>>Hello from Chicago, Lisa Martin, back with you and John Furrier. This is day one of the Cube's coverage of Ansible Fest 2022. John, we've been having great conversations all morning about automation and how it's really pivotal and central. One of the things that we want to talk about next is automation as a strategy. Yeah. You know, some of the barriers to customer adoption, one of them is, well, can we, can we really understand where the most ROI is gonna be? But another one is automation happening kind of in pockets and silos. And we're gonna be talking next with one of our alumni about breaking those down. >>This is gonna be a great segment from the customer perspective, the conversations they're having problems trying to solve, and really got a great cube alumni back to share. And we're excited. It's be a good segment. >>We do have a great alumni, Walter Bentley, Fresh from the keynote stages back with us, the senior manager of the automation practice at Red Hat. Walter, it's great to have you back on the program. >>Thank you. Thank you for having me back. I really look forward to doing this every year and you know, it's, it's >>Exciting. So we had your great energetic keynote this morning and you were really talking about organizations need to think about automation from a strategic lens perspective, a really a true long term investment. Where are most organizations today and how are you gonna help them get there? >>Right. So most organizations today are kind of in that sweet spot where they've discovered that they can do the tactical automation and they can deal with those small day-to-day things. And now they wanna move into the space where they're really able to plug automation into their current workflows and try to optimize it. And, and that's the perfect direction to be heading. And, and what I always encourage our customers is that once you get to that point, don't stop. You gotta keep going because the next phase is, is when you begin to innovate with automation. And when automation is at first is, is at the beginning of the, of everything you're creating. And at that point, that's when you're really gonna see the great benefits from it. >>How have your customer conversations evolved over the last couple of years, particularly as the world has changed, but we've also seen the acceleration of automation and so much, so much advancement in the technology. >>Right. You know, you'll be shocked that our customers wanted us to speak to them in more of an enterprise architecture level. They wanted us to really be able to come in and help them design how they're going to lay out their automation vision. And that surprised me at first. My background being in architecture for many years, I didn't know that, you know, automation had evolved to that level. And, and that was one of the things that we, we tried to do our best to rise to the occasion and be able to answer that call. >>You know, Walter, one of the things when we were in person last in 2019, you were on the cube and then we did the remote. We were kind of right. You got it right. When we were, we were talking about this, Hey, if this goes the way we think it's gonna go, the automation layer is gonna be horizontally scaled with the cloud. So income, cloud, growth, lift and shift. Now I got some refactored applications in the cloud and I got on premises edge coming hybrid steady state. What does automation look like? You had said it's gonna scale. Yep. And so as clients realize, well this is was the kind of a group within the group doing some automation stuff with Ansible, all great stuff, Product leadership, great community check, check, check. Now, how do you make that a global architecture for a company? What, what's it take to make that an enterprise scale architecture? What's the next step for the, for the journey and, and for the community and the customers? >>So one of the major announcements today is actually one of the right steps in the right direction, which is now that you can deploy a on all of your hyperscalers, right? So you have it local, you're covering your private cloud area, now you're able to cover your hyperscalers. Now it's time to unite them together so that they can all kind of work as one function. And to me, that is the enterprise approach that that to aap. And I'm just so excited that we finally have rolled it out for aws. We have it for Azure, of course we have it inside. And we're also working on things like you said, like the edge, but also things like making sure we're covering customers that are air gaped customers that do not have the capability of the ingress in, in, in, in being, of being able to go in and out of that environment and that network. Right. We're working on strategic, strategic solutions to be able to do that better >>For what's interesting, we've been talking about super cloud on the cube. I, we coined that term at reinvent about people using cloud in a different way to kind of do things and it's become kind of also a, a term for multi-cloud. Yes. So if you think about what you just said, it's interesting, this cloud services that could, they all have stores, they have compute, There might be a day where they're all kind of invisible. Yes. And you can have spanning services across the cloud, but yet they can still differentiate on their own. So it's not so much about sneakers, it's more about that interoperability. How do you see that? What's your reaction to that? Right. >>Well, that's one of the core reasons why we move to the name of the answ automation platform. Platform being the key right? Is, is the platform is supposed to be able to span into different environments and really kind of unite them together. And that was one of the the things that I really liked about when we went to that late last year. Yeah. Late last year. And, and we've been working with our customers and make sure that we make that front and center, that they move towards that environment so that they can begin to do better scale and really operate at that, at that executive level. >>What's your favorite customer story that you think really articulates the value of what you just said? >>Right. So the one, so I'll give you a different one from the one that I, that I talked about on stage. And, and again, it it, when we went in from a services engagement, we did not expect the outcome of the fact that they would access this particular customer. We went in something very tactical, just laying down the platform for them. And, and the expectation was we would lay it down and walk away and then hopefully they would pick it up and kind of run with it. What we came to realize is that they liked the oversight and they liked the way that we were working with them. And they wanted to take those preferred approaches and really embed them Right. And their organization. And so they invited us back actually for two or three different consulting engagements to come back and just help them drive that adoption. And this is at the, they're at the very beginning, right? So they're doing it a little bit different in a lot of other organizations. The other organizations would lay down the platform, do some things, and then call us back to help them them with adoption, Right. >>Is the report card out? Yeah, >>Absolutely. They did it differently. And, and that to me stood out as the level of maturity their IT organization is. >>It sounds like they went from tactical to strategic Yes. Pretty quickly. Which is not normally the >>Case. No, no, not at all. Not normally the case. But as you can clearly see that, we're starting to see that more and more with our customers. They're upleveling, I hate for the theme, but they're upleveling. Right. And, and, and that's what I meant by my organization, my team that I, that I run, we have to do more with our customers because they're expecting more >>For them to level up. And I loved how that was used this morning. I'm like, Yeah, that's a cool term. Level up. We all gotta level up to some degree. How are you helping organizations do that from a cultural shift perspective? Because of course the people are so integral to this being successful. Can't forget >>That. Absolutely. So, you know, you know, remember the days of when you would have the DevOps team and that was like the thing, like you have to form your DevOps team and once you got that, you're good to go. And, and I always tell our customers that's a good start, but that's definitely not where you want to end. And you have to get to the point where you have all parts of your organization writing automation content, feeling comfortable, being able to kind of control their day to day. And so that's where you have to break down those silos. You have to really have those, you know, your operators and your developers and, and your DBAs and your networking folks really communicating. And, and if everyone kind of takes care of their own world and write content to control what they do on a day to day, they can bring those together. >>Walter, on buzzword it's been kicking around Silicon Valley in the tech industry re recently is multiplayer versus single player software. Yes. And I I heard that must be from gamers obviously. Yes. Discourse pop. I heard that on, stayed here in the matrix announcement earlier. You know, when you talk about teamwork ops devs while working together, clearly the operator role is changing. What that means is changing devs are getting stronger and more open source, they're shifting left and all that good stuff in the, in the CID pipeline as the teams work together, multiplayer in an organization. What's the success form of that you see emerging for how to organize, how to motivate, how to get people kind of in a good, you know, teamwork pass score kind of team oriented approach? >>Well, I'm really proud to talk about is how AAP has really enabled that and, and kind of fast tracks that ability for everyone to work together within a, the all the functionality that's now built into it. There's pieces of it that are focused on different operators or different parts of the IT organization, right. And, and, and we're made to be able to help to bring them all together. You know, I love the components such as the service catalog. You know, imagine being able to have a place where you can publish all of your, your content for other people to consume. You know, back in the day everything was stored in, in a repository, right? And you had to know what you were looking for. And so just small changes like that, having the, the, the Ansible toy, right? So you're having tools that are actually built in for those who are writing the content to be able to have at their fingertips the ability to test their content right from inside of the, the, the toy, right? So the terminal interface, just those small little nuances to me is what helps to bring it all together and kind of create that >>Great leverage glue. Yes. Not a lot of busy work and you know, absolutely. Hunting and packing for stuff like configuring manually. >>Absolutely. >>Awesome. What's next for you guys? >>Well, you know, we have some big announcements coming up tomorrow. I won't, I won't get into as much as I want to talk about >>It. Events. Yeah, >>Yeah, yeah. Something starts with the e but also some really fantastic technology. We're, what we're doing is, is we're really taking the idea of automation and really feeding into it in a sense that we're building into some mar some, some really smart technology into aap. And I'm, I'm, I'm excited, I'm excited for direction it's going and I know everyone tomorrow are gonna really, really hear some great >>Things. We heard upleveling, we heard upleveling culture shift. If I asked you what does culture shift mean, how would you answer that? >>I would answer that in a sense that it, it, the culture shift is, is shifting from the place where you feel that you're on an island and you have to solve for it alone as well as feeling that you have to solve for the whole ribbon of whatever you're working on. And that culture shift is moving from that mentality to the fact that you have a whole team of folks who may know how to solve for that already. And you feel comfortable being able to reach out to them and work with them to be able to build that. And that's, that to me is the change. You know, I'm, I'm a old school infrastructure dude, you know, I was the one who would, who would wake up two o'clock in the morning to fix a problem, right? I thought it was on me, but now the culture shift is now it's, we are a team and we're gonna work together to solve it. So that's, that's kind of my view on >>It. And the appetite in organizations is there, cuz oftentimes in the, in the siloed world, it's, I own this, this is my baby. Right? Right. How do you help them as a, as a trusted advisor to really open up the kimono and embrace that collaboration? Because ultimately that's the right strategic direction for the business, >>Right? The first step in that is making sure that everyone is kind of operating from the same book, right. Or the same plan. And, and until you actually write that plan down and publish it in a place for other people to consume it, it creates a little bit of a barrier, right? So that's the first thing we do is write down that plan, make it available for all the consume. And at the beginning, you know, not everyone runs to it, but over time if their curiosity begins to peak and then over time they begin to consume it and possibly contribute to it themselves over time, that's, that's how we kind of conquer that. And so far we've seen some good success. >>What would you say if someone said, you know, I want some proof, proof in the pudding proven methods to help accelerate the time to value with automation and help organizations to really understand and quantify the ROI for doing so. >>Right. And, and to me that's, this is the conversation I love having because we've, we've come out with something that we call success metrics and, and yes, they are exactly what they sound like, right? There are some metrics that you can use to measure in your organization to kind of determine your maturity around automation. The two key things that I would love to share about that is that when we think of metrics, right? We think of performance, we think of, you know, how well something is running, how long it's been running. Those are all great, but the two additional success metrics that we include in there are around more of the cultural field. The perception, right? The perception as well as how comfortable your employees feel using that product. And that's where that, that the shift of looking at the cultural, not just the technical side, but the cultural side of things has made a big difference. So I love sharing those metrics with our customers. It usually resonates and then we help them dig in on, to see how they, how they fit, and also give them some ideas as to how they can improve going forward. >>I'm sure they appreciate that knowing where that, where we are now, how do we get to the end, not the end state. Obviously it's a journey, but how do we get farther along in this from a unified front approach rather than absolutely operating in these silos, which is not gonna get us to the, the the on the journey that we should be on. Correct. Yeah. Yep. So some good stuff coming out tomorrow. Not gonna give us any nuggets, which totally understands. Nope. >>No, but it's, you're gonna be very excited. Yes. It's good stuff. >>Awesome. I gotta ask you one quick question before we wrap up. You mentioned multi-cloud earlier. This is a big conversation in the industry. A lot of people are debating what that is. It sounds good on paper. Where is the customer's view as they look at this journey? Because we, we see a future where there'll be services that won't be common across clouds. There's a differentiation and some that will be, and that, that just be shared like compute for instance. And let, let us be there where you can call in to the multi-cloud. What's, how do you, how do your customers think about multi-cloud? Are they having that conversation more they go, Is that more of a destination of the future? In their mind >>It feels more like a destination of the future. Right now, a lot of organizations have kind of solidified on one cloud per se that they want to be able to roll out as far as being able to scale up and down their resources. But the idea is, is eventually, you know, you, you're gonna go with whatever works best for that product or whatever works best for that, that business case that you're trying to solve for. And, and that's why I love the fact that AEP is kind of generically being able to be applied across all of them. So that, that is, that is gonna be your unifier, right? That's gonna be the layer that will stay the same no matter where you go. And that's one of the things that I love about our product around that is that, that we are meant to be the unifier and we're >>Bless the whole today. It's a great opportunity for Ansible that's there. All >>Right. To be the unifier. Last question for you before we wrap. What was some of the feedback about, from your session this morning on Ansible really being that unifier? Any, any folks come up to you and say anything that was particularly insightful? >>Well, you know what, it it, what was kind of alluded to or shared with me directly was the fact that, you know, thinking about automation as you would traditional platforms, right? And, and building a strategy and, and the idea that you need to write that down and actually make some decisions around that. And, and it wasn't that it wasn't thought about it, it was just, it just never came front to mind. And, and so I'm happy that I was able to plant that seed because that, that's what we're seeing that makes the difference between those who are very successful with automation and those, those who may >>Not be writing it down. Sometimes it's fact to basics that back to basics really help absolutely fuel the growth of organizations. Walter, thank you. Thanks for joining John and me on the queue today talking about what's going on, automation as a strategy, the vision and how Ansible is really on its way to becoming that unifier. We appreciate your insights. Cool. >>No, it's my pleasure. And thank you for having me again. All >>Right, cool. Our pleasure for Walter Bentley and John Furrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube Live from Chicago. Day one of our coverage of Ansible Fest 2022 continues next.

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Ansible Fest 2020 brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, Cube virtual's coverage of Ansible Fest 2020 virtual. We're not face to face this year. I'm your host John Furrier with theCube. We're virtual, this theCube virtual and we're doing our part, getting the remote interviews with all the best thought leaders experts and of course the Red Hat experts. We've got Walter Bentley, Senior Manager of Automation practice with Red Hat and Jason Smith, Vice President of North American services, back on theCube. We were in Atlanta last year in person. Guys, thanks for coming on virtually. Good morning to you. Thanks for coming on. >> Good morning John. Good morning, good morning. >> So since Ansible Fest last year a lot's happened where she's living in seems to be an unbelievable 2020. Depending on who you talk to it's been the craziest year of all time. Fires in California, crazy presidential election, COVID whole nine yards, but the scale of Cloud has just unbelievably moved some faster. I was commenting with some of your colleagues around the snowflake IBO it's built on Amazon, right? So value is changed, people are shifting, you starting to clear visibility on what these modern apps are looking like, it's Cloud native, it's legacy integrations, it's beyond lift and shift as we've been seeing in the business. So I'd love to get, Jason we'll start with you, your key points you would like people to know about Ansible Fest 2020 this year because there's a lot going on this year because there's a lot to build on and there's a tailwind for Cloud native and customers have to move fast. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah so, a lot has happened since last year and customers are looking to be a lot more selective around their automation technologies. So they're not just looking for another tool. They're really looking for an automation platform, a platform that they can leverage more of an enterprise strategy and really be able to make sure that they have something that's secure, scalable, and they can use across the enterprise to be able to bring teams together and really drive value and productivity out of their automation platform. >> What's the key points in the customers and our audience around the conversations around the learning, that's the new stuff happening in using Ansible this year? What are the key top things, Jason? Can you comment on what you're seeing the big takeaway for our audience watching? >> Yeah, so a lots change like you said, since last year. We worked with a lot of customers around the world to implement Ansible and automation at scale. So we're using our automation journeys as we talked about last year and really helping customers lay out a more prescriptive approach on how they're going to deliver automation across their enterprise. So customers are really working with us because we're working with the largest customers in the world to implement their strategies. And when we work with new customers we can bring those learnings and that experience to them. So they're not having to learn that for the first time and figure it out on their own, but they're really able to learn and leverage the experience we have through hundreds of customers and at enterprise scale and can take the value that we can bring in and help them through those types of projects much more quickly than they could on their own. >> It's interesting. We were looking at the research numbers and look at the adoption of what Ansible's doing and you guys are with Red Hat it's pretty strong. Could you share on the services side because there's a lot of services going on here? Not just network services and software services, just traditional services. What are the one or two reasons why customer engaged with Red Hat services? What would that be? >> Yeah so, like I said, I mean, we bring that experience. So customers that typically might have to spend weeks troubleshooting and making decisions on how they're going to deliver their implementations, they can work with us and we can bring those best practices in and allow them to make those decisions and implement those best practices within hours instead of weeks, and really be able to accelerate their projects. Another thing is we're a services company as part of a product company. So we're not there just to deliver services. We're really focused on the success of the customer, leveraging our technologies. So we're there to really train and mentor them through the process so that they're really getting up to speed quickly. They're taking advantage of all of the expertise that we have to be able to build their own experience and expertise. So they can really take over once we're gone and be able to support and advance that technology on their own. So they're really looking to us to not only implement those technologies for them, but really with them and be able to train and mentor them. Like I said, and take advantage of those learnings. We also help them. We don't just focus on the technologies but really look at the people in process side of things. So we're bringing in a lot of principles from DevOps and Agile on open practices and helping customers really transform and be able to do things in a new way, to be much more efficient, a lot more agile, be able to drive a lot more value out of our technology. >> Walter, I got to ask you, last year we were chatting about this, but I want to get the update. And I'd like you to just give us a quick refresh definition about the automation adoption journey because this is a real big deal. I mean, we're looking at the trends. Everyone realizes automation is super important at scale, as you think about whether it's software data, anything's about automation it's super important, but it's hard. I mean, the marketplace we were looking at the numbers. I was talking to IDC for you guys at this festival and of Ansible Fest, and they said about five to 10% of enterprises are containerized, which means this huge wave coming of containerization. This is about the automation adoption journey because you start containerizing, (laughs) right? You start looking at the workflows on the pipelinig and how the codes being released and everything. This is important stuff. Give us the update on the automation adoption journey and where it is in the portfolio. >> Well, yeah, just as you called it out, last year on main stage and Ansible fest, almost every customer expressed the need and desire to have to have a strategy as to how they drive their adoption of automation inside their enterprise. And as we've gone over the past few months of splitting this in place with many customers, what we've learned is that many customers have matured into a place where they are now looking at the end to end workflow. Instead of just looking at the tactical thing that they want to automate, they are actually looking at the full ribbon, the full workflow and determining are there changes that need to be made and adjusted to be more efficient when it comes to dealing with automation. And then the other piece as we alluded to already is the contagious nature of that adoption. We're finding that there are organizations that are picking up the automation adoption journey, and because of the momentum it creates inside of that organization we're finding other municipalities that are associated with them are now also looking to be able to take on the journey because of that contagious nature. So we can see that how it's spreading in a positive way. And we're really looking forward to being able to do more of it as the next quarter and the next year comes up. >> Yeah, and that whole sharing thing is a big part of the content theme and the community thing. So great reference on that, good thing is word of mouth and community and collaboration is a good call out there. A quick question for you, you guys recently had a big win with NTT DoCoMo and their engagement with you guys on the automation, adoption journey. Walter, what were some of the key takeaways? Jason you can chime in too I'd like to get some specifics around where it's been successful >> To me, that customer experience was one that really was really exciting, primarily because we learned very early on that they were completely embodying that open source culture and they were very excited to jump right in and even went about creating their own community of practice. We call them communities of practice. You may know them as centers of excellence. They wanted to create that very early in increment, way before we were even ready to introduce it. And that's primarily because they saw how being able to have that community of practice in place created an environment of inclusion across the organization. They had legacy tools in place already, actually, there was a home grown legacy tool in place. And they very quickly realized that it didn't need to remove that tool, they just needed to figure out a way of being able to how to optimize and streamline how they leverage it and also be able to integrate it into the Ansible automation platform. Another thing I wanted to very quickly note is that they very quickly jumped onto the idea of being able to take those large workflows that they had and breaking them up into smaller chunks. And as you already know, from last year when we spoke about it, that's a pivotal part of what the automation adoption journey brings to our organization. So to sum it all up, they were all in, automation first mindset is what that was driving them. And all of those personas, all of those personal and cultural behaviors are what really helped drive that engagement to be very successful. >> Jason, we'll get your thoughts on this because again, Walter brought up last year's reference to breaking things up into modules. We look at this year's key news it's all about collections. You're seeing content is a big focus, content being not like a blog post or a media asset. Like this is content, but code is content. It's sharing. If it's being consumed by other people, there's now community. You're seeing the steam of enabling. I mean, you're looking at successes, like you guys are having with NTT DoCoMo and others. Once people realize there's a better way and success is contagious, as Walter was saying, you are now enabling new ways to do things faster at scale and all that good stuff has been go check out the keynotes. You guys talk about it all day long with the execs. But I want to learn, right? So when you enable success, people want to be a part of it. And I could imagine there's a thirst and demand for training and the playbooks and all the business models, innovations that's going on. What are you seeing for people that want to learn? Is there training? Is there certifications? Because once you get the magic formula as Walter pointed out, and we all know once people see what success looks like, they're going to want to duplicate it. So as this wave comes, it's like having the new surfboard. I want to surf that wave. So what's the update on Ansible's training, the tools, how do I learn, it's a certification of all. Just take a minute to explain what's going on. >> Yeah, so it's been a crazy world as we've talked about over the last six, seven months here, and we've really had to adapt ourselves and our training and consulting offerings to be able to support our remote delivery models. So we very, very quickly back in the March timeframe, we're able to move our consultants to a remote work force and really implement the tools and technologies to be able to still provide the same value to customers remotely as we have in person historically. And so it's actually been really great. We've been able to make a really seamless transition and actually our C-SAT net promoter scores have actually gone up over the last six months or so. So I think we've done a great job being able to still offer the same consulting capabilities remotely as we have onsite. And so that's obviously with a real personal touch working hand in hand with our customers to deliver these solutions. But from a training perspective, we've actually had to do the same thing because customers aren't onsite, they can't do in person training. We've been able to move our training offerings to completely virtual. So we're continuing to train our customers on Ansible and our other technologies through a virtual modality. And we've also been able to take all of our certifications and now offer those remotely. So as, whereas customers historically, would have had to gone into a center and get those certifications in person, they can now do those certifications remotely. So all of our training offerings and consulting offerings are now available remotely as well as they were in person in the past and will be hopefully soon enough, but it's really not-- >> You would adopt to virtual. >> Excuse me. >> You had to adopt to the virtual model quickly for trainings. >> Exactly. >> What about the community role? What's the role of the community? You guys have a very strong community. Walter pointed out the sharing aspect. Well, I pointed out he talked about the contagious people are talking. You guys have a very robust community. What's the role of community in all of this? >> Yeah, so as Walter said, we have our communities a practice that we use internally we work with customers to build communities of practice, which are very much like a centers of excellence, where people can really come together and share ideas and share best practices and be able to then leverage them more broadly. So, whereas in the past knowledge was really kept in silos, we're really helping customers to build those communities and leverage those communities to share ideas and be able to leverage the best practices that are being adopted more broadly. >> That's awesome. Yeah, break down those silos of course. Open up the data, good things will happen, a thousand flowers bloom, as we always say. Walter, I want to get your thoughts on this collection, what that enables back to learning and integrations. So if collections are going to be more pervasive and more common place the ability to integrate, we were covering for VMware world, there's a VMware module collection, I should say. What are customers doing when you integrate in cross technology parties because now obviously customers are going to have a lot of choice and options. If I'm an integration partner, it's all about Cloud native and the kinds of things we're talking about, you're going to have a lot of integration touch points. What's the most effective way for customers integrating other technology partners into Ansible? >> And this is one of the major benefits that came out of the announcement last year with the Ansible automation platform. The Anible automation platform really enables our customers to not just be able to do automation, but also be able to connect the dots or be able to connect other tools, such as other ITM SM tools or be able to connect into other parts of their workflows. And what we're finding in breaking down really quickly is two things. Collections obviously, is a huge aspect. And not just necessarily the collections but the automation service catalog is really where the value is because that's where we're placing all of these certified collections and certified content that's certified by Red Hat now that we create alongside with these vendors and they're unavailable to customers who are consuming the automation platform. And then the other component is the fact that we're now moved into a place where we now have something called the automation hub. which is very similar to galaxy, which is the online version of it. But the automation hub now is a focus area that's dedicated to a customer, where they can store their content and store those collections, not just the ones that they pull down that are certified by Red hat, but the ones that they create themselves. And the availability of this tool, not only just as a SaaS product, but now being able to have a local copy of it, which is brand new out of the press, out of the truck, feature is huge. That's something that customers have been asking for a very long time and I'm very happy that we're finally able to supply it. >> Okay, so backup for a second, rewind, fell off the truck. What does that mean? It's downloadable. You're saying that the automation hub is available locally. Is that what-- >> Yes, Sir. >> So what does that mean for the customer? What's the impact for them? >> So what that means is that previously, customers would have to connect into the internet. And the automation hub was a SaaS product, meaning it was available via the internet. You can go there, you can sync up and pull down content. And some customers prefer to have it in house. They prefer to have it inside of their firewall, within their control, not accessible through the internet. And that's just their preferences obviously for sometimes it's for compliance or business risk reasons. And now, because of that, we were able to meet that ask and be able to make a local version of it. Whereas you can actually have automation hub locally your environment, you can still sync up data that's out on the SaaS version of automation hub, but be able to bring it down locally and have it available with inside of your firewall, as well as be able to add your content and collections that you create internally to it as well. So it creates a centralized place for you to store all of your automation goodness. >> Jason, I know you got a hard stop and I want to get to you on the IBM question. Have you guys started any joint service engages with IBM? >> Yeah, so we've been delivering a lot of engagements jointly through IBM. We have a lot of joint customers and they're really looking for us to bring the best of both Red Hat services, Red Hat products, and IBM all together to deliver joint solutions. We've actually also worked with IBM global technology services to integrate Ansible into their service offerings. So they're now really leveraging the power of Ansible to drive lower cost and more innovation with our customers and our joint customers. >> I think that's going to be a nice lift for you guys. We'll get into the IBM machinery. I mean, you guys got a great offering, you always had great reviews, great community. I mean, IBM's is just going to be moving this pretty quickly through the system, I can imagine. What's some of the the feedback so far? >> Yeah, it's been great. I mean, we have so many, a large joint customers and they're helping us to get to a lot of customers that we were never able to reach before with their scale around the world. So it's been great to be able to leverage the IBM scale with the great products and services that Red Hat offers to really be able to take that more broadly and continue to drive that across customers in an accelerated pace. >> Well, Jason, I know you've got to go. We're going to stay with Walter while you drop off, but I want to ask you one final question. For the folks watching or asynchronously coming in and out of Ansible Fest 2020 this year. What is the big takeaway that you'd like to share? What is the most important thing people should pay attention to? Well, a couple things it don't have to be one thing, do top three things. what should people be paying attention to this year? And what's the most important stories that you should highlight? >> Yeah, I think there's a lot going on, this technology is moving very quickly. So I think there's a lot of great stories. I definitely take advantage of the customer use cases and hearing how other customers are leveraging Ansible for automation. And again really looking to not use it just as a tool, but really in an enterprise strategy that can really change their business and really drive cost down and increase revenues by leveraging the innovation that Ansible and automation provides. >> Jason, thank you for taking the time. Great insight. Really appreciate the commentary and hopefully we'll see you next year in person Walter. (all talking simultaneously) Walter, let's get back to you. I want to get into this use case and some of the customer feedback, love the stories. And we look, we'd love to get the new data, we'd love to hear about the new products, but again, success is contagious, you mentioned that I want to hear the use cases. So a lot of people have their ear to the ground, they look up the virtual environments, they're learning through new ways, they're looking for signals of success. So I got to ask you what are the things that you're hearing over and over again, as you guys are spinning up engagements? What are some of the patterns that are emerging that are becoming a trend in terms of what customers are consistently doing to overcome some of their challenges around automation? >> Okay, absolutely. So what we're finding is that over time that customers are raising the bar on us. And what I mean by that is that their expectations out of being able to take on tools now has completely changed and specifically when we're talking around automation. Our customers are now leading with the questions of trying to find out, well, how do we reduce our operational costs with this automation tool? Are we able to increase revenue? Are we able to really truly drive productivity and efficiency within our organization by leveraging it? And then they dovetail into, "Well, are we able to mitigate business risk, "even associated with leveraging this automation tool?" So as I mentioned, customers are up leveling what their expectations are out of the automation tools. And what I feel very confident about is that with the launch of the Ansible automation platform we're really able to be able to deliver and show our customers how they're able to get a return on their investment, how by taking part and looking at re-working their workflows how we're able to bring productivity, drive that efficiency. And by leveraging it to be able to mitigate risks you do get the benefits that they're looking for. And so that's something that I'm very happy that we were able to rise to the occasion and so far so good. >> Last year I was very motivated and very inspired by the Ansible vision and content product progress. Just the overall vibe was good, community of the product it's always been solid, but one of the things that's happening I want to get your commentary and reaction to this is that, and we've been riffing on this on theCube and inside the community is certainly automation, no brainer, machine learning automation, I mean, you can't go wrong. Who doesn't want automation? That's like saying, "I want to watch more football "and have good food and good wifi. I mean, it's good things, right? Automation is a good thing. So get that. But the business model issues you brought up ROI from the top of the ivory tower and these companies, certainly with COVID, we need to make money and have modern apps. And if you try to make that sound simple, right? X as a service, SaaS everything is a service. That's easy to say, "Hey, Walter, make everything as a service." "Got it, boss." Well, what the hell do you do? I mean, how do you make that happen? You got Amazon, you got Multicloud, you got legacy apps. You're talking about going in and re-architecting the application development process. So you need automation for the business model of everything as a service. What's your reaction to that? Because it's very complicated. It's doable. People are getting there but the Nirvana is, everything is a service. This is a huge conversation. I mean, it's really big, but what's your reaction to that when I bring that up. >> Right. And you're right, it is a huge undertaking. And you would think that with the delivery of COVID into our worlds that many organizations would probably shy away from making changes. Actually, they're doing the opposite. Like you mentioned, they're running towards automation and trying to figure out how do they optimize and be able to scale, based on this new demand that they're having, specifically new virtual demand. I'm happy you mentioned that we actually added something to the automation adoption journey to be able to combat or be able to solve for that change. And being able to take on that large ask of everything as a service, so to speak. And increment zero at the very beginning of the automation adoption journey we added something called navigate. And what navigate is, is it's a framework where we would come in and not just evaluate what they want to automate and bring that into a new workflow, but we evaluate what they already have in place, what automation they have in place, as well as the manual tasks and we go through, and we try to figure out how do you take that very complex, large thing and stream it down into something that can be first off determined as a service and made available for your organization to consume, and as well as be able to drive the business risks or be able to drive your business objectives forward. And so that exercise that we're now stepping our customers through makes a huge difference and puts it all out in front of you so that you can make decisions and decide which way you want to go taking one step at a time. >> And you know it's interesting, great insight, great comment. I think this is really where the dots are going to connect over the next few years. Everything is as a service. You got to lay the foundation. But if you really want to get this done I got to ask you the question around Ansible's ability to integrate and implement with other products. So could you give an examples of how Ansible has integrated and implemented with other Red Hat products or other types of technology vendors products? >> Right. So one example that always pops to the top of my head and I have to give a lot of credit to one of my managing architects who was leading this effort. Was the simple fact that you when you think about a mainframe, right? So now IBM is our new family member. When you think about mainframes, you think about IBM and it just so happens that there's a huge ask and demand and push around being able to automate ZOS mainframe. And IBM had already embarked on the path of determining, well, can this be done with Ansible? And as I mentioned before, my managing architect partnered up with the folks on IBM's side, so the we're bringing in Red Hat consulting, and now we have IBM and we're working together to move that idea forward of saying, "Hey, you can automate things with the mainframe." So think about it. We're in 2020 now in the midst of a new normal. And now we're thinking about and talking about automating mainframes. So that just shows how things have evolved in such a great way. And I think that that story is a very interesting one. >> It's so funny the evolution. I'm old enough to remember. I came out of college in the 80s and I would look at the old mainframe guys who were like "You guys are going to be dinosaurs." They're still around. I mean, some of the banking apps, I mean some of them are not multi threaded and all the good stuff, but they are powering, they are managing a workload, but this is the beautiful thing about Cloud. And some of the Cloud activities is that you can essentially integrate, you don't have to replace the old to bring in the new. This has been a common pattern. This is where containers, microservices, and Cloud has been a dream state because you can essentially re layer and glue it together. This is a big deal. What's your reaction to that? >> No, it's a huge deal. And the reality is, is that we need all of it. We need the legacy behaviors around infrastructure. So we need the mainframe still because they has a distinct purpose. And like you mentioned, a lot of our FSI customers that is the core of where a lot of their data and performance comes out of. And so it's not definitely not a pull out and replace. It's more of how they integrate and how can you streamline them working together to create your end to end workflow. And as you mentioned, making it available to your organizations to consume as a service. So definitely a fan of being able to integrate and add to and everything has a purpose. Is what we're coming to learn. >> Agility, the modern application, horizontal scalability, Cloud is the new data center. Walter great insights, always great to chat with you. You always got some good commentary. I want to ask you one final question. I asked Jason before he dropped off. Jason Smith, who was our guest here and hit a hard stop. What is the most important story that people should pay attention to this year at Ansible Fest? Remember it's virtual, so there's going to be a lot of content around there, people are busy, it's asynchronous consumption. What should they pay attention to from a content standpoint, maybe some community sizes or a discord group? I mean, what should people look at in this year? What should they walk away with as a key message? Take a minute to share your thoughts. >> Absolutely. Absolutely key messages is that, kind of similar to the message that we have when it comes down to the other circumstances going on in the world right now, is that we're all in this together. As an Ansible community, we need to work together, come together to be able to share what we're doing and break down those silos. So that's the overall theme. I believe we're doing that with the new. So definitely pay attention to the new features that are coming out with the Ansible automation platform. I alluded to the on-prem automation hub, that's huge. Definitely pay attention to the new content that is being released in the service catalog. There's tons of new content that focus on the ITSM and a tool. So being able to integrate and leverage those tools then the easier math model, there's a bunch of network automation advances that have been made, so definitely pay attention to that. And the last teaser, and I won't go into too much of it, 'cause I don't want to steal the thunder. But there is some distinct integrations that are going to go on with OpenShift around containers and the SQL automation platform that you definitely are going to want to pay attention to. If anyone is running OCP in their environment they definitely going to want to pay attention to this. Cause it's going to be huge. >> Private cloud is back, OpenStack is back, OCP. You got OpenShift has done really well. I mean, again, Cloud has been just a great enabler and bringing all this together for developers and certainly creating more glue, more abstractions, more automation, infrastructure is code is here. We're excited for it Walter, great insight. Great conversation. Thank you for sharing. >> No, it's my pleasure. And thank you for having me. >> I'm John Furrier with theCube, your host for theCube virtual's, part of Ansible Fest, virtual 2020 coverage. Thanks for watching. (gentle upbeat music)

>>live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the Q covering Answerable Fest 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. >>Hey, welcome back, everyone. It's the cubes. Live coverage here in Atlanta, Georgia, for answerable fast. Part of redheads. Big news. Ansel Automation Platform was announced. Among other things, they're great products. I'm John for ear, with my coast to minimum, but two great guests. You unpack all the automation platform features and benefits. Walter Bentley, senior manager. Automation Practicing red hat and vj Job Olu, director of Red Hat Consulting Guys Thanks for coming on. Thanks. So the activity is high. The buzz this year seems to be at an inflection point as this category really aperture grows big time seeing automation, touching a lot of things. Standardization. We heard glue layer standard substrate. This is what answer is becoming so lots of service opportunity, lot of happy customers, a lot of customers taking it to the next level. And a lot of customers trying to consolidate figure out hadn't make answerable kind of a standard of other couples coming in. You guys on the front lines doing this. What's the buzz? What's the main store? What's the top story going on around the service is how to deploy this. What are you guys seeing? >>So I think what we're seeing now is customers. Reactor building automation. For a long time, I have been looking at it at a very tactical level, which is very department very focused on silo. Whether country realizes with this modern develops and the change in how they actually go to the market, they need to bring the different teams together. So they're actually looking at watching my enterprise automation strategy be how to actually take what I've learned in one organization. And I still roll it across the enterprise so that now struggling and figuring out how to be scared, what we have, how do we change the culture of the organization to collaborate a lot more and actually drive automation across enterprise? >>Walter One of the things we've been we've talked about all the time in the Cube, and it's become kind of cliche. Digital transformation. Okay, I heard that before, and three things people process, technology, process and capability you guys have done You mentioned the siloed having capabilities that's been there. Check was done very, very well as a product technology Red hat in the portfolio. Great synergies. We talked about rail integration, all the benefits there. But the interesting thing this year that I've noticed is the people side of the equation is interesting. The people are engaged, is changing their role because automation inherently changes there, function in the organization because it takes away probably the mundane tasks. This is a big part of the equation. You guys air hitting that mark. How do you How are you guys seeing that? How you accelerating that has that changing your job, >>right? So customers are now economy realizing that going after automation in a very tactical manner is not exactly getting them what they want as a far as a return on investment in the automation. And what they're realizing is that they need to do more. And they're coming to us and more of an enterprise architectural level and say we want to talk mortgage grander strategy. And what they're coming to realize is that having just one small team of people that were calling the Dev Ops team is not gonna be ableto drive that adoption across the organization. So what we're trying to do is work with customers to show them how they collaboration in the culture of peace is huge. It's a huge part of adopting automation. Answerable is no longer considered a emerging tech anymore. And and I when I say that, I mean a lot of organizations are using answerable in many different ways. They're past that point, and now they're moving on to the next part, which is what is our holistic strategy and how we're gonna approach automation. And And we wanted leverage danceable, unanswerable tower to do that. >>Does that change how you guys do your roll out your practices in some of your programs? >>Well, we did have to make some adjustments in the sense of recognizing that the cultural piece is a pivotal part of it, and we can go in and we can write playbooks and rolls, and we can do all those things really great. But now we need to go in and help them structure themselves in a way where they can foster that collaboration and keep a moment. >>And I'll actually add on to that so reactive, large, open innovation labs three years ago, and what we have to learn doing that is using labs and allows practices to actually help customers embrace new culture and change. How they actually operate has actually helped us take those practices and bring it into our programs and kind of drive that to our customers. So we actually run our automation adoption program and the journey for customers through those practices that we actually learned in open innovation loves like open practice, library, even storming priority sliders and all of those modern techniques. So the goal is to help our customers understand those practices and actually embrace them and bring them into the organization to drive the change that that's looking for within the organization. >>A. J. Is there anything particular for those adoption practices when you're talking about Cloud? Because the communication amongst teams silos, you know, making things simpler is something that we absolutely do need for cloud. So I'm just curious how you connect kind of the cloud journey with the automation journey. >>So all of the journey program that actually created, whether it's a contender adoption program or the automation adoption program, we actually followed the same practices. So whether you're actually focused on a specific automation to, like, answerable or actually embarking on hybrid multicolored journey. We actually use the same practices so the customers don't have toe learn new things every time you have to go from one product, one of the so that actually brings a consistent experience to customers in driving change within the organization. So let's picture whether it is focusing automation focused on cloud migrating to the cloud. The practices remained the same, and the focus is about not trying to boil the ocean on day one. Try to break it into manageable chunks that give it a gun back to the business quickly learned from the mistakes that you make in each of the way and actually build upon it and actually be successful. >>So, Walter, I always love when we get to talk to the people that are working straight with customers because you come here to the conference, it's like, Oh, it's really easy Get started. It doesn't matter what role or what team you're in. Everybody could be part of it. But when you get to the actual customers, they're stumbling blocks. You know what are some of those things? What are some of the key things that stop people from taking advantage of all the wonderful things that all the users here are doing >>well. One of the things that I've identified and we've identified as a team is a lot of organizations always want to blow the ocean. And when and when it comes down to automation, they feel that if they are not doing this grand transformation and doing this this huge project, then they're not doing automation. And the reality is is that we're Trent with showing them that you can break things up into smaller chunks, as Visi alluded to. And even if you fail, you fail fast and you can start over again because you're dealing with things in a smaller chunk. And we've also noticed that by doing that, we're able to show them to return on investment faster so they can show their leadership, and their leadership can stand behind that and want to doom. Or so that's one of the areas. And then I kind of alluded to the other area, which is you have to have everybody involved. You want just subject matter experts riding content to do the automation. You don't want that just being one silo team. You want to have everybody involved and collaborate as much as possible. >>Maybe can you give us an example? Is about the r A y How fast to people get the results and, you know, prove toe scale this out. >>So with the automation adoption journey, what we're able to do is is that we come in and sit down with our customers and walk them through how to properly document their use cases. What the dependencies, What integration points, possibly even determining what is that? All right, ranking for that use case. And then we move them very quickly in the next increment. And in the next increment, we actually step them through, taking those use cases, breaking them down into minimum viable products and then actually putting those in place. So within a 90 day or maybe a little bit more than a little bit more than the 90 day window, were able to show the customer in many different parts of the organization how they're able to take advantage of automation and how the return on investment with hopes of obviously reducing either man hours or being able to handle something that is no a mundane task that you had to do manually over and over again. >>What are some of the things that people get confused about when they look at the breath of what's going on with the automation platform? When I see tool to platform, transitions are natural. We've seen that many times in the industry that you guys have had product success, got great community, that customers, they're active. And now you've got an ecosystem developing so kind of things air popping on all cylinders here. >>So the biggest challenge that we're actually being seeing customers is they actually now come to realize that it's very difficult to change the culture of the organization right there, actually embarking on this journey and the biggest confusion that is, how do we actually go make those changes? How do we bring some of the open practice some of the open source collaboration that Riddle had into the organization so they actually can operate in a more open source, collaborative way, and what we have actually learned is we actually have what we call its communities of practice within Red Hack. It is actually community off consultants, engineers and business owners. The actual collaborate and work together on offering the solutions to the market. So we're taking those experiences back to our customers and enabling them to create those communities of practice and automation community that everybody can be a part off. They can share experiences and actually learn from each other much easier than kind of being a fly on the wall or kind of throwing something or defense to see what sticks and what does not. >>What's interesting about the boiling the ocean comment you mentioned Walter and B J is your point. There is, is that the boil? The ocean is very aspirational. We need change rights. That's more of the thing outcome that they're looking for. But to get there is really about taking those first steps, and the folks on the front lines have you their applications. They're trying to solve or manage. Getting those winds is key. So one of things that I'm interested in is the analytics piece showing the victory so in the winds early is super important because that kind of shows the road map of what the outcome may look like versus the throw the kitchen, sink at it and, you know, boil the ocean of which we know to the failed strategy. Take us through those analytics. What are some of the things that people tend to knock down first? What are some of the analytical points that people look at for KP eyes? Can you share some insight into that? >>Sure, sure. So we always encourage our customers to go after the platform first. And I know that may sound the obvious, but the platform is something that is pretty straightforward. Every organization has it. Every organization struggles with provisioning, whether of a private cloud, public cloud, virtualization, you name it. So we have the customer kind of go after the platform first and look at some of their day to operations. And we're finding that that's where the heaviest return on investment really sits. And then once you get past that, we can start looking like in the end, work flows. You know, can they tie service now to tower, to be able to make a complete work flow of someone that's maybe requesting a BM, and they can actually go through that whole workflow by by leveraging tower and integration point like service. Now those air where we're finding that the operators of these systems going getting the fastest benefit. And it also, of course, benefits the business at the end of the day because they get what they need a lot fast. >>It's like a best practice and for you guys, you've seen that? Yes, sir. Docked with that out of E. J. What's your comment on all this? >>So going back to the question on metrics Automation is great, but it does not provide anybody to the business under the actually show. What was the impact, whether it's from a people standpoint, cost standpoint or anything else. So what we try to drive is enable customers. You can't build the baseline off where they are today, and as they're going through the incremental journey towards automation, measure the success of that automation against the baseline. And that actually adds the other way back to the customer. As a business you didn't get to see. I was creating a storage land. I was doing it probably 15 times a month. Take it or really even automated. It spend like a day created a playbook. I'll save myself probably half, of course, and that could be doing something that's better. So building those metrics and with the automation analytics that actually came in the platform trying those bass lines. So the number of executions, actually the huge value they'll actually be ableto realize the benefits of automation and measure the success off within enterprise. >>So I'm a customer prospect, like I want to get a win. I don't want to get fired. I won't get promoted. Right, I say, Okay, I gotta get a baseline and knock down some playbooks. Knock that down first. That what you're gonna getting it. That's a good starting. >>Starting. Understand your baseline today. Plan your backlog as to what you want to knock down. And once you know them down, build a dashboard as to what the benefits were, what the impact was actually built upon it. You actually will see an incremental growth in your success with automation. >>And then you go to the workflow and too, and that's your selling point for the next level. Absolutely good playbook. Is that the automation programs that in a nutshell or is that more of a best practice >>those components of the ah, the automation adoption journey that we allow the customer to kind of decide how they want their journey to be crafted. Of course, we have a very specific way of going about and walking them through it. But we allowed in the kind of crap that journey and that is those the two components that make up the automation. >>We're gonna put you guys on the spot with the tough question We heard from G. P. Morgan yesterday on the Kino, which I thought was very compelling. You know, days, hours, two minutes. All this is great stuff. It's real impact. Other customers validate that. So, congratulations. Can you guys share any anecdotal stories? You know, the name customers? Just about situations Where customs gone from this to this old way, new way and throw some numbers around Shearson Samantha >>is not a public reference, but I like to give you a customer. Exactly. Retail company. When we first actually went and ran a discovery session, it took them 72 days to approach in an instance. And the whole point was not because it took that long. It because every task haven't s l. A We're actually wait for the Acela manually. Go do that. We actually went in >>with our 72 hours, two days, two days, >>actually, going with the automation? We Actually, it was everybody was working on the S L. A. We actually brought it down to less than a day. So you just gave the developers looking to code 71 days back for him to start writing code. So that's the impact that we see automation bringing back to the customers, right? And you'll probably find the use causes across everywhere. Whether J. P. Morgan Chase you actually had the British Army and everyone here on states talking about it. It is powerful, but it is powerful relief you can measure and learn from it >>as the baseline point. Get some other examples because that's that's, uh, that's 70 days is that mostly delay its bureaucracy. It's It's so much time. >>It's manual past and many of the manual tasks that actually waiting for a person to do the task >>waterfall past things sound, although any examples you can >>yes, so the one example that always stands out to me and again, it's a pretty interviewing straight forward. Is Citrix patching? So we work with the organization. They were energy company, and they wanted to automate patching their searches environment, patching this citrus environment took six weekends and it took at least five or six engineers. And we're talking about in bringing an application owners, the folks who are handling the bare metal, all all that whole window. And by automating most of the patching process, we were able to bring it down to one weekend in one engineer who could do it from home and basically monitor the process instead of having to be interactive and active with it. And to me, that that was a huge win. Even though it's, you know, it's such dispatching. >>That's the marketing plan. Get your weekends back. Absolutely awesome. Shrimp on the barbecue, You know, Absolutely great job, guys. Thanks for the insight. Thanks. Come on. The key. Really appreciate it. Congratulations. Thank you. Thanks for sharing this queue here. Live coverage. Danceable fest. Where the big news is the ass. Full automation platform. Breaking it down here on the Q. I'm John. First to Minutemen. We're back with more coverage after this short break

(gentle music) >> Hello from Chicago, Lisa Martin here at AnsibleFest 2022 with John Furrier. John, it's great to be here. The transformation of enterprise and industry through automation. This is not only the 10th anniversary of Ansible, this was the first in-person AnsibleFest since 2019. >> It's awesome, it's awesome, Lisa, and I want to welcome everyone to our live performance here in Chicago. We were remote for two years, 2019 in Atlanta. AnsibleFest, part of Red Hat now, Red Hat part of IBM. So much has happened in the past couple years and I think one of the things that we're going to cover this week here in Chicago, is the evolution of Ansible, where it fits into the new cloud-native ecosystems emerging, and also, kind of, what it means for developers and operators. And we're going to see a lot of that here at AnsibleFest with wall-to-wall coverage, keynote just happened. Very interesting to see, you know, Ansible stayed true to their knitting, as you say, you know. What do they do? No big announcements. Some big community news. But humble. >> Very humble. Very humble, but also very excited. All the keynotes did a great job of addressing that community, and being grateful to the community for, really, the evolution that we see at Ansible and now 10 years later. They were talking a lot about smoothing operations for the developers, democratizing automation across the organization. They talked a little bit about that skills gap. I wanted to get your opinion, 'cause as we know there's, they talked about it from a demand perspective, there's over 300,000 open positions on LinkedIn for Ansible skills. So a lot of opportunity there, a lot of opportunity for them to help democratize automation across organizations. >> Yeah, I mean, I think the big theme last year we heard, "Three things, top three things at AnsibleFest 2021, Animation, Automation, Automation." Again, this year the same theme, "Automate everywhere" is what they're talking about. But I think you're right, there's a cultural shift where the entire cloud ecosystems kind of spun to the doorstep of what Ansible's ecosystem stood for for many years in the decade, which is configuration, running things at scale. That notion is now persistent across all the enterprise. And I think the key takeaway from the keynote, in my opinion, is that configuration and automation around devices and infrastructure stuff is an enterprise architecture now, it's not just a, kind of a corner case, or a specific use case, it's going to be native across the entire enterprise architecture. And that's why we heard a lot of cultural shift conversations. And that is where the people who are running the Ansible stuff, they're going to be the keys to having the keys to the kingdom. And I think you're going to see a lot more of this automation at scale. I love the introduction of ops-as-code, that's a little piggyback off of infrastructure-as-code and infrastructure-as-configuration. They're saying operations now is the new software model and it's like ops dev, not dev ops. So it's really interesting to see how the operator is now a very big important role in the next level of cloud native. And it's really exciting because this is kind of what we've been reporting on theCUBE, for over 12 years. So, watching Ansible grow organically into a powerhouse community is very interesting. To see how they operationalize this, you know, going forward. >> Well the operator's becoming really pivotal catalysts in this next way, that you've been covering for 12 years. You know, if we think about some of the challenges and the barriers to adopting automation that organizations have had, one of them has been skills, staff rather. The other has been, "Hey, we need to really determine which processes to automate, that's actually going to give us the most ROI, most bang for our buck." They talked a little bit about that today, but that's still something that Ansible is working with its customers and the community to help sort of demystify. >> Yeah and I think that they were front and center around, "You on the room," people in the room, "you make this happen." They're very much, it's not a top-down corporate thing, Ansible staying true to their roots as I mentioned. But the thing about skills gap is interesting, you heard Kaete Piccirilli talking about, "Level Up how your organization automates, push your people, expand your scope." So the theme is, the power is in the hands of this community to essentially be the new enterprise architecture for operations. At the same time that feeds the trend around, we're seeing this accelerated cloud-native developer we're seeing, we're going to be at KubeCon next week, that cloud-native developer, they want to go faster, they want self-service. So you're seeing higher velocity cloud-native development putting pressure on the ops teams to level up, so the theme kind of connects for me. I think Red Hat has got it right here, with Ansible, that the theme is shifting to ops better get their act together, to level up and to the velocity of what the developers are expecting. At the same time, giving them the freedom to be using infrastructure-as-code, infrastructure-as-configuration, and ultimately, ops-as-code. To me, I think this is like the evolution of how infrastructure-as-code, which is the nirvana of DevOps, now is ops-as-code. Which means, if that's true, ops becomes much more invisible, if you will, which is what developers want. >> And we're going to be breaking down ops-as-code today, no doubt, in our conversations with some of the great Ansible community folks and partners and leaders that we have on, as well as tomorrow in our full two days of coverage. You talked about cultural shift, we talk about that a lot John, it's challenging, but one of the things I think that was very palpable this morning, is the power of the Ansible community. Not just those folks that are here with us in Chicago, but all the folks watching virtually online. >> Yeah. >> Truly help drive that cultural shift that is needed for organizations to really be able to streamline cloud ops. >> Yeah and I think Adam Miller who came on, I thought his portion was excellent, around community. He talked about, you know, the 10 years, put a little exclamation point on that. Managing the communications within the community. He actually brought up IRC and Slack and then, "We have Discord." And they introduced a new standard for communications it's called Matrix, which is open-source based. And even in their decision making, their principles around open source stay true. Again, they checked the box there, I thought that was really cool. The other thing that, within the meat of the product, the automation platform, Matt Jones was talking about the scale, the managing at scale, is one thing. But the thing that I think that hit, jumped out at me, was that this trusted automation messaging was really huge. Signing, having signatures, that really hits the supply chain that we've been talking about, and we're going to talk about it next week at KubeCon, the software supply chain is trusting the code. And I think as you have automation, it's a really big part of the new platform. So, I thought that was really the meat on the bone there. >> That was a very strong theme, was the trust this morning. You know, another thing that was important was Walter Bentley, who's coming on, I believe, later today, talked about how organizations really need to think about the value that automation can deliver to the business and then develop an automation strategy, really thinking at it strategically rather than what a lot of folks have done. And they've put automation in sort of in silos and pockets. He's really talking about, how can you actually make it strategic across the organization and make sure that you really fully see and understand and can articulate the value to the business, from a competitive advantage perspective, that it's going to deliver. >> Yeah, and Stefanie Chiras who's coming on too, she mentioned a lot about the multi-cloud, multi-environment layer, how Ansible can sit across all the environments and then still support the cloud-native through what she called "an automation loop". That's going to be really talking to what we're seeing as multi-cloud or super-cloud, next-gen cloud, where Ansible's role of automating isn't just corner case in the enterprise. Again, if it's an enterprise-wide architecture, it will be a centerpiece of multi-cloud, multiple capabilities. Whether that's compatibility services or, you know, stuff running best of breed on different clouds. 'Cause, obviously Amazon was on stage here, they're talking about this, big Ansible supporter. So, we've got Google supporting Ansible, so you got the multiple clouds and even VM-Ware environments. So, Ansible sits across all this. And so, I think the big opportunity that I'm seeing come out of this, is that if Ansible is in this position, this could be a catalyst for them to be the multi-cloud hybrid architecture for configuration and operations, and I think, the edge is going to be a really interesting conversation. We have a lot of guests coming on, I'll talk about that. But, I think running distributed workloads across multiple clouds in multiple environments, that's a killer app and we'll see if they can pull it off. We're going to be drilling everyone on that topic today, so I'm looking forward to it. >> We're going to be dissecting that. I like how you paint that picture of Ansible really as the nucleus of that hybrid cloud strategy. You know, so many organizations are living in a hybrid cloud world for many reasons, but for Ansible to be able to be that catalyst. And question for you, if we think about that, when we talk about multi-cloud strategically or organically or whatnot, where is automation moving in terms of the customer conversation? We know Ansible's really focused on smoothing the developer experience, but where is automation going, in your vision, up the C-suite stack? >> Well, multi-cloud is a C-suite message and they love to hear that, but you talk to anyone who's in the trenches, they hate multi-cloud. It's more complexity and there's a lot of issues around latency. So what you're seeing is, you're starting to see an evolution of more about compatibility and interoperability. And this is kind of classic enterprise abstraction layers when you start getting into these inflection points, as things get better, so it gets sometimes more complex. So I think Ansible's notion of simplicity and ease of use, could be the catalyst for this abstraction layer between clouds. So it's all about reducing the complexities, because at the end of the day, if you want to do something on multiple clouds, whether that's run common services across, that's not making it simpler. You got to, it's going to be harder before it gets easier. So, if that makes any sense. So doing multi-cloud sounds great on paper, but it's really hard and that's why no one's really doing it. So you're going to start to see multi-cloud, what we call super-cloud, which is more capabilities on one cloud. And then having them still differentiate the idea that some standard's going to emerge, is complete fantasy. I think you're going to, we still need more innovation. Amazon does a great job, Microsoft's coming up on number two position as well, the clouds still need to differentiate. But that doesn't change Ansible's position. They can still be that shim layer or bolt-on, to whatever clouds do best. If you run 'em on machine learning on Google, that's cool. You want to use Amazon for this? How do you make those work? That's a hard problem. And, again, that's where automation ends up. >> And with that context, do you think that Ansible has the capability of helping to dial down some of the complexity that's in this hybrid multi-cloud world? >> Yeah, I mean, I think the thing about what's going on great here, that's unique in the history of the computer industry, is open source is so powerful and it continues to power away with growth. So, more code is coming. So, software supply chain is a big issue, we heard that with the trusted thing, but also now, how people buy now is different. You can actually try stuff out on open source and then go to Red Hat, Ansible, and say, "Hey, I'm going to get some support." So there's a lot of community collective intelligence involved in decision making, not just coding, but buyer selection and consumption. So the entire paradigm of purchasing software and using it, has completely changed. So, that puts Ansible in a leading position because they got a great community, and now you've got open source continuing to thrive away. So, if you're a customer, you don't need the big enterprise sales pitch you can just try the code, if you like it, then you go with Ansible. So it's really kind of set up nicely, this cloud market, for companies like Ansible, because they have the community and they got the software, it's open and it is what it is, it's transparent, everything's above board. >> Yeah, you know, you talk about the community, you mentioned Matrix earlier, and one of the things that was also quite resonant during the keynote this morning was the power of collaboration and how incredibly important that is to them, to stay native to their open-source roots, as you you said. But also really go to where the customers are. And they talked about that with respect to Matrix and Discord and that was an interesting, this is the community reaching out to really kind of grow upon itself. >> Well, being someone who's used all those tools, even IRC 'cause I'm old, all the old folks use IRC. Then the, kind of, Gen X'ers use, and the millennials use Slack. Discord, the way they mentioned Discord, it's so true. If you're a gamer, you're younger, you're using Discord. Now, Matrix is new, they're trying to introduce an open source, 'cause remember they don't control Discord and they don't control Slack. So Slack's Salesforce now, and Discord is probably going to try to get bought by Microsoft, but still, it's not open. So Matrix is their open-sourced chat service. And I thought that was interesting and I think, that got my attention, because that went against the principles of users that like Slack. So, it'd be great. I mean if Matrix, if that takes off, then that's going to be a case study of going against-the-grain on the best-of-breed package software like Slack or Discord. But I think the demographic shift is interesting. Discord is for younger generations, let's see how Matrix will do. And the uptake wasn't that big. Only been around for a couple months, we've seen almost 5,000 members. But, you know, not a failure. >> Right. >> But not a home run either. >> Right. Well we'll have to see how that progresses- >> Yeah, we'll see how that plays out. >> as all of the generations in the workforce today try to work together and collaborate. You know, if we think about some of the things that we're going to talk about today and tomorrow, business outcomes, increasing business agility, being able to ensure compliance, with security and regulatory requirements, which are only proliferating, really also helping organizations to optimize those costs and be as competitive as they possibly can. So I'm excited to dissect the announcements that came out today, some of the things that we're going to hear today and tomorrow, and really get a great view of the automation infrastructure marketplace and what's going on. >> Yeah, it's going to be great. Infrastructure-as-code, infrastructure-as-config, operations-as-code, it's all leading to, you know, distributed computing edge. It's hybrid. >> Yep. All right John- >> Yeah. >> looking forward to two days of wall-to-wall CUBE coverage with you, coming to you live from Chicago, at the first AnsibleFest in person, since 2019. Lisa Martin and John Furrier with you here all day today and tomorrow, stick around, our first guest joins us. We're going to dissect ops-as-code, stick around. (gentle music)

>> (upbeat music) [Narrator] From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AnsibleFest 2020, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hello welcome back to theCUBE virtual coverage of AnsibleFest 2020 Virtual. We're not face to face this year. I'm John Furrier, your host. We're bringing it together remotely. We're in the Palo Alto Studios with theCUBE and we're going remote for our guests this year. And I hope you can come together online enjoy the content. Of course, go check out the events site on Demand Live. And certainly I have a lot of great content. I've got a great guest Skyla Loomis Vice president, for the Z Application Platform at IBM. Also known as IBM Z talking Mainframe. Skyla, thanks for coming on theCUBE Appreciate it. >> Thank you for having me. So, you know, I've talked many conversations about the Mainframe of being relevant and valuable in context to cloud and cloud native because if it's got a workload you've got containers and all this good stuff, you can still run anything on anything these days. By integrating it in with all this great glue layer, lack of a better word or oversimplifying it, you know, things going on. So it's really kind of cool. Plus Walter Bentley in my previous interview was talking about the success of Ansible, and IBM working together on a really killer implementation. So I want to get into that, but before that let's get into IBM Z. How did you start working with IBM Z? What's your role there? >> Yeah, so I actually just got started with Z about four years ago. I spent most of my career actually on the distributed platform, largely with data and analytics, the analytics area databases and both On-premise and Public Cloud. But I always considered myself a friend to Z. So in many of the areas that I'd worked on, we'd, I had offerings where we'd enabled it to work with COS or Linux on Z. And then I had this opportunity come up where I was able to take on the role of leading some of our really core runtimes and databases on the Z platform, IMS and z/TPF. And then recently just expanded my scope to take on CICS and a number of our other offerings related to those kind of in this whole application platform space. And I was really excited because just of how important these runtimes and this platform is to the world,really. You know, our power is two thirds of our fortune 100 clients across banking and insurance. And it's you know, some of the most powerful transaction platforms in the world. You know doing hundreds of billions of transactions a day. And you know, just something that's really exciting to be a part of and everything that it does for us. >> It's funny how distributed systems and distributed computing really enable more longevity of everything. And now with cloud, you've got new capabilities. So it's super excited. We're seeing that a big theme at AnsibleFest this idea of connecting, making things easier you know, talk about distributed computing. The cloud is one big distribute computer. So everything's kind of playing together. You have a panel discussion at AnsibleFest Virtual. Could you talk about what your topic is and share, what was some of the content in there? Content being, content as in your presentation? Not content. (laughs) >> Absolutely. Yeah, so I had the opportunity to co-host a panel with a couple of our clients. So we had Phil Allison from Black Knight and Pat Lane from Allstate and they were really joining us and talking about their experience now starting to use Ansible to manage to z/OS. So we just actually launched some content collections and helping to enable and accelerate, client's use of using Ansible to manage to z/OS back in March of this year. And we've just seen tremendous client uptake in this. And these are a couple of clients who've been working with us and, you know, getting started on the journey of now using Ansible with Z they're both you know, have it in the enterprise already working with Ansible on other platforms. And, you know, we got to talk with them about how they're bringing it into Z. What use cases they're looking at, the type of culture change, that it drives for their teams as they embark on this journey and you know where they see it going for them in the future. >> You know, this is one of the hot items this year. I know that events virtual so has a lot of content flowing around and sessions, but collections is the top story. A lot of people talking collections, collections collections, you know, integration and partnering. It hits so many things but specifically, I like this use case because you're talking about real business value. And I want to ask you specifically when you were in that use case with Ansible and Z. People are excited, it seems like it's working well. Can you talk about what problems that it solves? I mean, what was some of the drivers behind it? What were some of the results? Could you give some insight into, you know, was it a pain point? Was it an enabler? Can you just share why that was getting people are getting excited about this? >> Yeah well, certainly automation on Z, is not new, you know there's decades worth of, of automation on the platform but it's all often proprietary, you know, or bundled up like individual teams or individual people on teams have specific assets, right. That they've built and it's not shared. And it's certainly not consistent with the rest of the enterprise. And, you know, more and more, you're kind of talking about hybrid cloud. You know, we're seeing that, you know an application is not isolated to a single platform anymore right. It really expands. And so being able to leverage this common open platform to be able to manage Z in the same way that you manage the entire rest of your enterprise, whether that's Linux or Windows or network or storage or anything right. You know you can now actually bring this all together into a common automation plane in control plane to be able to manage to all of this. It's also really great from a skills perspective. So, it enables us to really be able to leverage. You know Python on the platform and that's whole ecosystem of Ansible skills that are out there and be able to now use that to work with Z. >> So it's essentially a modern abstraction layer of agility and people to work on it. (laughs) >> Yeah >> You know it's not the joke, Hey, where's that COBOL programmer. I mean, this is a serious skill gap issues though. This is what we're talking about here. You don't have to replace the, kill the old to bring in the new, this is an example of integration where it's classic abstraction layer and evolution. Is that, am I getting that right? >> Absolutely. I mean I think that Ansible's power as an orchestrator is part of why, you know, it's been so successful here because it's not trying to rip and replace and tell you that you have to rewrite anything that you already have. You know, it is that glue sort of like you used that term earlier right? It's that glue that can span you know, whether you've got rec whether you've got ACL, whether you're using z/OSMF you know, or any other kind of custom automation on the platform, you know, it works with everything and it can start to provide that transparency into it as well, and move to that, like infrastructure as code type of culture. So you can bring it into source control. You can have visibility to it as part of the Ansible automation platform and tower and those capabilities. And so you, it really becomes a part of the whole enterprise and enables you to codify a lot of that knowledge. That, you know, exists again in pockets or in individuals and make it much more accessible to anybody new who's coming to the platform. >> That's a great point, great insight.& It's worth calling out. I'm going to make a note of that and make a highlight from that insight. That was awesome. I got to ask about this notion of client uptake. You know, when you have z/OS and Ansible kind of come in together, what are the clients area? When do they get excited? When do they know that they've got to do? And what are some of the client reactions? Are they're like, wake up one day and say, "Hey, yeah I actually put Ansible and z/OS together". You know peanut butter and chocolate is (mumbles) >> Honestly >> You know, it was just one of those things where it's not obvious, right? Or is it? >> Actually I have been surprised myself at how like resoundingly positive and immediate the reactions have been, you know we have something, one of our general managers runs a general managers advisory council and at some of our top clients on the platform and you know we meet with them regularly to talk about, you know, the future direction that we're going. And we first brought this idea of Ansible managing to Z there. And literally unanimously everybody was like yes, give it to us now. (laughs) It was pretty incredible, you know? And so it's you know, we've really just seen amazing uptake. We've had over 5,000 downloads of our core collection on galaxy. And again that's just since mid to late March when we first launched. So we're really seeing tremendous excitement with it. >> You know, I want to want to talk about some of the new announcements, but you brought that up. I wanted to kind of tie into it. It is addictive when you think modernization, people success is addictive. This is another theme coming out of AnsibleFest this year is that when the sharing, the new content you know, coders content is the theme. I got to ask you because you mentioned earlier about the business value and how the clients are kind of gravitating towards it. They want it.It is addictive, contagious. In the ivory towers in the big, you know, front office, the business. It's like, we've got to make everything as a service. Right. You know, you hear that right. You know, and say, okay, okay, boss You know, Skyla, just go do it. Okay. Okay. It's so easy. You can just do it tomorrow, but to make everything as a service, you got to have the automation, right. So, you know, to bridge that gap has everything is a service whether it's mainframe. I mean okay. Mainframe is no problem. If you want to talk about observability and microservices and DevOps, eventually everything's going to be a service. You got to have the automation. Could you share your, commentary on how you view that? Because again, it's a business objective everything is a service, then you got to make it technical then you got to make it work and so on. So what's your thoughts on that? >> Absolutely. I mean, agility is a huge theme that we've been focusing on. We've been delivering a lot of capabilities around a cloud native development experience for folks working on COBOL, right. Because absolutely you know, there's a lot of languages coming to the platform. Java is incredibly powerful and it actually runs better on Z than it runs on any other platform out there. And so, you know, we're seeing a lot of clients you know, starting to, modernize and continue to evolve their applications because the platform itself is incredibly modern, right? I mean we come out with new releases, we're leading the industry in a number of areas around resiliency, in our security and all of our, you know, the face of encryption and number of things that come out with, but, you know the applications themselves are what you know, has not always kept pace with the rate of change in the industry. And so, you know, we're really trying to help enable our clients to make that leap and continue to evolve their applications in an important way, and the automation and the tools that go around it become very important. So, you know, one of the things that we're enabling is the self service, provisioning experience, right. So clients can, you know, from Open + Shift, be able to you know, say, "Hey, give me an IMS and z/OS connect stack or a kicks into DB2 stack." And that is all under the covers is going to be powered by Ansible automation. So that really, you know, you can get your system programmers and your talent out of having to do these manual tasks, right. Enable the development community. So they can use things like VS Code and Jenkins and GET Lab, and you'll have this automated CICB pipeline. And again, Ansible under the covers can be there helping to provision those test environments. You know, move the data, you know, along with the application, changes through the pipeline and really just help to support that so that, our clients can do what they need to do. >> You guys got the collections in the hub there, so automation hub, I got to ask you where do you see the future of the automating within z/OS going forward? >> Yeah, so I think, you know one of the areas that we'd like to see go is head more towards this declarative state so that you can you know, have this declarative configuration defined for your Z environment and then have Ansible really with the data and potency right. Be able to, go out and ensure that the environment is always there, and meeting those requirements. You know that's partly a culture change as well which goes along with it, but that's a key area. And then also just, you know, along with that becoming more proactive overall part of, you know, AI ops right. That's happening. And I think Ansible on the automation that we support can become you know, an integral piece of supporting that more intelligent and proactive operational direction that, you know, we're all going. >> Awesome Skyla. Great to talk to you. And so insightful, appreciate it. One final question. I want to ask you a personal question because I've been doing a lot of interviews around skill gaps and cybersecurity, and there's a lot of jobs, more job openings and there are a lot of people. And people are with COVID working at home. People are looking to get new skilled up positions, new opportunities. Again cybersecurity and spaces and event we did and want to, and for us its huge, huge openings. But for people watching who are, you know, resetting getting through this COVID want to come out on the other side there's a lot of online learning tools out there. What skill sets do you think? Cause you brought up this point about modernization and bringing new people and people as a big part of this event and the role of the people in community. What areas do you think people could really double down on? If I wanted to learn a skill. Or an area of coding and business policy or integration services, solution architects, there's a lot of different personas, but what skills can I learn? What's your advice to people out there? >> Yeah sure. I mean on the Z platform overall and skills related to Z, COBOL, right. There's, you know, like two billion lines of COBOL out there in the world. And it's certainly not going away and there's a huge need for skills. And you know, if you've got experience from other platforms, I think bringing that in, right. And really being able to kind of then bridge the two things together right. For the folks that you're working for and the enterprise we're working with you know, we actually have a bunch of education out there. You got to master the mainframe program and even a competition that goes on that's happening now, for folks who are interested in getting started at any stage, whether you're a student or later in your career, but you know learning, you know, learn a lot of those platforms you're going to be able to then have a career for life. >> Yeah. And the scale on the data, this is so much going on. It's super exciting. Thanks for sharing that. Appreciate it. Want to get that plug in there. And of course, IBM, if you learn COBOL you'll have a job forever. I mean, the mainframe's not going away. >> Absolutely. >> Skyla, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE Vice President, for the Z Application Platform and IBM, thanks for coming. Appreciate it. >> Thanks for having me. >> I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE here for AnsibleFest 2020 Virtual. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)