirin, so Identity Proxy, cool. Future of software development architecture. >> I think one of the strong things that you're going to see in software development is I think the days of people running it differently in development, and then sandbox and testing, QA, and then in prod, are over. They want to basically have that same experience, no matter where they are. They want to not have to do the crossing your fingers if it, remember, now it gets reddited or you got slash-dotted way back in the past and things would collapse. Those days of people being able to put up with those types of issues are over. And so I think that you're going to continue to see the development and the style of microservices, containers, orchestrated by something that can do auto scaling and healing, like Kubernetes. You're going to see them then start to use that base layer to add new capabilities on top, which is where we see Kubeflow, which is like, hey, how can I go put scalable machine learning on top of containers and on top of Kubernetes? And you even see, like I said, you see people saying, "Well, I don't really want to run "two different data planes and do the inception model. "If I can lay down a base layer "of Kubernetes and containers, then I can run "bare metal workloads against the bare metal. "If I need to launch a virtual machine, "I'll just launch that inside the container." And that's what KubeVirt's doing. So we're seeing a lot of this very interesting stuff pop. >> John Furrier: Yeah, creativity. >> Creativity. >> Great, talk about your role in the Office of the CTO. I know we got a couple of minutes left. I want to get out there, what is the role of the CTO? Bryan Stevens, formerly a Red Hat executive. >> Yeah, Bryan's our CTO. He used to run a big chunk of the engineering for Google Cloud, absolutely. >> And so what is the office's charter? You mentioned some CIOs, former CIOs are in there. Is it the think tank? Is it the command and control ivory tower? What's the role of the office? >> So I think a couple of years ago, Diane Greene and Bryan Stevens and other executives decided if we want to really understand what the enterprise needs from us, from a cloud perspective, we really need to have some people that have walked in those shoes, and they can't just be Diane or can't just be Bryan, who also had a big breadth of experience there. But two people can't do that for every customer for every product. And so they instituted the Office of the CTO. They tapped Will Grannis, again, had been in Boeing before, been in the military, and so tapped him to build this thing. And they went and they looked for people that had experience. Former VPs of Engineering, former CIOs. We have people from GE Oil and Gas, we have people from Boeing, we have people from Pixar. You name it, across each of the different verticals. Healthcare, we have those in the Office of the CTO. And about, probably, I think 25 to 30 of us now. I can't remember the exact numbers. And really, what our day to day life is like is working significantly with the product managers and the engineering teams to help facilitate more and more enterprise-focused engineering into the products. And then working with enterprise customers, kind of the big enterprise customers that we want to see successful, and helping drive their success as they consume Google Cloud. So being the conduit, directly into engineering. >> So in market with customers, big, known customers, getting requirements, helping facilitate product management function as well. >> Yeah, and from an engineering perspective. So we actually sit in the engineering organization. >> John Furrier: Making sure you're making the good bets. >> Jonathan: Yes, exactly. >> Great, well thanks for coming on The Cube. Thanks for sharing the insight. >> Jonathan: Thanks for having me again. >> Great to have you on, great insight, again. Google, always great technology, great enterprise mojo going on right now. Of course, The Cube will be at Google Next this July, so we'll be having live coverage from Google Next here in San Francisco at that time. Thanks for coming on, Jonathan. Really appreciate it, looking forward to more coverage. Stay with us for more of day three, as we start to wrap up our live coverage of Red Hat Summit 2018. We'll be back after this short break. (upbeat electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, It's the Cube. Covering Red Hat Summit 2018. Brought to you buy, Red Hat. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We're live here in the Cube in San Francisco, California, Monscone West, Cube's exclusive coverage of Red Hat Summit 2018. I'm John Furrier, co-host. With John Troyer, he's my analyst co- host, he's the co -founder of Tech Reckoning Advisory and Community Development Firm. My next guest is Marco Bill-Peter, Senior vice-president of Customer Experience and Engagement at Red Hat. Welcome back to the Cube. Good to see you. So, you guys have a great track record with customer support. You guys use gold standard in open source, you've done it well, very reliable. It's a changing world. You know, Open Shift now, certainly the center piece, west, new acquisition. A lot of things happening with in the portfolio. Cloud native new capabilities are on the horizon. So, you've got to figure it out. So, what's the support strategy? What do you guys do? How are you looking? I'm sure it's challenging but never too much of a challenge for you guys. You're smart, what's the support strategy? >> I think the recipe it is really like not getting stuck in a wave, right? And be open to, you know I think Jim Whitehurst and his keynote talk quite a bit about, you used to do all plan, describe and execute. That thing just doesn't work, right? Because supporting customers on Linux, supporting them when they move to Open Shift or even application, is a whole different piece. So, as a leader you got to be flexible as in okay, here we do it this way, let's put more money in this. Let's say Open Shift support, Open Shift kind of, what's the customer experience there, right? Kind of figure out how it works. There's a lot of things that scare me in the daily business as in like okay, we can't do that. But I think Red Hat is really good in reconfiguring, Jim talked about that in a keynote as well, reconfiguring the organization. And so, we move for example, quality assurance into my organization and combining that with support. All of them give some more opportunities realizing, oh this product maybe not ready yet for the market, right? We can not support that. Or, you augmented with, I wouldn't call it AI capabilities, but more like those capabilities. All of the sudden stuff gets done automatically. >> And multi cloud is again, just like multi vendor environment, but it's a little bit different obviously. But multiple clouds you have different architectures. You guys do some progressive things. What's new, architecturally within the support group? Because you have deals announced here with IBM and Microsoft, one of them is a joint, I think integrated program where guys are teaming up. >> Microsoft is interesting. >> We've teamed last three, four years, right? With he first deal and gone further. You're like funny, right? I've been at Red Hat so long and you put people on premise. It's kind of funny. But it's good, right? And that's where you got to glue together. Sometimes it's people. Sometimes it's also more having the data, right? I mean if you go multi cloud. Difference between multi vendor, multi cloud. Multi vendor, you just call the vendor and tell them hey you handle it. Here, I'll put data, you handle it. Or maybe you do it a bit better. But, multi cloud is, well it's running there, how do you get access to that? Then the whole privacy laws comes in. So you got to be more instrumentation, you know, telemetry-- >> You're using tech to help you guys out. That's what you're referring by AI. >> I actually think that the next ten years you will see support changing quite a bit. >> John: In what way? >> But also you have to staff this up, right? You need to upscale your folks as well as technology. >> That doesn't go away. But I think you've got to go more that you really need deep skills. If you want to support Open Shift you've got to, either you understand it from the middle side, from the application side or from the bottom from the infrastructure. You need both skill sets. So you need really highly skilled people. But one the other hand if it's really like real time and people don't have patience to wait two weeks, especially if you're in the cloud. More and more tooling. I see the vision as in it would be less and less based on the scale but I think it's less people involved more and more automation, tooling. >> You kind of see it now with boss, kind of just tip of the iceberg. But you've got automation built into the culture of Red Hat. You've put coral west. They want to automate everything. >> You see Insights, right? We launched Insights three years ago out of support. They take support data, find out what's really happening, create rules that if you match it the customer systems say you have this and this issue. And now it's in the incentive stage of the strategy as in we can automate it, but you can automate it. you have a problem, you want to have it solved. >> You're presenting a support service. >> Exactly, and eventually, we'll not even tell you, in maybe hindsight we'll tell you, hey, you had this network issue or configured the wrong way, we fixed it have a good day. >> Well it came up in Cooper Netty's conversation we had last week in Copenhagen, we were in Denmark for CubeCon around things Cooper Netty's defacto standing, so great stuff, that's certainly great. Istio service mesh is atopic that's highly discussed. And one of the thing that comes up is the automation the down side is potentially it fixes things. So, you could have a memory leak for instance, that you never know gets fixed. But it just crashes every day and reboots itself. So, the new kinds of instrumentation that's emerging. So this is really the though job. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> How do you get in there-- >> Also have automation-- >> And you as the central provider, right, are pulling in data from across the world and across the customer base. So how do you take that, sift it to be more proactive about decision making and support. >> So we capture all this support data. And you know it's fascinating, we have some AI capabilities, some machine learning capabilities go through there. But it's fascinating, sometimes we see new issues coming up. What we do is then, we go well let's look who is exposed to that, just to get a footprint. And then you actually inform customers, hey, you had this and this issue or you have this. It's really a different, I want to get more proactive or I want to get more automated. With the automation I just want to be, right, so we installed, over the last, I would say 18 months, like a bot, simple bot basically, his name is Edmond. And he works on support cases. And we started slow, very slow. We didn't let it go as in total machine or anything. But now, I gave some stats earlier today. In one used case it's 25 percent faster solving a customer issue using Edmond. And he participates in 11 percent of all support cases. >> Wow. >> Edmond is a busy guy. >> And the game is changing too. I mean in the old days, first lines support, second lines support, offline support, then escalation. These things are older IT mechanisms. With this you're talking about completely doing away with, in essence first line support. But also first line support might come in, from say a Microsoft or an IBM. You've got to be ready for anything. >> Actually I think it's not just first line support. And it's not replacing them. It's helping them. It's really making them faster, right? I think the frustration piece is, like, customer opens his support case, some data is missing, right? So, you have a que it gets to that. Engineering looks and oh, there's data missing. Edmond sees that and says hey, I need this data. Based on all the support cases we fixed similar issues, this is the data we need. So Edmond gets the data ready, engineer looks and in some cases Edmond actually closes it out. >> Closes it out. >> Tells the customer here there's a better solution, do it this way. >> Yeah, that's fascinating. >> I'd love to pull the camera back a little bit, right? You are not the SVP of support. You're the SVP of customer experience and engagement, right? That's an entirely different role in some ways, in that you're responsible for customer success at some level. >> That is correct, yeah. >> Talk a little bit about reconfiguring organization to be that-- >> So I think maybe dive in a little bit on the customer success. So we have a organization, they call technical account. It's part of the customer success organization. That's a human business but it's fascinating, right. We put these claims on clients and have them work together. They understand the business. It's an old business but trust me, having still a human in there understanding, okay this is customer x, y, z. That's the business objective, I talked about this today as well, not to forget, hey this customer actually wants to do whatever, whatever on the like an SIP to actually take that further to actually support case and doing that the team helps quite a bit. And then also the commitment, right? We don't want just to do support cases and then that's why you renew with Red Head, we want to make sure you actually get value out of it and that's why you want to renew. So that's why we configured different. It's bigger, right? It's bigger as in really making sure the product is correct. So that's why quality assurance is in my team, this support. That's why I run internal IT for the engineering team. We run the stuff that we sell actually earlier. And some of my team is like, Marco why do we have to do that? Because we learn and I much rather have you feel the pain than the customer feel the pain. That's why we configure different than, I've been 12 a half years right on this and it's still exciting that we are still able to change around-- >> I think the quality assurance piece is still big too cause you're in there as well. Looking at the QA. >> Yeah. >> Making sure that's good too. You're testing out the products and doing QA all within the mindset of customer experience. >> Exactly, and you've got to move that being agile, is more you see developers actually submitting test cases. Tests, so that's the component testing and the basic tests. What we got to do more, is what you mentioned, if somebody does less with Open Shift to contain all that, that thing together, if some service software defines storage, that thing together to bring together that's the hard drive. So I want to move more and more. That we take used spaces from customers, we'll close it. This is how we do it. X, y, z, customer and apply that. >> At the end of the day it's the same game different playing field. The customer wants choice, best possible solution experience, for them. You guys got to enable that, and then support it, make it happen. >> Yeah. >> And with cloud. >> And you see how, I don't know if you saw the demo yesterday when they show basically I think or Amazon was slower and every traffic that routed. This is reality as well, right? I mean if you look at one press release we did yesterday, I just find it a fascinating story. They're kitchen appliances. I don't know if you saw that. But they have over a million kitchen appliances or cooking appliances connected to the internet. It's a German, Swiss company when they got to upgrade the system so they get recipes done, they actually spin up instances in Alibaba in Asia and I think in Amazon in the U.S. They spin it up, they scale out all the appliances connect then they shrink it together. How do you support these customers a whole different case. >> That's great for the customer. >> Yeah. >> But more of a challenge for you guys. >> Then again with preparation of the right integration testing before, with the right set up that we know this is what the customer is doing this weekend. Amadeus as well, talked at the keynote, we worked long time with Amadeus. >> You're a smart team. >> As part of your customer role, you were involved with the Innovation awards. They were up on stage this morning. What struck me was they were both about time to value. And speed of deployment as well as scale. Often these were global companies, we had Amadeus on yesterday, spanning the globe. Huge number of transactions. Anything stand out to you in those Innovation Awards this year? Perhaps, that's been different in previous years? I think that the scale is actually interesting that you say. I think we have much quicker now. I think that's awesome, technology matures. I think we used to have more smaller work projects in getting to a certain scale. But I just goes faster. I think the controlled piece is probably a bit more accepted. This whole containerization is not magic anymore. I think a lot is being moved, is coming from the development side but also from the Linux side. So I think there's a less struggle of that. But I do still see some cultural struggles. You talk to customers, maybe not the Innovation Award winners. but even them they say, hey it took us a long time to convince internal structures, how we change things around. >> Talk about the open source role because you mentioned, before we came on how you guys are all in the open, an open source. Is there like a project that you're part of that supports centric? Is there certain things you're picking out over the source? As you guys do the QA and build you own stuff. >> Yeah we do a lot. We submit a lot to open. There's very few. We don't share data. We can't share customer data for obvious reasons. But tooling, most of the tooling we share if it's data collectors. We re an open source road. There' not much that we don't, there's nothing proprietary. Engineers, that's why they're coming to write. That's the configuration. They want to see, hey how does this stuff get applied. They own the packages, then some stuff is shared. If it's tied to the customer portal, the AI pieces maybe the open source parts of it but-- >> What's it like this year, for the folks who are watching who couldn't make it? What's the vibe here at Red Hat Summit 2018? What's the hallway conversations like? What's some of the dinners? What are you talking about? What's the chatter? >> I think the big chatter for me is kind of like this Open Shift, containers, agile development. You know the agile development comes back and back and really like how do we do this right? And tech connects obviously, how do you take application develop them or how do you take applications put them in a container. And then you see these demos. With multi cloud. >> New applications is not stand alone Linux anymore. >> Yeah. We have containers and tend to be able to run public cloud or multi cloud on premise. The options are endless. And I think that's the strengths from Red Hat. We prove that with Linux we can have a solid API. We don't screw up the applications. And if we can guarantee that across the four footprints, that's Paul's vision five, six years ago. I think we are there. >> You talked about a bit of cultural shift. How can Red Hat help it's customers come up to speed? That's a little bit...but be more agile. >> It's a good example. I think we do a lot of these sessions. I actually think that our sales motion, they are pretty aware with open sources, what the culture is. They do a lot of these sessions with customers. Jim Whitehurst is actually awesome. When he comes to clients. We did a C level event at a bank, based in Zurich and it was in a Swiss bank. And I think that they got like 140 C level, CIO groups. And Jim did a talk about the open organization about breaking down the barriers. I think that's a role that we play. Well some is Red Hat's role, but we go to do that stuff. Because we can share part of it in how we are configured, how we are different. >> I think that kind of thing is high on every CIO's list of agendas. >> And everything in the open is proving that open is winning. Open beats closed pretty much every time and is now pretty standard operating wise we're starting to see but operational wise, not just for software development. >> I actually think that from practice and how to run the company. Some stuff is transparency, right? If you work in a company that you're not transparent with your associates, can you really do this in 2018? >> No. >> And so I think those are elements that I think we do well to have had. And we got to keep internal as well, reminding ourselves, these core principles from open source are really important. >> Hiring, so you're bringing new Red Hatters in? >> At the rate we are hiring it's actually big concerns. How do we maintain this culture, right. This talk is not always polite but it's the way we function. >> You guys are humble. You're playing the long game, I love that about you. So congratulations Marco. Thanks for coming on the Cube show. >> Thanks very much. >> Thanks. >> It's the Cube Live here in San Francisco for Red Hat Summit 2018 here in Moscone West. I'm John Furrier and John Troyer. Stay with us for more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

(indistinct chatter, electronic intro music) >> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's the Cube! Covering Red Hat summit 2018, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hello and welcome back this is the Cube's exclusive coverage here in San Francisco, California at Moscone West, I'm John Furrier with John Troyer co-founder of Tech Reckoning and our next guest is Joe Fitzgerald, vice president and general manager of the management and business unit at Red Hat, home of Ansible, among other great capabilities, welcome to the Cube, thanks for stopping by. Red Hat summit 2018's happening all the buzz is all about Kubernetes, containers, obviously Linux, and all the action really transforming the digital journey of customers. I mean, cloud scale: check, data: check, (chuckling) new applications: check, a lot of interesting things now, Kubernetes' workload, multi cloud, all kind of coming together, what's going on for you guys in the show, 'cause you know honestly management, operations, automation, these are all things that are data driven, your thoughts? >> Joe: Yeah, so I'm responsible for management and automation, and so all these technologies that you're hearing about, Red Hat is helping people digitally transform, right, so a lot of the technologies you mentioned, it turns out that these envorironments really require automation to move fast, right, and management is essential to keep these really complex environments up and running, and secure, which is a big issue for people. >> Furrier: IT operations has been around for a while but it's always been, like, managing the data center, but now you've got a lot of things going on. Management, operations, and data is changing the world because now you can apply automation to it, what's a customer to do here? Because a lot of people are recasting, and I won't say replatformizing, but they're definitely looking at a global, cloud native, with containers, legacy is taken care of, how do I instrument this? What is the approach that you guys see customers taking from Red Hat's perspective? >> Joe: Well there's a couple of principles, automation is huge and it's entering because automation on the front edge, getting the containers and cloud services, automation is huge, but we also see automation for people to reduce the burden of their legacy environments, by using automation to free up resources and people, and money that they can put into their front end, you know, digital transformation activities. Right? The other thing besides automation that we're driving is analytics based operations, because these environments, once you build them, and start operating them, get very complex very fast, right? So it's beyond somebody sitting in front of a network console waiting for red lights to come up on the dashboard and reacting. It really has to be automated, and they have to get a lot of insights into what's going on. >> Furrier: It's an interesting challenge, I want to get into the hybrid cloud for a second, because before we get into hybrid cloud challenges, automation is a double edged sword, you can automate something and all of a sudden you could have a memory leak and you don't even know about it, because it's self healing! There's a lot of automation going on, so the analytics have to be smarter. This why we've been hearing this come up a lot, which is 'Okay, I need visibility not just into what's happening, what's breaking, but what's going on beyond the automation.'. These are new dynamics, what's the approach there? How are you guys looking at that trend? Is there any products out there to solve this challenge? >> Joe: So we've had product in our portfolio, it's Red Hat insights, which is a predictive analytics based offering that we've had, and basically what it does is it analyzes our customer's systems and it looks across, you know, sort of a broad set of settings and processes, and configurations and things, and basically can actually tell them 'Hey, these systems are at risk, they're likely to either have performance issues or a crash, or they have security vulnerabilities', and actually tell them what's going to happen, and what they need to do. So that's called Red Hat Insights, as the name implies gives you a very, you know, deep insight into your systems. We've recently tied that to automation, to say 'This is what's wrong with your systems, would you like us to automate and correct them or remediate them?'. Now I can tell you, having been around automation for a while most people don't trust automation. Think about the first time your going to get in your self driving car, and you're going to go 'Wait a minute, I'm going to not have a steering wheel or brake pedal or something?'. That's, like, terrifying right? Automation in IT's the same way, it's like 'Wait, I'm going to have this system do what to my production systems?', so there's usually this cycle where it's like, show me what you're going to do with the automation. Let me get sort of comfortable and verify it, and then let me push the button and then automate it, that's a natural cycle. >> Troyer: Lets go down one level from that and talk about hybrid cloud, so, we see a lot of examples of that, hybrid cloud, multi cloud, on-prem with OpenStack, you know, out in the public cloud with OpenShift, you know, multiple clouds at once. So, you've got your self driving cloud now. One layer down, what do enterprises and IT operators need to look at from a governance and an operations perspective? What are things they need to be worried about if they're going to be running a multi cloud scale operation like that? >> Joe: So let me use the self driving car analogy. Lets say you bought a self driving car from three different car manufacturers. Okay, the instrumentation and the hardware, the software, is all going to be vastly different, but you're supposed to operate those things at a consistent level. So think about a hybrid cloud, all these clouds have different instrumentation, how they get monitored and managed, and the kind of events they generate >> Troyer: The cost models. >> The cost models, all those things, so it's not like you can just write a simple piece of code and say 'Oh just monitor these things' or 'Just make sure they're secure' or compliant, you have to actually instrument into each of the cloud particular, you know, instrumentations, right? And then try to automate that, so one of the things we do is we provide sort of consistent way for people to manage what's otherwise a pretty complex heterogeneous hybrid cloud environment. >> Furrier: And how's that going? Can you give us some anecdotal insight into how that's going? >> Joe: Well it's going very well, we have a number of customers here at summit who are talking about, sort of, their production journeys with Red Hat. Transforming, whether it's on OpenStack for private cloud or OpenShift for containers, or using our middleware services or integration services, and then using our management and automation to actually deploy those things, keep them secure, keep them operational, and run them at scale, it's those huge success points. >> Furrier: Joe, Ansible's been a very successful acquisition for Red Hat, what's the status or the future plans, any updates on Ansible? Its role, its relevance, and so forth? >> Joe: So Ansible's a great story, so Ansible was an open source company, very smart people, very innovative technology, strong community. Red Hat acquired the company about 2 1/2 years ago, and one of the things that we did was we didn't screw it up, right? A lot of times big companies acquire small companies and they basically crush the innovation and they kill whatever the unique thing that company was doing. In this case what we've done is, because Red Hat's so good at open source, and we've actually nurtured that community. We've actually helped that community grow, virally. So the amount of contributors to the community has grown significantly, the amount of integration activities, interest in that community has grown wildly over the past 2 1/2 years. So I think our biggest thing is, we let it do what it's really good at, and we've nurtured it, so we've taken a really smart team with some great technology and we've amplified that with the Red Hat, you know, sort of capabilities. >> Furrier: What was the secret sauce on that? 'Cause this is a really, kind of, hard thing to do. Acquisitions can get mangled a bit, and founders leave, and what did you guys do specifically to not screw it up? Was it leave them alone? Invest some tech? You mentioned nurturing, what specifically did you guys do, looking back at that, that was the secret to that success? >> Joe: So I, having been personally acquired three times, right? I joined Red Hat through acquisition over five years ago, so I've been here a while. When I did the Ansible acquisition I wanted to make sure that what we didn't do was break anything, so a lot of times, in acquisitions, they tend to take the new company apart, and they say 'Okay, marketing moves over to corporate marketing, engineering moves over here, product management moves over there.' and they sort of take the transmission apart, and then they wonder why the engine's not running anymore, why the car's not running anymore. And so the first thing was: don't break anything. Let's understand it, let's understand how it fits in. I also think there was a good culture match. There was a good impedance match, for the fact that they were smart open source guys. So the Red Hat way was, like >> Furrier: So they got Red Hat? >> Yeah, they got Red Hat, and a number of them were ex Red Hatters, I mean, we have a lot of Red Hatters that go off and start up very interesting projects because of their background, and sometimes they come home. And this was that kind of case. >> Furrier: That's good, that's a great practice. I've got to say I've seen many acquisitions mangled, you know, it's the same exact thing, just go to the playbook, they tear them apart. >> Joe: Yeah it doesn't usually end well. You know, when large company acquires small company. >> So I'm curious how you all are looking at the role of the IT admin/operator in this new world, this new cloud data world we're going to, you know, the people formerly known as sysadmins, you know, I think they thought about automation a lot with maybe day zero, like setting things up. But now we've got day one and beyond, you know, we've got to run these clouds. Does IT become full of SRE's and operators? How are you dealing with your community and training them and teaching them how to go to work with a new environment? >> Joe: Yeah so the world has gotten significantly more complicated for those folks, right? In the good old days they were sort of segmented, maybe, into compute, network, and storage teams, and now you've got like, the public cloud team, and the private cloud team, and the container team, and the different teams, right? So the complexity has been amplified, right? What we're trying to do is, we're trying to reduce that complexity by things like Ansible, that basically can automate across those domains. So we introduced Ansible network automation, you can automate storage, you can automate compute, you can do stuff in private cloud, physical servers, different layers with the same set of tools. That means that a person, instead of being a generalist, or specialist, can be what Gartner calls a versitalist. They can actually be good at a number of domains, and in this case with a single tool set, without having to learn five different tools. >> Furrier: Joe, great to have you on the Cube. Thanks for the insights, great to hear your perspective, final question for you; AI, machine learning, always a big part of analytics, are you guys doing anything there? What's the update on what's coming? Because Automation, you've got to love machine learning, got to love some of this software. You guys doing anything in particular, notable, that you want to share? That's worth highlighting? >> Joe: Yeah we showed some stuff in our keynote here, in terms of demos, but we're really driving towards algorithmic IT operations. We're going to keep applying analytics, building towards machine learning and AI for these complex environments. We have some really smart people internally, data scientists and experts, we have a lot of expertise because we're building some of these platforms, and the new technologies. We have a lot of customers, they trust us, they share data with us, so we're really looking forward to advancing this sort of AI ops discipline. >> And the trend as your friend, the winds at your back, whatever you want to call it, you see in Kubernetes, you see in the kind of decomposition of services down to the very low granular level, throw some instrumentation on it, you now have data, data's good right? >> Joe: Speed of transformation is getting faster. >> Joe Fitzgerald, Vice President and General Manager of the management business unit here at Red Hat, on the Cube, sharing his insights here in the Cube, I'm John Furrier with John Troyer, stay with us for more live coverage after this short break. (outro music)

>> Announcer: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Red Hat Summit 2018 brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to see CUBE's exclusive coverage of Red Hat Summit 2018 live in San Francisco, California at Moscone West. I'm John Furrier, your cohost of theCUBE with John Troyer co-founder of Tech Reckoning advisory and community development firm. Our next two guests Mike Piech Vice President and General Manager of middleware at Red Hat and Mark Little, Vice President of Software Engineering for middleware at Red Hat. This is the stack wars right here. Guys thanks for coming back, good to see you guys again. >> Great to see you too. >> So we love Middleware because Dave Vellante and I and Stu always talk about like the real value is going to be created in abstraction layers. You're seeing examples of that all over the place but Kubernetes containers, multi-cloud conversations. Workload management and all these things are happening at these really cool abstraction layers. That's obviously you say global I say middleware but you know it's where the action is. So I got to ask you, super cool that you guys have been leading in there but the new stuff's happening. So let's just go review last year or was it this year? What's different this year, new things happening within the company? We see core OS' in there, you guys got OpenShift is humming along beautifully. What's new in the middleware group? >> There's a few things. I'll take one and then maybe Mike can think of another while I'm speaking but when we were here this time last year we were talking about functions as a service or server-less and we had a project of our own called Funktion with a K, between then and now the developer affinity around functions as a service has just grown. Lots of people are now using it and starting to use it in production. We did a review of what we were doing back then and looked around at other efforts that were in the market space and we decided actually we wanted to get involved with a large community of developers and try and move that in a direction that was pretty beneficial for everybody but clearly for ourselves. And we've decided, and we announced this publicly last year but we're now involved with a project called Apache OpenWhisk instead of Funktion. And OpenWhisk is a project that IBM originally kicked off. We got involved, it was tied very closely to cloud foundering so one of the first things that we've been doing is making it more Kubernetes native and allowing it to run on OpenShift. In fact we're making some announcements this week around our functions are service based on Apache OpenWhisk. But that's probably one of the bigger things that's changed in the last 12 months. >> I would just add to that that across the rest of the middleware portfolio which is as you know, a wide range of different technologies, different products, in our integration area we continue to push ahead with containerizing, putting the integration technologies in the containers, making it easier to basically connect the different components of applications and different applications to each other together through different integration paradigms whether it's messaging or more of a bus style. So with our Jboss Fuse and our AMQ we've made great progress in continuing to refine how those are invoked and consumed in the Openshift environment. Forthcoming very shortly, literally in the next week or two is our integration platform as a service based on the Fuse and AMQ technologies. In addition we've continued to charge ahead with our API management solution based on the technology we acquired from Threescale a couple of years ago. So that is coming along nicely, being very well adopted by our customers. Then further up the stack on the process automation front, so some of the business process management types of technologies we've continued to push ahead with containerizing and that was being higher up the stack and a little bit bigger a scale of technology was a little bit more complex in really setting it up for the containerized world but we've got our Process Automation 7.0 release coming out in the next few weeks. That includes some exciting new technology around case management, so really bringing all of those traditional middleware capabilities forward into the Cloud Native, containerized environment has been I would say the most significant focus of our efforts over the last year. >> Go ahead. >> Can you contextualize some of that a little bit for us? The OpenShift obviously a big topic of conversation here. You know the new thing that everyone's looking at and Kubernetes, but these service layers, these layers it takes to build an app still necessary, Jboss a piece of this stack is 17, 18 years old, right? So can you contextualize it a little bit for people thinking about okay we've got OpenStack on the bottom, we've got OpenShift, where does the middleware and the business process, how has that had to be modernized? And how are people, the Java developers, still fitting into the equation? >> Mark: So a lot of that contextualization can actually, if we go back about four or five years, we announced an initiative called Xpass which was to essentially take the rich middleware suite of products and capabilities we had, and decompose them into independently consumable services kind of like what you see when you look at AWS. They've got the simple queuing service, simple messaging service. We have those capabilities but in the past they were bundled together in an app server, so we worked to pull them apart and allow people to use them independently so if you wanted transactions, or you wanted security, you didn't have to consume the whole app server you actually had these as independent services, so that was Xpass. We've continued on that road for the past few years and a lot of those services are now available as part and parcel of OpenShift. To get to the developer side of things, then we put language veneers on top of those because we're a Java company, well at least middleware is, but there's a lot more than Java out there. There's a lot of people who like to use Pearl or PHP or JavaScript or Go, so we can provide language specific clients for them to interact. At the end of the day, your JavaScript developer who's using bulletproof, high performing messaging doesn't need to know that most of it is implemented in Java. It's just a complete opaque box to them in a way. >> John F: So this is a trend of microservices, this granularity concept of this decomposition, things that you guys are doing is to line up with what people want, work with services directly. >> Absolutely right, to give developers the entire spectrum of granularity. So they can basically architect at a granularity that's appropriate for the given part of their job they're working on it's not a one size fits all proposition. It's not like throw all the monoliths out and decompose every last workload into it's finest grain possible pieces. There's a time and a place for ultra-fine granularity and there's also a time and a place to group things together and with the way that we're providing our runtimes and the reference architectures and the general design paradigm that we're sort of curating and recommending for our customers, it really is all about, not just the right tool for the job but the right granularity for the job. >> It's really choice too, I mean people can choose and then based on their architecture they can manage it the way they want from a design standpoint. Alright I got to get your guys' opinion on something. Certainly we had a great week in Copenhagen last week, in Denmark, around CUBECon, Kubernetes conference, Cloud NativeCon, whatever it's called, they're called two things. There was a rallying cry around Kubernetes and really the community felt like that Linix moment or that TCPIP moment where people talk about standards but like when will we just do something? We got to get behind it and then differentiate and provide all kinds of coolness around it. Core defacto stand with Kubernetes is opening up all kinds of new creative license for developers, it's also bringing up an accelerated growth. Istio's right around the corner, Cubeflow have the cool stuff on how software's being built. >> Right. >> So very cool rallying cry. What is the rallying cry in middleware, in your world? Is there a similar impact going on and what is that? >> Yeah >> Because you guys are certainly affected by this, this is how software will be built. It's going to be orchestrated, composed, granularity options, all kinds of microservices, what's the rallying cry in the middleware? >> So I think the rallying cry, two years ago, at Summit we announced something called MicroProfile with IBM, with Tomitribe, another apps vendor, Piara and a few quite large Java user groups to try and do something innovative and microservices specific with Enterprise Java. It was incredibly successful but the big elephant in the room who wasn't involved in that was Oracle, who at the time was still controlling Java E and a lot of what we do is dependent on Java E, a lot of what other vendors who don't necessarily talk about it do is also dependent on Java E to one degree or another. Even Pivotal with Springboot requires a lot of core services like messaging and transactions that are defined in Java E. So two years further forward where we are today, we've been working with IBM and Oracle and others and we've actually moved, or in process of moving all of Java E away from the old process, away from a single vendor's control into the Eclipse Foundation and although that's going to take us a little while longer to do we've been on that path for about four or five months. The amount of buzz and interest in the community and from companies big and small who would never have got involved in Java E in the past is immense. We're seeing new people get involved with Eclipse Foundation, and new companies get involved with Eclipse Foundation on a daily basis so that they can get in there and start to innovate in Enterprise Java in a much more agile and interesting way than they could have done in the past. I think that's kind of our rallying call because like I said we're getting lots of vendors, Pivotal's involved, Fujitsu. >> John F: And the impact of this is going to be what? >> A lot more innovation, a lot quicker innovation and it's not going to be at the slow speed of standards it's going to be at the fast, upstream, open source innovative speed that we see in likes of Kubernetes. >> And Eclipse has got a good reputation as well. >> Yeah, the other significant thing here, in addition to the faster innovation is it's a way forward for all of that existing Java expertise, it's a way for some of the patterns and some of the knowledge that they have already to be applied in this new world of Cloud Native. So you're not throwing out all that and having to essentially retrain double digit millions of developers around the world. >> John F: It's instant developer actually and plus Java's a great language, it's the bulldozer of languages, it can move a lot, it does a lot of heavy lifting >> Yep. >> And there's a lot of developers out there. Okay, final question I know you guys got to go, thanks for spending the time on theCUBE, really appreciate certainly very relevant, middleware is key to the all the action. Lot of glue going on in that layers. What's going on at the show here for you guys? What's hot, what should people pay attention to? What should they look for? >> Mark: I'll give my take, what's hot is any talk to do with middleware >> (laughs) Biased. >> But kind of seriously we do have a lot of good stuff going on with messaging and Kafka. Kafka's really hot at the moment. We've just released our own project which is eventually going to become a product called Strimsy, integrated with OpenShift so it's coognative from the get-go, it's available now. We're integrating that with OpenWhisk, which we talked about earlier, and also with our own reactive async platform called Vertex, so there's a number of sessions on that and if I get a chance I'm hoping to say into one >> John F: So real quick though I mean streaming is important because you talk about granularity, people are going to start streaming services with service measures right around the corner, the notion of streaming asynchronously is going to be a huge deal >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> Mark: And tapping into that stream at any point in time and then pulling the plug and then doing the work based on that. >> Also real quick, Kubernetes, obviously the momentum is phenomenal in Cloud Native but becoming a first class citizen in the enterprise, still some work to do. Thoughts on that real quick? Would you say Kubernetes's Native, is it coming faster? Will it ever be, certainly I think it will be but. >> I think this is the year of Kubernetes and of enterprise Kubernetes. >> Mike: I mean you just look at the phenomenal growth of OpenShift and that in a way speaks directly to this point >> Mike, what's hot, what's hot? What are you doing at the show, what should we look at? I'd add to, I certainly would echo the points Mark made and in addition to that I would take a look at any session here on API management. Again within middleware the three-scale technology we acquired is still going gangbusters, the customers are loving that, finding it extremely helpful as they start to navigate the complexity of doing essentially distributive computing using containers and microservices, getting more disciplined about API management is of huge relevance in that world, so that would be the next thing I'd add. >> Congratulations guys, finally the operating system called the Cloud is taking over the world. It's basically distributed computer all connected together, it sounds like >> All that stuff we learned in the eighties right (laughs) >> It's a systems world, the middleware is changing the game, modern software construction of Apple cases all being done in a new way, looking at orchestration, server lists, service meshes all happening in real time, guys congratulations on the all the work and Red Hats. Be keeping it in the open, Java E coming around the corner as well, it's theCUBE bringing it out in the open here in San Francisco, I'm John Furrier with John Troyer we'll be back with more live coverage after this short break

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partner. (bouncy upbeat music) >> Welcome back to SiliconANGLE Media's production of VMworld 2017. This is theCube. I am your host, Stu Miniman. Happy to be joined for this special segment. Calling it the independent wrap analysis multi-hybrid focus with Blue Cow. Blue Cow is here. First-time guests on the program and Blue Cow has brought a few of the friends. Friends of mine, people that I got to know through this phenomenal VMware community also guest host on the program here. Been a pleasure working with all three of you. John Troyer from Tech Reckoning Justin Warren from Pivot 9 and Keith Townsend, the CTO advisor. Gentlemen, thank you so much for coming here. Now, we're independent when we come to this and I don't think any of us are shy as to kind of sharing our opinions. I think all of us have had "I can't believe what you said on Twitter" at least once. In fact, I remember when John Troyer was working for VMware I did get a call every once in awhile. I've said, if I didn't get a call at least once a year from him saying, "Hey Stu, can you moderate that a little," I'm probably not doing my job. Let's get into it. The first thing I'd say is it's 2017. We blinked and like we're getting towards the end of it. Of course, there's the big party. There's still a whole bunch of sessions going for another day. Reactions on the show, high-level things. Keith, let's start down with you. >> First off, the energy of the show this year was, I have to say it was, I have to say it was up a notch. There was a lot of uncertainty around the acquisition and even Pat's future, whether or not he would be here for the VMworld this year, as the head of VMware he announced, I think it was kind of like with a little bit of pride, that he said "This is my 5th year as CEO of Vmware" and he bought the energy Monday and I think that energy has transferred throughout all of the VMware staff and throughout the show for the past few days. >> Just in that question, of course, and how many selfies has Blue Cow done at the show? >> Not as many as usual, unfortunately, because we've been very, very busy with briefings and meetings, so we haven't had as much selfie time as we've had, but we still make time to take a few photos around the show. And, yeah, I agree with Keith. The energy this year, and I think it had started with the example that Pat set at the first keynote. Which, it's just been lifted this year and I've been saying for, I've been hearing it from a lot of different people and I've been having it in conversations as well that this year, VMware stopped apologizing for existing and it's embraced itself, and I'm sure that having the stock price hit a nice high of a 107, I'm sure that helped with Pat and his idea of, "That makes you happy. Makes it a lot easier for you to keep your job." >> That's great, there was a comment actually The first time most of us remember. The week of Vmworld? The stock actually was going up. John, you know, you've got lots of experience with this community; your take. >> Certainly more energy than last year. I mean, let's look at the micro and the macro. There's always tactical stuff going on. Last year, Vster 6.5 had not been released. Dell acquisition and nobody was sure what was going on exactly. This year, the big VMware cloud on AWS announcement, I think, is an acknowledgement of maybe, that we can talk about. That, wait a minute. Once you get down to the nitty-gritty plumbing infrastructure layer, you still need to partner with somebody like VMware. I think the industry and the analysts, and the market, that's one of the things they like and then look at the macro trends on the economy. If you look at the Expo floor this year? Huge, lots of money being spent, lots of vendors here. There's something macro going on as well with the people here. >> Let's talk about two things I look at. Did VMware meet expectations? Was it what you expect? And, what are we going to be looking back at when we come here? John, I'll start with you, you hit on the big topic from my standpoint, looking at VMware and AWS. What will VMware look like in the future? Are they going to be a SAS provider? How does that transition from an infrastructure software company to a different fit for how they do cloud today versus the whole Vcloud era and everything before it? That was era not error even though, you know... >> Hey, they had a lot to do, of messaging and a lot of product-in announcements and a lot of introductions this week. I don't know, let's give them a B for that because there were a lot of them and they had a lot to do in a short space especially, like, through the lens of say the keynotes which is the lens a lot of people have. I think AWS, VMware Cloud on AWS is the big story. I don't know, I predict that in a year or two VMware will probably be the biggest VMware hoster service provider, right? I think a lot of workloads are going to shift into the AWS service through VMware and that will happen to excess capacity. It'll happens through a lot of different things. But, that's my prediction. >> I'm sorry, you say VMware will-- >> VMware will be the largest VMware hoster within a year or two. >> I feel like I'm watching the NFL Network. Bold predictions, here we have it. VMware has got 4500 partners, John. I've have Ajay Patella on a couple of times talking about his tiers of partners and everything like that. But let's let some of the guys weigh in. >> I'll extend on that, I kind of agree. I think that there's a lot of customers who will basically do a lift and shift and use cloud and I think having to choose between which of their children is the most beautiful and which one they love more has been has been really tearing them apart and I think that now they don't have to make that choice. I think they're going to be a lot easier for, particularly CIOs, to just say, "Yep, I'm doing some cloud." The announcement on Tuesday sort of felt a little flat for me because they were talking about Google container services which is running on Pivotal. Pivotal's sort of an unappreciated part of the whole portfolio, I think. There's a lot of companies some really interesting software development work there. But, as we mentioned, the development community? That's not this community. This is much more about infrastructure people. That kind of whole announcement and what they were talking about on Day 2? Just kind of went, it felt a little bit off for me. >> Yeah, I want to echo, I think a couple of statements that you've made. One, that VMware's seemed to embrace... Monday, they seem to embrace being VMware. You know what? We may pick on the concept of VMware VSphere being cloud. That VMware is very proud of calling their SDDC strategy which is an important strategy. It adds a lot of value to, not just legacy IT but current things that people are doing in their data center and they embraced being what they do well on Monday, and then we had cloud pizza on Tuesday which kind of broke that but I think I loved the message for VCF, VMware Cloud Foundation, this concept, this reference architecture, this validated design that I can run in my data center. I know that at a Rax pace, at a CNF such as... take your Switch, take your choice between Switch and CenturyLink, etc. I'm going to get that consistent openstack what should have been openstack filling across cloud providers, but John, I agree with you. AWS is AWS at the end of the day and it's a easy checkbox to say VMware Cloud on AWS? Really easy to do and it's easy to consume. I don't have to go and choose between Cloud providers. >> One of the things of this show is that there never enough hours in the day, even Vegas. I actually have to admit I got to bed at a reasonable hour every night. We still have one more night for me here so we'll see on that. Hallway conversations, parties, some of the really cool stuff on on the show floor we talked about a little. I'll start off with kind of, from a customer standpoint, Some customers I talked to; a number of them seemed to be, "I want to move faster. "I'm interested in trying new things "and price isn't necessarily number one on my list. "It's further down the list." Which reminds me: It's not quite there yet but I go to Amazon Reinvent and this will be the fifth year and we are doing the Cube at that show. That's the thing that really excites me. There's cool new things we're trying. I echo and agree with a lot of what you all said about Day 2. Most of the customers here aren't ready for PKS. Sure Pivotal has lots of customers that are using Vmware, but the average attendee's not there. Kind of a wild card, customer insights, cool parties, things there. John, do you want to start down on your end? >> Sure, my channel check and the most surprising thing that I saw this week were talking to SC's from VMware and saying that their customers were coming to them and asking "Help? I now have Kubernetes in the house. "What do I do with it?" That surprised me. I have been a Kubernetes and Container advocate but a skeptic as far as adoption and at least anecdotally the folks that I talk to, it sounds like actually it's now trickling its way and kind of to the mainstream to where the VMware accounts are going to be able to have to deal with it. Now I will say on the flip side, Stu, if you look out at the show floor there are no developer tools, dev ops tools, cloud tools, maybe some cloud tools. That side of, that AWS side of the house, the people that are there, those companies that are there who are not here. If you were a customer, if you were an IT person looking to, this year, finally, educate yourself on how to do that that wasn't here at this show. >> For me, it's been about migration. This is about we have a whole bunch of stuff running on VMware, it's already there and that was one of the reasons VMware was popular in the first place, was that you could take stuff you already doing and you can virtualize it and then you could increase the capacity utilization that you have and you could get some more efficiencies out of that and then people started to layer additional services on top of that and to do interesting an new things on that. It allowed them to do that because it kind of freed up some time. I think we're going to say that again as things start to move to the cloud people start to do them in different ways. the workloads will migrate. It's not just going to happen tomorrow and some of the things that we're seeing, one of the things that impressed me about the show was a company called Densify who had been around previously. They were called Server and they did a rebrand and repossession and nailed it and it's a very, very simple tool that actually sells about the business. It's not about a technology, they don't actually talk about how the thing works or what's going on underneath it. But it allows you to understand the effect of what's happening if you move from VMware here over to that cloud, this cloud or the other cloud and it shows you the pricing. I looked at that and just went I can walk into a CFO and I can sell them on the idea just showing them this. That kind of experience, I think, we're going to start seeing a lot more of that as people moved to the cloud. >> So Monday gave me a new catch phrase for VMworld. VMware moves at the speed of the CIO and, you know what? With hallway conversations I still talk to, John, I don't remember like one-third of the attendees of VMworld are all first-time attendees, I talked to a lot of first-time attendees and it's amazing because VMware has an enormous sales team and they are very aggressive getting to accounts and talking about the overall message. I had people coming up to me and saying "Man you know what, I just found out about this "vRealize Log Insight and it's amazing!" and I'm thinking, Wow, that doesn't get much much more traditional IT than log management with vRealize and you know VMware has preached that for the past 5 or 6 years at the show I think it just shows the Delta in the community from those looking to do the developer, dev ops and cloud-native integration. Us, as analysts, pushing VMware saying, "Hey, what's your digital transformation story? "It's something other than cloud pizza," to all the way, to the keeping the lights on with SAP and Oracle apps that will not change and haven't changed and probably won't change for the next 10 to 15 years. >> Yeah and actually it brings up an interesting point; I had a conversation with Pumela this morning and we were talking about how it used to be, come to the show and it's the virtualization show. Now, It's a pretty broad ecosystem and in some ways it's, I wouldn't say fragmented but I'm grasping for a better word because you walk through the show floor and Dentrify, interesting. We had one of their co-founders on as to that kind of cloud management, and how all those pieces, these big hairy issues that people are solving. We've got people working at analytics and data. You've got all the cloud pieces, security all over the place, networking, we've always had storage at the show. But I'd been a little jaded coming to VMworld. It's now my 8th year and I've kind of re-energized this year. I know that some people have stopped coming. There's a new influx coming in. Let's fast-forward to VMworld 2018. What are you hoping to see from this ecosystem? Any final things you'd want to say? "Hey, this is what we can do better?" Or, "This thing, Do it absolutely again especially!" We've got one more year in Vegas then I think we'll probably go back to San Francisco. You've all been to many of these. Where do we start? >> I'll take two. One, is I like'd to see more basketball players and rappers. We had a lot of them on. >> Did you hang with KD? >> I did not. I was busy. He called my people and I don't know if you want tee that one up, what that one is. >> You could mention that absolutely. >> Sure. I mean Rubrik was here winner of the Best of Show of VMworld. Also spent a lot of marketing dollars on Kevin Durant who was also an investor and also Henson Nischlak >> Did they make cards? I'm on a trading card. How hilarious is that? >> Keith: Trading cards were cool, I have one. >> Yeah. Absolutely. >> They came to play and and they bought it this year. Marketing dollar spent, I actually have a second predication which is that next year or the year after we'll be talking about, it seemed like VMware and Red Hat are throwing down against each other so I think next year we might be talking about the Dell technologies Red Hat wars in the cloud. >> Open source comes up but hadn't been discussed much except we did some Red Hat interviews here. Red Hat? Absolutely. Hybrid cloud environment, Microsoft, VMware, and Red Hat all players there. John's been thinking about this wrap for a while I know. >> Well I'm going to switch completely differently and into the future what I like to see just to shake it up a little bit. I don't think we should talking about AWS things around containers. I think there will be some of that conversation but what I want to see is that VMware starts hosting a function service. I want to see functions on VMware because I reckon that's where the industry is going to move to in the long time. >> Stu: Serverless, you're saying? >> Yeah, Serverless. >> Like I mentioned on Day two? >> I want to see a functions as a service on VMware on AWS. >> Oh, that will happen. >> There you go product management. That's what you can go build. >> You can tie it into Lambda right now, right? You'll have your... >> yeah but if you're tie it into Lambda that just plays right into AWS's hands. >> Give Chris Wolfe a call and Kit Colbert will make that happen. >> You know what? Full disclosure. I was part of judging for best of VMworld and Rubrik won Best of VMworld. I don't want to see more data protection. I don't want to see more secondary storage. I think one of the driving elements that part of that discussion, pulling back the onion a little bit was about redefining something in the data center that had been forgotten, that API level access Rubrik pushes API level access to the data center. This is something that I've asked from VMware forever which is to basically be the API to my data center. You may not ever, I may never get function as a service. I may never get PaaS, I may never get all these cool things from a developer perspective that I want from VMware but at the very minimum, you're the software defining data center. I want to have APIs into the data center and that data center is not just my physical Data Center but this whole VCF thing that's pushed whether it's in my data center, in Rackspace, or some other VCAMP partner or in AWS. My interface, If infrastructure is going to continue to be VMware's customer then you should enable me from an API perspective to manage my software-defining data center, believe it or not. >> Unfortunately, I love to chat with these gentlemen for hours at a time if I can. We're limited with the queue. We only give you a taste of what's happening at these shows if I've mentioned before, you need to come to these kind of events to talk to these quality people. We also mentioned a few of the sponsors on the show. Sponsorship helps us bring, not only the Cube to the event, but helps me bring high quality, independent analysis from gentlemen like this. Please check out all of our sponsors. Check out all of our content on theCUBE.net. These, all three of them, creating a lot of content. Go to their Twitter handle, @ctoadvisor, @jpwarren, and @jtroyer, I'm @stu. Thank you so much for joining us for our coverage of VMworld 2017. Reach out to all of us. Really, we'll get back to you. 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