>> From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020 brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back, I'm Stuart Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat summit 2020, 7th year we've been covering the event of course, one of the differentiators this year is it is a virtual event. We're bringing a Red Hat executives, customers and partners from where they are around their globe to this digital event and really happy to bring back one of our cube alumni is also one of the keynote speakers. He's got a new role but lots of technology to share. Matt Hicks, the SVP of product and technologies with Red Hat. Matt, thank you so much for joining us. Normally we'd all get together. You and I are even geographically relatively close to each other, but of course today as we've said many times, we are together apart. So thanks so much for joining us. >> Hey, thanks for having me. >> All right, so compared to some say it, the company that owns Red Hat, IBM, you're a relatively short timer with Red Hat you only been there for 14 years, Matt, but we, we've talked to many times OpenShift. One of the big things we talk about with you over the last few years, you're one of the founding members of that team, but before we get into it, you've got a new role, the product pieces we said you're kind of stepping up, filling in for the shoes that Paul has, As Paul now says steps up to the CEO role. So tell us a little bit about what that means for you and your your organization. >> Yeah, sure, so you're right. I used to run an engineering for Red Hat and now I have the scope of engineering and the business and our support organization so previous role and it's a great opportunity. I'm excited about emission I've been at Red Hat 14 years. I was actually at IBM prior. So the combination asking pretty significant there. But it's, it's just the neat opportunity. I love being able to, to focus on the entire portfolio for example how it's impacting customers. Especially right now this is tricky time right now for a lot of customers I think Red Hat we're doing our best to make sure we have that value them just to sort of get through the crisis bench form. >> Yeah, absolutely Matt. We usually, when we're looking at a keynote, it's celebrating some new announcement, talking about the culmination of these things and there's a real effort of course, to set a nice balanced tone here. Of course you've got lots of critical companies that rely on Red Hat technologies, on your partner solutions to make sure things work. So, bring us in a little inside basically the organization and how you're helping your customers. I know in these challenging times. >> Yeah, I know this year didn't make a big push and PR who fluff hall all the work. Really proud of that work, but it just, it wasn't the right time to have that focus on product releases. That said, if you look at our customer base there pretty split right now. We have a large part of our customer base they are folks centers weathering the storm right now, and a lot of that work is it's cost savings, it's efficiency it's actually I'm doubling down on their data centers where they've got to go back to things that they own and down that side we'vethrown a whole host of efforts setback from extending our support services. We've gone through extending our product life cycle so customers don't get and then having to do an upgrade right now. We're working with Ansible and with RHEL just in and how we can help customers save and get through it sort of in the way that they want. On the other side though take some industries, whether they're developing a vaccine or shipping, they say there exploding like they need to scale and push and we're making sure that we didn't hold back any technology. 'Cause the toughest thing would be to say, "Well, okay, let's take in OpenShift." We have new serverless capabilities or pipelines. We didn't want it take any of those pieces away from the customer that might be needing to scale 500% right now, but it, it is it's a challenging time. We sort of have helping customers is either end of a really, really wide spectrum. And the good news though we have I think we have good solutions on both album through, but it is a unique experience for me. And as long as I've been in then sure I haven't quite seen as much of AI, I divide. >> Yeah, it's really Matt, I think back to I was working in the tech vendor community back when 9/11 happened and some of the rallying of the community but this has a personal impact for everyone, it's 9/11, it was kind of everybody went home for a day and then rally the troops. You didn't make a big deal of it, but you made sure you helped those customers. Today, this has such a wide impact and yeah, as you said but very unique time that we're living in here. One of the messages you talked about in your keynote is was really emphasizing message we've heard for Red Hat for a number of years. Talking about how your solution really everywhere. Even more than ever. Some of the stories you hear about where technology is accelerating, of course things like work from home. But also customers that are doing digital transformations or I've been looking at cloud adoption, sometimes those things, they need to move through some of the last few steps even faster because they can't touch the gear or they can't access stuff. Or I need to got that automation going even faster so that we can leverage it. So help us walk through a little bit. Yow know where are your technology pieces are OpenShift some of the other technologies that are so critically important for customers today. >> Yeah, you touched on a lot of areas and I would say we probably saw this start and certainly been amplified and just worldwide importance with Telecom. Telecom providers as they've pushed towards things like 5G it's it's not the traditional like you have one data center type thing play and that's what you think troll and whether you call this edge or anything else that relate. You have these multiple tiers of infrastructure and they run it massive scale. And so they wanted one technology platform that could run it was close to the user as possible. And I run into a bunch of different form factors and footprints and also and that's where we really started working with the Telecom providers on OpenShift and taking some of the experience. We certainly work a lot with them with OpenStack for networks, but as things got closer to the edge that pushed to OpenShift was pretty prevalent. We are now seeing you mentioned it where I think customers, a lot of customers are being forced into the digital transformation journey right now I really like, well, everyone's home. How do you serve your customers with this? And they're really that last mile of changes is coming very quick to them. And I think we're seeing a lot of similarities with that technology based, right. The same challenges that the telecom providers had can be applied to other industries, whether it's manufacturing, others in this generally we call it like it's that edge focused area you don't have and infrastructure that runs in one place, you're having to aggregate a lot of it we call this our hybrid cloud work and OpenShift is really Red Hats hybrid cloud. >> Yeah, so often we talk about some of the hype that goes around certain words. I think about cloud-native we've been talking about cloud for so many years out of close partners with all the various solutions out there. When things need to get done, how does it help businesses? How does it help IT reacts to the business and how do we make sure we stay in business? So how was that conversation of cloud-native changed and where's Red Hat sitting in that discussion? >> Yeah, I think not the best circumstance, but I think one of the things that's been really prevalent is when you see this pull back in some way basis to data centers, that conversation about did I build my apps to a standard that I've got it costs, can I move them to a lower cost center structure for me? Like right now, in a week for two weeks. Yeah, that's becoming pretty critical where, we've believed in that model for a long time of whether it's cloud native services building them to a platform that gives you that flexibility that has become a pain point for customers right now. And one of the nice things we've seen this in some government services where if they're built on OpenShift even on premise, they're on the other side of that, where they're having to scale these services massively, they're able to take the same app, same platform, go out to public cloud providers actually help fulfill that scale. Customers, I think that built to that pattern. If they're contracting for a bit or doubling down on their data center, they have the same thing. They can pull back from the public cloud if they need to, but that, that app affordability has gone from being real like secondary, tertiary concern to being a critical aspect of cost savings or just a lot of enterprises right now and in a shockingly short period of time. >> It's interesting when you talk about engineering groups and how they're building product. Most of the development teams I talked to, we're distributed before this event happened. And yes, there's some adjustments that need to happen. I think Red Hat has some almost unique capabilities compared to some others out there. Because, not only do you have your development teams, but of course everything that Red Hat is doing is open source. So I'd love to hear your viewpoint as to, as you think about your product roadmap and what's going to happen in 2020, how do the communities and there's been a number of course key acquisitions that Red Hat has done over the years. Talk a little bit about that dynamic and how much this affects what's happening and how this helps Red Hat both put together the products and the portfolio that it offers. >> Yeah, I think you're right, We're, we are incredibly lucky just business model wise and even as a starting where on the engineering team over half of our engineering team is remote to begin with. And then on top of that, we work with open source communities where we're still just the minority presence in most of those. And so you're working with team members that you've never met. So you could say, the bulk of the work that we did was really distributed. So it wasn't just a huge system shock. Everybody stay productive, stay from home. The second part, that was great our strategy overall, it really doesn't change for us because we're, we're seeing a lot of pressure applied to it where customers maybe a three year plan to get there is becoming their six months plan. But in terms of running infrastructure in these combinations being able to run it in your data center, being able to scale off public clouds and do that consistently, that hasn't changed for us. We are refining areas of making sure that we contributed really double down on infrastructure, mission critical infrastructure like telecom's right now because they're certainly going through the scale there going to push for things like 5G we want to make sure we're doing everything we can for that. Well, we were already working pretty closely with them, so not a huge strategy shift for us. It's okay, how can we just really focus these on the value that customers need right now. We're excited about if you look in the efficiency areas in these combinations, what we're doing with Ansible it's pretty critical to users. Like if you take a real user that's running a data centers worth a year and they need to remotely be able to manage it, control it, optimize it to see you can't get people there. great solutions around around and so we're, we're really pushing down that path. Then if you look at other areas, like with OpenShift, some of the management work group I've been doing, or the scaling areas, if you go through serverless models or pipelines, if you're in the shipping industry or you're in pharmaceuticals working on vaccines, they have massive scaling needs right now. And so they're pushing very hard on and that's what a new technology has reached. All right, there is one technology area that I'd love to get your view. Well, you talked a little bit about in the keynote, definitely plenty of breakouts and we actually have you've interviews digging into of course, current eddies, the latest is going on with OpenShift and a big piece is the virtualization with OpenShift virtualization. As I mentioned at the beginning, you're one of the founding members of the OpenShift team. So as you look at, bare metal virtualization painters were at VMs public cloud on premises. Give us your viewpoint as to where we are in 2020 and how some of that journey has changed over time and how Red Hat might have a slightly different view of how things should be built and where the future should go compared to others in the industry. >> Yeah, really excited about this area because if you look at Red Hat sort of view on this is that we can run Kubernetes sort of as the thing that directly runs on Linux and Bare-metal and for us that's OpenShifting RHEL and it's, it's very powerful because if you look at what virtualization came from, it was machines got really, it's strong and so we needed to carve them up into smaller pieces, make it manageable, that's what Linux containers do is they take a machine they carve them up into these units and let you use all of the power on the physical hardware and we know this world from RHEL for us, that's what Linux does it lights up hardware. So I think the norm in the industry for the last yours years was people would still carve up machines with virtualization, then they would run containers on top and virtualization was sort of your main substrate and there were some challenges with that. The containers it's harder for them to move across those boundaries like BMS isolated for a reason we actually think, and it was an upstream project called KubeVert. Again, we saw this in the telcos pretty early where they were putting OpenShift on bare metal on gear itself, and they were driving to run virtualization inside. And then really you have the flexibility of containers carving up the hardware and we need to bring VMs in. We can run VMs inside of it containers and that it's the opposite of how most people think about it. But it, it gives you the best of both worlds. 'Cause we look at Kubernetes it is sort of that next generation infrastructure layer and you can fit VMs very nicely into that. That's what we're doing with container-native virtualization it gives you a good cost benefits on that. And also if you're going from a virtualized world to a container world you're optimizing towards that destination with OpenShift it's just, it is neat technology 'cause I think most customers they still have a ton of VMs out there. So even if they're bought off on an OpenShift path how do they bring VMs into that story? And so that as of now that's something we're enabling them to be able to do. Cool technology, I mean I'm excited about that. And again, it has a great telco focus for us right now, but I think this is one where it'll have broad reach cross enterprise users to just that are already down this journey and need to accelerate it for cost savings. That's great solution there. >> Yeah, definitely from what I've learned, it's pretty empowering to really help that application development team understand really those cloud native architectures if you will. One of the challenges of VMs was used to just kind of stick the application in there. I think about it anymore and that does not meet where really companies are going. It's all right, Matt, I got to ask you the last question. Since you own product and technologies, talk about some of the tough areas. Where is Red Hat really working with the community to help really improve things for the ecosystem and for customers as you look out through the rest of the 2020? >> Yeah, I think looking out for the rest of 2020 it's sort of, it's picking focus areas because that the most challenging thing the nice part especially at Red Hat too, there is a ton of goodwill. What can we jump in help can we do and when we looked at it, a lot of our customers, they're doing awesome thanks. And they're sort of in the middle of the crisis. So a big part of our focus then making sure we help them. One of my friends favorite stories, it's close to really like Red Hats ethos is a Medtronic, they're a ventilator. They manufacture ventilators, they open source there are ventilator designs so that companies like Ford or Telsa could actually they're retooling their factories to build them Medtronics open sources so they can actually get the designs to build. When we see those things it's just awesome. Like those are great like that is what for us opens spaces is build on and we are really doubling down to make sure that whether it is a support case or bug or problem where we have to jump in and give them engineering expertise to help them scale. That has been our focus probably for most of 2020. In doing that well, I think our challenge our hard part is just bringing focus from all of them, little things we can do, to what are the things that are going to have the most impact right now, which is, it's tough but we have a lot of them. Like on the technology side, we have the virtualization areas. Some of the, the workaround cork is like, how do we bring Java workloads into this Kubernetes world? Like really good things there, but I'm sure what we know right now we'll unfortunately it probably change again and another couple of months. We just have to he really flexible, keep prioritizing focus on it. >> Right, well Matt Hicks taking a new leadership role is always challenging especially in these times. So I want to wish you the best of luck and of course thank you to the team. We always really appreciate the partnership with Red Hat to be able to share this content with the communities. Always good to talk to you man. >> Sounds good, it's great talking to you too. And maybe next year we'll be back to the in person. >> Absolutely. All right, watch more coverage for Red Hat summit 2020 I'm Stuart Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> [Narrator] From the SiliconANGLE media office in Boston, Massachusets, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, Dave Vellante here coming at you from our East Coast studios in Marlborough, MA just outside of Boston. What I wanted to do is give you a little recap of 2017 and what's happening and give you an update on SiliconANGLE Media. So as many of you know SiliconANGLE Media INC comprises three brands. TheCUBE, which as most of you know is we call it sometimes the ESPN of tech, it's our live and on demand video broadcasting element. And of course we have the research arm which is Wikibon and Wikibon.com And then, SiliconANGLE is our news site. And so I want to just, as I said, recap what went down in 2017 some of the things you may not know about. >> Last February, February first, actually we opened the new studio in Palo Alto, California. It's at 989 Commercial ST, you should check it out. It's sort of near the mountain view line but it's in Palo Alto, it's a great location, we have a large studio there. And throughout the year, in 2017 we held events, we had launches, but most importantly John Furrier, my business partner, is really running editorial content programs out of that studio. >> So every Thursday Furrier has high level key guests come in CEOs, VCs, in customers, and they just riff on what's going on in the industry and what's happening It's been an absolutely awesome resource for us and I really encourage you guys to go check it out. We did 135 show days last year. TheCUBE is run by our general manager, Jeff Frick and 135 show days meaning we broadcast live at 135 days at events last year, which is just incredible. >> It was our first year we ever did anything in China We did the Alibaba conference, the cloud show there that was very exciting. We did a number of shows in Europe and of course all the big shows in the United States as well >> We launched three websites last year. TheCUBE.net is the latest one. You know, a lot of times we talk about data driven media. If you go to theCube.net and check it out, you'll see something called theCUBE Alumni database. And theCUBE Alumni database contains virtually everybody who's ever been on theCUBE. So you can search CIOs, CEOs, developers, bloggers, analysts all the folks that have been on theCUBE you can see and they've got a profile page on each one of those so, we're collecting all that data SiliconANGLE.com we launched the new website >> SiliconANGLE is run by Rob Hof, who is our Editor-in-Chief Rob was the Silicon Valley beuro chief for business week for the better part of a decade, so we're really proud to have Rob on. He's been on for the last couple of years and just doing a great job with that site. >> And then Wikibon.com is run by Peter Burris he's our Chief Research Officer He's been with us now for the better part of 2 years and he's got that team cranking on all kinds of research in cloud and AI and data orientation, the edge, and infrastructure for emerging applications like AI. >> One of the areas we're most excited about that we launched in 2017 was a new capability called Clipper. So we have this tool called Video Clipper as you know, John Furrier and I, when we met we had this vision for data driven media and innovation and we launched this tool we call video clipper that was developed by Kent Libbey and his team one of our newer executives that we brought in last year on the product side. >> What Video Clipper does is we transcribe every video now that we do, we'll transcribe this video, and then we synchronize the transcript with the video and we're able to then search video, highlight a text, a paragraph let's say, push a button and boom we've got a clip and that clip is ready to be shared throughout various social media platforms like Twitter, and LinkedIn, and Facebook and the like So very, very excited about that tool you're going to be hearing more about that We don't sell it as a separate tool, we integrate it as part of our offerings and got some new offerings that we're bringing to customers in 2018. >> One of the other really exciting things in 2017 we brought in a new chief revenue officer his name is Greg Theriault, I'm going to introduce you to him today Greg Theriault is with me here in studio, Greg, it's great see you, thanks for spending some time with us. >> [Greg] Thank you, Dave, thanks for the opportunity I've never been more excited. Let me tell you a little bit about myself I live in Concord, MA right around the studio here and I came from the IT industry. I've been there for a long time. I used to be at a small systems integrator, kind of the size of SiliconANGLE Media, building client servers, computing, got certified in Novell, and then I jumped into sales. I worked most recently at Forester Research and was there for almost 18 years, two decades, building the sales capabilities, always wrapped around the customers, but I am thrilled to be here today >> [Dave] So, Novell, when our network goes down can you help us fix that? >> It was about 20 years ago but, you know the history with Novell >> Yeah, another Utah company that somehow didn't make it, but for a while they were a little monopoly. So you've been in the business now for a couple of decades maybe, you know, think about what has happened over the last 20 years, what kind of changes have you seen? Share with us your perspectives. >> I've never seen so much disruption from client server, to social computing, to AI, now it's digital disruption in everything and you hear about this all the time in the news that companies are becoming software companies look around the corner, GE is now GE digital, they're trying to reinvent themselves, very, very exciting times. AI machine learning, autonomous computing, and then right around the corner there's block chain I mean that's the big buzz these days Also there's the autonomous vehicles, and let em give you a quick story About two years ago my son was born and I was fortunate enough to have a breakfast with the CEO of Tesla, and I asked him "Hey, he was born, what's going to happen in 16 years?" and JB said to me quite candidly, he said "if your son is driving a car that's not autonomous it won't be safe and he won't need a license" So, things are happening at an epic speed I don't know I these prediction will be true but it is Telsa >> [Dave] Won't need a license, you know it's funny, I mean, I don't know how you feel about it but when I turned 16 it was one of the most exciting days of a young person's life. You wonder what the social implications of that is if you don't need a license, I don't know maybe they can start driving at 14 or 13, you know whatever but you know what I'm saying? >> [Greg] Yeah That was a really exciting time we couldn't wait to get our permits and "Dad can I drive you to the dump?" Right? It's like... >> Self driving cars and self driving refrigerators, I mean, it's moving fast it's at an epic speed right now >> Well everything, and again, you take that business it's all about the data, as I said in my intro we always talk about data driven media we got so much data, you talk about digital transformation, philosophy is digital meets data >> Right >> and you talked about GE you're seeing all these companies now getting disrupted because digital allows people to move so fast, it allows companies like Apple to get into financial servies and you're seeing Amazon become a content company and it's really all around the data, isn't it? >> [Greg] Absolutely >> So, I wonder if you could share with our audience, SiliconANGLE Media, small company you came from a much larger firm, a big brand, Forester, your former company. What attracted you to SiliconANGLE Media? >> I think it was the fact that I jumped on airplane and went out to Palo Alto and met with your general managers. I think the innovation and the speed, the speed around it's in your DNA and then you took social computing, combined it with really computing power. And then I saw the Video Clipper tool. It's the fastest application I've ever seen to clip video and that innovation, the speed really attracted me to the company, to build really powerful content >> [Dave] Yeah it's been quite a ride since I met John Furrier in 2010. You know, John at the time, said "Dave, whatever we do we have to innovate. "We have to continue to invest in R&D" And those R&D experiments they don't always pay off but when one hits, like the Clipepr tool, it can be a home run so we're very excited about that. Share with us your philosophy, what can we expect from Greg Theriault? >> [Greg] Sure, I appreciate that. Well I'm happy to be here I actually blogged on LinkedIn over the weekend about my transition here, and I think it starts off with my family, my son and my wife they helped me, they grounded me, but my philosophy on business is to really be customer focused to hire the right people, train and coach, and build a different mindset which I call the growth mindset the sales rep of the future is being disrupted right now just like very other function. And that is absolutely pivotal. I think the buyers change, Dave. Faster in two years than the past 100 years the buyer is in control, you have to build systems, processes and technologies wrapped around how do you help the customer be successful at drygrowth and that's the biggest shift going on right now I mean sales right now, again, is being disrupted so social selling and things like that, I want to bring that kind of discipline and processes to SiliconANGLE Media >> [Dave] Well, what about social selling? A lot of people will, when social media really started to come into play, a lot of people say "well, we sell to IT people, and IT people, they don't have time to go on Twitter, they don't do Facebook" What's your perspective, has that changed you know and what about that? >> It's changed faster than I could ever believe buyers buy differently but they also need to see the different presence in social that's Twitter, that's LinkedIn, and that's also you have to be on the phone, you have to be in front of customers but it absolutely is pivotal that the new, let's call it a digital rep, needs to understand the tools to listen. Listen to the customer first and foremost, and it's a new channel but it's a channel here for a long time. Again, it's disrupting sales at an epic pace >> [Dave] So what are your priorities, looking out, say, near term, mid-term, long term? >> [Greg] To wrap my hand around the customer base you have to innovate with them, with the team we build And also to build the collaborative culture I'm really into culture and the ability to kind of game-afy the culture, grow the business, accelerate the business, and also develop the team that we build. I mean, the aspirations to where do they want to be in a couple years will help build the business and that's a global business as well >> Well, of course, a lot of the action in the tech business is out in Silicon Valley, and you and I are based here in the East coast, What can we expect in terms of your presence in Silicon Valley? >> I'll be on a plane a lot, and I don't mind that at all I mean, it's a flat country right now So I'll be on a plane, but also the heat is in Boston, New York, Chicago, but the Valley is where it's at so I'm going to be jumping on plane in two weeks to meet with the team, I can't wait >> [Dave] Well, we're excited Greg, to have an executive of your callabor join our team. >> [Greg] Thank you, appreciate that >> Congratulations, and look forward to many, many years of productive growth and adding value for our clients with you >> [Greg] Likewise, thank you >> Alright, you're welcome. Thanks for watching everybody, this is Dave Vellante with Greg Theriault, we'll see you next time.