[Music] hi I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another Cube conversation where we go in depth of thought leaders from around the industry to bring you the best ideas and insights about how to improve your business with technology one of the many things that CIOs and business leaders have to think about is how are they going to execute digital transformations what will be the priorities we all know the relationship between digital transformation and the use of data differently but different technologies assert themselves a different way and very important different relationships especially with cloud vendors assert themselves in different ways and that's one of the many challenges that CIOs have to deal with today serve the business better attend to those relationships and drive the company forward to achieve its ultimate outcomes and objectives so to have that conversation today we've got a great guest Thor Wallace is the senior vice president and CIO at Netscape door welcome to the cube thank you so tell us a little bit about what the CIO at netskope does sure so let me start by telling you a little bit about net sky so net Scout is a network monitoring and a service assurance company as the CIO I'm obviously responsible for providing the tools and the environment for running the company I'm also heavily involved in for example understanding and the applications and the business direction that we're taking we're also working on improving our customer relationships and experiences for example we have a customer portal that were sort of re-evaluating and sort of improving and we're also obviously trying to drive user productivity worldwide we have very briefly about 33 locations worldwide we're corner here and outside of Boston and have large offices both in Texas and California so you're a traditional supplier of technology services it's trying to make a transition to this new world and as part of that and that's got itself is going through digital transformation so that it can better support its customers digital transformations I got that right exactly so let me tell you a little bit about sort of what we're trying to achieve what some of the Y's are and sort of show where we are at this moment yeah so we're you know we as a company are being challenged by the same sort of environment that everyone else else is being a challenge with which is to be able to move as quickly as we can and provide as much of an impact of our customers as possible so so how I've read that sort of mandate in that remit is to really focus on improving our customer experience as I said you know working with a new sort of new platform and we re platforming and refactoring our application our customer service application but also really focusing on how best to improve user productivity so those are the areas that we've been focusing on direct driving IT productivity is important to me so that's a fairly substantial argument for moving operations to the cloud and we're also part of that is transforming sort of a hardware based environment to a much more of a virtualized and software based environment so that includes cloud that includes virtualization which we've obviously have taken a lot of ground on and for example what we've already done is virtualized all of our operations in the data center over the years we've also moved a lot of workloads to cloud were you know cloud agnostic but you know we have a fairly large environment it was salesforce.com we use office 365 which are obviously major applications on the cloud so we have a workload that's quite mixed for today we can we maintain on Prem data centers we have enough large engineering footprint as well so we will kind of live in all of the worlds so we live obviously on Purim we have cloud and one of the things that I think we've learned over the years is that in order to continue the journey of cloud we need to really worry about a couple things one is we want to make sure that we are we keep our operations in in an excellent place so and I can talk more about that in a few minutes and as I said we we want to continue to maintain our ability to execute and really what I call velocity to be able to add value and so cloud actually presents some of those opportunities for us but it also obviously makes things quite complicated in that we have multiple environments we have to make sure that people still get the services and the applications they need to do their job and provide those you know in a in a very productive way in a cost-effective way so that we can maintain that as an IT organization so you've got salesforce.com you've got office 365 you've got some other objectives movies some other applications up into the cloud each of those applications though has been historically associated with a general purpose network that you get to control so that you can give different quality of service to different classes workload or applications how is that changing and what pressures is that putting on your network as you move to more cloud based operations well I think that's a huge challenge for us and I think frankly for for most people I think you have to rethink how your network is designed fundamentally from the ground up and if you think about networks in the past you know in mainly an on-prem world you basically had a backhaul a lot of traffic in our in our case 33 locations worldwide a lot of back hauling of of services and and transactions back to wherever that application exists so for example historically we've had office excuse me in the Microsoft mail system or exchange on Prem we have you know other services that are on print for example Oracle and our ERP system etc and the challenge was to move all that traffic back to basically our core data center and as you move to the cloud you have an opportunity to actually real to rethink that so we've been in the process of doing over the last say year has been to redesign our network from the ground up and moving away from sort of the central monolithic network to more of a cloud slash edge base network so with that we've also moved from hardware basically a fairly heavy investment at hardware in each of the offices for example and we're now or we've actually in the process very far along in the process of converting all that hardware into a software-defined network that allows us to do some things that we have never been able to do operationally for example we can make deployments sort of from one central location worldwide both for security and patching etc and so what we've also done is we've moved as I said we have a lot of our workloads already in the cloud and we continue to put more on the cloud one of the things that's become important is we've got to maintain and create actually a low latency environment so for example ultimately putting our you know unified communication systems and technologies and the cloud to me where is me without having a low latency environment and a low latency network so that we can actually provide dial tone well worldwide and without worrying about performance so what we've what we've already done is we've transitioned from the centralized network into an edge based Network we've actually happened now a partner that we now are putting in services into a local presence idea have worldwide into firm into three locations for equinox and with that comes the software based network and allows us to move traffic directly to the edge and therefore once we're at the edge we can go very quickly a sort of backbone speeds into whatever cloud service we need whether it's as your AWS or Salesforce or any other provider office 365 we can get that sort of speed and low latency that is created a new environment for us at which is now virtual software base gives us a tremendous amount of flexibility moving what I consider fairly heavy and significant workloads that remain on Prem it gives us the option of moving that to the cloud so and with that one of the key things that comes with that is holding making sure that we can hold our accountable are our vendors very accountable for performance so for example if we experience an issue with office 365 performance whether it's in Pune or Westford or wherever it is we want to be able to make sure that we have the information and the data that says to Microsoft in this case hey you know we're actually the performance isn't great from wherever wherever those users are wherever that office is so we want to provide them information and to basically prove that our network or our insert internal capabilities and network are performing very well but may be that there's an issue with something and performance that on their size so without this sort of fact-based information it's really hard to have those discussions with vendors so one of the things I think is important for everyone to consider when you move more to a cloud is you've got to have the ability to troubleshoot and and make sure that you can actually maintain a very complicated environment so one of the things we have done is we and we continue to do is use our own products actually to give greater visibility that we've ever had before in this new sort of multi this multi sort of cloud multi Prem environment so so which is a very powerful thing for us and a team that is using this technology is sort of seeing visibility things that they've never really been able to see before so that's been quite exciting but I think that's sort of frankly table stakes moving forward into you know deeper more cloud or sort of sort of workload independent model that we're seeking well so one of the government building this because I have conversations like this all the time and I don't think people realize the degree to which some of these changes are really going to change the way that they actually get worked on when there's a problem you have control of the network and the application and the endpoints if there is an issue you can turn to someone who works for you and say here's the deal fix this so I'll find somebody else that can fix it so you have an employment-based almost model of coercion you can get people to do what you want to do but when you move into the cloud you find yourself having to use a contracting approach to actually get crucial things done and problems crop up either way it doesn't matter if you own it all or somebody else owns at all you're going to encounter problems and so you have to accelerate and diminish the amount of back-and-forth haggling that goes on and as you said the best way to do that is to have fact-based evidence-based visibility into what's actually happening so that you can pinpoint and avoid the back-and-forth about whose issue it really is exactly I mean there's so much you know is at the end of the day IT is still responsible for user productivity so whether somebody's having you know an application issue in terms of availability or frankly if it's not performing up to what it should be you're still accountable as an organization and regardless of where the workloads are it could be as you point out you know back in the day you could always go to your data center and do a lot of investigation and really do a lot of troubleshooting within the four walls today you just don't have that visit you don't have that luxury call it and so it's a whole new world and you know we all are relying increasingly on vendors which reads a contracting star which is you know presents an issue and you know sort of having these conversations with a vendor or contractor regardless of your relationship with them you're still again you're on the hook or for doing this so you've got to have some facts you've got to have some story you have to show in terms of hey you know we're good on this side you know the issue really is on you and we've actually had situations whether it was performance issues or service interruptions or bugs from different vendors where they've impacted our you know the net Scout organization and without you know deep understanding of what's going on you really don't have anywhere to go you you really have to have this sort of greater visibility and this is one of the things that you know is a is a is a lesson learned from at least from the journey that we're taking and so I think that's part of the story of the cloud and sort of migration and virtualization story is you really have to have this newfound visibility so I think that's been you know really important for us so I'm gonna I'm gonna see if I can't generalize that a little bit because I think it's great point as you go into a network redesign to support go to operations excellent operations in a cloud you have to also go into a sourcing and information redesign so that you can be assured that you're getting the information you need to sustain the degree of control or approximate the control that you had before otherwise you've got great technology but no way to deal with problems when they arise right exactly and you know as I said we've seen this movie and Minoo without having what we have I think we would have struggle as an organization actually to resolve the issue and that's not good for the company because you know IT part of the minute the mandate and their the remit for us is to make sure that people are as productive as it can be and so not having the ability to provide that environment is actually a huge problem for I think a lot of people and one of the ways we are working with it is to you know have that sort of visibility it also means upgrading the team skills which we've done a lot of work on so you take folks that were in IT that you know may have had a certain set of skills sort of in the on-prem environment call it those skills are quite different in in that in the sort of cloud or the mix exposure environment so I think upskilling you know having more information better information is really as part of the story that we're learning and that part of it at the end of the day it's not about upgrading the network it's about upgrading the network capability exactly yeah and you can't do that if especially the new world if you don't upgrade your ability to get information about how the whole thing is working together exactly all right Thor Wallis senior vice president and CIO at net Scout thanks very much for being on the queue thank you and once again I want to thank you participating in today's conversation until next time

>> Live from San Francisco. It's the cube covering IBM thing twenty nineteen brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to Mosconi North here in San Francisco. I'm student like co host David Dante. You're watching four days of live wall to wall coverage here at IBM. Think twenty nineteen. Happy to welcome back to the program first time in her new role. And she's also moved back to David, my home area of the Boston Massachusetts F area. Stephanie Sherice, who's now the vice president and general manager of Red Hat Enterprise. Lennox Business Unit. That red hat Stephanie. Thanks so much for joining. >> What's my pleasures to It's great to be back with you both. >> All right, Stephanie, be back. You know, I happen to notice quite a few IBM. Er's obviously know you. We've had you on our program and many of the IBM shows in the past. So tell us, what's it like being back at one of the Big Blue shows? >> No, it's great. It's great. As you know, I somewhat grew up at IBM might. I had seventeen years. I know so many people in the thing you miss most is in the network. So it's been it's a great opportunity to be here. Catch up with old friends, Talked to new colleagues. Great. What brought >> you to Red hat? I mean, like, you say, long career at IBM, and it was obviously prior to the acquisition, so you didn't know that was coming? What was the lore? >> So I'd say a couple of things clearly, as you know, I became a student of the Lenox Space while I was in while I was at I B M in the Power Systems unit. So fascinated for what Lennox has taught the industry about. I always say Lennox Lennox taught the world how development is meant to be done through open source in the innovation of a community. So that was a thrilling aspect for me to join. Also, I think I truly believe in the open hybrid, multi cloud strategy that Red Hat has had actually for years. Now. I think open source is all about choice and flexibility. It's what Lennox provides and moving forward their strategy around having a management portfolio, having a Cooper Netease platform all built upon being able to consume Lennox wherever and however you want it, I believe in the strategy. So it's been really exciting, and having the rail aspect is fantastic. >> So, Stephanie, you're right. You own that. Really? The core of red hats business. You know, Red Hat Enterprise Lennox, You know, we've been covering this space heavily for years, and everything that redheads doing comes back to, you know, that Lennox Colonel and there Ah, lot of people don't really understand that. The business model say it's like, Oh, well, you know, red hat cells free and, oh, that's a service model and things like that bring us inside your business and what's exciting and dynamic and happening in that space. >> It's It's such an incredible time. I couldn't ask for a better job, but I love the linen space for a couple of things. As you look at all the things that are changing in the industry today, I always say to customers, you may not know the applications. You'll run next year in three years, in five years, you may not know where you'll want to run them. What you do know it's they'll run on Lennox, right? It's the fastest growing operating system in the industry today. It's number one choice of developers. So, as you look to see, what can you do to prepare for the innovation Its pick your Lennox and Red hat has done an incredible job of making a consumable. If you look at the hundreds of thousands of packages out there, an open source, you take that you pull it into. Really, I feel what well delivers bread had. Enterprise Lennox delivers is an ecosystem. It's a trusted ecosystem. We test the team does an incredible job of testing a breadth of hardware, everything from, you know, X eighty six systems to power systems. Dizzy, too, you know, in video G, D G X. So way test all of that and then all the way up to the applications. We pull that ecosystem with us now, our goal is to be able to provide that anywhere. So you take that capability whether you do it. Bare metal, virtual machine, public cloud, private cloud. Now you move into containers. You know, everything we do in rail translates overto open shift. Whether you consume it as a private cloud and open stack or containerized in open shift, all of that ecosystem follows through. So it really is. When I look at is the bedrock of the of the entire portfolio for red hat, and we really are at Enterprise software company Today we pull in management with things like answerable and satellite. You pull all that together. Automation of the storage portfolio. It's just such an exciting time. It's a real transition from going from a no s company and building >> upon that. >> I mean truly an enterprise software company from multiple clouds. >> So I was talking about more about that because open shift gets all the buzz. Ostensibly, it was a key linchpin of the acquisition that I being made. Well, What's the connection between between rail and the rest of red hats? Portfolio. Maybe you could connect those dogs. >> That would be so, as you look at, and I'm an infrastructure person for a long time, as you know, and coming from the infrastructure up space, most was purchased from an infrastructure of you for many years. Now. It's all about how you consume the applications and the infrastructure comes in and feeds it from an application. Space containers are amazing, right? They bring that incredible flexibility started. Stop it, move it lifted, shifted Everything. Thing is, from an application perspective, it's simple. From a Lennox perspective, it's actually much more complicated, you know, in the days of bare metal or even V EMS. Quite clean cut between your systems, your operating system. You're hyper visor in your application. Once you move into containerized worlds, you've split up your Lennox. You have user space in your container. You have Cooper netease making ten times the number of calls to the colonel space that the hyper visor ever did. Much more complicated. So as you move into that space of Kou Burnett ease and containers and orchestration, you know, you really want someone who knows Lennox because the clinic space is more complicated, bringing simplicity from a container and application >> performance management, security changes >> Absolutely automation. So really is as we look at the portfolio, we have a You know, we believe strongly in the customer experience, we deploy with rail that trusted ecosystem. In order to be able to take that into a container world, we need to be able to get access into the user space into the coup. Burnett ease and into the colonel because they're so intimately twine entwined. So as we transition that open shift is the way we delivered, we build upon the same rail. Colonel, we used the user space. >> So, Stephanie, like you, I'm an infrastructure person. And, you know, my background is in, you know, the OS. And, you know, down that environment, there's been a wave of, you know, just enough operating system. How do we slice these up? I look of Cora West, which read, Had acquired was originally a We're going to slim down, you know, the colonel and make things easily. Where's the innovation still happening? Lenox And, well, you know why is still Lin It's going to be relevant going forward. You talked about, you know, containers, things like server list all threatened to say, Oh, well, you know, my application development person shouldn't have to think about it. But why is it still important? >> Yeah. So you know whether things I love about my role is with the position that red hat has in the industry with rail. And, you know, we have Ah, we have a approximately fifty thousand set of that fifty thousand customers who use rail and trust us. So as we look at how we drive innovation, I love the ability to kind of help redefine what an operating system is. And you know, certainly we bring added value did in real seven and now we have the relic beta out. So we're continuously adding things. We added in a few things about consumption base. We added app streams which separates out the ability to update your user space at a different rate in pace than your core. A court sort of based level which allows you to do faster updates in your user space. Continue on your core. Run multiple versions of your user space. It's a fantastic way to pull an innovation faster. We've also done a number of things with our capabilities around taking that first step into container ization, including tools like Build a pod man scope EOE so that within the operating system itself you conduced those based kind of capabilities for container ization. That first step. And then when you need orchestration, you can move over to open ship. So there's a ton of innovation left in the operating system. Security is core to everything we do. S o the innovation around security remains a constant were in the typical open source fashion. We've released the Beta here in November. We're gathering great feedback. We have about one hundred and forty high touch beta customers who were working hand in hand with to get feedback. And we're looking forward to bringing rally to market >> What? One of the big pieces of feedback you're getting a lot of people excited about in terms of Really. >> Certainly everyone looks to us for their security. So that's been that's been a great place for us. We had work to do on making it easier to consume as we continue to drive things with developers. And we have a new portal that's allowing sort of a single user space view those kinds of consumption. Things are very important today because, as you said, you want skills to be easily transferrable. Easily updated s o A lot of the consumption based things we've been >> working on, >> um, as well as thie tooling? >> Yeah. You talk about that skill set that's one of the biggest challenges in a multi cloud world is if I'm going to live in all these iron mint, what's the same and what's different communities is only a small piece. But Lennox is, you know something that's transferrable. What are you seeing? What are you hearing from customers in that regard? >> Yeah, I think, and that's one thing. We're working hard to try and make sure that you know, I think like when you when you buy a house, right, you can buy a house. You could buy an apartment building in Pine Office building. What doesn't change is the land underneath. You need that land to be stable, and you know you can build whatever you want on it. And that's how we view our lennox consuming anywhere you want. It's always secure. It's always stable in multiple public clouds. I think really it's the flexibility when I look at that pull open hybrid cloud space, customers aren't looking to buy a product. They're looking to establish a relationship with someone who's going to provide them what they need to do today on their mission critical applications but have the flexibility going forward to take them where they want to go. They may pick Ascent one public cloud today. They want to move it in two years and three years to a different public cloud. It's establishing that relationship to be able to consume that Lennox, preserve those skills but have the flexibility. And tomorrow >> Red has made a number of storage acquisitions recently. Obviously, the tight relationship between the operating system and the I O how do you look at that space? The opportunity, You know, the TAM talk a little bit about the storage moments >> we have so clearly we have our storage division. We've been working very closely with them to build up capabilities. Largely, you'll see it with open shift. The container ization and storage management within containers is tricky business. So as we pulled together the collaboration between our storage unit as well as our container unit, that's providing real capabilities for that ease of consumption. How do you bring the storage with the container deploys. My team has worked very closely with the management team as you pull in the management aspect with things like automation and management satellite capabilities, answerable is an amazing tool. Amazing tool. In fact, we've pulled in things like system rolls directly into the operating system so that you can set up things like networking. You. Khun, set up storage with answerable playbooks in a much simpler way. That's allowing us to get that ease of consumption. It is about, you know, David's fully about being able for us Tow leverage the portfolio. How do we allow clients to take the journey using Lennox from everything from bare metal and VM out to container ization, Pull in multiple clouds, get the storage features and functions and get the automation and management. >> So, Stephanie, you would looked at and partnered with Red had quite a bit before you had joined the company. What surprised you coming inside the company? Is there anything but being on the inside now that you look back here like, Wow, I didn't expect that or was different than what I had seen from the outside. >> You know, I think what I think, what I love and surprise me a bit was the passion of open source. You know, you look at any company from the outside and and certainly as a student from the outside, you look at the business and how the business is doing and how it's growing in his study. All of that, Well, you don't get to see from the outside is the open source passion of the developers who I get to work with every day. I mean, they just they understand the market. They do it as a hobby on the weekends. It's it's It's just unbelievable, right? I love being I'm up in Westford is, you know, with all the developers, it's great. >> So I'm gonna ask you a lot of talk about the culture, you know, between Red Hat and IBM. You you've been in both camps. Now what do you thoughts in the culture >> s O? You know, I think when I look at the culture, I love the culture at Red Hat. As you know, I've been in many places at IBM and multiple divisions and multiple units. There's a lot of autonomy between the business units at IBM from my own experience. And there's so many people I miss working with colleagues at IBM that, you know I worked in and head with, and WeII brought amazing things to mark it. So I look forward to working with them again. You know, I always look for those groups that are passionate, and there's a lot of passionate IBM is I miss working with. So I look forward to bringing that back >> seventy one to give you the final word. We know. You know Jim Whitehurst has got a president and he's doing later today. I believe Red Hat has a has a good presence there, tells Red Hat here it think. What should be people be looking >> for? Yeah, I think so. Clearly, there's a lot of buzz and excitement about what both Red Hat and IBM Khun do together for the open hybrid cloud. I come at it now from a full Lennox perspective, and I couldn't be more excited about what Lennox is going to deliver for innovation and for customers to consume an innovation as we pull in and look, look to all these discussion that will happen with Jim and Jeannie on stage today, it's it's great. We'll be able to take what Red Hat has done and scale it now with the help of IBM, so very excited about the future. All right, >> Well, Stephanie, we really appreciate your sharing. Congratulations. You're going >> to see about thanks for the time. >> So we still have, you know, about three more days left here at IBM Thinking, of course, the Cube will be at Red Hat Summit twenty nineteen, which is back in Boston, Massachusetts, for Dave A lotta arms to minimum. Thanks for watching the cue

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube. Covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel and their ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back to Las Vegas. Good afternoon to you. No matter where you're watching, here in the US, we know it is afternoon. As we wind up our coverage for day three at AWS re:invent here on the Cube. One of seven venues we're in right now that's hosting various satellite events. Right now we're in the Sands Expo. Rebecca Knight, John Walls, with Russ Currie. The vice president of Enterprise Strategy at NetScout. Russ, good to see you sir. >> Nice to see you again. >> I've got to be careful. I've got two Bostonian's of sorts here. >> Sorry, sorry. >> So if I don't get something on the accent, you just let me know (laughs) >> We'll talk amongst ourselves. >> Sorry if your sports inferiority complex is.. We're the champions, whatever >> Russ, if you would, first off, your take about what you're seeing here. Because, here we are, day three. As you know, you've been to a lot of shows. Day three, kind of, usually hits a different gear, right? >> Right >> Slows down a little bit. There's still a lot of excitement here. There's still a lot of people around. This show has a little different vibe to it. >> It really does. It's interesting because it becomes a little bit more serious, I think. At this point, in day three for this show, it's now, people are really kind of, they've been exposed to an awful lot in the last three days. And they're really saying, "Okay, now I really want to understand the nuts and bolts of it", and they're spending a little bit more time sitting and learning, understanding what you have to offer them in terms of your solution sense. So it's been an awful lot of fun. Also we did a couple of speaking engagements, so it's really good getting the folks that went and saw our guys speak and seeing them come into the booth and say, 'I want to talk more about that'. >> Well, I want to talk more about that, so you have a new marketing campaign, but first for the viewers who are not familiar with NetScout, you're a Fortune 500 company, but tell us a little more about who you are and what you do. >> Right, so what we do is we provide visibility into the communications between servers and clients and basically see all of the traffic that traverses the network and whether the network is in a public cloud, private cloud, or an on-prem environment, and by looking at that traffic we're able to understand the performance of the services that are being delivered and ensure the security performance of those servers. But right in that perspective we give IT the tools they need to get quicker to the mean time to knowledge, identifying where a problem might be or where a risk may exist and being able to solve those tough problems. >> So it's been a year since you've been on the Cube, I know the esteemed John Walls interviewed you. >> We go way back, yes. >> What's new this year? What sort of advancements, progressions have you implemented? >> So last year when we came in was really our first entry into the public cloud environment and our first entry into AWS, since then we've got a lot of really good traction, a lot of embracing of our technology, we partnered more closely with AWS and got ourselves onto the marketplace. We also enhanced our partnership with VMware and now a part of their NetX integration so we have high levels of integration into both of those platforms, which of course is strong to this entire audience. We've introduced new features and functionality into our product to be able to provide greater visibility, even going deeper into understanding the way the applications are functioning and also added some more security profiling into our products and being able to identify threats as they come into the enterprise network and also as they go out ,so, it's been interesting, it's been a lot of fun. >> You talk about the hybrid cloud and obviously we're hearing that here, this week right, so AWS is obviously slightly shifting its perspective a bit, you know, in terms of on-prem and dealing with the public cloud as well, mind that merger. Your clients, is their any arm twisting that you still have to do or are people buying into it a little more wholeheartedly now in terms of the public cloud and that you've addressed these security concerns? >> I think actually we've become an enabler in often times for our customers, to move to the cloud with competence, where they were a little bit concerned that as they move into the cloud, what kind of investment in tools are they going to have to make? What are they going to potentially lose as they put their workloads into the cloud ? Do they lose a degree of visibility and control? And what we've been able to do is ensure that they have that same experience no matter where they deploy. We were talking earlier about one of our customers that's in the travel and entertainment business and they have been using our gear on cruise ships and in their on-prem data center, but expanded themselves into AWS to extend their capabilities and provide a better user experience for those on ship and now what they really have was the ability to have visibility from ship to shore to cloud and have that perspective and have the confidence that they're delivering a high quality experience to their customers. >> Ship to shore to cloud, not every company can say that. >> Exactly. >> But speaking of motto's, you have a new marketing campaign, visibility without borders. What does that mean? What are you trying to evoke their with your customers? >> What we we're really trying to look at there is the ability to provide visibility no matter where you're deployed. If you have a deployment in a public cloud environment like AWS, you want to have that same level of visibility in your on-prem environment, you want to have it no matter where you have a workload, wherever you have an instance that you want to manage. You want to be able to have that same perspective, one of the things we talk about a little bit, is the idea that, providing a single pane of glass into the service insurance experience and I think that often times, when people try to get to that single pane of glass, they end up with more of a single glass of pain. (laughing) You know, they're trying to aggregate so much stuff that it really doesn't come together too well. >> Right. >> But because we focus in on the data source itself then it just provides that continuity regardless of where they deploy. >> Alright and the importance of visibility, obviously when you're talking about end to end right now, whether you're on-prem or whether you're in the public cloud you're not particular, right? >> Right. >> As a user, I just want to see my operation from start to finish and I don't care where it is. >> Exactly, providing that end to end perspective and being able to understand how I'm delivering services, what the customer experiences, no matter where I deploy and especially when we look at taking advantage of some of the elastic compute capabilities and the like that exists in the cloud, you want to ensure that you're actually getting what you paid for as well, you want to have those controls in place, knowing that what you're delivering is meaningful and impacting the business in a positive way as opposed to, potentially, in a negative way, and spending too much for something that doesn't improve anything in terms of the customer experience. >> Right. >> So the customers, when they want to talk about return on investment, what excites them most? What kind of things are you showing them that is delighting them? >> Often times it's really about mean time to knowledge, we spend a lot of time pointing fingers at each other when we're trying to solve a problem instead of pointing our fingers at the problem. And that's really what we try to focus in on, really getting down into the real details of why something is not performing properly, not, what might be performing improperly. So being able to really get down to that detail and get the right people working on the right problems, I often talk about it in terms of getting the right information, to the right person at the right time, to do the right thing. And if you're able to do that, you're going to provide a better user experience to your customers. >> You mention that a lot of your personnel, a lot of your folks here have been speaking, talking to various groups, I always find that interesting right, because, it's usually the Q&A. >> Yes. >> That when things pop off. So, if you had to generalize about the kind of feedback you're getting from those sessions in terms of the questions, the concerns, the challenges, what are you hearing from folks out there? >> It's kind of funny, one of the things that we get a lot of times is, "You really can do this?" you know, "Is this real what you're showing us?", it's like, yes, this is actual traffic we're showing you exactly what we're seeing. >> Yeah. >> And then they are often pretty amazed at our ability to bring this all into something that visualizes these complex applications that they're delivering across multiple different environments and they have that ah-ah moment where they go, "Oh gosh I really need this, you know, this is really that end to end view that I've been looking for for so long, but I really can't get what I use, a bunch of disparate tools, to try and bring that together" >> So that means, what you just described, is really the definition of innovation, which is providing customers with things that they want, that they didn't even know they wanted. How do you stay innovative? I mean here we are at AWS, Amazon, one of the most innovative companies on the planet and in the history of industry. >> Absolutely. >> How does a company, you're based in Westford, Massachusetts, how do you stay on the cutting edge? >> We spend an enormous amount of time working with our customers and listening to them in terms of where they're going, what their plans are, what new technologies might they be implementing, what are their major initiatives, we regularly reach out and we have constant contact with them to get that feedback and make sure that we're developing solutions that are meaningful to them, it's really about, not what feature can I deliver but what can I provide as value, that's going to make their lives better. Because, as an IT person, it's a tough job right? You're usually the person that people look at and say "Why isn't this working?". >> Right. >> And not being able to have an answer to that, is not a good position to be in. (laughter) Right, so what we're really trying to do is provide them with that answer and give them that ability to be able to answer the tough questions and solve those tough problems. >> Talking about finger pointing, it happens right? >> It does, you know. So what we're really all about is making sure that they're able to get the problem solved as quickly as possible. One of the interesting things I've been hearing from our customers too is that they're looking to this concept of a versatilist, rather than having just a straight forward specialist coming in and work on problems, having people that are a little bit broader in terms of their capabilities and looking at things not only from the perspective, say I'm a network guy, I'm going to look at the network and the app guys going to look at the app. >> Right. >> You got to cross pollinate a little bit and provide that ability to see both sides of that problem, so that's starting to happen. >> Certainly presents a challenge for your workforce right? All of a sudden, you've got to be a little smarter and where a lot of different hats. >> Exactly. >> Versatilist, I like that. You heard it here first. >> Yeah. >> Well, Russ, if you're going to go and ship the shorter cloud, you let us know? OK? >> OK. (laughing) >> Because we want to take that journey with you, alright? >> Love to. >> Thanks for being with us again, good to see you. >> Thank you, it was a pleasure. >> You bet, safe trip home. Back with more here from AWS re:Invent, you are watching us live on the Cube.

>> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube covering Red Hat Summit 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat. (electronic music) >> Welcome Back to The Cube's coverage of the Red Hat Summit, Boston, Massachusetts. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost Stu Miniman. We are joined by Paul Cormier. He is the executive vice president and president of products and technologies here at Red Hat. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> I want to ask you about a point you made earlier in your keynote. You talked about the challenges the customer is facing. You talked about how last year the three big ones were cost, security, and automation. This year it's all about Cloud strategy and about the pace of innovation. What is driving this shift in customer priorities and challenges? >> I think the big thing that's driving it, I think over the previous years, people were really test driving a lot of the Cloud and the hybrid technologies. And now, as they actually start to move to the next phase and they actually have to stitch it into their environment, that's where we get real. And that's actually why we see a lot of customers here 'cause that's what we've done over the last 12 to 18 months is worked with our customers in getting this into their environment. Cloud as part of their IT environment and not the entire IT environment. So I think that's what driving it. We're solving real world problems now, and I think that's what we do best, and I think that's what open source does best. >> Paul, I thought it was a great point. I loved to see that the Cloud strategy was like the number one thing, because it is what I've been hearing when I've been talking to practitioners last year or two. I had a T-shirt that said, Blah blah cloud, because we spent so many years talking about it. In the industry it's always, Oh, there's this cool new thing and customer you need to get on it. Now, having a Cloud strategy is critical for any IT department to understand how they're going forward, where they deploy resources, where they go to their partners, like yourself, to be able to change and shift many of the things that they're doing. >> Well, what we've found, even in my own shop, right, even my own development shop, what we've found is you had a lot of departmental groups going out to the public Cloud. And now you're getting, now, because you're spending so much there and pieces going out, now the CIO gets involved, and now they want to look at it. How is this going to fit into my overall strategy? And so, at that point, the only way is hybrid. And so, the CIO now, they don't want five islands of different operating environments, they want one. As a little operating group, really doesn't care, they want their own thing, but when the CIO's now looking at an overall structure for the entire company, that's what's really driving hybrid right now. And that's really driving these implementations, and frankly, that's what's driving a lot of the desire to have this common operating environment that we've been talking about for a long time. And implementing for a long time. >> So how do you do it? When you talked about these five separate islands, but those five islands now need to work together and communicate and collaborate and come up with a unified strategy, how do you do it? >> Two things. First of all, because so much has moved to Linux, RHEL is that platform. The Cloud is about the application. One of the points that I made in my keynote this morning, kind of made it a little subtly, so maybe it didn't come through, we're not building infrastructure for the sake of building infrastructure. We're building infrastructure for the applications. And so, that's the really important part. The applications run on Linux, so the first step, the first step is really getting a common operating environment for the application. We did that 15 years ago with RHEL. So now, when you see RHEL on Bare Metal, RHEL as a virtual machine on US, VMware, or Microsoft, RHEL as a container in a private Cloud, RHEL in one of the public guys, it's the same RHEL. So, we do seven one or seven two, it's seven one or seven two, we upgrade in the same way with the same number of bits. When we have a security update for seven two, it's the same thing. So now the application really with RHEL really gets that consistency. Then, with OpenShift now we bring the infrastructure to maintain it, support it, deploy it, and manage it. And so, that's what's really, the light bulb's going on for a lot of CIO's as they've seen OpenShift, and OpenStack as well, because we're making this hybrid world now manageable and secure. But RHEL's been the key because that's the application. That's the application layer. Frankly, that is the piece that VMware didn't have, right? VMware didn't have any pieces that touched the app. Apps don't run on hypervisors, they run operating systems. And even containers, it's just a Linux OS sliced up in different way. So that's really been the key. We've been at this for 15 years. Really, if you look at it that way, we've evolved this over 15 years. >> Alright, Paul you mentioned briefly in your keynote an announcement with AWS. I know keynote tomorrow is going to go into more detail, but, we think it's a pretty big deal. I've been talking to some of the press, we talked to one of your customers, Optum, who's one of the keynote speakers. I mean, he said game changer. This is, he uses Open Shift, loves what we can do this. You were just talking about the application Affinity, and that's what infrastructure's for. Can you connect that with what we're talking about with AWS here? >> I think why this is a game changer for all of us, and mostly the customer, is because, prior to this, invoking an Amazon service for an application would mean that it could only be invoked from that infrastructure at AWS, can only be run there, frankly. And it really was limiting. With now bringing the connection points back into OpenShift the application can now invoke that Amazon service from on Amazon, or even on Premise. And it really extends the reach of Amazon to come in to really now build a hybrid environment. And I also think it's significant for our customers telling both of us, both Red Hat and Amazon, that they want want to run in a hybrid world. So, that's the game changer. It really extends both of our reaches that way while keeping that consistent operating environment with the RHEL base. >> And that's different than just saying oh, I can run a VM in an Amazon environment. >> Right, because you're running a VM as an island. Now, you're running an actual system that's spanning across the hybrid world being managed and orchestrated from one place. >> I want to talk to you about your approach to the product design and development process. In the past you have talked about the virtues of patience and how you do not build a multi-million dollar product overnight. It takes years. And yet, on the other hand, there is this desire and hunger for fast innovation and changes. How do you strike that balance with your team and also with customers? >> My wife wouldn't say I had that much patience. (laughing) >> But at least you appreciate that it's a good thing. >> No, I mean, frankly, our company and even all the way to our board of directors has been very, very supportive of that. I mean, the first thing we do is we start and ease up stream communities. And really, what we are doing now is we're really integrating multiple communities together. When it was just the OS in the past people used to say all the time there is no Linux community, there's multiple communities and our job is to bring it all together. Right now, it's that on steroids. We try to pick the right technologies and drive it. I mean, I'll give you a great example. We bought a company a few years back, Qumranet. At the time Zen was the hyper visor, the community was going to KVM, we bought the company, they had zero revenue, we had zero additional revenue because it was a hyper visor. We bought it so we could get behind the community, bolster it, and know it would go in the right direction. That is the key that no one else has really figured out, is to place yourself in these communities over the years, and drive it, drive it, drive it, and then bring that innovation into a product. I call it the difference between a project and a product. Our products are really an amalgamation of many communities put together in a platform to solve a real world problem. But you have to have the patience. RHEL has been such a successful product for us, frankly, it's fueled financially, it's fueled us and given us the ability to have the patience for all these next generation platforms. That's what's done it for us really. >> Your CEO Jim Whitehurst, in his book, talked about how from an acquisition standpoint, everything you do, it's got to be open sourced. Does that hamper you at all or are there certain technology areas, things are moving so fast, that would you buy something and keep it internal for a while until it was open source? How do you handle something like that? >> The last five or six acquisitions were not open sourced, so we open sourced them. >> Stu: Okay. >> It's just in our DNA, frankly, I think it's forced us to do it the right way, because we couldn't have a closed sourced product now if we tried. If Jim and I said we're going to have a closed sourced product we'd be in the office alone. And it's in the DNA, and it's really forced us to build better software, because we never ever think here's the line and everything below is open and above is closed. We never have to think that. It's all open. And it just forces that innovation. The landscape is littered with companies that have tried to have that line. It just doesn't work. You confuse your your engineers, you confuse your market, you confuse your customers, you confuse your partners. It's all open. And that's what really drives the innovation. >> Let's talk about recruitment and getting this war for talent that we're seeing in the tech industry. Red Hat's based in North Carolina. You're based here in Boston. Of course we have people here 70 different countries, as your CEO mentioned in his opening remarks. What are you seeing? What are the trends? What do the best and brightest developers want out of an employer? And how are you giving it to them? >> A couple things. Up here in Boston the products group is headquartered up here. Sales group is headquartered up here. So we sort of live together. One of the things we've just did, we just announced we're opening an office right across the street here, for both R&D and our customer briefing center. So one thing is-- >> Congratulations. We're excited for that. Of course you'd had the Westford facility with lots of engineers. But Boston, a block away from where GE's new headquarters going to be. >> A block away. It's about collaborating with the universities, collaborating with the students to come out of the universities. I see it around the world. No, but they want to be in the city. >> Rebecca: Yeah. >> They want to be in the city. That's the first thing. We have a thousand engineers in the Czech Republic that are core to our product. They build many of the products in the Czech Republic. We're near universities. The reason why we did Boston for the R&D is universities, just as the Czech Republic. Because now what's taught in engineering and computer science programs is Linux and open source. So when students can get out, go work for a company, we give them the freedom to really drive where the technology needs to go, that's really our recruiting draw. I would never go into our engineers and say you will implement this this way. They implement it the right way. >> Rebecca: So autonomy? >> Autonomy. >> Rebecca: And cities. (laughing) >> Paul: Well, autonomy and cities in the right places. >> Right, right. >> We're really looking for the talent that really wants to innovate. And they're coming out of the universities now doing that. So that's what's been successful for us. >> Alright, Paul we were talking about this is the 13th year of the show, it's the fourth year we've done it. The Cloud piece has really matured a lot. If you looked forward, if we come back a year from now, what do you kind of see as some of the major things that we'll want to have accomplished? What's on your plate for the next 12 months? >> One of the things that we're looking at now, I sort of ended it up in my keynote, is we really think that we've really abstracted the differences for the application layer, storage layer, application layer, management layer, across the hybrid world, but there's a lot of pieces of the infrastructure that the operations people have to deal with every day. The network stacks, the really underneath and the plumbing storage stacks. Sort of the difference between OpenShift and OpenStack. VM's being orchestrated beside containers. So we really starting to see those pieces come together. Really that application layer and that infrastructure layer coming together. We think of OpenStack as bringing the infrastructure to the hybrid world and OpenShift as bringing the application to the hybrid world. Starting to bring those pieces together. And I think that's what you'll see more of next year. Is commonality around management, orchestration, networking, storage, just more of that, and more ease of plug and play. >> Great, well Paul Cormier thank you so much for joining us. This is Rebecca Knight along with Stu Miniman. Thank you for joining us at Red Hat Summit 2017. We'll be back just after this. (electronic music)