>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Hello everybody, welcome back to IBM Think 2021, the virtual edition. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm pleased to welcome back a long time Cube alum, Jim Whitehurst, who's the president of IBM. And I'll call him chief cultural evangelist, welcome Jim. Great to see you again. >> Great to see you, Dave. Thanks so much for having me. >> Yeah, it's really our pleasure. And I want to start off, it's just over a year as president of IBM. And I wonder, you know, when you're a little kid or, you know, early in your career, computer science class, did you ever think you'd be president of a company that was founded in 1911? I mean, amazing. I wonder if you could share what's the most important thing you've learned in your first year? >> Well, look, I mean, as you said, I would've never thought it. Yeah, I was the first kid to have an IBM PC on the block and was always into technology but never saw myself as like, you know, running a big tech company. So it is humbling. I would say that there are tons of lessons in the first year. I guess the two that strike me most is one is just related to strategy and that's, you know, Red Hat and most technology companies, we're very customer focused. But it's around whatever technology we're bringing to market where IBM has fundamentally transitioned. And kind of transformed itself over time to make sure it can meet customer needs. So it's sold off businesses, it's bought other businesses, it's created new businesses. So it really shows the kind of the focus and value on serving our customers and doing whatever it takes to do it. And that's been a fundamental kind of different strategy than most companies have had. I think one of the reasons that we've been around for over a 100 years. The second is I'm deeply into culture and I've talked a lot about the difference of running Red Hat, it's all about innovation versus Delta Airlines where I was before, which is driving efficiency. IBM is both and so really trying to think through how you run an organization that needs to run the financial systems of the world, that extraordinary reliability and drive roadmaps on things like quantum computing. At the same time be able to innovate iteratively with our customers and in open source communities. And kind of getting that balance right as a leader. It's, you're kind of doing what we did at Red Hat and what we did at Delta but kind of doing it together. And I think that stretched me as a leader and kind of taught me a lot about how we're thinking about continuing to evolve the culture at IBM. >> Now, of course, you do this leadership series, you put out things out on LinkedIn and words matter. And that's what I take away from a lot of the little short hits that you do, which I really appreciate. My stuff that I put Jim on LinkedIn, it's just, you got to invest like 15, 20 minutes. So I really appreciate the short hits. But you do that regular series and I'm curious do you do that to reach more IBM people? Are you an open source culture? You're trying to help others. And I'm curious as to sort of why that platform as opposed to sending around an internal thing an IBM. And I'm wondering if your principles and how they've evolved kind of post pandemic. >> Well, so first off, maybe that comes from Red Hat but I think IBM shares that it's if you have something really, really valuable, you want to share it. And look, when I am out talking to our customers, CEOs and some of the biggest companies in the world, honestly we rarely talk about technology 'cause other people are more detailed or deep in that. We primarily do talk about culture. And how you think about again, how do you take an organization that's been built to drive efficiency and scale on a global basis and make it able to be more nimble and more innovative? And so, and obviously, hopefully that's all with IBM and Red Hat technologies. But ultimately most of my conversations at a senior leadership level are about culture and leadership style to drive that. And so if that's valuable for CEOs of some of the world's largest companies, it's valuable to leaders kind of across all spectrums, all sizes. And so I think LinkedIn is a good way to kind of take some of those messages and make sure we were able to share those much more broadly. So certainly I spend more time talking about it inside of IBM and I spend a lot of time with our clients talking about it. But I think many of the lessons are applicable more broadly. And so why not share them? And LinkedIn's a great platform to be able to do that. >> How about you, how have your principles, how have your principles sort of changed and how have they evolved post pandemic? >> Well, I think a couple things, so one is the pandemic kind of forces you to get more precise about it. And what I mean by that is so much of leadership is about building credibility and trust and influence. And when you're seeing someone in 3D live, visual cues can kind of mean a lot in the water cooler conversations. Or who you run into in the hall can all help kind of create that level of trust. But you can't do that in 2D. As great as Zoom and other platforms are, you just can't quite do it. And so you have to be much more thoughtful in how you're creating opportunities to kind of create trust. So I'd say I've gotten more surgical in thinking about kind of what those elements of leadership are that do that. I think the second thing I've really learned at IBM again is back to this. We have to be able to do both, drive a future state in a known world as well as, I call it seek a future state in an unknown world. So driving a roadmap for quantum computing takes a number of different technologies coming together in one year, in two years, in five years. And that really does have to be pre-planned, which is very very different, that I'll call the iterative innovation approach that we use at Red Hat and open source communities and working with our clients. And we have to do both. And so as a leader you really have to understand the problem you're trying to solve and apply slightly different kind of leadership tactics against that. So when you're executing a known versus you are trying to create something in an unknown, does require different approaches and we have to do both in IBM. And I think that's the struggle a lot of companies have, every company needs to do that. If you're Delta Airlines, you don't want anybody innovating on the safety procedures before your flight. Yet you want a lot of innovation happening on your website and your mobile app. So how do you bring those together? And as a leader you can have a common set of values, but recognize you have to bring different tools to the table, depending on the context in which you're leading. And so I learned a lot more and gotten a lot crisper with that since being at IBM. >> Interesting, I mean, the pandemic, we all know it's been terrible but one of the upshots has been we had a glimpse of the future sort of shoved into a forced march of digital in 2020. And so obviously the next 10 years ain't going to be like the last 10 years. And one of the things we've been talking about is ecosystems and partnerships and the power and leverage that you can get from those. And Arvin has said, laid it out, we are returning to growth company. And so I wonder if you could talk to how partnerships and ecosystems play into that return to growth for IBM. >> Well, first off a key part of our strategy we talk about hybrid cloud and AI. It's not just about, hey, a platform that runs across all the different deployment models is convenient. It's also because innovation is coming from so many sources today. It's coming from a by-product from the web 2.0 companies, it's coming from open source. It's coming from an explosion of startups because of the amount of capital in venture capital. It's coming from traditional software companies. It's coming from our clients who are participating in open source. And so you have so many sources of innovation. Much of what we're doing is landing a platform that allows you to consume innovation safely and reliably from wherever it's coming from. So a core part of a platform by definition is the ecosystem around it. Having a platform that runs everywhere is great but if you don't have any applications that run on it who cares. And so ecosystem and partners have always been important to IBM, but for this strategy of this horizontal platform oriented strategy, it is critical to our success because much of the platform is the ecosystem. And so we've already talked about investing a billion dollars in that ecosystem to get ISVs and other partners on our platform, again, to ultimately kind of create that kind of horizontal layer where I can run anything that I want to on it and I can run that anywhere I want to. And so the two sides of that so all the innovation happening on top and making sure it runs everywhere is what really unlocks the freedom of choice. That reduces friction to innovation, which allows everybody in the ecosystem from our clients to ISVs to hardware partners to innovate more quickly. And that's what we really see as the benefit of our platform. It's not a horizontal stove pipe, come innovate in this one place. It's recognizing innovation's happening in so many places. And the only way we're going to be able to allow people to ingest that is to have a horizontal platform that everyone's participating in. Which is why partners and ecosystem are so important, not only to the success of our platform, but to the, I'd say, as a success of this next generation of computing. These horizontal fabrics that require an ecosystem kind of built around them. >> I think that's an important nuance that maybe people don't understand that yes, you have a platform. Obviously, OpenShift is a linchpin but it's an enabler for people to build other platforms. It's not the be all, end all platform that's sort of ultimately becomes another Island. And so that is a key part of the growth strategy and presumably expand your total available market. >> Oh, absolutely and so this is the key is we can talk about great IBM technologies. We're doing amazing things in security and AI and natural language processing and all these other areas. But the platform is a recognition that we're not going to do everything for everybody anymore. There's just the democratization of technology means that there is so many sources of innovation. And so first and foremost, we have to land a platform so you can consume anything from anywhere. And then of course, we'll drive our own pace of innovation both in hardware and software around that platform. But we are just a player on that platform, which we're really instantiating for really anybody to be able to reach customers or customers to reach sources of innovation. >> I know sustainability is a passion of yours, that it's obviously a hot topic right now. Oftentimes I joke tongue in cheek, Milton Friedman's rolling over in his grave with all this ESG talk. And I know you just posted recently on LinkedIn. And of course I went right down to Kavanaugh because my premise is not only is sustainability the right thing to do, it's also good business. But I wonder if you could give us your perspectives on this. >> Yeah, well, so first off, I mean, as a large global citizen as IDM I think this is an important role that we play and look, this isn't new to IBM. We came out with our first statements around environment in 1970. We put out our first report that's become our environmental impact report in 1990. We've been talking about climate since the early two thousands. So we've been involved in this for a long, long time because I do think it's important broadly. But there's also a specific role I think IBM can play beyond just our own individual actions to reduce our own footprint. Because of some of the extraordinary technologies that IBM has worked on in the years especially around semiconductors, we have just an amazing amount of technology, expertise, intellectual property around material science. And so just a couple of examples of those that relate to the environment. We in doing some other work realized that we had a way to be able to recycle PET plastic, which is a real problem because so many clothes and other things are now made out of PET. And it's really hard to recycle but a by-product of other work we're doing realized we could do that. And so we've formed a JV and we're funding that to not profit from it but to make sure that much more of the world's PET is recycled. Or the work that we're doing on batteries, where using ocean water instead of rare earth minerals to make batteries that not only are cleaner but last longer. Those are kind of byproducts of our kind of core business. The areas that we can see the benefits of innovation and material science being able to impact the world. I am hopeful that we'll be able to play a role with all of that in clear air carbon capture. I mean, that's still far further away but I do think IBM has a unique role that we can play because of our deep expertise in, again, material science, quantum computing, and modeling that put us in a unique position to have a major impact on the world. >> I wonder if we could talk a little bit about sort of IBM and its technology bets. And I've made the point a number of times in my writing that IBM's R and D spend has been about pretty constant, about $6 billion a year. But as IBM is jettison certain businesses got out of the x86 server business and it got out of the Foundry business with micro electronics. Now it's spinning out NewCo. What happens, the effect is that R and D as a percent of revenue goes way, way up. And my premise has always been that allows IBM to be more focused. So whether it's hybrid cloud, AI, quantum, Edge where are you placing your technology bets and maybe give us a sense of how you ranked them, some of your favorites. >> Yeah, so, look, that's exactly right. I mean, we are one of the few places that still invest a massive amount in R and D, especially in fundamental research. And so I'll kind of break down kind of the core areas. So first off, what I'd say is part of the hybrid cloud platform is recognizing we don't need to do everything for everyone. There is great open source technology. There are great other vendors that are doing things that we can enable our customers to access via the platform. So we're not trying to do everything for everybody in the way maybe 40 years ago we did. Because we understand there's so much great other technology out there that we're going to make sure that we expose. So we're investing in areas where we think we can uniquely add value that need to happen that others aren't doing. So AI, let me take that as an example. There's tremendous work happening in machine learning that we see every day because of Facebook and people trying to identify cats. And so I don't mean to trivialize it, there's a phenomenal work happening there. There's a lot less work being done on in AI on things where you have a lot less data. Or areas where you need explainable unbiased AI and the problem with machine learning engines is they're not auditable by definition. That's kind of a black box. And so we do a lot of work in areas like that. We do a lot of work in natural language processing. So we've had more of a as a kind of publicity kind of push the technology something called Project Debater. Where Watson can debate kind of champion debaters. That was mainly to make sure we can understand language in context, which allows for being able to better handle call centers in areas like that. Allows us to understand source code, which also is thinking about how you migrate applications from on-premise to the cloud. So we have a bunch of AI things that we are doing and is a core focus of what we're doing. But specifically we're investing in areas like anti-biased auditability, natural language processing, areas where others aren't. Which is unique and we can bring those capabilities together with what others are doing. Security, obviously, a huge, huge area where we've invested in quantum safe encryption. We've invested in confidential computing. In other words, even in compute mode your data is encrypted. So you can keep your own keys, so not even we on our cloud can see your data. So a lot of investments happening around security and that's going to continue to be an area as we know that's going to get more and more and more scrutiny. So heavy, heavy focus there. Heavily focused on technologies that help you kind of modernize your infrastructure. So automation tools, integration tools and areas around that. So on the software side, those are kind of the main areas. When you look on the hardware side, obviously quantum is a significant area where we have a leadership position we continue to drive. But even semiconductor research in kind of process technology. So we announced something with Intel to work with them to bring some of our process technologies. As we kind of go from 7 nanometers to 5 to 2 to ultimately 1. That set of technologies is an area where we have a real leadership position and we'll continue to work with now Intel. We continue to work with others to drive that forward. So whole bunch of areas both on the hardware and the software side that we continue to make progress on. >> Yeah, the Silicon piece is interesting. And when we saw that Arvin as part of the Intel announcements that we thought originally, oh, maybe it's just about quantum but it's really much more than that. You mentioned the process. We dug into it and we realized, wow, we said Power10 actually has the highest performance. And because of the way in which you are not to geek out but you're you dis-aggregate memory. And Pat Gelsinger talked about system on a package. It turns out folks that IBM is actually the leader in that type of capability. And also the way that systems on chips use memory is very inefficient but IBM has actually invented some techniques to make that much more efficient. That's sort of the future of semiconductors. And the reason why we spend so much time thinking about it is because it's of national interest. There's a huge chip shortage, which doesn't look like it's going away anytime soon. So that's a critical part of national competitiveness and technology competitiveness going forward. >> Well, and the other interesting part about that, and you talked about Power10, going back to the hybrid cloud platform that we talked about. It's not just about running applications across wherever you want to run them. It also abstracts the chip architecture. So all of a sudden whether it's on the mainframe, it's on power, it's on ARM, it's on x86 and a whole bunch of other technologies that might get developed. We're making it much easier to kind of consume that specialization or variety at the hardware level. Recognize as Moore's law runs its course there's no longer this inevitability of everything's just going to go to x86. I think we are going to see more variety because we're going to have needs in the factory floor or in the automobile or with massive container as applications. Where you're going to need, whether it's kind of shared memory or different architectures all the way out to kind of low battery consumption. And that whole kind of breadth and our hybrid cloud platform enables that variability. And then IBM obviously has great technology to enable kind of building unique capability in hardware. So we kind of play on both sides of it, both kind of developing great technologies but then making it really easy for developers to consume and use those specialized features. >> I'm glad you brought that up, Jim. We mentioned Moore's law because we're all talking about how Moore's law is waning and it's quote, unquote dead. But the reality is, is the outcome of Moore's law which is the doubling of performance every two years is actually accelerating because of the common actuarial factors of CPU's and GPU's and NPUs and accelerators and DSPs. If you add all those up and actually, we're actually quadrupling every two years. So we have more processing power at much lower costs because of the volumes that you're seeing on things like ARM. So it's actually a very exciting time. We're entering an era that really, it's hard to get your mind around sometimes. So my question is how should we think about the future state of IBM? What does that look like? >> Well, so first off, the thing that I've found extraordinary about IBM kind of having been there now just a little over a year as an employee, a couple of years, I guess, when Red Hat was acquired. Is it is unique in fundamentally changing, again, who we are to kind of meet the needs going forward. And if you think about the needs in technology, recognize it was only like 20 years ago that Nicholas Carr wrote his famous article, IT Doesn't Matter, it's about back office. And in that world, IBM was really, really effective at building and running IT systems for our clients. We would come in, we would just kind of do everything for them. Today, technology is the forefront of developing or building competitive advantage for almost any business. And so nobody wants to kind of hand the keys, so we no longer are necessarily doing things for our clients. We're doing things with our clients. So there's a whole set of work, and we talked about how we engage with our clients, how we're much more collaborative and co-creative and our whole garage model to help build the capability to innovate with our clients is a key part of what we're doing. We'll continue to drive core technologies forward like quantum in key areas that require billions of dollars of research that frankly no one else is willing to do. And then we bring it all together with this hybrid cloud platform where we recognize it's no longer about us doing it all for you anymore. We're going to do the things where we can uniquely add value but then provide it all on a platform which allows you to consume from wherever, however you want to in a safe, secure, reliable way. So as we watch this next generation of computing unfold, cloud shouldn't end up being a bunch of vertical stove pipes. It truly needs to be kind of a horizontal platform that allows you to run any application anywhere in a safe, secure, reliable way and our architecture helps do that. So it's no longer able to do everything for you. It's we can do things uniquely on a platform and work with you to be able to help you kind of create your own pace of innovation, your own sources of advantage. And so that's the broad kind of direction that we're going, again, as enterprises move from consuming technology to be more efficient, to driving advantage with it. They need partners who understand that focused on their success and can innovate with them. And that's really where we're going with our technology, with our services capability and kind of our approach to how we work with our clients. >> Yeah, Jim, you just laid out the Holy grail of computing in the coming decade and with IBM's acquisition of Red Hat. And it really enables that vision and clearly the company is one of the top few that are in a position to do that. Jim Whitehurst, thanks so much for coming back on theCUBE. Really appreciate your time. >> Thanks for having me, it's great to chat. >> All right and thank you for watching. Keep it right there for more content of theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021, the virtual edition, be right back. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Well, what I'm most excited about is we're going to talk about real world examples of the Hybrid Cloud and AI. You know, it's what we talked about last year in terms of the platform but this year we can talk about ISVs, we can talk about individual clients and how they're actually getting real value out of the platform already. And so highly encourage you to come see that, see how these technologies are manifesting themselves and real-world tangible impact for our clients. (upbeat music)

(bright music) >> From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Hello everybody, welcome back to IBM Think 2021, the virtual edition. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm pleased to welcome back a long time Cube alum, Jim Whitehurst, who's the president of IBM. And I'll call him chief cultural evangelist, welcome Jim. Great to see you again. >> Great to see you, Dave. Thanks so much for having me. >> Yeah, it's really our pleasure. And I want to start off, it's just over a year as president of IBM. And I wonder, you know, when you're a little kid or, you know, early in your career, computer science class, did you ever think you'd be president of a company that was founded in 1911? I mean, amazing. I wonder if you could share what's the most important thing you've learned in your first year? >> Well, look, I mean, as you said, I would've never thought it. Yeah, I was the first kid to have an IBM PC on the block and was always into technology but never saw myself as like, you know, running a big tech company. So it is humbling. I would say that there are tons of lessons in the first year. I guess the two that strike me most is one is just related to strategy and that's, you know, Red Hat and most technology companies, we're very customer focused. But it's around whatever technology we're bringing to market where IBM has fundamentally transitioned. And kind of transformed itself over time to make sure it can meet customer needs. So it's sold off businesses, it's bought other businesses, it's created new businesses. So it really shows the kind of the focus and value on serving our customers and doing whatever it takes to do it. And that's been a fundamental kind of different strategy than most companies have had. I think one of the reasons that we've been around for over a 100 years. The second is I'm deeply into culture and I've talked a lot about the difference of running Red Hat, it's all about innovation versus Delta Airlines where I was before, which is driving efficiency. IBM is both and so really trying to think through how you run an organization that needs to run the financial systems of the world, that extraordinary reliability and drive roadmaps on things like quantum computing. At the same time be able to innovate iteratively with our customers and in open source communities. And kind of getting that balance right as a leader. It's, you're kind of doing what we did at Red Hat and what we did at Delta but kind of doing it together. And I think that stretched me as a leader and kind of taught me a lot about how we're thinking about continuing to evolve the culture at IBM. >> Now, of course, you do this leadership series, you put out things out on LinkedIn and words matter. And that's what I take away from a lot of the little short hits that you do, which I really appreciate. My stuff that I put Jim on LinkedIn, it's just, you got to invest like 15, 20 minutes. So I really appreciate the short hits. But you do that regular series and I'm curious do you do that to reach more IBM people? Are you an open source culture? You're trying to help others. And I'm curious as to sort of why that platform as opposed to sending around an internal thing an IBM. And I'm wondering if your principles and how they've evolved kind of post pandemic. >> Well, so first off, maybe that comes from Red Hat but I think IBM shares that it's if you have something really, really valuable, you want to share it. And look, when I am out talking to our customers, CEOs and some of the biggest companies in the world, honestly we rarely talk about technology 'cause other people are more detailed or deep in that. We primarily do talk about culture. And how you think about again, how do you take an organization that's been built to drive efficiency and scale on a global basis and make it able to be more nimble and more innovative? And so, and obviously, hopefully that's all with IBM and Red Hat technologies. But ultimately most of my conversations at a senior leadership level are about culture and leadership style to drive that. And so if that's valuable for CEOs of some of the world's largest companies, it's valuable to leaders kind of across all spectrums, all sizes. And so I think LinkedIn is a good way to kind of take some of those messages and make sure we were able to share those much more broadly. So certainly I spend more time talking about it inside of IBM and I spend a lot of time with our clients talking about it. But I think many of the lessons are applicable more broadly. And so why not share them? And LinkedIn's a great platform to be able to do that. >> How about you, how have your principles, how have your principles sort of changed and how have they evolved post pandemic? >> Well, I think a couple things, so one is the pandemic kind of forces you to get more precise about it. And what I mean by that is so much of leadership is about building credibility and trust and influence. And when you're seeing someone in 3D live, visual cues can kind of mean a lot in the water cooler conversations. Or who you run into in the hall can all help kind of create that level of trust. But you can't do that in 2D. As great as Zoom and other platforms are, you just can't quite do it. And so you have to be much more thoughtful in how you're creating opportunities to kind of create trust. So I'd say I've gotten more surgical in thinking about kind of what those elements of leadership are that do that. I think the second thing I've really learned at IBM again is back to this. We have to be able to do both, drive a future state in a known world as well as, I call it seek a future state in an unknown world. So driving a roadmap for quantum computing takes a number of different technologies coming together in one year, in two years, in five years. And that really does have to be pre-planned, which is very very different, that I'll call the iterative innovation approach that we use at Red Hat and open source communities and working with our clients. And we have to do both. And so as a leader you really have to understand the problem you're trying to solve and apply slightly different kind of leadership tactics against that. So when you're executing a known versus you are trying to create something in an unknown, does require different approaches and we have to do both in IBM. And I think that's the struggle a lot of companies have, every company needs to do that. If you're Delta Airlines, you don't want anybody innovating on the safety procedures before your flight. Yet you want a lot of innovation happening on your website and your mobile app. So how do you bring those together? And as a leader you can have a common set of values, but recognize you have to bring different tools to the table, depending on the context in which you're leading. And so I learned a lot more and gotten a lot crisper with that since being at IBM. >> Interesting, I mean, the pandemic, we all know it's been terrible but one of the upshots has been we had a glimpse of the future sort of shoved into a forced march of digital in 2020. And so obviously the next 10 years ain't going to be like the last 10 years. And one of the things we've been talking about is ecosystems and partnerships and the power and leverage that you can get from those. And Arvin has said, laid it out, we are returning to growth company. And so I wonder if you could talk to how partnerships and ecosystems play into that return to growth for IBM. >> Well, first off a key part of our strategy we talk about hybrid cloud and AI. It's not just about, hey, a platform that runs across all the different deployment models is convenient. It's also because innovation is coming from so many sources today. It's coming from a by-product from the web 2.0 companies, it's coming from open source. It's coming from an explosion of startups because of the amount of capital in venture capital. It's coming from traditional software companies. It's coming from our clients who are participating in open source. And so you have so many sources of innovation. Much of what we're doing is landing a platform that allows you to consume innovation safely and reliably from wherever it's coming from. So a core part of a platform by definition is the ecosystem around it. Having a platform that runs everywhere is great but if you don't have any applications that run on it who cares. And so ecosystem and partners have always been important to IBM, but for this strategy of this horizontal platform oriented strategy, it is critical to our success because much of the platform is the ecosystem. And so we've already talked about investing a billion dollars in that ecosystem to get ISBS and other partners on our platform, again, to ultimately kind of create that kind of horizontal layer where I can run anything that I want to on it and I can run that anywhere I want to. And so the two sides of that so all the innovation happening on top and making sure it runs everywhere is what really unlocks the freedom of choice. That reduces friction to innovation, which allows everybody in the ecosystem from our clients to ISVs to hardware partners to innovate more quickly. And that's what we really see as the benefit of our platform. It's not a horizontal stove pipe, come innovate in this one place. It's recognizing innovation's happening in so many places. And the only way we're going to be able to allow people to ingest that is to have a horizontal platform that everyone's participating in. Which is why partners and ecosystem are so important, not only to the success of our platform, but to the, I'd say, as a success of this next generation of computing. These horizontal fabrics that require an ecosystem kind of built around them. >> I think that's an important nuance that maybe people don't understand that yes, you have a platform. Obviously, OpenShift is a linchpin but it's an enabler for people to build other platforms. It's not the be all, end all platform that's sort of ultimately becomes another Island. And so that is a key part of the growth strategy and presumably expand your total available market. >> Oh, absolutely and so this is the key is we can talk about great IBM technologies. We're doing amazing things in security and AI and natural language processing and all these other areas. But the platform is a recognition that we're not going to do everything for everybody anymore. There's just the democratization of technology means that there is so many sources of innovation. And so first and foremost, we have to land a platform so you can consume anything from anywhere. And then of course, we'll drive our own pace of innovation both in hardware and software around that platform. But we are just a player on that platform, which we're really instantiating for really anybody to be able to reach customers or customers to reach sources of innovation. >> I know sustainability is a passion of yours, that it's obviously a hot topic right now. Oftentimes I joke tongue in cheek, Milton Friedman's rolling over in his grave with all this ESG talk. And I know you just posted recently on LinkedIn. And of course I went right down to Kavanaugh because my premise is not only is sustainability the right thing to do, it's also good business. But I wonder if you could give us your perspectives on this. >> Yeah, well, so first off, I mean, as a large global citizen as IDM I think this is an important role that we play and look, this isn't new to IBM. We came out with our first statements around environment in 1970. We put out our first report that's become our environmental impact report in 1990. We've been talking about climate since the early two thousands. So we've been involved in this for a long, long time because I do think it's important broadly. But there's also a specific role I think IBM can play beyond just our own individual actions to reduce our own footprint. Because of some of the extraordinary technologies that IBM has worked on in the years especially around semiconductors, we have just an amazing amount of technology, expertise, intellectual property around material science. And so just a couple of examples of those that relate to the environment. We in doing some other work realized that we had a way to be able to recycle PET plastic, which is a real problem because so many clothes and other things are now made out of PET. And it's really hard to recycle but a by-product of other work we're doing realized we could do that. And so we've formed a JV and we're funding that to not profit from it but to make sure that much more of the world's PET is recycled. Or the work that we're doing on batteries, where using ocean water instead of rare earth minerals to make batteries that not only are cleaner but last longer. Those are kind of byproducts of our kind of core business. The areas that we can see the benefits of innovation and material science being able to impact the world. I am hopeful that we'll be able to play a role with all of that in clear air carbon capture. I mean, that's still far further away but I do think IBM has a unique role that we can play because of our deep expertise in, again, material science, quantum computing, and modeling that put us in a unique position to have a major impact on the world. >> I wonder if we could talk a little bit about sort of IBM and its technology bets. And I've made the point a number of times in my writing that IBM's R and D spend has been about pretty constant, about $6 billion a year. But as IBM is jettison certain businesses got out of the x86 server business and it got out of the Foundry business with micro electronics. Now it's spinning out NewCo. What happens, the effect is that R and D as a percent of revenue goes way, way up. And my premise has always been that allows IBM to be more focused. So whether it's hybrid cloud, AI, quantum, Edge where are you placing your technology bets and maybe give us a sense of how you ranked them, some of your favorites. >> Yeah, so, look, that's exactly right. I mean, we are one of the few places that still invest a massive amount in R and D, especially in fundamental research. And so I'll kind of break down kind of the core areas. So first off, what I'd say is part of the hybrid cloud platform is recognizing we don't need to do everything for everyone. There is great open source technology. There are great other vendors that are doing things that we can enable our customers to access via the platform. So we're not trying to do everything for everybody in the way maybe 40 years ago we did. Because we understand there's so much great other technology out there that we're going to make sure that we expose. So we're investing in areas where we think we can uniquely add value that need to happen that others aren't doing. So AI, let me take that as an example. There's tremendous work happening in machine learning that we see every day because of Facebook and people trying to identify cats. And so I don't mean to trivialize it, there's a phenomenal work happening there. There's a lot less work being done on in AI on things where you have a lot less data. Or areas where you need explainable unbiased AI and the problem with machine learning engines is they're not auditable by definition. That's kind of a black box. And so we do a lot of work in areas like that. We do a lot of work in natural language processing. So we've had more of a as a kind of publicity kind of push the technology something called Project Debater. Where Watson can debate kind of champion debaters. That was mainly to make sure we can understand language in context, which allows for being able to better handle call centers in areas like that. Allows us to understand source code, which also is thinking about how you migrate applications from on-premise to the cloud. So we have a bunch of AI things that we are doing and is a core focus of what we're doing. But in specifically we're investing in areas like anti-biased auditability, natural language processing, areas where others aren't. Which is unique and we can bring those capabilities together with what others are doing. Security, obviously, a huge, huge area where we've invested in quantum safe encryption. We've invested in confidential computing. In other words, even in compute mode your data is encrypted. So you can keep your own keys, so not even we on our cloud can see your data. So a lot of investments happening around security and that's going to continue to be an area as we know that's going to get more and more and more scrutiny. So heavy, heavy focus there. Heavily focused on technologies that help you kind of modernize your infrastructure. So automation tools, integration tools and areas around that. So on the software side, those are kind of the main areas. When you look on the hardware side, obviously quantum is a significant area where we have a leadership position we continue to drive. But even semiconductor research in kind of process technology. So we announced something with Intel to work with them to bring some of our process technologies. As we kind of go from 7 nanometers to 5 to 2 to ultimately 1. That set of technologies is an area where we have a real leadership position and we'll continue to work with now Intel. We continue to work with others to drive that forward. So whole bunch of areas both on the hardware and the software side that we continue to make progress on. >> Yeah, the Silicon piece is interesting. And when we saw that Arvin as part of the Intel announcements that we thought originally, oh, maybe it's just about quantum but it's really much more than that. You mentioned the process. We dug into it and we realized, wow, we said Power10 actually has the highest performance. And because of the way in which you are not to geek out but you're you dis-aggregate memory. And Pat Gelsinger talked about system on a package. It turns out folks that IBM is actually the leader in that type of capability. And also the way that systems on chips use memory is very inefficient but IBM has actually invented some techniques to make that much more efficient. That's sort of the future of semiconductors. And the reason why we spend so much time thinking about it is because it's of national interest. There's a huge chip shortage, which doesn't look like it's going away anytime soon. So that's a critical part of national competitiveness and technology competitiveness going forward. >> Well, and the other interesting part about that, and you talked about Power10, going back to the hybrid cloud platform that we talked about. It's not just about running applications across wherever you want to run them. It also abstracts the chip architecture. So all of a sudden whether it's on the mainframe, it's on power, it's on ARM, it's on x86 and a whole bunch of other technologies that might get developed. We're making it much easier to kind of consume that specialization or variety at the hardware level. Recognize as Moore's law runs its course there's no longer this inevitability of everything's just going to go to x86. I think we are going to see more variety because we're going to have needs in the factory floor or in the automobile or with massive container as applications. Where you're going to need, whether it's kind of shared memory or different architectures all the way out to kind of low battery consumption. And that whole kind of breadth and our hybrid cloud platform enables that variability. And then IBM obviously has great technology to enable kind of building unique capability in hardware. So we kind of play on both sides of it, both kind of developing great technologies but then making it really easy for developers to consume and use those specialized features. >> I'm glad you brought that up, Jim. We mentioned Moore's law because we're all talking about how Moore's law is waning and it's quote, unquote dead. But the reality is, is the outcome of Moore's law which is the doubling of performance every two years is actually accelerating because of the common actuarial factors of CPU's and GPU's and NPUs and accelerators and DSPs. If you add all those up and actually, we're actually quadrupling every two years. So we have more processing power at much lower costs because of the volumes that you're seeing on things like ARM. So it's actually a very exciting time. We're entering an era that really, it's hard to get your mind around sometimes. So my question is how should we think about the future state of IBM? What does that look like? >> Well, so first off, the thing that I've found extraordinary about IBM kind of having been there now just a little over a year as an employee, a couple of years, I guess, when Red Hat was acquired. Is it is unique in fundamentally changing, again, who we are to kind of meet the needs going forward. And if you think about the needs in technology, recognize it was only like 20 years ago that Nicholas Carr wrote his famous article, IT Doesn't Matter, it's about back office. And in that world, IBM was really, really effective at building and running IT systems for our clients. We would come in, we would just kind of do everything for them. Today, technology is the forefront of developing or building competitive advantage for almost any business. And so nobody wants to kind of hand the keys, so we no longer are necessarily doing things for our clients. We're doing things with our clients. So there's a whole set of work, and we talked about how we engage with our clients, how we're much more collaborative and co-creative and our whole garage model to help build the capability to innovate with our clients is a key part of what we're doing. We'll continue to drive core technologies forward like quantum in key areas that require billions of dollars of research that frankly no one else is willing to do. And then we bring it all together with this hybrid cloud platform where we recognize it's no longer about us doing it all for you anymore. We're going to do the things where we can uniquely add value but then provide it all on a platform which allows you to consume from wherever, however you want to in a safe, secure, reliable way. So as we watch this next generation of computing unfold, cloud shouldn't end up being a bunch of vertical stove pipes. It truly needs to be kind of a horizontal platform that allows you to run any application anywhere in a safe, secure, reliable way and our architecture helps do that. So it's no longer able to do everything for you. It's we can do things uniquely on a platform and work with you to be able to help you kind of create your own pace of innovation, your own sources of advantage. And so that's the broad kind of direction that we're going, again, as enterprises move from consuming technology to be more efficient, to driving advantage with it. They need partners who understand that focused on their success and can innovate with them. And that's really where we're going with our technology, with our services capability and kind of our approach to how we work with our clients. >> Yeah, Jim, you just laid out the Holy grail of computing in the coming decade and with IBM's acquisition of Red Hat. And it really enables that vision and clearly the company is one of the top few that are in a position to do that. Jim Whitehurst, thanks so much for coming back on theCUBE. Really appreciate your time. >> Thanks for having me, it's great to chat. >> All right and thank you for watching. Keep it right there for more content of theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021, the virtual edition, be right back. (gentle music)

[Music] from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston it's the cube covering the IBM thing brought to you by IBM hi I'm Stu Minuteman and this is the cubes coverage of IBM think 2020 the digital experience we talked to IBM executives their partners and their customers really thrilled to welcome back one of our cube alumni he has a new role since the last time he was on the cube at an event Jim white Hersey is now the president of IBM of course former CEO of Red Hat Jim pleasure to see you thanks so much for joining us hey it's great to be back hope you're doing well we are all trying to stay safe we miss seeing you and the team in person had a great digital event with the Red Hat team last week for summit of course I love you know either going to San Francisco or my backyard here in Boston from it but the thing we've been saying is we are now together even when we're apart so so many changes going on of course the global pandemic impacting everyone and the keynote you and the other IBM executive talking about you know really how it's helping IBM solidify what they believe their their decisions are and the technology direction so you know not a big vivid or change but Jim really want to get your feedback as to what advice you have for your customers where should they be investing worst they be slowing down how should they be thinking about their IP spend in today's world yeah so first off you know our hybrid cloud strategy which IBM and you know Red Hat now combined have been on for quite a long time has been all about flexibility resilience in an unknown future I think there were ever a time where having flexibility is important it's now so you know we have had clients saying hey I can use the cloud because all of a sudden with work at home I have huge increases in demand we find others that say wow I was using the cloud but I have a reduction in absolute demand so I want to pull those workloads back I'm gonna run premises say the marginal dollars so you have people kind of doing very different things than we thought we would be doing this month and going forward through the year and so having an architecture that's built for change it's certainly hybrid cloud architectures a part of that is I think being born out here as people are trying to understand new ways of working and certainly with IBM you know with some of the technologies we have around AI with helping various industries as they're all volumes increased as people are you know changing tickets or have more questions and our ability to help people scale up AI to address those so they're not trying to add people in a very difficult time you know just broadly you know our platforms run some of the most mission critical systems so keeping those systems up going and being resilient and with thousands of things CEOs and CIOs have to worry about you know knowing that you have a partner that's gonna keep your most important systems up and running are all things that we do every day and I think that value shows through even more right now yeah absolutely we've been hearing plenty of reports customers as they you know might have been thinking about how fast they move or how do they leverage cloud pods an important piece of what they need to be doing how does the combination of IBM and Red Hat differentiate from some of the other cloud offerings both cloud Nai across the industry today yeah sure well let me start off with cloud and then I'll talk about how AI complements and accelerates that that strategy so what's different about what IBM is doing is we have a vision that the best architecture is a choice full horizontal architecture where you can run your application anywhere but it's not just about running it now you know clouds are now becoming internet themselves a source of innovation via various api's with functionality behind those so in order to consume innovation learn ever it might come from you have to have flexibility to be able to move your work and so IBM is unique in saying hey we're not just a cloud provider we're actually providing a platform that runs across any of the major cloud providers and so we make that real by having the Red Hat platform OpenShift is a core part of what we do I think secondly as having the platform's great but it's all about having the platform so you can consume innovation to deliver business value and iBM has injected that with a whole series of capabilities whether that's being able to pull data and information out of you know existing workloads to the whole AI portfolio to help people really build a cognitive Enterprise and inject intelligence and AI into business processes so they can build you know a different intelligent kind of AI infused set of business processes or in our new businesses so the combination of a horizontal platform going to run anywhere with the ability whether it's with software or with services capability to add on top we can now help you leverage that we can help you take that Ferrari he built out for a drive to help you build new sources of value right one of the big discussion points this week has been edge computing a lot of discussion it's you know much earlier in the adoption and maturation of the ecosystems compared to what we were talking about for cloud so what's important with edge how our BM and RedHat going to extend what they've been doing to edge type of deployment well edge becomes an extension of the data center you know I think there was a period of time when we thought about computers as individual things and now we've had this idea of a data center is where computing happens and then they're you know thin devices like phones or whatever kind of out in the ether the tether back but you know as the Internet of Things continues to expand as the ability of computing technology towards the edge you know continues to grow with technology advances as 5g continues to expand out and you know abroad the ability to have use cases of computing at the edge just increase it increases so whether that's autonomous driving is an obvious major use case where they'll be massive amounts of you that you can't handle the latency of taking all that compute back to the data center to you know how you're making sure the paint finish that a factory is putting on a you know a piece of metal is being done you know correctly and optimally and environmentally efficiently all those things are far sensing at the edge and computing at the edge to be economic but here's the issue you don't want to have to develop a whole new infrastructure of software and you'll be able to do that a whole different set of developers with different skill sets and different rules on different infrastructure so what we're doing with this platform I talked about when I said this platform runs everywhere it's not just that it runs on the major public clouds or in your data center or bare metal or virtualized it runs all the way out to the edge now as soon as you get out to the edge you have a whole new set of management challenges because the types of applications are different how they temper hether back are different so we are working with large enterprises and with telcos not only on Bhaiji rollout but also edge infrastructure and the management tooling to be able to have an application run in the factory in an effective efficient safe way but then be able to be tethered all the way back to bringing data back for analytics in the data center so we've made some really exciting announcements on what we're doing with both industrial enterprise customers on edge computing and then how we're working with telcos to bring that to life because a lot of that obviously gets integrated back into the core telco infrastructure so this idea of edge computing and mobile edge computing are critical to the future of you know of computing but importantly they're critical to the future of how enterprises are going to operate that value going forward and so you know we've taken a real leadership position around that given that we have the core infrastructure but we also understand you know our clients and you know industry verticals and business processes so we could kind of come at it from both angles and really bring that value quickly to our all right and Jim what's the role of open source there you know one of the bigger points that was talked about at Summit last week was the I believe it's the advanced cluster management for cloud and it was some IBM people and some IBM technology came in to Red Hat and they've opened forced it we're just talking about edge computing and telecommunications service providers I remember talking with you and the team you know back at OpenStack summits with network functions fertilization open source was a big piece of it so where does open play in these ecosystem discussions well I should say this is one of the really exciting things about the the marriage of Red Hat and IBM is in Red Hat has deep capability and open source and delivering open source platforms and has been doing that for two decades now in IBM's always been a large participant in open source but has never really delivered platforms right it's always infused open source components in other kind of solutions and so by bringing the two together we can truly leverage the power of open source to help enterprises and telcos consume open source at scale to really be able to take advantage of this massive innovation is happening and so in particular you know we're seeing in telco exactly what we saw happened in the data center which is people did have these vertical stacks and the data center it was the unix's you know of the past where applications were tied to the operating systems tied to the hardware the same thing exists in telco infrastructure now and the telcos understand this idea the value of a horizontal platform so how do you have a commodity yet infrastructure underneath so hardware with an open source infrastructure so people can feel confident they're not locked into one vendor so also can feel confident that they can drive feature set that they need into these platforms and so the idea that open kind of almost think of it as Oh Linux but for data centers are now Linux for a 5g which is a combination of OpenStack on the virtualized side OpenShift brunetti ECM containers from a container of perspective be able to bring that to telcos and 5g rollouts allows them to separate the in functionality which sits in an application whether that's a virtualized application or a container and be able to confidently be able to run that on open infrastructure is something that open-source is doing today in telco and the same way it disrupted you know traditional data center infrastructure over the last couple decades and then IBM can both bring that with services capability as well as a whole set of value-added services kind of further up the stack which makes the open source infrastructure usable you know in a manageable cost-effective way today and so that's why we're so excited about especially what we could do with edge because we're bringing the same disruption we brought to the data center 20 years ago and we can do it in a safe secure reliable and manageable way all right well Jim thank you so much for the updates congratulations on all the accomplishments of the Red Hat team last week and the IBM team this week great thank you it's great to be back and I look forward to seeing you again live in the not-too-distant future absolutely until we're back in person the cube bringing you IBM think the digital experience on Stu minimun and as always thank you for watching the queue [Music] you

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a Cube conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a special CUBE conversation. We've been doing a CXO series talking to leaders around the industry how they are dealing with the global pandemic. Really happy to welcome to the program Jim Whitehurst. He is the former CEO of Red Hat. He is now the president of IBM. Jim, pleasure to see you, thanks so much for joining on. >> Hey, it's great to be on, thanks for having me. >> All right, so Jim, we talk about change in this industry an awful lot. You of course, went through a lot of professional change recently. You've got the plaque behind you for the largest software acquisition in industry history. Of course, Red Hat getting bought by IBM. In the midst of everything happening in the globe you got a new title. Yeah as I said, you just moved from Red Hat you are now an IBM-er, wearing the corporate blue, nice job. But still no tie. Oh, of course we know your style there. But Jim, want to ask you when the pandemic rolled out what was your first move as a leader? >> Well, first move was to get the team together and bond as a team. So much of traditional management is about grooving a set of routines and then driving those to drive efficiency in them. Got to take variance out because that's what drives efficiency. But this is a whole new thing, it's a whole new change. And so, first off you want to recognize the human elements and the stress related to it. But you also want to open it up saying, okay well what are we going to do? How are we going to work? And so that's no something that you'd go hire a consultant to do in two weeks. So, bringing the team together and really saying okay what do we all think? How do we actually go about running this? Really was the first thing we did at Red Hat and we did the same thing at IBM. I think this is, we talked so much about the traditional management structures really weren't built for rapid change and resilience. Well guess what, we're right in the middle of rapid change uncertainty and resilience right now. So, if there's ever a time to change how we lead now is the time to do it. >> Yeah, I would often quote Clay Christensen and I believe he said, strategy is something that you don't write it in stone. It's something that you must look at a certain point in time and make changes. And when we talked about cloud adopting it's like okay let me make a strategy but let's revisit it every quarter? These days it's, let's get the team together a couple times a week because what we did a week or a month ago is not the same as today. So, how do you make decisions today? And how do you continue to iterate and communicate with the team to deal with what's happening in the field? >> Well right now we're having multiple meetings with teams a week, with my team and then kind of rippling it out from there. We've asked everyone to commit to having well face to face video conference, so not just phone calls with their teams multiple times a week and ripple that out. We've actually and hopefully you'll soon hear in the next week or two, see it on GitHub. We've created a, I'm going to think of it as contract. What we expect, our expectations around working home including it's okay to have bad hair days and... We've got a whole set of kind of ways of working that we really crowd sourced inside of IBM in a very kind of open source type way. It wasn't something we dictated from the top and all the entire senior team is now committed to that. And we are planning on putting it out on GitHub as well, so if others find value in it. But a lot it really does start to recognize it's hard to know the stresses that people are under. Or what they need to do to be effective. And so it's the perfect time to backup and say, hey you have to figure some of this out and tell us what you need to do to be successful. >> Yeah. What you just talked about with GitHub is some the silver linings, if you will of what's been happening here. The communities we live have always been collaborative in nature. Open source is something that you expect people to be able to come together, but it really is something that we've seen highlighted some of the good cases with, whether it is 3D printing items leveraging open source projects to the like. I'm curious and we know it is early days but are there any things that you're seeing from a cultural standpoint, from a... That you believe will be permanent after we're through the immediate threat? >> Yeah, yeah we've talked about this a lot at open source is this idea of reciprocity. That transactions in an economy don't have to be so quid pro quo. I give you this, you give me that. Things like goodwill matter. Things like reputation matter. And certainly that's true in open source communities. And I do think we went through a period of time in large corporate organizations around the world where it became a little more nameless, faceless and so we're in business to make a profit. And--Milton Freidman--if you do that, that's good for society. And I think we've all already started and the business round table actually did this a few months ago. But I think this is causing all businesses to back up and say what role do we play in society? And what can we do more than what we do everyday to serve out customers? What else can we do to add value? And I think that's something certainly I don't think just senior leaders are doing. I've gotten dozens of emails from IBM-ers with the ideas of how to go do this. And I think it does really cause you, in a good way to back up and say, why do we exist as a firm, right? And I hope everyone's doing that. Or why do we exist beyond purely a for profit mechanism? And I know that theory around, well if we profit maximize society is better off. But I do think rounding that out with a little bit more of a since that weaken having direct purpose beyond profit is something that certainly great companies have always talked about, IBM's always talked about it. But this is a time it feels real, it feels personal it feels like right now, what do we do this week and next week? I don't know if you saw this, but how quickly, within a matter of days the weather channel app, which is an IBM app has a COVID button on it so you can see down to your county level the number of people infected and that bubbled up, that went to top down Arvind or me saying, let's go do that. And so, I do think that having broadly people in corporations think about well what role do I play in society is a really, really helpful thing. >> Yeah, so I'm glad you actually brought up weather because we want to talk for a second about climate. You wrote a very thoughtful piece for Earth Day. It's been really interesting to see how the planet is doing without as many humans around. I've heard things from cities in Italy that are talking about city centers will never let cars back in. There are landscapes that are more beautiful than ever. There are wild animals going places that they hadn't been before. So, I'm wondering if there's any lessons learned or things that we can do from a global climate standpoint that we've learned as a part of what has happened. >> Well, my view is that there are two major benefits in this crisis associated with environment. Not even need to say benefits. There are two lessons learned that I think could be durable. First off, I think it is inspirational to see how quickly the environment can bounce back. So if you kind of get this like, oh well what can I do? Does it really matter? Aren't we too far gone? I've heard often, well there's nothing we can do we're just down a irreversible path. I think this shows how quickly change can happen and I hope in that, people derive inspiration. Because I do think that's important to realize our actions can have benefits. I think that's important. And then I think, secondly, again back to this point of as organizations reflect on their role beyond just profit making, I'm hoping those two things can link up and we will come out of this with fundamental changes. I think we're all learning that we can work in different ways and we can still get work done. And so, we bring those things together. I'm really hopeful that as a society and as individual companies we'll back up and say hey we can impact the environment. We know we can work in some ways differently. How do we bring that together to bring about a sustainable change and outcomes in the environment. >> Well, Jim Whitehurst, always a pleasure to get an update from you. Thank you so much for sharing how you, your peers and the community are handling these challenging time. >> Hey I always enjoy our conversations. Thanks so much for having me and I look forward to seeing you soon. >> All right, thank you for watching this CUBE conversation. I'm Stu Miniman. Check out theCUBE.net for all the events upcoming interviews and archives, including lots with Jim Whitehurst in the past. Thank you for watching. (calm music)

>> live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the queue covering your red. Have some twenty nineteen. You buy bread. >> Oh, good morning. Welcome back to our live coverage here on the Cube of Red Hat Summit twenty nineteen, along with two men. Timon, I'm John Walls were in Boston. A delightful day here in Beantown. Even made more so by the presidents of Jim White, her's president, CEO, Red hat. Jim, Thanks for joining us. Number one. Number two. What else could go right for you here this week? This has just been a great show. Great keynotes. You had great regulatory news on Monday. I mean, you've got a four leaf clover in that pocket there. I think for him >> to tell you what the weather is holding up well, for us, you're right with great partnership announcements. Amazing product launches. You have been a red hat, but eleven years now and this is only my third rail launch, right? When we deliver it, we commit to long lives. And so But it's awesome to be a part of that. And we had all the engineers on stage. I can't imagine how it could get any better. >> You >> win the lottery >> Oh, yeah? Well, yes. This one step at a time here. Relate and open share for we'LL get to those just a little bit. Let's go back to the keynote last night. First life, you have CEOs of IBM and Microsoft. Very big statements, right? We know about the IBM situation. I think a lot of people got a charge out of that a little bit. You know, Jenny commenting about have a death wish for this company. And I have thirty four billion reasons why I wanted to succeed. But a very good message. I think about this. This linkage that's about to occur, most likely. And the thought going forward from the IBM side of the fence? >> Yeah. I thought it was really good toe have her there. Not only to say that, you know, we're obviously bought it toe to make it grow, but also really making a statement about how important open source is to the future of IBM, right? Yeah. What became clear to me early on when we were talking is this is a major major. I would say that the company might be too strong a word, but it is a major kind of largest possible initiative around open source than you can imagine. And so I can't imagine, uh, imagine a better kind of validation of open source with one large technology companies the world basically going all in with us on it >> to talk about validation of open source, such a nadella up on stage. If you had told me five years ago that within a week I would see Satya Nadella up on stage with the CEO of'Em wear and then a week later up on stage with the CEO, right hat, I'm like, Are we talking about the same Microsoft? This is not the Microsoft that I grew up with on and worked with soap. We're talking your team and walking around. It wasn't just, you know, he flew in from Seattle. I did. The casino left. He was meeting with customers. There's a lot of product pieces that are going together, explain a little bit, that kind of the depth of the partnership and >> what we've made. Just tremendous progress over the last several years with Microsoft, you know, started back in two thousand fifteen. Where were you across certified hyper visors, And that's kind of a basic you know, let's work together. Over the last couple of years, it's truly blossomed into a really good partnership where, you know, I think they've and we both gotten over this, you know, Lennox versus Windows thing. And you know, I say, we've gotten over. I think we both recognized, you know, we need to serve our customers in the best possible way on that clearly means is two of the largest infrastructure software providers working closely together and what's been interesting. As we've gone forward, we find more and more common ground about how we could better serve our customers. Whether that's you know what might sound mundane. That's a big deal sequel server on Realm and setting benchmarks around that or dot net running on our platforms. Now all the way to really be able to deliver a hybrid cloud with a seamless experience with open shift from, you know, on premise to to Azure and having Deutsche Bank on State's twenty five a thousand containers running in production, moving back and forth to your >> you know what getting customers to change is challenging. You know, it's a little surprising even after that this morning to be like Oh, yeah. Let me pull up windows and log in and do all this stuff. We've talked to you a lot over the years about culture, you know, loved your book. We've talked a lot about it, but I really enjoyed. Last night is I mean, you had some powerful customers stories talking about how red hats helping them through the transformation. And like the Lockheed one for me was like And here's how we failed at first because we tried to go from waterfall to scrum Fall on. Do you know he definitely had the audience you're after? >> Yeah, I really wanted to make Mikey No talking about it called How we have so many great What's to talk about your rela a open ship for bringing all those capabilities from for OS. But I really wanted Teo talk about the hell, because that actually is the hardest part for customers. And so having kind of customers back in back to back to back, talking about success stories and failures to get there, and it really is about culture. And so that's where we called the open source way, which we kind of coin, which is, you know, beyond the code. It's, you know, meritocracy and how you get people to work together and collaboration. That's what more and more our customers want to talk about. In fact, I'd say ninety percent of the customer meetings I'm in, which are, you know, more CIA level meetings they're all about. Tell me about culture. Tell me how you go about doing that. Yeah, We trust the technology's gonna work. We don't have that issue with open source anymore. Everybody assumes you're gonna have open source. It's really how do you actually make that effective? And so that's what I really wanted to tow highlight over the course of the evening. >> You know, there was a lot of conversation, too. And you have your talking to Jenny about culture last night that you have multiple discussions over the course of the negotiation or of the conversations. So it wasn't just some cursory attention This I mean, the both of you had a really strong realization that this has to work in terms of this, you know, merging basically of philosophies and whatever. But you've had great success, right with your approach. So if you can share a little bit about how those cops is ations How you went through what transpired? Kind of how we got to where we are Now that you know, we're on the cusp of successful moment for you. Yeah, >> sure. So, yeah. I mean, from day one, that was the center of the discussion, I think early on. So year Agos, um, IBM announced, contain arising their software on open shift. And I think that's when the technical light went off about Hey. Having the same bits running across multiple clouds is really, really valuable in open shifts. The only real way to do that. And yes. Oh, Arvind was here from IBM on stage talking about that. And so I think technically, it was like, OK, ding, this makes sense. Nobody else could do it. And IBM, with their capabilities and services integration center. Just lot of strategic logic, I think the difficult part. Even before they approached this. Now, kind of looking back on it, having all these discussions with him now it's okay. Well, culturally, how do we bring it together? Because, you know, we both have strong cultures, mean IBM has a famous culture. We do that air very, very, very different. And so from the moment Jenny first approached me literally, you know, Hey, we're instant this, But let's talk about cultural, how we're going to make this work because, you know, it is a lot of money to spend on a company with No I p. And so you know, I think as we started to work through it, I think what we recognized is we can celebrate the strength of each other's cultures, and you know the key. And this is to not assume that there's one culture that's right for everything. We have a culture hyper optimized for collaboration and co creation, whether that's upstream with our source communities or downstream with our customers or with our employees and how that works. And that's great. Let's celebrate that for what it is. And, you know, IBM kind of run some of those big, most mission critical systems in the world, you know, on mainframes and how you do that looks and feels different. And that's okay. And it's okay to be kind of different. But together, if we can share the same values if we can, you know, share the same desire to serve our customers and put them first how we go about doing it. It's okay if those aren't exact. And as we got more comfortable with that, um, that's when I got more comfortable with it. And then, most importantly for me is we talk about culture. But a lot of our culture comes from the fact that we're truly a mission kind of purpose driven company, right? We're all about making open source the default choice in the world. And you know, to some extent remember, have these conversations with senior teams like, Hey, we were going to think we're going to change the world. You know? How better can we propel this for? This is such a huge platform to do it, and yet it's going to be hard. But aren't we here to do hard things? >> So it talked about it, You know, it's it's always been difficult selling when you don't have the. There's been a lot of discussions in the ecosystem today, as companies that build I p with open source and some of the models have been changing and some of the interactions with some of the hyper scale companies and just curious when you look at that, it's you know, related to what you're doing, what feedback you have and what you're seeing. >> Yeah. Look, first, I'LL say, I can't talk about that as an interested observer because our model is different than a lot of open source software companies. You know, Paul talked about in his keynote today, and we talked a lot about you know, our models one hundred percent open source, where we take open source code, typically getting involved in existing communities in creating life cycles, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so that model's worked well for us. Other open source companies where I think this is more of a challenge with the hyper scale er's right more of the software themselves. And obviously they therefore need to monetize that in a more direct way. You know, our sins are businessmen always say it's a really bad business model the right software and give it away. You know, that's not what we do where hundreds and open source, but you know, if you look at our big communities were, you know, ten to twenty percent of the contribution, because we want to rely on communities. The issue for those companies that are doing Maur. The code contribution themselves is there's a leakage in the open source license, which is, you know, the open source, like the viral licenses. You know, if you make changes and you redistribute, you have toe also, you know, redistribute your code as well. And redistribution now is to find in a hyper scale is just different. So there's kind of a leakage in the model. I think that ultimately gets fixed by tweaks to the licenses. I know it's really controversial, and companies do it, but, you know, Mongo has done it. I think you'LL see continuing tweaks to the length the licenses would still allow broad use, but kind of close that loophole if you want to call that a loophole. >> Yeah, well, it's something that you know as observers. We've always watched this space and you know, when you talk about Lennox, you know, you've created over three billion dollar company, But the ripple effects of Lennox has been huge. And I know you've got some research that we want to hear about when we've looked at like the soup space. When you look at the impact of big data and now where is going you know, the hoodoo distribution was a very, very small piece of that. So, you know, talk a little bit about the ripples. Is some new research that >> way? Had some research that was that we commission to say, What is the impact of Lenin's right hand and press linens? And then we were all blown away. Ten trillion dollars. I mean, so this isn't our numbers or we had really experts do this and e. I mean, it really blew us away. But I think what happens is if you think about how pervasive it is in the economy, it's ultimately hard to have any transaction done that doesn't somehow ripple into technology and technology. Days primarily built around Lynn IQ. So in red headed President X is the leader, so it just pervades and pervades. When you look at the size in the aperture and you make a really good point around, whether it's a duper lennox, I mean, we could look a red hat, the leader and Lennox and we're, you know, less than four billion dollars of revenue. But we've created this massive ecosystem the same thing with the Duke. You think about how big an impactful. Big data and the analytics and built on it are massive. The company's doing are only a couple hundred million dollars, and I will say I've become comfortable with I'd say, five years ago, I used to say in my glass half empty day I'd be like we're creating all of this value yet we're just only getting this little tiny sliver. Um, I've now flip that around and say My glass Half full days I look and say Wow, with this lever we have with this little bit of investment were fundamentally changing the world. And so everybody's benefiting in a much larger scale around that. And when you think about it, that aperture is something really, really, really excited >> about. Well, you talk about, you know where the impact will be. Talk about Cloud, that the wave of container ization, you know, Where do you see that ending up? You know, I look, you know, Cooper Netease is one of those things. There's a lot of excitement and rightfully so. It was going to change the market, but it's not about a Cuban aunties distribution. It's going to be baked into every platform out there. Yeah, gunships doing quite well. And you know all the cloud providers, your partner with them and working with them. It's less fighting to see who leads and Maura's toe. How do we all work together on this? >> Well, you know, I think that's >> the great thing about ah well functioning, mature, open source projects is it behooves everybody to share. Now we'LL compete ultimately, you know, kind of downstream. But it who's everybody to share and build on this kind of common kind of component. And, you know, like any good open source project, it has a defined set of things that it does. I think you hit on a really important point. Cooper Netease is such an important layer. Doesn't work without Lennox, right? I mean, lyrics is, you know, containers or Lennox. And so how do you think about putting those pieces to gather manageability and automation thinks like answerable. And so, you know, at least from our perspective, it's How do you take these incredible technologies that are cadence ng, you know, at their own pace and are fundamentally different but can't work unless you put them all together? Which to us, you know, that creates a big opportunity to say, How do I take this incredible technology that thousands of, of really technically Swiss cave people are working on and make it consumable? Archer Traditional model has been like linnet, simply saying We're going to snap shot. We're going created to find life we're going back for, you know, do patching for what? And we still do that. But there's now an added sir sort of value, something like open shift, where you can say, Okay, we could put these pieces together in life cycle and together. And, you know, we see instances all the time where an issue with Cooper Netease requires, you know, a change analytics. And so being able to life cycle in together, I think we can really put out a platform where we literally now we're saying in the platform you're getting the benefits of millions of people working on overtime on Lenox with tens of thousands people working on Cooper, Netease and the Learnings are all been kind of wrapping back into a platform. So our ability to do that is it kind of open source continues to move up. The stack is really, really exciting. >> Now. You were talking about transformative technologies on DH. How great it is to be a part of that right now. You alluded to that last night in the keynote. So you're talking about this, You know your history lessons. You know how much you love doing that? Your ki notes and you know, the scientific method Industrial Revolution open source. Just without asking you to re can you are a recount. All that. Just give us an idea about how those air philosophically aligned it. How you think those air open source follows that lineage, if you will, where it is fundamentally changing the world. It is a true global game change. Yeah, And >> so the point last night was a really kind of illustrate how a change in thinking can fundamentally change the world we live in. And so what I talked about just kind of quickly is so the scientific method developed and kind of the fifteen hundreds ish time frame was a different way to discover knowledge. So it goes from kind of dictates coming down from, you know, on high, too. Very simple hypothesis, experiment, observation of the results of the things that go through that process and stand the test of time and become what we consider knowledge right? And that change lead immediately to an explosion of innovation, whether that with the underpinnings of the industrial revolution or enlightenment, what we've done in medicine, whole bunch of areas. And yeah, the analogy I came to was around well, the old way we just try to innovate constrains us in a more open approach is a fundamentally better way to innovate. But what I found so interesting in and I think you picked up on it if it didn't emphasize this much, wanted to excite and having a lot of time, its many of the same characteristics of scientific discovery. So the idea of you know, independence anybody could actually do this pinpoints the importance of experimentation and learning those Air Corps components of, you know, tef ops and agile and open source, right? It's very, uh, in the end, the characteristics are actually quite similar as well. I think that's just fascinating to see happen. >> So e think about that. And if you could bring it back to the customers you're talking to, you have a lot of executive conversation, said You focus a lot on the how is really challenging. We understand. You know, the organizational structure of most companies goes back over a hundred years to military. So you know, what you see is some of the one of the biggest challenges that, you know, executive thieves we're facing these days. And, you know, how are they getting past that? Stuck? >> Yeah. And so, you know, I think the simple is way to state. The problem, which I hear over and over again, is we tried an agile transformation, and it failed because our culture was already and cultures Mohr of, ah always tell the executor when they said to me, It's like, Okay, but recognized cultures and output, not an input. And it's an output of leadership behaviors, beliefs, values what's been rewarded over time. So if you want your culture to change, actually to think about changing the way that you lied and manage and broadly, the structures, the hierarchies, the bureaucratic systems that we have in place today are really good at driving efficiency in a static environment. So if you're trying to slightly take a little bit of cost out building a car, you start with what you did last year. You get a bunch of scientists are consultants to look at it, and then you direct some fairly small changes. So the structure were in places other wrong with them. When value creation was about standardization of economies of scale. The hierarchies work really, really well to distribute tasks and allow specialization and optimization. The problem is now most value creation. It's requiring innovation. It's how doe I innovate and how I engage with my customer. You know the example I used a couple years ago? Its summit was, you know, the average cars use ninety minutes today. So if you think about how to reduce the cost of transfer port ation, is it taking two percent out of the cost of building a car? Or is it figuring out whether it's ride sharing or other ways? Teo. A fractional ownership. Whether it is to increase the average utilization of the car, it's clearly the ladder. But you can't do that in about bureaucratic hierarchical system that requires creativity and innovation, and the model to do that requires injecting variants in. That's what allows innovation to happen. So as leaders, you have to show up and say, all right, how do I encourage descent, you know, how do I accept failure? Right. So this idea of somebody tries something and it fails. If you fire him, nobody's gonna try anything again. But experimentation by definition requires a lot of failures and how you learn from it. So how do you build that into the culture where as executives you say holding people accountable doesn't mean, you know, firing him or beating him up. If they make a mistake, it's how do I encourage the right level of risk taking in mistakes, you know, even down to the soft side. So you know, how do you hold somebody accountable in an agile scrum, right. Your leaders have to be mature enough to sit down, have a conversation. Not around here. The five things you were supposed to do and you did forum. So you get in eighty right now, you can't say exactly what they need to do because it's a little blurry. So you have to have leaders mature enough to sit down and have a conversation with somebody is I think you got an eighty. Thank you. Got an eighty because here's what you did well, and here's what you didn't. But it's subjective. And how do you build that skill and leaders? They oughta have those subjective conversations, right? That sounds really, really soft, but it's not gonna work if you don't have leaders who can do that right? And so that's why it's hard. Because, you know, changing peep people is hard. And so that's why I think so. Many CEOs and executives want to talk about it. But that's what I mean by it's a soft side. And how do you get that type of change to happen? Because if you do that, pick ours honestly, pick somebody else's, you know, agile Davis with methodologies. They'LL work if you have a culture, this accepting of it >> before they let you go. There were two things to our quick observations about last night. Number one rule Samant hitch up on the licensing, so I know you've got your hands full on that. Good luck with that. You mentioned licensing a little bit ago, and I learned that thirty four billion dollars is a good deal. Well, right, that's what you said I heard it from are absolutely well. Things >> were a separate entity. We don't have licenses. So I don't know how we would go into an l A >> given. We don't have a license to sell. So got some expectations setting >> we need to do with our customers and then, you know, but separately, You know, I think people do forget that Red Hat is a not only a really fast growing company were also really profitable company. Most of the other software companies that are growing at our pace on a gap basis makes little to no money. We have because we get the leverage of open source, we actually generate a very large amount of free cash flow. And if you actually not to get the details of the financials. But we look at our free cash flow generation in our growth, I would argue, was a smoking good deal. That thirty four. I was asking for a lot more than that. >> You could had smoking good the last night that was gonna work to give thanks for the time. >> It's great to be here. >> Thank you. Thank you for hosting us here. Great opportunities on this show for I know that's exciting to see two but continued success. We wish you all >> thanks. So much. Thank you for being here. It's great to have you, >> Jim. White House joining us back with more live coverage here on the Cube. You are watching our coverage here in Boston of Red Hat Some twenty nineteen. Well,

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hey welcome back everyone, this is theCUBE's exclusive of Red Hat Summit 2018, live in San Francisco at the Moscone West, I'm John Furrier the cohost of theCUBE. Here this week, as a cohost analyst John Troyer, co-founder of TechReckoning, an advisory and community development firm. Our next guest is Jim Whitehurst, the president and CEO of Red Hat, we have the man at the helm, the chief of Red Hat. Jim great to see you thanks for coming on and taking the time. >> Yes great to be here, thank you for hosting with us here. >> So you're fresh off the keynote, you've got a spring in your step, you're pumped up. Red Hat is really getting accolades across the board so congratulations on the big bets you've made. >> Jim: Thank you. >> You guys are looking like geniuses. We know you're super smart as a company so congratulations. >> Either that or lucky, but we'll take it either way. We are well positioned. >> Analysts love your opportunity, we're reading in the financial analysts out in the web it's saying, you know, the expanded market opportunity for Red Hat is looking really good. You've got infrastructure applications and management all kind of come in together. OpenShift is a center piece of all this and the cloud scale world is moving right to your doorstep. This is really the big tailwind for you guys. By design or like, how does that all coming together, is it the master plan? >> Well yeah I think it's two things, one is because we don't bet five years out on technology and write a technology stack to get there. That's not our model. Our model is to engage in communities, and when those communities get popular enough that we think that there's value in a supported version, then we offer the supported version. Now if you flip that around and think about what that means, it means we're never wrong with the technology bet, because we're not providing a product until it's something that's already highly successful. So we didn't offer OpenStack until it was successful. We weren't offering a Kubernetes offering until it was popular, and so I think that's one benefit. We truly work bottom up in communities. And then secondly I do think we've benefited from the fact that we've lived in the old traditional enterprise world for 20 years helping them migrate from Unix to Linux. So I think we understand the old world and the one kind of spin we put on the technologies is we have the sense of, okay for traditional enterprises, it's great there's all this cool stuff that Facebook and Twitter and others are doing, how does that apply to this set of problems? I think we uniquely have a foot in both worlds so we work and develop with the Googles, Facebooks, Twitters, but we really think hard about how those technologies apply to a traditional enterprise and the context and legacy migration and all the other issues that they face. >> You had years of experience dealing with the practical nature of getting support to customers. But you got to bring that new shiny new toy but make it right for the customers. >> Yeah exactly, and I think one of the reasons OpenShift, you mentioned that, it's our Kubernetes platform, is getting so much attention is we have instrumented and architected it to be able to run traditional stateful enterprise applications, and so you can do cloud native 12 factor, blah blah blah blah blah on it, but importantly you can run your traditional application suite on it, and so one of the reasons like you see so much momentum and so much interest in it is we're trying to span both worlds, and really thinking from an enterprise IT mindset in terms of their problems and saying how do you apply these technologies to make it work. So we're not sitting here saying you need to go do this, you need to adopt Google's practices. What we're saying is here's great technology we think you can leverage to kind of help you as you migrate to this new world. >> You guys got some clear visibility, and I think it's interesting in the container trend and Kubernetes, really good timing for Red Hat with this going on, and so two things we were commenting on our open today was we got to interoperability of multiple cloud options going on with Kubernetes and containers with respect to legacy applications, and then you got the cloud native scale for all the new stuff. So the old model in tech was kill the old to bring in the new, but now you have a new model where you can actually keep the old legacy, containerize it while building new functionality all within software that you guys are enabling, so this is kind of a breath of fresh air for a lot of people in the industry, on the enterprise side saying oh I can still use my stuff. But yet build new scale with cloud and on-prem and have a choice. >> Exactly. And it's not just use my old stuff. It is also leverage my existing people and their skills. Recognize the appdev world, most people aren't developing in a stateless cloud native way, and if you look at the traditional enterprise developer, they on average have four hours a month to do continuing education and new skill development. So, the idea that you're going to flick a switch and say all my new applications are going to be in this new model is crazy. Plus so much of the work you're doing is around your existing estate, really providing a platform that says you can develop new with the skills once you have those. You can take your existing people and take them on a journey versus like this big chasm that you have to get over as you think about both your applications and skill sets and build over time. I think that resonates really well with enterprises. >> Jim I really liked the keynote this morning. It was a very customer focused, not technology focused, and a lot of these keynotes lately have been fear based. You know, change or die, right? Your company's going to go out of business. You had a more positive vision, and the stories there were very good. A lot about time to market, time to value, some nice stories. I was joking, I think, you know, flying cars would be great, but I know I'm in the future if T-Mobile can help car makers update the apps in the car within a couple months using OpenShift, right? That's the future as far as I'm concerned. But you had this really nice framework of instead of preplanning everything as IT is want to do, you talked about configure, enable, engage. Can you talk a little bit about that framework and kind of your prescription for upleveling the organization and it's resiliency basically, as it hits the ground running. >> Yeah sure, and so I think you put a really good light on this idea of so many technology companies are out there kind of almost fear mongering around digital transformation, and what's happening is organizations around the world, fundamentally how they create value is changing. And it's all gotten listed under this moniker of digital transformation. But what it's basically saying is the future is very unknowable because the world is changing very, very fast, and it's ambiguous. You're likely to have the uberized, I mean that's a word now, orthogonal competitors coming in different ways. So your normal way of let me do a five year plan, let me prescribe a set of initiatives, organizations, and job descriptions to go attack that, and then execution becomes about compliance against that plan. That model no longer works when you don't know the future well enough to be able to do that. And so rather than just pick on that and say oh you should be scared, you should be scared, what we tried to do is say hey, Red Hat's lived in that world forever. Like, we had no idea that Kubernetes was going to be as successful as it is, and we don't necessarily know where it's going to be five years from now. But we know if we build the right context, it will develop the capabilities required for us to meet our customers' needs. And so applying that same model that we've seen in open source, and frankly we see in a lot of web 2.0 companies, we get asked over and over again, hey you provide me great technology, but help me contextualize this broader problem. Because the problem that everybody has is I need to be able to move more quickly, I need to be able to react to change more quickly, and I need to innovate more effectively. That is not a SKU. If that were a SKU we would be $100 billion company, right? That's not a product you can buy, it's a capability to build. And so the model we talked about was planning gets replaced by configuring, right? So, you don't know what the future's going to be but you know it's going to change, and so configure yourself for change. Prescription, or this idea you lay out all the steps that need to happen for people. In an unknowable world you can't do that and it gets replaced by enablement. So how do you enable people with the strategy, the context, but also the tools, decision support tools and information to make the right decision. And execution becomes less about compliance and more about engagement. So how do you engage your people in your organization to effectively react to change going forward? And so this model, and it's a very open sourceish type model of from plan, prescribe, execute, to configure, enable, engage, I think encapsulates a lot of what organizations will need to go do to be successful. >> I got to ask you a question on the community piece. I think that's where you guys have been successful with the community. It's a great way to be successful. You know, AB testing, you just look at what people want and you deliver on it. There's feedback from the community. So I got to ask you, modern open source, as we look forward on this next wave, what is, in your opinion, the key dynamic going on in open source? How is it changing for the better? What are you guys looking at? Because you're seeing a lot of younger people coming in. Open source is a tier one citizen in the world. Everyone knows that now. I mean and when you guys started it was, you know Red Hat and there's an alternative and now you guys have made that market. But now we're looking at another generation, microservices, cloud scale. Open source has become the model. You're seeing a lot more commercializations. Projects maintaining open, some productization going on at the same time. Is there some key changes that you see that people should be aware of or that you guys are watching in how open source has evolved? >> Yeah, so two changes. One kind of a broad role of open source, and then I'll come back then to how it's consumed. You're exactly right. Ten years ago and certainly 15 years ago, open source was about creating lower costs open alternatives to traditional software, right? And that's what we did. You know, Linux looks a lot like Unix, it's just lower cost and more flexible, etc., etc. Over time, though, as the big web 2.0 companies adopted open source as a model, you get this move so more innovation was coming from users than from vendors. So it's like big data, take that as an example. Big data exists not because of open source, it's because a ton of large IT leaders like Google and Facebook and Microsoft and Yahoo, etc., had these big data problems. And rather than going and finding vendors to solve them they solved them themselves. They did it in open source. And so you see this model move from vendor led to user led, and it's just like the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution, the winner's were at the machine tool manufacturers. These people use the machine tools. So I think we'll continue to see this happening where the majority of innovation is happening from users done in an open source way. Now the flip side then is, I think there was a sense 20 years ago and even 10 years ago among the zealots, that it's a big war between open source and proprietary. What we're seeing now, I think developing, you see this with a lot of the partnerships we announced, is open source will be embedded across virtually any technology platform, right? You can't use your phone, you can't get money out of a bank machine, you can't do a search, you can't do any of that stuff without using a lot of open source software. Doesn't mean the whole stack has to be open. Now we're all open and we're advocates for that, but you're seeing Microsoft embrace it, you're seeing IBM embrace, and so broadly I think you will see a larger and larger share of the technology stacks that people use today, be open source, and that'll continue. >> I mean I think the proprietary thing is pretty much a dead horse at this point. I mean, open has always won, open is winning, but also to your point about earlier making decisions in the community, there's a risk management benefit on this user led. You're taking away the risk. There's all kinds of risk management being done for you. There's no longer operational things that cost money, like managing releases. You can actually get great operational benefits as well as risk management for what to do. >> Well exactly, because these platforms, it's not let me look at three vendor solutions and say which one do I think looks the best. You actually can say what are people using at scale, what's worked well? And unless you are a bleeding edge adopter, you actually can get the observations of how people are using it and what's working and what's not. And I'll tell you from a vendor perspective it's great. When we release a product we never say, oh, does the market want this? We're not releasing the product until after the market's already adopted the technology in a community way in a pretty significant way. It's a great day, certainly game changing, I think it's going to be written up as kind of a new dynamic that's going to certainly be referenced in the history books. I want to get your perspective on the going forward basis. I know you guys are a public company so you can't really talk about the numbers, but in looking at some of the financial analysts reports recently on you guys, there's a quote I want to get your reaction to. This analyst said, "Software containers "look to be much larger opportunity than RHEL ever was, "and if Red Hat can become a leader here, "it will set the company up for many years to come. So there's obviously some people saying, obviously the container thing is pretty big. How are you guys talking to the marketplace, both the industry market, financial market, and customers around the containerization opportunity, how does Red Hat look at that? How is you as the CEO talk to that trend? 'Cause I know RHEL. RHEL's got a track record. But now you got containers. What's the order of magnitude? What's the mental model people should take to think about containers? >> So I can answer that in a couple of different ways. So let me start off with the size of the opportunity. So, as applications go from these monolithic services for applications to containerized microservices, that architecture is very, very different. And in the old world you'd have an operating system. And then you'd have a whole set of tool chains and management tools and all of these things to manage these applications, right? Well, in a containerized world you expect the platform to manage that for you, right? And so in the old world, which still exists in this growing force, but in the Linux world we provide the operating system on which the application ran, and then you got different management tools, application performance management, CMBD, all of this stuff that worked around that, right? You expect your platform to do that now, so if you think about the value we have in OpenShift, which is our platform, it's doing that telemetry, it's doing patching, it's doing a lot of the automation that was happening before. So there's a lot more value in the platform. And so like a two socket server running RHEL versus a two socket server running OpenShift, there's like an order magnitude price difference. And our customers aren't looking at it saying, oh my god that's expensive, they're actually looking at it like it's cheap versus the whole sets of tool change and management tools they were doing in the old world. So fundamentally the container platform has a dramatic amount of value. Now then from a Red Hat perspective, and I'll bring up another company, it's a little bit of a competitor, but VMWare did a great job of becoming the default management tool company around a virtualized infrastructure. Well why? Because in the shift from physical to virtual they were there first. And they kind of built a paradigm for managing that. Well in this world going to containers, containers are Linux containers, so we're there first. And so working to drive that paradigm, I think we can be a significant share player in these new container platforms, and honestly if you look out in the market, the clouds have their individual cloud offerings, which are fine. We actually can span all of that. So if you have any hybrid structure at all, we have by far the best solution to address that, and I think analysts are assuming we're going to be successful at a much higher value add and therefore more expensive product. If we get our RHEL share of that, you know it's an order of magnitude larger opportunity. >> And that's the cloud economics in play right there. 'Cause with that scale you're talking about okay, OpenShift's taking on a new role for the multi-cloud, for the large scale, you know horizontally scalable synchronous services that are coming online like microservices. >> Exactly, exactly. >> (sound distorts voice) cloud scale partnership and ecosystem strategy right? Your customers are deploying OpenShift on clouds like Amazon, Google, big partnership with Microsoft announced this week as well as a big IBM partnership. Can you talk a little bit about how Red Hat is approaching that cooperation and competition and what parts you'd like to keep on Red Hat versus where you're going to end up partnering. >> Yeah so, we, when you think about the fact that we sell free software, right? You got to think hard about the value proposition. And one of the value propositions we've always believed in is we create choice for our customers. So running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we're geeks we can talk about all this value associated with it. For many purchasing departments the value was always, when it comes up for a hardware refresh, I'm not locked into one vendor now. I can bid that out because every vendor works on RHEL. So if my application runs on RHEL, I have unlocked choice at that layer. So that's built into our DNA. It's not just a value our software adds, it's the flexibility we're providing customers. So when we look at these new generation platforms, we really strongly believe we can add a lot of value by abstracting whether you want to run it on premise, on a server, on VMWare, on any of the public clouds. By abstracting those away we're giving our customers choice at the core platform layer. So part one is to make sure OpenShift is a first-class citizen and runs well everywhere. And so for our customers then, you know that your application will run anywhere. For our ISV partners to take IBM for instance, because IBM has announced all of their software running on OpenShift, that can now run wherever OpenShift runs, which is, by the way, everywhere, without IBM having to do a lot of work. So creating this abstraction layer huge benefits for someone like IBM. So you can now run mission critical IBM software anywhere you want to run it via OpenShift. So real value to a partner like that, obviously a value to us as it drives workloads. Now one of the other things that we've seen a lot is that people have gotten used to cloud, is they're really saying, hey I love OpenShift, this is great, but honestly you manage it for me. That's one of the things I like about cloud, so I love the idea of this abstraction layer, but I don't want to have to build my own management or my organization to be able to manage this at scale, so you be my service provider. And so we built that in a small way, so we have OpenShift Dedicated, which is an offering that Red Hat engineers run that runs on Amazon. But we want to make sure our customers had choice and also they could choose other vendors they want to work with and you know, Microsoft has a lot of heritage in enterprises, so this opportunity for enterprise is to be able to run OpenShift at scale on Microsoft, fully managed and supported jointly by Microsoft and Red Hat we think is a really phenomenal offering, 'cause we just don't have the scale to build out the capabilities to even meet the demand that's coming in right now for us to offer a managed service of OpenShift. >> And you guys are also doing some work, just to point out and I want to get your comment on, to help with the licensing issues. I know there's been some announcements where you guys are trying to get some more support for folks who are dealing with some of the licensing issues when expiring and so we had your associate general counsel on talking about some of the, version two, version three, grace periods. What does that mean for customers? What is the internal motivation behind that? Is it just making it easier? >> Well you know, this whole idea of licensing being an impediment to customer success, I just find horribly bothersome in the technology industry. And so we've always tried to strip that out for Red Hat, with our customers, and now trying to say well Red Hat's big enough it can have enough influence broadly. How do we try to be more influential in communities? So certainly nothing in the open source licensing arena, not just for us but for any vendor, gets in the way of customer success. And I think that's so important this idea of the artifact of protecting IP means you create lack of flexibility for your customers. I don't think anybody wanted that to happen, but it's happened. And so anything we can do to kind of tear that down we're working to do. >> Well congratulations on all your success, and I know that when I hear words like defacto standard it gets my attention. You see Kubernetes, role OpenShift's doing. We're envisioning a huge wealth creation of new value creation market coming online pretty quickly. You guys doing a great job. Congratulations on that. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Awesome work. Final question for you, I know you got to roll, but you guys are also growing, I noticed your teams are growing, how do you maintain the Red Hat culture? You get more people coming on working for the company, what's the strategy? Give them the Kool-Aid injection? Do you got to bring them in, assimilate into the open source ethos that you guys built and are expanding? What's the plan of getting all these new employees and new partners on board with the Red Hat way? You hand them the red pill and the blue pill and they better take the red pill. No in all seriousness, it's a high class problem but it's still a problem. You know, we do grow roughly 20% a year. Taking this account even modest attrition, roughly 25% of the people at the end of the year at Red Hat weren't here at the beginning of the year. And so when you think about a culture based company, and I spend a lot of time talking about our source of advantages and capability that's tied up in our culture, that's critical, so from how we think about recruiting over half our employees come from employee referrals, they say nobody knows a Red Hatter like a Red Hatter, to the way we do onboarding, which people laugh, you walk out of onboarding you still don't know how to get a computer, but you have been indoctrinated in the power of open source to the way we do checkups along the way, the way we use video and a whole bunch of things to do that. Because it is critical. It is who we are and what allows us to be successful. >> Do you get a lot of Red Hatters out there who left the company, started companies, they come back in the fold through acquisitions? So that's always a great, great sign and we love what you're doing. I'll say CUBE are open. We love open always is winning and it's the new standard. So congratulations. >> Well thank you for having me. It's great. And I really appreciate you being here, participating in the summit. >> All right, Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat. We're here in theCUBE, live coverage day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Check out all the coverage on thecube.net, siliconangle.com, and wikibon.com for all the action. I'm John Furrier, John Troyer, more live coverage after this short break. Stay with us, we'll be right back.

(upbeat techno music) >> Host: Live, from Boston Massachusetts, it's the Cube, covering Red Hat Summit 2017, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome to day two of the Red Hat Summit here in beautiful Boston, Massachusetts. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We are welcoming Jim Whitehurst, who is the president and CEO of Red Hat. Thanks so much for taking the time to sit down with us. >> Thanks, it's great to be here. >> So, I want to talk about the theme of this year's conference, which is celebrating the impact of the individual. In your keynote you talked about the goal of leadership today is to create a context for the individual to try, to modify, to fail, to just keep going. Sounds great. How do you do that? >> Well that's why I say, leadership is about creating a context for that to happen. So you have to create a safe environment for people to try and fail. And you know, this is a tough one, because somebody fails 20 times, you know, maybe it's time him to find a new career. >> Rebecca: (laughs) >> But, you have to create the opportunity for people to fail in a safe way and actually then learn from that. And one of the things I talk a lot about, especially CEOs and CIOs is, you got to create that context. The world that we used to live in was all about taking variance out, you know, Lean Six Sigma process. Innovation's all about injecting variance in, and there's no way to inject variance in without making errors. So how do you, I want to say reward making errors, but you certainly want to reward risk taking and recognize, by definition, some risks aren't going to play out. And that's all about culture. Yeah, it's about process and reward systems, but it's mainly about culture. >> So reward, risk taking, no blaming, what are some other defining elements of this culture in which individuals can feel free to take risks? >> Well, I think a big part of it is you have to celebrate the people who try things And you celebrate taking the risk. You don't necessarily celebrate the successes, right? It's like, you know, in school, you miss something, that's bad, you get something right, that's good. Well we have a tendency to say, let's celebrate the successes, versus actually celebrating the risk taking. And so, there are some processes and systems you have to put in place. You have to have systems in place to make sure no one can risk 100 million dollars. If every Red Hatter could risk 100 million dollars, we'd be in trouble. But you have to figure out how you give enough latitude, enough free time. And, I was just yesterday talking to some Red Hatters who had moved over from IBM. They said, "It's great, we can try new things." Now, try new things within a context of a certain amount of budget or a certain amount of time. So there are processes and systems you have to put in place, but ultimately it's culture more than anything else. It trumps anything else. >> Jim, in your keynote, you said, planning is dead, and that, you know, we're lousy predictors, things are changing so fast. Your role though, you're CEO of a public company that has 60 quarters of consecutive revenue growth. So, it seems you guys are doing pretty well at getting involved in some of the waves that are happening, understanding how to keep growing at a steady pace. Maybe you can reconcile that a little bit for us, as to how you're doing that. >> Yeah, so, one of the reasons that I think that we've been able to navigate a whole set of fairly significant transitions in technology is that we don't select technology, we select communities. And I think that's a really important subtlety. So, we didn't come in and say, "Oh, we like OpenStack more than we like CloudStack of Eucalyptus or the other opensource IaaS that were out five years ago. We looked and observed that OpenStack had built the biggest user base. You know the reason we're significantly involved in Kubernetes today, versus Diego, or Swarm, or the other orchestrators for containers out there, is we observed it was building the biggest community. And, we don't just glom on, we actually kind of get in and contribute ourselves. But we look more to say what are the best communities and let's get involved in that. I don't know what the Kubernetes roadmap is for the next five years, but I'm confident that it has the best community that will drive the right direction for-- >> It's probably a little over-simplified to say you looked for the VHS ecosystem versus the Betamax best technology. >> Rachael: (laughs) >> No, exactly. Exactly, but that's what we think we're good at is observing when a community is the best community. And I say that, it's not just a matter of observation. Whether it's OpenStack or Kubernetes, we get in a help think about governance, right? So, one of the things I think really helped OpenStack is we saw it had the best user community, but we help put together the governance structure, which truly made it neutral, made it open. And so, we try to actually help in doing that, but it really is about identifying communities rather than technologies. >> Is it ever possible that you could identify the right community that might have certain elements, but it's got elements that wouldn't quite work for the opensource way, can you change that community? Is it possible to go in and push a new culture into that community? >> We think we're actually pretty good at that. Now, I think there's a mix of not every community has to be the same. We often talk about, there is no opensource community. There are are literally two million open source communities. And Linux has a culture, many of our projects in JBoss. So Drools is different than Fuse that's different than others. And so, it's okay that the cultures can be different. The key is they all have to have a common element about being open, and committing to being open, and truly being a meritocracy, cause if they best ideas don't win, that's when communities fall apart. And that's actually one of the biggest places where they fall apart. So, I do think we can influence open, and I think just by our contributions we probably influence the cultures of some of those communities. But we don't try to say is there's a Red Hat way to do community. There are a lot of different ways. >> Jim, we look at the cloud space, open is one of these terms that doesn't necessarily mesh with your definition with what the cloud guys do. You guys, of course, supported Red Hat Linux in every single cloud environment that I can think of. For many years you have a expanded partnership with AWS. But, I was debating with Sam Ramji yesterday, from Google, about like, there is no open cloud. There are clouds that use opensource, opensource can live here, but all the big public clouds are built on their platforms and openness is a challenge there. What's your thought as to how you fit there? And then we'll want to get into some of the discussion of the AWS announcement. >> Yeah, sure. So, in defense of the public clouds, it's impossible to offer a physical offering that has hardware in a software stack without it having some of your technologies that don't make it totally open, right? Or transferable. >> Is this why we never saw a Red Hat Open Cloud? >> Well, it's just that, yeah, it doesn't quite make sense in our context for that reason as well. So the role we try to play is, we do try to play the abstracter role, and we do that at multiple levels. So, Red Hat Enterprise Linux runs across a physical data center, virtual data center, and the major clouds. And that's an abstraction point that we think adds value. Because all the way back to 15 years ago, Red Hat Enterprise Linux meant that you could run the same application on a Dell server or an IBM, or an HP Blade, right? And so, we're working to apply that at the cloud level, certainly at the operating system level, but, because of all the services and the growth containers, we needed to do it at another level, and that's what we're doing with OpenShift. So, OpenShift allows you to run on physical, or on virtual in your own data center, on the major public clouds, and take advantages of the services underneath, but do it in a little bit more of an abstracted way. >> All right. So, we had Optum on yesterday, who was also part of the keynote. He's using OpenShift. He's using AWS. He was very excited about the opportunity of OpenShift being able to extend those Amazon services. You and Andy Jassy doing a video this morning. Give us a little bit of the inside look. You know, how long did it take to put this together? My understanding, it's not shipping today, but coming a little bit later this year. Give us a little bit behind what happened. >> Yeah, so. You know, this really started off with a breakfast Andy and I had in January, where we said, look, our teams are working really well together, and we've been partners since 2008, but kind of from the bottom up, I think we were taking very much an incremental approach of what we could do together, what customers we could work with. And, I think it's a little bit in the context of they've been out some other kind of big deals with some other vendors, and so, why don't we think about, what's a true net new offering. So let's now just talk about, oh, running it on Amazon's lower cost. I mean, clearly there's a cost thing there, but, what can we do that's like, wow, actually changes the life of some of the people who are using our technologies. And so what we decided is, well, wouldn't it be amazing, literally at breakfast we were talking about it, if OpenShift, which is used by enterprises all around the world, could actually leverage the thousands of services that AWS is putting out, right? So, right now, if you want to use all of these services, you have to be on AWS, which is great, but there are a lot of customers for whatever reasons, for regulatory reasons, or just by choice or economics, who decided to run on-premise or elsewhere. And so, by making those thousands of services available, it's a win-win all around. For Amazon, it's a ability to expose some really amazing innovation to many, many thousands, hundreds of thousands of developers, and for us it's a way to expose all this innovation to our developers, without kind of forcing someone necessarily to go all-in on cloud. Now, I'll say that we were literally, you know, Sunday night still getting the final contract done. >> Rebecca: (laughing) >> But I would say, when you have a really clear, differentiated source of value for customers, the deal came together, I think, relatively quickly. >> Yeah, et cetera. One of the things we've been trying to reconcile a little bit is, when you talk to customers about where their applications live, that hybrid or multi-cloud world, versus the offerings that are out there, it was a mismatch, because, you know, they were like, oh, I'm using VMware in one place, and I'm using Amazon somewhere else. I've got my SaaS in a different place. We're starting to see Amazon mature their discussion of hybrid through partnerships of yours. OpenShift looks like something that can really help enable customers to kind of get their arms around those environments in many locations. >> Well, I think so. One of the things, if you really go and talk to developers, developers really don't care that much about infrastructure software, and they shouldn't care. And, it's interesting. I think developers right now are really enamored by containers, because containers somewhat makes their life easy. But, I was talking to some of the folks in Red Hat that deal a lot with developers, and they say, ultimately developers shouldn't want to care and don't want to care about even containers. They just want to write code, and they want code to work, right? And one of the cool things about OpenShift is that's kind of what you're doing, is you're saying write code. Yeah, use any of the services you want from anywhere you want to use it. They're all there. They're all available. You don't have to worry about, I want this service, so I have to run this on Amazon, or, hey, I got my database on-premise, so I got to run here. Let's just make it easy. And I think that's one of the cool things about this announcement that's cool for developers, but it's also unique that it's something that only we could bring together. >> Yeah, serverless is something that's been gaining a lot of buzz to kind of say, right, it's underneath there. There's probably going to be containers, but my people writing applications don't want to worry about that. Speak to, it's the application affinity and that tie to kind of modernization of applications that seems to be one of the biggest challenges we've been facing for the last couple of years. Why are companies coming to Red Hat, working across your solution set to help them with that challenge of their older applications, but also kind of building the new businesses. >> Well I think for a couple reasons. So first off, if we really think about what Red Hat is, we call ourselves a software company, but we give away all our IP, so that's a stretch, right? >> Rebecca: (laughs) >> You know, when we think about our overall mission is, we think, there's enterprise customers here with a set of challenges, and there's all this phenomenal innovation happening in opensource communities. How do we build a bridge between those. So certainly that's product. So we create opensource, well, products out of opensource projects. It's about architecture, and then it's about process. And we talked about open innovation labs. But in part of thinking about that's what we do, we obviously start off say, well, what are enterprise problems, and what are technologies that help solve those problems? So, one of the things that we've driven so hard into our container platform is the ability to run stateful applications, right? So it's great to talk about scale-out and cloud native, and we certainly do that, but go talk to any CIO and 99.9% of their application portfolio is stateful. And so, we think about that and we drive those needs. And the reason we're the second largest contributor of Kubernetes isn't just because we're nice people. It's because we're trying to drive enterprise needs into these projects. And so, I do think that technologies that would ultimately emerge, and the products we're able to put out, help enterprises consume opensource in a way that is actually value adding. >> I wanted to ask you about the examples that you used in the keynote today. The three that you highlighted were governance. >> Jim: Yeah. >> And I think that that was really interesting because you're showing how opensource is bringing new innovations and ideas into government and agencies not necessarily known for innovation. Where do you see the future of technology in government coming together? >> Well, one of the reasons I wanted to use government examples is that I actually wanted to highlight, well, what's the role of government when you start thinking about innovation. So, certainly, we could've brought up a lot of examples. You know, yesterday the Optum folks that are big users of our platform, and they've kind of created a context for innovation among their developers. But the reason I wanted to highlight governments, and really try to do it from regions around the world, was to say there is a role for government when you start thinking about what is the new system underneath the economy. So, in the 1940s and 50s in the US the interstate highway system was an important piece of infrastructure. We've always thought about roads and bridges and airports as important for creating the underpinnings for an economy, and that's really, really important in a world of physical goods. And it's not that we don't have physical goods now, but more and more we still have to start thinking about information assets. And look, I've gone and seen the FCC and advocated for net neutrality and all that stuff. And so, certainly broadband as a fundamental infrastructure's important, but I think that government plays a more important role. Whether that's education, and we could spend two hours on education, but even kind of creating these contexts where you make data available. That's what I loved about the British-Columbia example. But broadly it's like, how do you create a context for more citizen participation. I think it's just as important in the 21st Century as roads and bridges were in the 20th Century. >> Jim, you mentioned net neutrality. I'm curious your take on just kind of the global discussion that's going on. A lot of your customers here are international, you've got open communities. The question about net neutrality, trade. It feels like many people, we interviews the president of ICANN a few years ago, and was worried about, you know, are we going to have seven internets, not one internet, because there are certain Asian, and even like Germany, worried about cutting things off. How does that impact your thinking? Do you guys get involved in some of those governmental discussions? >> Well we do. A matter of fact, we actually do have, I'd say a small government affairs team that advocates around these issues. Because we see it too, even with OpenShift, where you start saying, well, different privacy laws in Europe versus the US, but what if someone's running OpenShift in Europe, but it's actually instantiated in the US, and who can get access to what data. Those are really, really important issues. And it is a little bit like, you know, we ought to pick the same railroad gauge, right? To some extent, we need to have a set of consistent policies, not necessarily in every area, but enough that you can actually have the free flow of information, without worrying about, oh my god, I'm exposing myself to felony privacy issues because I'm hosting this application on a cloud that happens to be in the US. So there's some real issues that we have to work through. And they're so bleeding edge and so complex, I'm not sure that we're quite ready to get those done. But these are going to be critical, critical to the economy of the 21st Century. >> The other thing, I can't let you go without asking you about just the opensource business models themself. I've been listening to podcasts. We had a couple of companies go IPO recently. >> Jim: Yeah. >> They're better involved, and they're like, oh wait, I'm an enterprise company, I'm a software company. VC, you shouldn't invest in opensource because they can't monetize what they're doing. What's your take on the investment and business prospect for the other companies that are not Red Hat? >> Well, look, I'm thrilled to see Cloudera going public. Obviously Hortonworks public. MuleSoft recently. And I know some of those are hybrid models, they have an open core, and they have some other proprietary around it. But look, it's still dollars that are getting invested in opensource software I think we've clearly proven a model that you can have 100% opensource and build a successful business. For a whole set of technologies, it's clearly a better innovation model. The thing that I continue to push people is, don't think about it as selling IP. And this is, I've actually had conversations with several university presidents about this same issue. University education is more about the content. Don't be scared of MOOCs, right? And most people kind of get that, a university education, yeah, content's a part of it. But there are 50 other things that make up an education. So that's when I always come back to opensource companies and say, assume the content's free, because it's going to be better if it's totally free. And now think about, how do you build a model around the fact that content's free. And, I think education's a great one. Your industry in media is certainly one that needs to continue to innovate around business models as well. So, rather than saying, let's take a development model that's superior in a number of regards for a set of technologies, especially around infrastructure, and say, let's hamper it, and make it work in the old school business model. Let's continue to work to innovate business models that allow the innovation to happen, because it's going to happen, right? You do have to recognize that so much of what you're seeing in opensource is really a byproduct of what Google and Facebook and others are doing. And that's going to continue, so the best innovation's going to come there. You got to figure out business models that work for it. >> You got to figure them out Thank you so much, Jim. Jim Whitehurst, we appreciate your time. >> It's great to be here. Thanks so much for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will return with more from the Red Hat Summit. (upbeat techno music)

(bright music) >> Okay, we're back in theCUBE. We said we were signing off for the night, but during the hallway track, we ran into old friend Stu Miniman who was the Director of Market Insights at Red Hat. Stu, friend of theCUBE done the thousands of CUBE interviews. >> Dave, it's great to be here. Thanks for pulling me on, you and I hosted Red Hat Summit before. It's great to see Paul here. I was actually, I was talking to some of the Red Hatters walking around Boston. It's great to have an event here. Boston's got strong presence and I understand, I think was either first or second year, they had it over... What's the building they're tearing down right down the road here. Was that the World Trade Center? I think that's where they actually held it, the first time they were here. We hosted theCUBE >> So they moved up. >> at the Hines Convention Center. We did theCUBE for summit at the BCEC next door. And of course, with the pandemic being what it was, we're a little smaller, nice intimate event here. It's great to be able to room the hall, see a whole bunch of people and lots watching online. >> It's great, it's around the same size as those, remember those Vertica Big Data events that we used to have here. And I like that you were commenting out at the theater and the around this morning for the keynotes, that was good. And the keynotes being compressed, I think, is real value for the attendees, you know? 'Cause people come to these events, they want to see each other, you know? They want to... It's like the band getting back together. And so when you're stuck in the keynote room, it's like, "Oh, it's okay, it's time to go." >> I don't know that any of us used to sitting at home where I could just click to another tab or pause it or run for, do something for the family, or a quick bio break. It's the three-hour keynote I hope has been retired. >> But it's an interesting point though, that the virtual event really is driving the physical and this, the way Red Hat marketed this event was very much around the virtual attendee. Physical was almost an afterthought, so. >> Right, this is an invite only for in-person. So you're absolutely right. It's optimizing the things that are being streamed, the online audience is the big audience. And we just happy to be in here to clap and do some things see around what you're doing. >> Wonderful see that becoming the norm. >> I think like virtual Stu, you know this well when virtual first came in, nobody had a clue with what they were doing. It was really hard. They tried different things, they tried to take the physical and just jam it into the virtual. That didn't work, they tried doing fun things. They would bring in a famous person or a comedian. And that kind of worked, I guess, but everybody showed up for that and then left. And I think they're trying to figure it out what this hybrid thing is. I've seen it both ways. I've seen situations like this, where they're really sensitive to the virtual. I've seen others where that's the FOMO of the physical, people want physical. So, yeah, I think it depends. I mean, reinvent last year was heavy physical. >> Yeah, with 15,000 people there. >> Pretty long keynotes, you know? So maybe Amazon can get away with it, but I think most companies aren't going to be able to. So what is the market telling you? What are these insights? >> So Dave just talking about Amazon, obviously, the world I live in cloud and that discussion of cloud, the journey that customers are going on is where we're spending a lot of the discussions. So, it was great to hear in the keynote, talked about our deep partnerships with the cloud providers and what we're doing to help people with, you like to call it super cloud, some call it hybrid, or multi-cloud... >> New name. (crosstalk) Meta-Cloud, come on. >> All right, you know if Che's my executive, so it's wonderful. >> Love it. >> But we'll see, if I could put on my VR Goggles and that will help me move things. But I love like the partnership announcement with General Motors today because not every company has the needs of software driven electric vehicles all over the place. But the technology that we build for them actually has ramifications everywhere. We've working to take Kubernetes and make it smaller over time. So things that we do at the edge benefit the cloud, benefit what we do in the data center, it's that advancement of science and technology just lifts all boats. >> So what's your take on all this? The EV and software on wheels. I mean, Tesla obviously has a huge lead. It's kind of like the Amazon of vehicles, right? It's sort of inspired a whole new wave of innovation. Now you've got every automobile manufacturer kind of go and after. That is the future of vehicles is something you followed or something you have an opinion on Stu? >> Absolutely. It's driving innovation in some ways, the way the DOS drove innovation on the desktop, if you remember the 64K DOS limit, for years, that was... The software developers came up with some amazing ways to work within that 64K limit. Then when it was gone, we got bloatware, but it actually does enforce a level of discipline on you to try to figure out how to make software run better, run more efficiently. And that has upstream impacts on the enterprise products. >> Well, right. So following your analogy, you talk about the enablement to the desktop, Linux was a huge influence on allowing the individual person to write code and write software, and what's happening in the EV, it's software platform. All of these innovations that we're seeing across industries, it's how is software transforming things. We go back to the mark end reasons, software's eating the world, open source is the way that software is developed. Who's at the intersection of all those? We think we have a nice part to play in that. I loved tha- Dave, I don't know if you caught at the end of the keynote, Matt Hicks basically said, "Our mission isn't just to write enterprise software. "Our mission is based off of open source because open source unlocks innovation for the world." And that's one of the things that drew me to Red Hat, it's not just tech in good places, but allowing underrepresented, different countries to participate in what's happening with software. And we can all move that ball forward. >> Well, can we declare victory for open source because it's not just open source products, but everything that's developed today, whether proprietary or open has open source in it. >> Paul, I agree. Open source is the development model period, today. Are there some places that there's proprietary? Absolutely. But I had a discussion with Deepak Singh who's been on theCUBE many times. He said like, our default is, we start with open source code. I mean, even Amazon when you start talking about that. >> I said this, the $70 billion business on open source. >> Exactly. >> Necessarily give it back, but that say, Hey, this is... All's fair in tech and more. >> It is interesting how the managed service model has sort of rescued open source, open source companies, that were trying to do the Red Hat model. No one's ever really successfully duplicated the Red Hat model. A lot of companies were floundering and failing. And then the managed service option came along. And so now they're all cloud service providers. >> So the only thing I'd say is that there are some other peers we have in the industry that are built off open source they're doing okay. The recent example, GitLab and Hashicorp, both went public. Hashi is doing some managed services, but it's not the majority of their product. Look at a company like Mongo, they've heavily pivoted toward the managed service. It is where we see the largest growth in our area. The products that we have again with Amazon, with Microsoft, huge growth, lots of interest. It's one of the things I spend most of my time talking on. >> I think Databricks is another interesting example 'cause Cloudera was the now company and they had the sort of open core, and then they had the proprietary piece, and they've obviously didn't work. Databricks when they developed Spark out of Berkeley, everybody thought they were going to do kind of a similar model. Instead, they went for all in managed services. And it's really worked well, I think they were ahead of that curve and you're seeing it now is it's what customers want. >> Well, I mean, Dave, you cover the database market pretty heavily. How many different open source database options are there today? And that's one of the things we're solving. When you look at what is Red Hat doing in the cloud? Okay, I've got lots of databases. Well, we have something called, it's Red Hat Open Database Access, which is from a developer, I don't want to have to think about, I've got six different databases, which one, where's the repository? How does all that happen? We give that consistency, it's tied into OpenShift, so it can help abstract some of those pieces. we've got same Kafka streaming and we've got APIs. So it's frameworks and enablers to help bridge that gap between the complexity that's out there, in the cloud and for the developer tool chain. >> That's really important role you guys play though because you had this proliferation, you mentioned Mongo. So many others, Presto and Starbursts, et cetera, so many other open source options out there now. And companies, developers want to work with multiple databases within the same application. And you have a role in making that easy. >> Yeah, so and that is, if you talk about the question I get all the time is, what's next for Kubernetes? Dave, you and I did a preview for KubeCon and it's automation and simplicity that we need to be. It's not enough to just say, "Hey, we've got APIs." It's like Dave, we used to say, "We've got standards? Great." Everybody's implementation was a little bit different. So we have API Sprawl today. So it's building that ecosystem. You've been talking to a number of our partners. We are very active in the community and trying to do things that can lift up the community, help the developers, help that cloud native ecosystem, help our customers move faster. >> Yeah API's better than scripts, but they got to be managed, right? So, and that's really what you guys are doing that's different. You're not trying to own everything, right? It's sort of antithetical to how billions and trillions are made in the IT industry. >> I remember a few years ago we talked here, and you look at the size that Red Hat is. And the question is, could Red Hat have monetized more if the model was a little different? It's like, well maybe, but that's not the why. I love that they actually had Simon Sinek come in and work with Red Hat and that open, unlocks the world. Like that's the core, it's the why. When I join, they're like, here's a book of Red Hat, you can get it online and that why of what we do, so we never have to think of how do we get there. We did an acquisition in the security space a year ago, StackRox, took us a year, it's open source. Stackrox.io, it's community driven, open source project there because we could have said, "Oh, well, yeah, it's kind of open source and there's pieces that are open source, but we want it to be fully open source." You just talked to Gunnar about how he's RHEL nine, based off CentOS stream, and now developing out in the open with that model, so. >> Well, you were always a big fan of Whitehurst culture book, right? It makes a difference. >> The open organization and right, Red Hat? That culture is special. It's definitely interesting. So first of all, most companies are built with the hierarchy in mind. Had a friend of mine that when he joined Red Hat, he's like, I don't understand, it's almost like you have like lots of individual contractors, all doing their things 'cause Red Hat works on thousands of projects. But I remember talking to Rackspace years ago when OpenStack was a thing and they're like, "How do you figure out what to work on?" "Oh, well we hired great people and they work on what's important to them." And I'm like, "That doesn't sound like a business." And he is like, "Well, we struggle sometimes to that balance." Red Hat has found that balance because we work on a lot of different projects and there are people inside Red Hat that are, you know, they care more about the project than they do the business, but there's the overall view as to where we participate and where we productize because we're not creating IP because it's all an open source. So it's the monetizations, the relationships we have our customers, the ecosystems that we build. And so that is special. And I'll tell you that my line has been Red Hat on the inside is even more Red Hat. The debates and the discussions are brutal. I mean, technical people tearing things apart, questioning things and you can't be thin skinned. And the other thing is, what's great is new people. I've talked to so many people that started at Red Hat as interns and will stay for seven, eight years. And they come there and they have as much of a seat at the table, and when I talk to new people, your job, is if you don't understand something or you think we might be able to do it differently, you better speak up because we want your opinion and we'll take that, everybody takes that into consideration. It's not like, does the decision go all the way up to this executive? And it's like, no, it's done more at the team. >> The cultural contrast between that and your parent, IBM, couldn't be more dramatic. And we talked earlier with Paul Cormier about has IBM really walked the walk when it comes to leaving Red Hat alone. Naturally he said, "Yes." Well what's your perspective. >> Yeah, are there some big blue people across the street or something I heard that did this event, but look, do we interact with IBM? Of course. One of the reasons that IBM and IBM Services, both products and services should be able to help get us breadth in the marketplace. There are times that we go arm and arm into customer meetings and there are times that customers tell us, "I like Red Hat, I don't like IBM." And there's other ones that have been like, "Well, I'm a long time IBM, I'm not sure about Red Hat." And we have to be able to meet all of those customers where they are. But from my standpoint, I've got a Red Hat badge, I've got a Red Hat email, I've got Red Hat benefits. So we are fiercely independent. And you know, Paul, we've done blogs and there's lots of articles been written is, Red Hat will stay Red Hat. I didn't happen to catch Arvin I know was on CNBC today and talking at their event, but I'm sure Red Hat got mentioned, but... >> Well, he talks about Red Hat all time. >> But in his call he's talking backwards. >> It's interesting that he's not here, greeting this audience, right? It's again, almost by design, right? >> But maybe that's supposed to be... >> Hundreds of yards away. >> And one of the questions being in the cloud group is I'm not out pitching IBM Cloud, you know? If a customer comes to me and asks about, we have a deep partnership and IBM will be happy to tell you about our integrations, as opposed to, I'm happy to go into a deep discussion of what we're doing with Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. So that's how we do it. It's very different Dave, from you and I watch really closely the VMware-EMC, VMware-Dell, and how that relationship. This one is different. We are owned by IBM, but we mostly, it does IBM fund initiatives and have certain strategic things that are done, absolutely. But we maintain Red Hat. >> But there are similarities. I mean, VMware crowd didn't want to talk about EMC, but they had to, they were kind of forced to. Whereas, you're not being forced to. >> And then once Dell came in there, it was joint product development. >> I always thought a spin in. Would've been the more effective, of course, Michael Dell and Egon wouldn't have gotten their $40 billion out. But I think a spin in was more natural based on where they were going. And it would've been, I think, a more dominant position in the marketplace. They would've had more software, but again, financially it wouldn't have made as much sense, but that whole dynamic is different. I mean, but people said they were going to look at VMware as a model and it's been largely different because remember, VMware of course was a separate company, now is a fully separate company. Red Hat was integrated, we thought, okay, are they going to get blue washed? We're watching and watching, and watching, you had said, well, if the Red Hat culture isn't permeating IBM, then it's a failure. And I don't know if that's happening, but it's definitely... >> I think a long time for that. >> It's definitely been preserved. >> I mean, Dave, I know I read one article at the beginning of the year is, can Arvin make IBM, Microsoft Junior? Follow the same turnaround that Satya Nadella drove over there. IBM I think making some progress, I mean, I read and watch what you and the team are all writing about it. And I'll withhold judgment on IBM. Obviously, there's certain financial things that we'd love to see IBM succeed. We worry about our business. We do our thing and IBM shares our results and they've been solid, so. >> Microsoft had such massive cash flow that even bomber couldn't screw it up. Well, I mean, this is true, right? I mean, you think about how were relevant Microsoft was in the conversation during his tenure and yet they never got really... They maintained a position so that when the Nadella came in, they were able to reascend and now are becoming that dominant player. I mean, IBM just doesn't have that cash flow and that luxury, but I mean, if he pulls it off, he'll be the CEO of the decade. >> You mentioned partners earlier, big concern when the acquisition was first announced, was that the Dells and the HP's and the such wouldn't want to work with Red Hat anymore, you've sort of been here through that transition. Is that an issue? >> Not that I've seen, no. I mean, the hardware suppliers, the ISVs, the GSIs are all very important. It was great to see, I think you had Accenture on theCUBE today, obviously very important partner as we go to the cloud. IBM's another important partner, not only for IBM Cloud, but IBM Services, deep partnership with Azure and AWS. So those partners and from a technology standpoint, the cloud native ecosystem, we talked about, it's not just a Red Hat product. I constantly have to talk about, look, we have a lot of pieces, but your developers are going to have other tools that they're going to use and the security space. There is no such thing as a silver bullet. So I've been having some great conversations here already this week with some of our partners that are helping us to round out that whole solution, help our customers because it has to be, it's an ecosystem. And we're one of the drivers to help that move forward. >> Well, I mean, we were at Dell Tech World last week, and there's a lot of talk about DevSecOps and DevOps and Dell being more developer friendly. Obviously they got a long way to go, but you can't have that take that posture and not have a relationship with Red Hat. If all you got is Pivotal and VMware, and Tansu >> I was thrilled to hear the OpenShift mention in the keynote when they talked about what they were doing. >> How could you not, how could you have any credibility if you're just like, Oh, Pivotal, Pivotal, Pivotal, Tansu, Tansu. Tansu is doing its thing. And they smart strategy. >> VMware is also a partner of ours, but that we would hope that with VMware being independent, that does open the door for us to do more with them. >> Yeah, because you guys have had a weird relationship with them, under ownership of EMC and then Dell, right? And then the whole IBM thing. But it's just a different world now. Ecosystems are forming and reforming, and Dell's building out its own cloud and it's got to have... Look at Amazon, I wrote about this. I said, "Can you envision the day where Dell actually offers competitive products in its suite, in its service offering?" I mean, it's hard to see, they're not there yet. They're not even close. And they have this high say/do ratio, or really it's a low say/do, they say high say/do, but look at what they did with Nutanix. You look over- (chuckles) would tell if it's the Cisco relationship. So it's got to get better at that. And it will, I really do believe. That's new thinking and same thing with HPE. And, I don't know about Lenovo that not as much of an ecosystem play, but certainly Dell and HPE. >> Absolutely. Michael Dell would always love to poke at HPE and HP really went very far down the path of their own products. They went away from their services organization that used to be more like IBM, that would offer lots of different offerings and very much, it was HP Invent. Well, if we didn't invent it, you're not getting it from us. So Dell, we'll see, as you said, the ecosystems are definitely forming, converging and going in lots of different directions. >> But your position is, Hey, we're here, we're here to help. >> Yeah, we're here. We have customers, one of the best proof points I have is the solution that we have with Amazon. Amazon doesn't do the engineering work to make us a native offering if they didn't have the customer demand because Amazon's driven off of data. So they came to us, they worked with us. It's a lot of work to be able to make that happen, but you want to make it frictionless for customers so that they can adopt that. That's a long path. >> All right, so evening event, there's a customer event this evening upstairs in the lobby. Microsoft is having a little shin dig, and then serves a lot of customer dinners going on. So Stu, we'll see you out there tonight. >> All right, thanks you. >> Were watching a brewing somewhere. >> Keynotes tomorrow, a lot of good sessions and enablement, and yeah, it's great to be in person to be able to bump some people, meet some people and, Hey, I'm still a year and a half in still meeting a lot of my peers in person for the first time. >> Yeah, and that's kind of weird, isn't it? Imagine. And then we kick off tomorrow at 10:00 AM. Actually, Stephanie Chiras is coming on. There she is in the background. She's always a great guest and maybe do a little kickoff and have some fun tomorrow. So this is Dave Vellante for Stu Miniman, Paul Gillin, who's my co-host. You're watching theCUBEs coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022. We'll see you tomorrow. (bright music)

from around the globe it's thecube with coverage of kubecon and cloudnativecon north america 2020 virtual brought to you by red hat the cloud native computing foundation and ecosystem partners hello and welcome back to the cube's coverage of kubecon plus cloud nativecon 2020 the virtual edition abinav joshi is here he's the senior product marketing manager for openshift at red hat and tom dean is the senior director of pro product management at cloudera gentlemen thanks for coming on thecube good to see you thank you very much for having us here hey guys i know you would be here it was great to have you and guys i know you're excited about the partnership and i definitely want to get in and talk about that but before we do i wonder if we could just set the tone you know what are you seeing in the market tom let's let's start with you i had a great deep dive a couple of weeks back with anupam singh and he brought me up to speed on what's new with cloudera but but one of the things we discussed was the accelerated importance of data putting data at the core of your digital business tom what are you seeing in the marketplace right now yeah absolutely so um overall we're still seeing a growing demand for uh storing and and processing massive massive amounts of data even in the past few months um where perhaps we see a little bit more variety is on by industry sector is on the propensity to adopt some of the latest and greatest uh technologies that are out there or that we we deliver to the market um so whether perhaps in the retail hospitality sector you may see a little bit more risk aversion around some of the latest tools then you you go to the healthcare industry as an example and you see we see a strong demand for our latest technologies uh with with everything that is that is going on um so overall um still a lot lots of demand around this space so abnormal i mean we just saw in ibm's earnings though the momentum of red hat you know growing in the mid teens and the explosion that we're seeing around containers and and obviously openshift is at the heart of that how the last nine months affected your customers priorities and what are you seeing yeah we've been a lot more busier like in the last few months because there's like a lot of use cases and if you look at the like a lot of the research and so on and we are seeing that from our customers as well that now the customers are actually speeding up the digital transformation right people say that okay kovac 19 has actually uh speeded up the digital transformation for a lot of our customers for the right reasons to be able to help the customers and so on so we are seeing a lot of attraction on like number of verticals and number of use cases beyond the traditional lab dev data analytics aiml messaging streaming edge and so on like lots of use cases in like a lot of different like industry verticals so there's a lot of momentum going on on openshift and the broader that portfolio as well yeah it's ironic the the timing of the pandemic but it sure underscores that this next 10 years is going to be a lot different than the last 10 years okay let's talk about some of the things that are new around data tom cloudera you guys have made a number of moves since acquiring hortonworks a little over two years ago what's new with uh with the cloudera data platform cdp sure so yes our latest therap uh platform is called cbp clara data platform last year we announced the public cloud version of cdp running on aws and then azure and what's new is just two months ago we announced the release of the version of this platform targeted at the data center and that's called cvp private cloud and really the focus of this platform this new version has been around solving some of the pain points that we see around agility or time to value and the ease of use of the platform and to give you some specific examples with our previous technology it could take a customer three months to provision a data warehouse if you include everything from obtaining the infrastructure to provisioning the warehouse loading the data setting security policies uh and fine-tuning the the software now with cbp private cloud we've been able to take those uh three months and turn it into three minutes so significant uh speed up in in that onboarding time and in time to valley and a key piece of this uh that enabled this this speed up was a revamping of the entire stack specifically the infrastructure and service services management layer and this is where the containerization of the platform comes in specifically kubernetes and red hat open shift that is a key piece of the puzzle that enables this uh order of magnitude uh improvement in time right uh now abner you think about uh red hat you think about cloudera of course hortonworks the stalwarts of of of open source you got kind of like birds of a feather how are red hat and cloudera partnering with each other you know what are the critical aspects of that relationship that people should be aware of yeah absolutely that's a very good question yeah so on the openshift side we've had a lot of momentum in the market and we have well over 2000 customers in terms of a lot of different verticals and the use cases that i talked about at the beginning of our conversation in terms of traditional and cloud native app dev databases data analytics like ai messaging and so on right and the value that you have with openshift and the containers kubernetes and devops like part of the solution being able to provide the agility flexibility scalability the cross cloud consistency like so all that that you see in a typical app dev world is directly applicable to fast track the data analytics and the ai projects as well and we've seen like a lot of customers and some of the ones that we can talk about in a public way like iix rbc bank hca healthcare boston children's bmw exxon mobil so all these organizations are being are able to leverage openshift to kind of speed up the ai projects and and help with the needs of the data engineers data scientists and uh and the app dev folks now from our perspective providing the best in class uh you say like experience for the customers at the platform level is key and we have to make sure that the tooling that the customers run on top of it uh gets the best in class the experience in terms of the day zero to day two uh management right and it's uh and and it's an ecosystem play for us and and and that's the way cloudera is the top isv in the space right when it comes to data analytics and ai and that was our key motivation to partner with cloudera in terms of bringing this joint solution to market and making sure that our customers are successful so the partnership is at all the different levels in the organization say both up and down as well as in the the engineering level the product management level the marketing level the sales level and at the support and services level as well so that way if you look at the customer journey in terms of selecting a solution uh putting it in place and then getting the value out of it so the partnership it actually spans across the entire spectrum yeah and tom you know i wonder if you could add anything there i mean it's not just about the public cloud with containers you're seeing obviously the acceleration of of cloud native principles on-prem in a hybrid you know across clouds it's sort of the linchpin containers really and kubernetes specifically linchpin to enable that what would you add to that discussion yeah as part of the partnership when we were looking for a vendor who could provide us that kubernetes layer we looked at our customer base and if you think about who clara is focused on we really go after that global the global 2000 firms out there these customers have very strict uh security requirements and they're often in these highly regulated uh industries and so when we looked at a customer's base uh we saw a lot of overlap and there was a natural good fit for us there but beyond that just our own technical evaluation of the solutions and also talking to uh to our own customers about who they do they see as a trusted platform that can provide enterprise grade uh features on on a kubernetes layer red hat had a clear leadership in in that front and that combined with our own uh long-standing relationship with our parent company ibm uh it made this partnership a natural good thing for us right and cloudera's always had a good relationship with ibm tom i want to stay with you if i can for a minute and talk about the specific joint solutions that you're providing with with red hat what are you guys bringing to customers in in terms of those solutions what's the business impact where's the value absolutely so the solution is called cbd or color data platform private cloud on red hat openshift and i'll describe three uh the three pillars that make up cbp uh first what we have is the five data analytic experiences and that is meant to cover the end to end data lifecycle in the first release we just came out two months ago we announced the availability of two of those five experiences we have data warehousing for bi analytics as well as machine learning and ai where we offer a collaborative data science data science tools for data scientists to come together do exploratory data analytics but also develop predictive models and push them to production going forward we'll be adding the remaining three uh experiences they include data engineering or transformations on uh on your data uh data flow for streaming analytics and ingest uh as well as operational database for uh real-time surveying of both structure and unstructured data so these five experiences have been re-banked right compared to our prior platform to target these specific use cases and simplify uh these data disciplines the second pillar that i'll talk about is the sdx or uh what what we call the shared data experience and what this is is the ability for these five experiences to have one global data set that they can all access with shared metadata security including fine grain permissions and a suite of governance tools that provide lineage provide auditing and business metadata so by having these shared data experiences our developers our users can build these multi-disciplinary workflows in a very straightforward way without having to create all this custom code and i can stitch you can stitch them together and the last pillar that i'll mention uh is the containerization of of the platform and because of containers because of kubernetes we're now able to offer that next level of agility isolation uh and infrastructure efficiency on the platform so give you a little bit more specific examples on the agility i mentioned going from three months to three minutes in terms of the speed up with i uh with uh containers we can now also give our users the ability to bring their own versions of their libraries and engines without colliding with another user who's sharing the platform that has been a big ask from our customers and last i'll mention infrastructure efficiency by re-architecting our services to running a microservices architecture we can now impact those servers in a much more efficient way we can also auto scale auto suspend bring all this as you mentioned bring all these cloud native concepts on premises and the end result of that is better infrastructure efficiency now our customers can do more with the same amount of hard work which overall uh reduces their their total spend on the solution so that's what we call cbp private cloud great thanks for that i mean wow we've seen really the evolution from the the wild west days of you know the early days of so-called big data ungoverned a lot of shadow data science uh maybe maybe not as efficient as as we'd like and but certainly today taking advantage of some of those capabilities dealing with the noisy neighbor problem enough i wonder if you could comment another question that i have is you know one of the things that jim whitehurst talked about when ibm acquired red hat was the scale that ibm could bring and what i always looked at in that context was ibm's deep expertise in vertical industries so i wonder what are some of the key industry verticals that you guys are targeting and succeeding in i mean yes there's the pandemic has some effects we talked about hospitality obviously airlines have to have to be careful and conserving cash but what are some of the interesting uh tailwinds that you're seeing by industry and some of the the more interesting and popular use cases yeah that's a very good question now in terms of the industry vertical so we are seeing the traction in like a number of verticals right and the top ones being the financial services like healthcare telco the automotive industry as well as the federal government are some of the key ones right and at the end of the day what what all the customers are looking at doing is be able to improve the experience of their customers with the digital services that they roll out right as part of the pandemic and so on as well and then being able to gain competitive edge right if you can have the services in your platform and make them kind of fresh and relevant and be able to update them on a regular basis that's kind of that's your differentiator these days right and then the next one is yeah if you do all this so you should be able to increase your revenue be able to save cost as well that's kind of a key one that you mentioned right that that a lot of the industries like the hospitality the airlines and so on are kind of working on saving cash right so if you can help them save the cost that's kind of key and then the last one is is being able to automate the business processes right because there's not like a lot of the manual processes so yeah if you can add in like a lot of automation that's all uh good for your business and then now if you look at the individual use cases in these different industry verticals what we're seeing that the use cases cannot vary from the industry to industry like if you look at the financial services the use cases like fraud detection being able to do the risk analysis and compliance being able to improve the customer support and so on are some of the key use cases the cyber security is coming up a lot as well because uh yeah nobody wants to be hacked and so and and so on yeah especially like in these times right and then moving on to healthcare and the life sciences right what we're seeing the use cases on being able to do the data-driven diagnostics and care and being able to do the discovery of drugs being able to say track kobit 19 and be able to tell that okay uh which of my like hospital is going to be full when and what kind of ppe am i going to need at my uh the the sites and so on so that way i can yeah and mobilize like as needed are some of the key ones that we are seeing on the healthcare side uh and then in terms of the automotive industry right that's where being able to speed up the autonomous driving initiatives uh being able to do uh the auto warranty pricing based on the history of the drivers and so on and then being able to save on the insurance cost is a big one that we are seeing as well for the insurance industries and then but more like manufacturing right being able to do the quality assurance uh at the shop floor being able to do the predictive maintenance on machinery and also be able to do the robotics process automation so like lots of use cases that customers are prioritizing but it's very verticalized it kind of varies from the vertical to a vertical but at the end of the day yeah it's all about like improving the customer experience the revenue saving cost and and being able to automate the business processes yeah that's great thank you for that i mean we we heard a lot about automation we were covering ansible fest i mean just think about fraud how much you know fraud detection has changed in the last 10 years it used to be you know so slow you'd have to go go through your financial statements to find fraud and now it's instantaneous cyber security is critical because the adversaries are very capable healthcare is a space where you know it's ripe for change and now of course with the pandemic things are changing very rapidly automotive another one an industry that really hasn't hadn't seen much disruption and now you're seeing with a number of things autonomous vehicles and you know basically software on wheels and insurance great example even manufacturing you're seeing you know a real sea change there so thank you for that description you know very often in the cube we like to look at joint engineering solutions that's a gauge of the substance of a partnership you know sometimes you see these barney deals you know there's a press release i love you you love me okay see you but but so i wonder if you guys could talk about specific engineering that you're doing tom maybe you could start sure yeah so on the on the engineering and product side um we've um for cbp private cloud we've we've changed our uh internal development and testing to run all on uh openshift uh internally uh and as part of that we we have a direct line to red hat engineering to help us solve any issues that that uh we run into so in the initial release we start with support of openshift43 we're just wrapping up uh testing of and we'll begin with openshift46 very soon on another aspect of their partnership is on being able to update our images to account for any security vulnerabilities that are coming up so with the guidance and help from red hat we've been we've standardized our docker images on ubi or the universal based image and that allows us to automatically get many of these security fixes uh into our into our software um the last point that i mentioned here is that it's not just about providing kubernetes uh red hat helps us with the end to end uh solution so there is also the for example bringing a docker registry into the picture or providing a secure vault for storing uh all the secrets so all these uh all these pieces combined make up the uh a strong complete solution actually the last thing i'll mention is is a support aspect which is critical to our customers in this model our customers can bring support tickets to cluberra but as soon as we determine that it may be an issue that uh related to red hat or openshift where we can use their help we have that direct line of communication uh and automated systems in the back end to resolve those support tickets uh quickly for our customers so those are some of the examples of what we're doing on the technical side great thank you uh enough we're out of time but i wonder if we could just close here i mean when we look at our survey data with our data partner etr we see containers container orchestration container management generally and again kubernetes specifically is the the number one area of investment for companies that has the most momentum in terms of where they're putting their efforts it's it's it's right up there and even ahead of ai and machine learning and even ahead of cloud which is obviously larger maybe more mature but i wonder if you can add anything and bring us home with this segment yeah absolutely and i think uh so uh one thing i want to add is like in terms of the engineering level right we also have like between cloudera and red hat the partnership and the sales and the go to market levels as well because once you build the uh the integration it yeah it has to be built out in the customer environments as well right so that's where we have the alignment um at the marketing level as well as the sales level so that way we can like jointly go in and do the customer workshops and make sure the solutions are getting deployed the right way right uh and also we have a partnership at the professional services level as well right where um the experts from both the orgs are kind of hand in hand to help the customers right and then at the end of the day if you need help with support and that's what tom talked about that we have the experts on the support side as well yeah and then so to wrap things up right uh so all the industry research and the customer conversation that we are having are kind of indicating that the organizations are actually increasing the focus on digital uh transformation with the data and ai being a key part of it and that's where this strategic partnership between cloudera and and red hat is going to play a big role to help our mutual customers uh through that our transition and be able to achieve the key goals that they set for their business great well guys thanks so much for taking us through the partnership and the integration work that you guys are doing with customers a great discussion really appreciate your time yeah thanks a lot dave really appreciate it really enjoyed the conversation all right keep it right there everybody you're watching thecube's coverage of cubecon plus cloud nativecon north america the virtual edition keep it right there we'll be right back

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to The Great Cloud Debate. I'm your moderator Rachel Dines. I'm joined by two debaters today Corey Quinn, Cloud Economist at the Duckbill Group and Stu Miniman, Senior Analyst and Host of theCube. Welcome Corey and Stu, this when you can say hello. >> Hey Rachel, great to talk to you. >> And it's better to talk to me. It's always a pleasure to talk to the fine folks over at CloudHealth at by VMware and less of the pleasure to talk to Stu. >> Smack talk is scheduled for later in the agenda gentlemen, so please keep it to a minimum now to keep us on schedule. So here's how today is going to work. I'm going to introduce a debate topic and assign Corey and Stu each to a side. Remember, their assignments are what I decide and they might not actually match their true feelings about a topic, and it definitely does not represent the feelings of their employer or my employer, importantly. Each debater is going to have two minutes to state their opening arguments, then we'll have rebuttals. And each round you the audience gets to vote of who you think is winning. And at the end of the debate, I'll announce the winner. The prize is bragging rights of course, but then also we're having each debater play to win lunch for their local hospital, which is really exciting. So Stu, which hospital are you playing for? >> Yeah, so Rachel, I'm choosing Brigham Women's Hospital. I get a little bit of a home vote for the Boston audience here and was actually my wife's first job out of school. >> Great hospital. Very, very good. All right, Corey, what about you? >> My neighbor winds up being as specialist in infectious diseases as a doctor, and that was always one of those weird things you learn over a cocktail party until this year became incredibly relevant. So I will absolutely be sending the lunch to his department. >> Wonderful! All right. Well, is everyone ready? Any last words? This is your moment for smack talk. >> I think I'll say that for once we can apply it to a specific technology area. Otherwise, it was insulting his appearance and that's too easy. >> All right, let's get going. The first topic is multicloud. Corey, you'll be arguing that companies are better off standardizing on a single cloud. While Stu, you're going to argue the companies are better off with a multicloud strategy. Corey, you're up first, two minutes on the clock and go. >> All right. As a general rule, picking a single provider and going all in leads to the better outcome. Otherwise, you're trying to build every workload to run seamlessly on other providers on a moment's notice. You don't ever actually do it and all you're giving up in return is the ability to leverage whatever your primary cloud provider is letting you build. Now you're suddenly trying to make two differently behaving load balancers work together in the same way, you're using terraform or as I like to call it multicloud formation in the worst of all possible ways. Because now you're having to only really build on one provider, but all the work you're putting in to make that scale to other providers, you might theoretically want to go to at some point, it slows you down, you're never going to be able to move as quickly trying to build for everyone as you are for one particular provider. And I don't care which provider you pick, you probably care which one you pick, I don't care which one. The point is, you've got to pick what's right for your business. And in almost every case, that means start on a single platform. And if you need to migrate down the road years from now, great, that means A you've survived that long, and B you now have the longevity as a business to understand what migrating looks like. Otherwise you're not able to take care of any of the higher level offerings these providers offer that are even slightly differentiated from each other. And even managed database services behave differently. You've got to become a master of all the different ways these things can fail and unfortunate and displeasing ways. It just leaves you in a position where you're not able to specialize, and of course, makes hiring that much harder. Stu, fight me! >> Tough words there. All right, Stu, your turn. Why are companies better off if they go with a multicloud strategy? Got two minutes? >> Yeah, well first of all Corey, I'm really glad that I didn't have to whip out the AWS guidelines, you were not sticking strictly to it and saying that you could not use the words multicloud, cross-cloud, any cloud or every cloud so thank you for saving me that argument. But I want you to kind of come into the real world a little bit. We want access to innovation, we want flexibility, and well, we used to say I would have loved to have a single provider, in the real world we understand that people end up using multiple solutions. If you look at the AI world today, there's not a provider that is a clear leader in every environment that I have. So there's a reason why I might want to use a lot of clouds. Most companies I talked to, Corey, they still have some of their own servers. They're working in a data center, we've seen huge explosion in the service provider world connecting to multiple clouds. So well, a couple of years ago, multicloud was a complete mess. Now, it's only a little bit of a mess, Corey. So absolutely, there's work that we need to do as an industry to make these solutions better. I've been pining for a couple years to say that multicloud needs to be stronger than the sum of its pieces. And we might not yet be there but limiting yourself to a single cloud is reducing your access to innovation, it's reducing your flexibility. And when you start looking at things like edge computing and AI, I'm going to need to access services from multiple providers. So single cloud is a lovely ideal, but in the real world, we understand that teams come with certain skill sets. We end up in many industries, we have mergers and acquisitions. And it's not as easy to just rip out all of your cloud, like you would have 20 years ago, if you said, "Oh, well, they have a phone system or a router "that didn't match what our corporate guidelines is." Cloud is what we're doing. There's lots of solutions out there. And therefore, multicloud is the reality today, and will be the reality going forward for many years to come. >> Strong words from you, Stu. Corey, you've got 60 seconds for rebuttal. I mostly agree with what you just said. I think that having different workloads in different clouds makes an awful lot of sense. Data gravity becomes a bit of a bear. But if you acquire a company that's running on a different cloud than the one that you've picked, you'd be ridiculous to view migrating as anything approaching a strategic priority. Now, this also gets into the question of what is cloud? Our G Suite stuff counts as cloud, but no one really views it in that way. Similarly, when you have an AI specific workload, that's great. As long as it isn't you seriously expensive to move data between providers. That workload doesn't need to live in the same place as your marketing website does. I think that the idea of having a specific cloud provider that you go all in on for every use case, well, at some point that leads to ridiculous things like pretending that Amazon WorkDocs has customers, it does not. But for things that matter to your business and looking at specific workloads, I think that you're going to find a primary provider with secondary workloads here and they're scattered elsewhere to be the strategy that people are getting at when they use the word multicloud badly. >> Time's up for you Corey, Stu we've got time for rebuttal and remember, for those of you in the audience, you can vote at any time and who you think is winning this round. Stu, 60 seconds for a rebuttal. >> Yeah, absolutely Corey. Look, you just gave the Andy Jassy of what multicloud should be 70 to 80% goes to a single provider. And it does make sense we know nobody ever said multicloud equals the same amount in multiple environments but you made a clear case as to why multicloud leveraging multi providers is likely what most companies are going to do. So thank you so much for making a clear case as to why multicloud not equal cloud, across multiple providers is the way to go. So thank you for conceding the victory. >> Last Words, Corey. >> If that's what you took from it Stu, I can't get any closer to it than you have. >> All right, let's move on to the next topic then. The next topic is serverless versus containers which technology is going to be used in, let's say, five to 10 years time? And as a reminder, I'm going to assign each of the debaters these topics, their assignments may or may not match their true feelings about this topic, and they definitely don't represent the topics of my employer, CloudHealth by VMware. Stu, you're going to argue for containers. Corey you're going to argue for start serverless. Stu, you're up first. Two minutes on the clock and go. >> All right, so with all respect to my friends in the serverless community, We need to have a reality check as to how things work. We all know that serverless is a ridiculous name because underneath we do need to worry about all of the infrastructure underneath. So containers today are the de facto building block for cloud native architectures, just as the VM defined the ecosystem for an entire generation of solutions. Containers are the way we build things today. It is the way Google has architected their entire solution and underneath it is often something that's used with serverless. So yes, if you're, building an Alexa service, serverless make what's good for you. But for the vast majority of solutions, I need to have flexibility, I need to understand how things work underneath it. We know in IT that it's great when things work, but we need to understand how to fix them when they break. So containerization gets us to that atomic level, really close to having the same thing as the application. And therefore, we saw the millions of users that deploy Docker, we saw the huge wave of container orchestration led by Kubernetes. And the entire ecosystem and millions of customers are now on board with this way of designing and architecting and breaking down the silos between the infrastructure world and the application developer world. So containers, here to stay growing fast. >> All right, Corey, what do you think? Why is serverless the future? >> I think that you're right in that containers are the way you get from where you were to something that runs effectively in a cloud environment. That is why Google is so strongly behind Kubernetes it helps get the entire industry to write code the way that Google might write code. And that's great. But if you're looking at effectively rewriting something from scratch, or building something that new, the idea of not having to think about infrastructure in the traditional sense of being able to just here, take this code and run it in a given provider that takes whatever it is that you need to do and could loose all these other services together, saves an awful lot of time. As that continues to move up the stack towards the idea of no code or low code. And suddenly, you're now able to build these applications in ways that require just a little bit of code that tie together everything else. We're closer than ever to that old trope of the only code you write is business logic. Serverless gives a much clearer shot of getting there, if you can divorce yourself from the past of legacy workloads. Legacy, of course meaning older than 18 months and makes money. >> Stu, do you have a rebuttal, 60 seconds? >> Yeah. So Corey, we've been talking about this Nirvana in many ways. It's the discussion that we had for paths for over a decade now. I want to be able to write my code once not worry about where it lives, and do all this. But sometimes, there's a reason why we keep trying the same thing over and over again, but never reaching it. So serverless is great for some application If you talked about, okay, if you're some brand new webby thing there and I don't want to have to do this team, that's awesome. I've talked to some wonderful people that don't know anything about coding that have built some cool stuff with serverless. But cool stuff isn't what most business runs on, and therefore containerization is, as you said, it's a bridge to where I need to go, it lives in these cloud environments, and it is the present and it is the future. >> Corey, your response. >> I agree that it's the present, I doubt that it's the future in quite the same way. Right now Kubernetes is really scratching a major itch, which is how all of these companies who are moving to public cloud still I can have their infrastructure teams be able to cosplay as cloud providers themselves. And over time, that becomes simpler and I think on some level, you might even see a convergence of things that are container workloads begin to look a lot more like serverless workloads. Remember, we're aiming at something that is five years away in the context of this question. I think that the serverless and container landscape will look very different. The serverless landscape will be bright and exciting and new, whereas unfortunately the container landscape is going to be represented by people like you Stu. >> Hoarse words from Corey. Stu, any last words or rebuttals? >> Yeah, and look Corey absolutely just like we don't really think about the underlying server or VM, we won't think about the containers you won't think about Kubernetes in the future, but, the question is, which technology will be used in five to 10 years, it'll still be there. It will be the fabric of our lives underneath there for containerization. So, that is what we were talking about. Serverless I think will be useful in pockets of places but will not be the predominant technology, five years from now. >> All right, tough to say who won that one? I'm glad I don't have to decide. I hope everyone out there is voting, last chance to vote on this question before we move on to the next. Next topic is cloud wars. I'm going to give a statement and then I'm going to assign each of you a pro or a con, Google will never be an actual contender in the cloud wars always a far third, we're going to have Corey arguing that Google is never going to be an actual contender. And Stu, you're going to argue that Google is eventually going to overtake the top two AWS and Azure. As a constant reminder, I'm assigning these topics, it's my decision and also they don't match the opinions of me, my employer, or likely Stu or Corey. This is all just for fun and games. But I really want to hear what everyone has to say. So Corey, you're up first two minutes. Why is Google never going to be an actual contender and go. >> The biggest problem Google has in the time of cloud is their ability to forecast longer term on anything that isn't their advertising business, and their ability to talk to human beings long enough to meet people where they are. We're replacing their entire culture is what it's going to take to succeed in the time of cloud and with respect, Thomas Kurian is a spectacular leader internally but look at where he's come from. He spent 22 years at Oracle and now has been transplanted into Google. If we take a look at Satya Nadella's cloud transformation at Microsoft, he was able to pull that off as an insider, after having known intimately every aspect of that company, and he grew organically with it and was perfectly positioned to make that change. You can't instill that kind of culture change by dropping someone externally, on top of an organization and expecting anything to go with this magic one day wake up and everything's going to work out super well. Google has a tremendous amount of strengths, and I don't see that providing common denominator cloud computing services to a number of workloads that from a Google perspective are horrifying, is necessarily in their wheelhouse. It feels like their entire focus on this is well, there's money over there. We should go get some of that too. It comes down to the traditional Google lack of focus. >> Stu, rebuttal? Why do you think Google has a shaft? >> Yeah, so first of all, Corey, I think we'd agree Google is a powerhouse in the world today. My background is networking, when they first came out with with Google Cloud, I said, Google has the best network, second to none in the world. They are ubiquitous today. If you talk about the impact they have on the world, Android phones, you mentioned Kubernetes, everybody uses G Suite maps, YouTube, and the like. That does not mean that they are necessarily going to become the clear leader in cloud but, Corey, they've got really, really smart people. If you're not familiar with that talk to them. They'll tell you how smart they are. And they have built phenomenal solutions, who's going to be able to solve, the challenge every day of, true distributed systems, that a global database that can handle the clock down to the atomic level, Google's the one that does that we've all read the white papers on that. They've set the tone for Hadoop, and various solutions that are all over the place, and their secret weapon is not the advertising, of course, that is a big concern for them, but is that if you talk about, the consumer adoption, everyone uses Google. My kids have all had Chromebooks growing up. It isn't their favorite thing, but they get, indoctrinated with Google technology. And as they go out and leverage technologies in the world, Google is one that is known. Google has the strength of technology and a lot of positioning and partnerships to move them forward. Everybody wants a strong ecosystem in cloud, we don't want a single provider. We already discussed this before, but just from a competitive nature standpoint, if there is a clear counterbalance to AWS, I would say that it is Google, not Microsoft, that is positioned to be that clear and opportune. >> Interesting, very interesting Stu. So your argument is the Gen Zers will of ultimately when they come of age become the big Google proponents. Some strong words that as well but they're the better foil to AWS, Corey rebuttal? >> I think that Stu is one t-shirt change away from a pitch perfect reenactment of Charlie Brown. In this case with Google playing the part of Lucy yanking the football away every time. We've seen it with inbox, Google Reader, Google Maps, API pricing, GKE's pricing for control plane. And when your argument comes down to a suddenly Google is going to change their entire nature and become something that it is as proven as constitutionally incapable of being, namely supporting something that its customers want that it doesn't itself enjoy working on. And to the exclusion of being able to get distracted and focused on other things. Even their own conferences called Next because Google is more interested in what they're shipping than what they're building, than what they're currently shipping. I think that it is a fantasy to pretend that that is somehow going to change without a complete cultural transformation, which again, I don't see the seeds being planted for. >> Some sick burns in there Stu, rebuttal? >> Yeah. So the final word that I'll give you on this is, one of the most important pieces of what we need today. And we need to tomorrow is our data. Now, there are some concerns when we talk about Google and data, but Google also has strong strength in data, understanding data, helping customers leverage data. So while I agree to your points about the cultural shift, they have the opportunity to take the services that they have, and enable customers to be able to take their data to move forward to the wonderful world of AI, cloud, edge computing, and all of those pieces and solve the solution with data. >> Strong words there. All right, that's a tough one. Again, I hope you're all out there voting for who you think won that round. Let's move on to the last round before we start hitting the lightning questions. I put a call out on several channels and social media for people to have questions that they want you to debate. And this one comes from Og-AWS Slack member, Angelo. Angelo asks, "What about IBM Cloud?" Stu you're pro, Corey you're con. Let's have Stu you're up first. The question is, what about IBM Cloud? >> All right, so great question, Angelo. I think when you look at the cloud providers, first of all, you have to understand that they're not all playing the same game. We talked about AWS and they are the elephant in the room that moves nimbly as a cheetah. Every other provider plays a little bit of a different game. Google has strength in data. Microsoft, of course, has their, business productivity applications. IBM has a strong legacy. Now, Corey is going to say that they are just legacy and you need to think about them but IBM has strong innovation. They are a player in really what we call chapter two of the cloud. So when we start talking about multicloud, when we start talking about living in many environments, IBM was the first one to partner with VMware for VMware cloud before the mega VMware AWS announcement, there was IBM up on stage and if I remember right, they actually have more VMware customers on IBM Cloud than they do in the AWS cloud. So over my shoulder here, there's of course, the Red Hat $34 billion to bet on that multicloud solution. So as we talk about containerization, and Kubernetes, Red Hat is strongly positioned in open-source, and flexibility. So you really need a company that understands both the infrastructure side and the application side. IBM has database, IBM has infrastructure, IBM has long been the leader in middleware, and therefore IBM has a real chance to be a strong player in this next generation of platforms. Doesn't mean that they're necessarily going to go attack Amazon, they're partnering across the board. So I think you will see a kinder, gentler IBM and they are leveraging open source and Red Hat and I think we've let the dogs out on the IBM solution. >> Indeed. >> So before Corey goes, I feel the need to remind everyone that the views expressed here are not the views of my employer nor myself, nor necessarily of Corey or Stu. I have Corey. >> I haven't even said anything yet. And you're disclaiming what I'm about to say. >> I'm just warning the audience, 'cause I can't wait to hear what you're going to say next. >> Sounds like I have to go for the high score. All right. IBM's best days are behind it. And that is pretty clear. They like to get angry when people talk about how making the jokes about a homogenous looking group of guys in blue suits as being all IBM has to offer. They say that hasn't been true since the '80s. But that was the last time people cared about IBM in any meaningful sense and no one has bothered to update the relevance since then. Now, credit where due, I am seeing an awful lot of promoted tweets from IBM into my timeline, all talking about how amazing their IBM blockchain technology is. And yes, that is absolutely the phrasing of someone who's about to turn it all around and win the game. I don't see it happening. >> Stu, rebuttal? >> Look, Corey, IBM was the company that brought us the UPC code. They understand Mac manufacturing and blockchain actually shows strong presence in supply chain management. So maybe you're not quite aware of some of the industries that IBM is an expert in. So that is one of the big strengths of IBM, they really understand verticals quite well. And, at the IBM things show, I saw a lot in the healthcare world, had very large customers that were leveraging those solutions. So while you might dismiss things when they say, Oh, well, one of the largest telecom providers in India are leveraging OpenStack and you kind of go with them, well, they've got 300 million customers, and they're thrilled with the solution that they're doing with IBM, so it is easy to scoff at them, but IBM is a reliable, trusted provider out there and still very strong financially and by the way, really excited with the new leadership in place there, Arvind Krishna knows product, Jim Whitehurst came from the Red Hat side. So don't be sleeping on IBM. >> Corey, any last words? >> I think that they're subject to massive disruption as soon as they release the AWS 400 mainframe in the cloud. And I think that before we, it's easy to forget this, but before Google was turning off Reader, IBM stopped making the model M buckling spring keyboards. Those things were masterpieces and that was one of the original disappointments that we learned that we can't fall in love with companies, because companies in turn will not love us back. IBM has demonstrated that. Lastly, I think I'm thrilled to be working with IBM is exactly the kind of statement one makes only at gunpoint. >> Hey, Corey, by the way, I think you're spending too much time looking at all titles of AWS services, 'cause you don't know the difference between your mainframe Z series and the AS/400 which of course is heavily pending. >> Also the i series. Oh yes. >> The i series. So you're conflating your system, which still do billions of dollars a year, by the way. >> Oh, absolutely. But that's not we're not seeing new banks launching and then building on top of IBM mainframe technology. I'm not disputing that mainframes were phenomenal. They were, I just don't see them as the future and I don't see a cloud story. >> Only a cloud live your mainframe related smack talk. That's the important thing that we're getting to here. All right, we move-- >> I'm hoping there's an announcement from CloudHealth by VMware that they also will now support mainframe analytics as well as traditional cloud. >> I'll look into that. >> Excellent. >> We're moving on to the lightning rounds. Each debater in this round is only going to get 60 seconds for their opening argument and then 30 seconds for a rebuttal. We're going to hit some really, really big important questions here like this first one, which is who deserves to sit on the Iron Throne at the end of "Game of Thrones?" I've been told that Corey has never seen this TV show so I'm very interested to hear him argue for Sansa. But let's Sansa Stark, let's hear Stu go first with his argument for Jon Snow. Stu one minute on the clock, go. >> All right audience let's hear it from the king of the north first of all. Nothing better than Jon Snow. He made the ultimate sacrifice. He killed his love to save Westeros from clear destruction because Khaleesi had gone mad. So Corey is going to say something like it's time for the women to do this but it was a woman she went mad. She started burning the place down and Jon Snow saved it so it only makes sense that he should have done it. Everyone knows it was a travesty that he was sent back to the Wall, and to just wander the wild. So absolutely Jon Snow vote for King of the North. >> Compelling arguments. Corey, why should Sansa Stark sit on the throne? Never having seen the show I've just heard bits and pieces about it and all involves things like bloody slaughters, for example, the AWS partner Expo right before the keynote is best known as AWS red wedding. We take a look at that across the board and not having seen it, I don't know the answer to this question, but how many of the folks who are in positions of power we're in fact mediocre white dudes and here we have Stu advocating for yet another one. Sure, this is a lightning round of a fun event but yes, we should continue to wind up selecting this mediocre white person has many parallels in terms of power, et cetera, politics, current tech industry as a whole. I think she's right we absolutely should give someone with a look like this a potential opportunity to see what they can do instead. >> Ouch, Stu 30 seconds rebuttal. >> Look, I would just give a call out to the women in the audience and say, don't you want Jon Snow to be king? >> I also think it's quite bold of Corey to say that he looks like Kit Harington. Corey, any last words? >> I think that it sad you think Stu was running for office at this point because he's become everyone's least favorite animal, a panda bear. >> Fire. All right, so on to the next question. This one also very important near and dear to my heart personally, is a hot dog a sandwich. Corey you'll be arguing no, Stu will be arguing yes. I must also add this important disclaimer that these assignments are made by me and might not reflect the actual views of the debaters here so Corey, you're up first. Why is a hot dog not a sandwich? >> Because you'll get punched in the face if you go to a deli of any renown and order a hot dog. That is not what they serve there. They wind up having these famous delicatessen in New York they have different sandwiches named after different celebrities. I shudder to think of the deadly insult that naming a hot dog after a celebrity would be to that not only celebrity in some cases also the hot dog too. If you take a look and you want to get sandwiches for lunch? Sure. What are we having catered for this event? Sandwiches. You show up and you see a hot dog, you're looking around the hot dog to find the rest of the sandwich. Now while it may check all of the boxes for a technical definition of what a sandwich is, as I'm sure Stu will boringly get into, it's not what people expect, there's a matter of checking the actual boxes, and then delivering what customers actually want. It's why you can let your product roadmap be guided by cart by customers or by Gartner but rarely both. >> Wow, that one hurts. Stu, why is the hot dog a sandwich? >> Yeah so like Corey, I'm sorry that you must not have done some decent traveling 'cause I'm glad you brought up the definition because I'm not going to bore you with yes, there's bread and there's meat and there's toppings and everything else like that but there are some phenomenal hot dogs out there. I traveled to Iceland a few years ago, and there's a little hot dog stand out there that's been there for over 40 or 50 years. And it's one of the top 10 culinary experience I put in. And I've been to Michelin star restaurants. You go to Chicago and any local will be absolutely have to try our creation. There are regional hot dogs. There are lots of solutions there and so yeah, of course you don't go to a deli. Of course if you're going to the deli for takeout and you're buying meats, they do sell hot dogs, Corey, it's just not the first thing that you're going to order on the menu. So I think you're underselling the hot dog. Whether you are a child and grew up and like eating nothing more than the mustard or ketchup, wherever you ate on it, or if you're a world traveler, and have tried some of the worst options out there. There are a lot of options for hot dogs so hot dog, sandwich, culinary delight. >> Stu, don't think we didn't hear that pun. I'm not sure if that counts for or against you, but Corey 30 seconds rebuttal. >> In the last question, you were agitating for putting a white guy back in power. Now you're sitting here arguing that, "Oh some of my best friend slash meals or hot dogs." Yeah, I think we see what you're putting down Stu and it's not pretty, it's really not pretty and I think people are just going to start having to ask some very pointed, delicate questions. >> Tough words to hear Stu. Close this out or rebuttal. >> I'm going to take the high road, Rachel and leave that where it stands. >> I think that is smart. All right, next question. Tabs versus spaces. Stu, you're going to argue for tabs, Corey, you're going to argue for spaces just to make this fun. Stu, 60 seconds on the clock, you're up first. Why are tabs the correct approach? >> First of all, my competitor here really isn't into pop culture. So he's probably not familiar with the epic Silicon Valley argument over this discussion. So, Corey, if you could explain the middle of algorithm, we will be quite impressed but since you don't, we'll just have to go with some of the technology first. Looks, developers, we want to make things simple on you. Tabs, they're faster to do they take up less memory. Yes, they aren't quite as particular as using spaces but absolutely, they get the job done and it is important to just, focus on productivity, I believe that the conversation as always, the less code you can write, the better and therefore, if you don't have to focus on exactly how many spaces and you can just simplify with the tabs, you're gona get close enough for most of the job. And it is easier to move forward and focus on the real work rather than some pedantic discussion as to whether one thing is slightly more efficient than the other. >> Great points Stu. Corey, why is your pedantic approach better? >> No one is suggesting you sit there and whack the spacebar four times or eight times you hit the Tab key, but your editor should be reasonably intelligent enough to expand that. At that point, you have now set up a precedent where in other cases, other parts of your codebase you're using spaces because everyone always does. And that winds up in turn, causing a weird dissonance you'll see a bunch of linters throwing issues if you use tabs as a direct result. Now the wrong answer is, of course, and I think Steve will agree with me both in the same line. No one is ever in favor of that. But I also want to argue with Stu over his argument about "Oh, it saves a little bit of space "is the reason one should go with tabs instead." Sorry, that argument said bye bye a long time ago, and that time was the introduction of JavaScript, where it takes many hundreds of Meg's of data to wind up building hello world. Yeah, at that point optimization around small character changes are completely irrelevant. >> Stu, rebuttal? >> Yeah, I didn't know that Corey did not try to defend that he had any idea what Silicon Valley was, or any of the references in there. So Rachel, we might have to avoid any other pop culture references. We know Corey just looks at very specific cloud services and can't have fun with some of the broader themes there. >> You're right my mistake Stu. Corey, any last words? >> It's been suggested that whole middle out seen on the whiteboard was came from a number of conversations I used to have with my co-workers as in people who were sitting in the room with me watching that episode said, Oh my God, I've been in the room while you had this debate with your friend and I will not name here because they at least still strive to remain employable. Yeah, it's, I understand the value in the picking these fights, we could have gone just as easily with vi versus Emacs, AWS versus Azure, or anything else that you really care to pick a fight with. But yeah, this is exactly the kind of pedantic fight that everyone loves to get involved with, which is why I walked a different path and pick other ridiculous arguments. >> Speaking of those ridiculous arguments that brings us to our last debate topic of the day, Corey you are probably best known for your strong feelings about the pronunciation of the acronym for Amazon Machine Image. I will not be saying how I think it is pronounced. We're going to have you argue each. Stu, you're going to argue that the acronym Amazon Machine Image should be pronounced to rhyme with butterfly. Corey, you'll be arguing that it rhymes with mommy. Stu, rhymes with butterfly. Let's hear it, 60 seconds on the clock. >> All right, well, Rachel, first of all, I wish I could go to the videotape because I have clear video evidence from a certain Corey Quinn many times arguing why AMI is the proper way to pronounce this, but it is one of these pedantic arguments, is it GIF or GIF? Sometimes you go back and you say, Okay, well, there's the way that the community did it. And the way that oh wait, the founder said it was a certain way. So the only argument against AMI, Jeff Barr, when he wrote about the history of all of the blogging that he's done from AWS said, I wish when I had launched the service that I pointed out the correct pronunciation, which I won't even deem to talk it because the community has agreed by and large that AMI is the proper way to pronounce it. And boy, the tech industry is rific on this kind of thing. Is it SQL and no SQL and you there's various ways that we butcher these constantly. So AMI, almost everyone agrees and the lead champion for this argument, of course is none other than Corey Quinn. >> Well, unfortunately today Corey needs to argue the opposite. So Corey, why does Amazon Machine Image when pronounce as an acronym rhyme with mommy? >> Because the people who built it at Amazon say that it is and an appeal to authorities generally correct when the folks built this. AWS has said repeatedly that they're willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time. And this is one of those areas in which they have been misunderstood by virtually the entire industry, but they are sticking to their guns and continuing to wind up advocating for AMI as the correct pronunciation. But I'll take it a step further. Let's take a look at the ecosystem companies. Whenever Erica Brescia, who is now the COO and GitHub, but before she wound up there, she was the founder of Bitnami. And whenever I call it Bitn AMI she looks like she is barely successfully restraining herself from punching me right in the mouth for that pronunciation of the company. Clearly, it's Bitnami named after the original source AMI, which is what the proper term pronunciation of the three letter acronym becomes. Fight me Stu. >> Interesting. Interesting argument, Stu 30 seconds, rebuttal. >> Oh, the only thing he can come up with is that, you take the word Bitnami and because it has that we know that things sound very different if you put a prefix or a suffix, if you talk to the Kubernetes founders, Kubernetes should be coop con but the people that run the conference, say it cube con so there are lots of debates between the people that create it and the community. I in general, I'm going to vote with the community most of the time. Corey, last words on this topic 'cause I know you have very strong feelings about it. >> I'm sorry, did Stu just say Kubernetes and its community as bastions of truth when it comes to pronouncing anything correctly? Half of that entire conference is correcting people's pronunciation of Kubernetes, Kubernetes, Kubernetes, Kubernetes and 15 other mispronunciations that they will of course yell at you for but somehow they're right on this one. All right. >> All right, everyone, I hope you've been voting all along for who you think is winning each round, 'cause this has been a tough call. But I would like to say that's a wrap for today. big thank you to our debaters. You've been very good sports, even when I've made you argue for against things that clearly are hurting you deep down inside, we're going to take a quick break and tally all the votes. And we're going to announce a winner up on the Zoom Q and A. So go to the top of your screen, Click on Zoom Q and A to join us and hear the winner announced and also get a couple minutes to chat live with Corey and Stu. Thanks again for attending this session. And thank you again, Corey and Stu. It's been The Great Cloud Debate. All right, so each round I will announce the winner and then we're going to announce the overall winner. Remember that Corey and Stu are playing not just for bragging rights and ownership of all of the internet for the next 24 hours, but also for lunch to be donated to their local hospital. Corey is having lunch donated to the California Pacific Medical Centre. And Stu is having lunch donated to Boston Medical Centre. All right, first up round one multicloud versus monocloud. Stu, you were arguing for multicloud, Corey, you were arguing for one cloud. Stu won that one by 64% of the vote. >> The vendor fix was in. >> Yeah, well, look, CloudHealth started all in AWS by supporting customers across those environments. So and Corey you basically conceded it because we said multicloud does not mean we evenly split things up. So you got to work on those two skills, buddy, 'cause, absolutely you just handed the victory my way. So thank you so much and thank you to the audience for understanding multicloud is where we are today, and unfortunately, it's where we're gonnao be in the future. So as a whole, we're going to try to make it better 'cause it is, as Corey and I both agree, a bit of a mess right now. >> Don't get too cocky. >> One of those days the world is going to catch up with me and realize that ad hominem is not a logical fallacy so much as it is an excellent debating skill. >> Well, yeah, I was going to say, Stu, don't get too cocky because round two serverless versus containers. Stu you argued for containers, Corey you argued for serverless. Corey you won that one with 65, 66 or most percent of the vote. >> You can't fight the future. >> Yeah, and as you know Rachel I'm a big fan of serverless. I've been to the serverless comp, I actually just published an excellent interview with Liberty Mutual and what they're doing with serverless. So love the future, it's got a lot of maturity to deliver on the promise that it has today but containers isn't going anyway or either so. >> So, you're not sad that you lost that one. Got it, good concession speech. Next one up was cloud wars specifically Google. is Google a real contender in the clouds? Stu, you were arguing yes they are. Corey, you were arguing no they aren't. Corey also won this round was 72% of the votes. >> Yeah, it's one of those things where at some point, it's sort of embarrassing if you miss a six inch pot. So it's nice that that didn't happen in this case. >> Yeah, so Corey, is this the last week that we have any competitors to AWS? Is that what we're saying? And we all accept our new overlords. Thank you so much, Corey. >> Well I hope not, my God, I don't know what to be an Amazonian monoculture anymore than I do anyone else. Competition makes all of us better. But again, we're seeing a lot of anti competitive behaviour. For example, took until this year for Microsoft to finally make calculator uninstallable and I trust concerned took a long time to work its way of course. >> Yeah, and Corey, I think everyone is listening to what you've been saying about what Google's doing with Google Meet and forcing that us when we make our pieces there. So definitely there's some things that Google culture, we'd love them to clean up. And that's one of the things that's really held back Google's enterprise budget is that advertised advertising driven culture. So we will see. We are working hand-- >> That was already opted out of Hangouts, how do we fix it? We call it something else that they haven't opted out of yet. >> Hey, but Corey, I know you're looking forward to at least two months of weekly Google live stuff starting this summer. So we'll have a lot of time to talk about google. >> Let's not kid ourselves they're going to cancel it halfway through. (Stu laughs) >> Boys, I thought we didn't have any more smack talk left in you but clearly you do. So, all right, moving on. Next slide. This is the last question that we did in the main part of the debate. IBM Cloud. What about IBM Cloud was the question, Stu, you were pro, Corey you were con. Corey, you won this one again with 62% of the vote and for the main. >> It wasn't just me, IBM Cloud also won. The problem is that competition was oxymoron of the day. >> I don't know Rachel, I thought this one had a real shot as to putting where IBM fits. I thought we had a good discussion there. It seemed like some of the early voting was going my way but it just went otherwise. >> It did. We had some last minute swings in these polls. They were going one direction they rapidly swung another it's a fickle crowd today. So right now we've got Corey with three points Stu with one but really the lightning round anyone's game. They got very close here. The next question, lightning round question one, was "Game of Thrones" who deserves to sit on the Iron Throne? Stu was arguing for Jon Snow, Corey was arguing for Sansa Stark also Corey has never seen Game of Thrones. This was shockingly close with Stu at 51.5% of the vote took the crown on this King of the North Stu. >> Well, I'm thrilled and excited that King of the North pulled things out because it would have been just a complete embarrassment if I lost to Corey on this question. >> It would. >> It was the right answer, and as you said, he had no idea what he's talking about, which, unfortunately is how he is on most of the rest of it. You just don't realize that he doesn't know what he's talking about. 'Cause he uses all those fast words and discussion points. >> Well, thank you for saying the quiet part out loud. Now, I am completely crestfallen as to the results of this question about a thing I've never seen and could not possibly care less about not going in my favor. I will someday managed to get over this. >> I'm glad you can really pull yourself together and keep on going with life, Corey it's inspiring. All right, next question. Was the lightning round question two is a hot dog a sandwich? Stu, you were arguing yes. Corey, you were arguing no. Corey landslide, you won this 75% of the vote. >> It all comes down to customer expectations. >> Yeah. >> Just disappointment. Disappointment. >> All right, next question tabs versus spaces. Another very close one. Stu, what were you arguing for Stu? >> I was voting tabs. >> Tabs, yeah. And Corey, you were arguing spaces. This did not turn out the way I expected. So Stu you lost this by slim margin Corey 53% of the vote. You won with spaces. >> Yep. And I use spaces in my day to day life. So that's a position I can actually believe in. >> See, I thought I was giving you the opposite point of view there. I mistook you for the correct answer, in my opinion, which is tabs. >> Well, it is funnier to stalk me on Twitter and look what I have to there than on GitHub where I just completely commit different kinds of atrocities. So I don't blame you. >> Caught that pun there. All right, the last rounds. Speaking of atrocities, AMI, Amazon Machine Image is it pronounced AMI or AMI? >> I better not have won this one. >> So Stu you were arguing that this is pronounced AMI rhymes with butterfly. Corey, you were arguing that it's pronounced AMI like mommy. Any guesses under who won this? >> It better be Stu. >> It was a 50, 50 split complete tie. So no points to anyone. >> For your complete and utterly failed on this because I should have won in a landslide. My entire argument was based on every discussion you've had on this. So, Corey I think they're just voting for you. So I'm really surprised-- >> I think at this point it shows I'm such a skilled debater that I could have also probably brought you to a standstill taking the position that gravity doesn't exist. >> You're a master of few things, Corey. Usually it's when you were dressed up nicely and I think they like the t-shirt. It's a nice t-shirt but not how we're usually hiding behind the attire. >> Truly >> Well. >> Clothes don't always make a demand. >> Gentlemen, I would like to say overall our winner today with five points is Corey. Congratulations, Corey. >> Thank you very much. It's always a pleasure to mop the floor with you Stu. >> Actually I was going to ask Stu to give the acceptance speech for you, Corey and, Corey, if you could give a few words of concession, >> Oh, that's a different direction. Stu, we'll start with you, I suppose. >> Yeah, well, thank you to the audience. Obviously, you voted for me without really understanding that I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm a loudmouth on Twitter. I just create a bunch of arguments out there. I'm influential for reasons I don't really understand. But once again, thank you for your votes so much. >> Yeah, it's always unfortunate to wind up losing a discussion with someone and you wouldn't consider it losing 'cause most of the time, my entire shtick is that I sit around and talk to people who know what they're talking about. And I look smart just by osmosis sitting next to them. Video has been rough on me. So I was sort of hoping that I'd be able to parlay that into something approaching a victory. But sadly, that hasn't worked out quite so well. This is just yet another production brought to you by theCube which shut down my original idea of calling it a bunch of squares. (Rachael laughs) >> All right, well, on that note, I would like to say thank you both Stu and Corey. I think we can close out officially the debate, but we can all stick around for a couple more minutes in case any fans have questions for either of them or want to get them-- >> Find us a real life? Yeah. >> Yeah, have a quick Zoom fight. So thanks, everyone, for attending. And thank you Stu, thank you Corey. This has been The Great Cloud Debate.

>>Yeah, >>from The Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston. It's the Cube covering IBM. Think brought to you by IBM. >>Hi, everybody. We're back. And you're watching the Cube's coverage of the IBM think digital event for 2020. This is that he's socially distant and socially responsible. You? My name is Dave a lot. David Larose. Who's the general manager of the IBM partner ecosystem? David, Good to see you. >>Likewise. Great to be here. >>Yes, it is. Your first year in running the the ecosystem. You probably don't expect to be managing through the this world crisis this novel Corona virus. But what was your first move? Your outreach to partners? How are you communicating to them? Maybe you could share with us how that's all going. >>It certainly wasn't in the break. So when I took this job, you're right. But, you know, we have a very strong relationship with with our partners, and what we have is we have a global advisory board. So about 25 or 30 of our largest customers across the world, we engaged with them very, very quickly. That's all of the CIOs presidents, vice presidents of styles, um, and we engage with them on a survey and said, How are you thinking about it's what are the what are your big concerns and, you know, not unusually. They came back with a couple of key things. Number one was, and their primary concern is how do they support their clients? That was probably number one on their list of things followed very closely. By enabling their firms that have a financial stability that was number two and then probably number three. I would say it was, you know, managing their work. But they're moving to a digital only type of environment, similar to what IBM has done ever kind of the three, the three big concerns. And then we spent some time talking to them about how we could help, then really deal with that and address some of those problems. And earlier this week, we we announced so therefore very key things around. How do we help them? One. How do we adapt our programs and our incentives and, uh, really looking at providing them with, you know, extension of things like loyalty program. So don't worry about you know, your ability to re validate and recertify. We gotta protect your loyalty for 2020. We added a lot of incentives in the hardware systems program in the second quarter, so we've increased by half a percent off their based incentive from the first dollar that a lot of areas around programs in terms. Then we sort of really tried to address that point of view around digital. Um, some companies were digitally ready, but there are many companies that weren't actually know a digital platform, but also we very quickly rolled out what we call it my digital marketing platform, where partners can come in and download content and curate content from IBM and then wrap their own campaigns around that and get that out and continue to engage with their clients and their partners. Um, and we funding all of that 100% from an IBM perspective on using our car marketing goals. We used to have a 50 50 funding model without with their partners. But in this particular scenario, that's a digital program that they're running with funding at 100%. And then we're also opening up to provide consultancy on how to optimize digital. So I think you know the thing that we've done here is just their programs in terms quickly, um, or money back into the into the program during the second quarter and protect the ability for our partners and then really trying to help them and enable them to get Teoh Digital our workforce and the digital program. >>Yeah, a couple things there. I mean, we were talking earlier to the the folks from IBM Global Finance, and that's a key part that you mentioned liquidity. You know, certainly these partners air obviously very much concerned about the uncertainty ahead. So having a partner like IBM that can, whether it's, you know, pass on, you know, lease terms, etcetera and provide that sort of blacking is this key? I think the other thing, too we've heard from a lot of executives, is you've got to stay close to your clients during we always do, but especially during times like this, And that's where partners are so crucial in IBM huge company, you know, massive direct sales force, but you can't cover everything. And so having the partner who's got intimate relationships, I mean, I was on a call earlier this week with a partner in Minneapolis I mean, he knows everybody in that region. And so you just that level of intimacy, I think becomes very, very important in times like this, doesn't it? >>Absolutely. And stay connected with with that. So we have about, you know, just a lot of, Ah, 21,000 active planners across across the world and staying close to the senior members of our largest partners is is really important to us. We had a We hosted a call earlier this week actually, with with their advisory council to test the programs that we've gotten in the market, Are they getting where they need, where they need the help the most? We take a lot of feedback with adjusted our programs. We're looking at this on a literally a daily basis right now on don't envisage that we would we would update pretty agile in terms of how we move that. But you know, to your point, having a partner network that we do have around by the hardware and software only on and is right, so learn what were wrong. You know what they're hearing from their pot from their clients and, you know, it allows us to more easily and quickly address needs across all of the IBM client set. >>So we interview a lot of partners, and, you know, when you talk to the familiar, they've got to make money. They have. The margin is very important to them, but it's almost it's table stakes. I mean, again, they can make money a lot of different ways. So what differentiates the suppliers is all these other things that you're talking about? Um, So I want to ask you when you came in to this this role, what you're doing priorities in terms of, you know, partner outreach, retaining that, that loyalty And what do you see changing a za result of this pandemic? >>Yeah, it's a great question. So look, four key priorities that we declared very early on and, by the way, you know, took over from John Touched at the time. And John has spent the last two years really transforming, um, your channel and the way we engage with channel. And so there was a lot of hard lifting that was already done, but it was sort of four. Things that we focused in on one was obviously, how do we continue? Accelerate IBM drive into the hybrid multi cloud market, particularly now with the integration of Red Hat into the organization. That's a very different, you know, sales motion that Wei had so accelerating that was one of the key parties, the 2nd 1 waas. And how do we continue to differentiate on the value and so ensuring that that our programs are staying up to speed and that they're being modernized? You know, the IBM possible program is being a program predominantly built on Recile over the last 10 years. Now the microchip that we're now talking about platforms not talking about consumption. And this week during Partner World, we're gonna talk about how we are going to evolve the part of the program to move into the rest partners who are building on platforms. And how about they're moving to consumption again, all around hybrid, multi, multi cloud. That's kind of the second thing skills, skills and expertise for out for a channel. We kind of have declared that we want our channel to be the most skilled channel in the industry, and it's really interesting, Dave, during this period of the pandemic, it's one of these times where we seem to have more recent and more time, and the partners have been giving us a lot of feedback to say during this time around. Workforce is home and is connected digitally. Why don't we? Wasn't IBM help with in enhancing the enablement programme certification? And so we're doing a lot around that. We see a Z great opportunity to CIO to really develop certifications and skills and expertise during this period. Um, and then the full thing is around winning in what we call out selective segments. And so we want our partners to operate across the IBM portfolio and across our client set. But where we really need the help and where we're putting the money in the programs is around the mid size organizations where they can bring the portfolio into places that it doesn't have this today, new clients or existing clients with with IBM. But the Jason like server was that kind of the four priorities and what we're seeing is and this situation that we're going through this pandemic going through, it's actually accelerating the areas around moving. My partner multi cloud cloud is becoming a differentiator for us and accelerating. I need to get a program that is relevant beyond just resell. But you know this, this concept of platforms and building. But as they build with their own light beyond platform and consumption, So I think it's it's actually accelerating what we've seen and have it moving forward. >>It's interesting what you're saying about resale. We've talked many, many years now on the Cube about the partner ecosystem. It really used to be about resale. You know, we have a majority of his box selling, and you could make a lot of money doing that, you know, a decade or two ago. But when Cloud came, partners really started to underst and that that there was a sea change happening in I T. For a while there, they thought, Wow, you know, this is really going to be challenging. Cloud's going to kill us. But what they realized after a while is with five exactly complex hybrid Cloud is it's not simple to cure and create a seamless experience across clouds on prime etcetera. So the huge opportunities open up, add value. So there's been a massive change in the mindset. Uh, and it sounds like particularly with digital, that the pandemic is going to accelerate that on. People are going to come out of this, um, almost having done some exercises, maybe in a little bit better shape than they came into it. You buy that premise? >>My question is no question about it. I mean, if you think about, you know, IBM portfolio for a minute. Um, and over the last really 6 to 9 months, we have containerized out our software portfolio. It's based on the, you know, the kubernetes container ization and an open ship. So we're ready from a portfolio perspective. And, you know, now we're catching up from a program perspective we're introducing this week and out in the world this concept of a build program and a service program, and so that is their will preserve and continue to evolve the cell program that resell. But you know this concept of the build program and the service programs and only extend the reach that we have to the data and the ecosystem that we're operating in new sets of partners. But is that one of transition, that business from recent consumption? We're going to support that. But then you have to your point around this whole digital everything from digital capabilities around, generating amount of opportunity and a little bit about that earlier with my program and the funding that we've got behind that the experience that we're we're offering as consultants, but also this concept of digital selling. You know, there's not all about partners are savvy around digital selling. So we've been doing that for many, many years. And, uh and so we're opening up digital selling Enablement sessions, Webinars consultancy and a bunch of assets that that IBM has and has invested in for many, many years and opening that up to you want to add channel? >>Yes, There was some great opportunities there for our partners. I mean, we The Cube has been covering the Red Hat Summit we had Jim Whitehurst on. We're in the process of scheduling Arvin so great to see, you know, kind of connect the dots between those franchises and identify the opportunities, and they're significant. I mean, Red Hat has a lot of momentum in the market. IBM has a huge presence, great opportunity to modernize applications, And then your point about the hardware side we just saw on IBM s latest earnings, released at the Fisher running in hardware right now on, uh, you know, obviously tailwind of the Z cycle, but other parts of the portfolio storage from 19%. So so some exciting times for partners, even though there's so much uncertainty in the market again, staying close to customers, you know, doing doing right by your employees, leveraging the IBM relationship where you're obviously providing a lot of backdrop in support. David, I wonder if you could just sort of wrap a bow around. You know, think 2020 is the virtual trucks are pulling away away from the virtual digital Mosconi. What's the take? Aways will give us the bumper sticker. >>Look, the bumper sticker is that it's never been a better time to be an idea. We've got a leading portfolio that is now ready for the new world. Will the consumption and the world building on um, we are, you know, we're modernizing our programs to ensure that you can make money here. There's a lot of money to be made as we as we get into this thing, this new world and we are behind you right now to support you financially and to get you develop digitally enabled guy. So never been a time to be an IBM partner right now. >>David. Great message. Thank you very much for coming on the Cube. And best of luck to you. Stay safe and ah, again, really appreciate your time. >>You too, Dave. Thanks very much. Bye. Site. >>You know, uh, and you're watching the Cube here at IBM? Think 2020. Our digital coverage. We'll be right back right after this short break. I'm Dave Volante, and you're watching the Cube? >>Yeah, yeah, yeah.

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hello everybody welcome to the cubes exclusive coverage of IBM thanks 2020 digital event experience the cube covering wall-to-wall we've got a number of interviews planned for you going deep my name is Dave Volante I'm here with stoom in ament's - how you doing doing great Dave so we're socially distant as you can see in the studio and mohab row everybody's you know six feet apart got our masks on took them off for this for this segment so Stu let's get into it so a very interesting time obviously for IBM Arvind Krishna doing the big keynote Jim Whitehurst new president so you got a new leadership a lot of talk about resilience agility and flexibility you know which is kind of interesting obviously a lot of their clients are thinking about kovat 19 in that context iBM is trying to provide solutions and capabilities we're going to get into it but really the linchpin of all this is open shift and RedHat and we're gonna talk about what that means for the vision that Arvind Krishna laid out and let's get into it your your thoughts on think 2020 yeah so Dave of course you know last week we had Red Hat summit so Red Hat is still Red Hat you and I had a nice discussion going into Red Hat summit yes thirty four billion dollar acquisition there now under IBM Jim white her slides over in that new role as president but you know one of the questions we've had fundamentally Dave is does an acquisition like this will it change IBM will it change the cloud landscape openshift and Red Hat are doing quite well we definitely have seen some some of the financials and every audience that hasn't seen your analysis segment of IBM should really go in and see that because the Red Hat of course is one of the bright spots in the financials they're you know good growth rate on the number of customers and what they're doing in cloud and underneath a lot of those announcements you dig down and oh yeah there's openshift and there's Red Hat Enterprise Linux rel so you know I long partner for decades between IBM and Red Hat but is you know how will the IBM scale really help the Red Hat pieces there's a number of announcements underneath you know not just you know how does the entire world work on you know Z and power and all of the IBM platforms but you know I believe it's arvind says one of the enduring platforms needs to be the hybrid cloud and you heard a Red Hat summit the entire week it was the open hybrid cloud was the discussion well yes so that actually is interesting you brought up Arvin's sort of pillars there were three enduring platforms that he cited then the fourth of course is I guess open hybrid cloud but the first was mainframes the second was and I'm not sure this is the right order the second was services and then the third was middleware so basically saying excuse me we have to win the day for the architecture of hybrid cloud what's that mean to you then I'd like to chime in yeah so so Dave first of all you know when when we did our analysis when IBM bought red Hatton says you know my TL DR was does this change the cloud landscape my answer is no if I'm a Amazon I'm not sitting there saying oh geez you know the combination of IBM and Red Hat well they're partners and they're they're gonna be involved in it does IBM have huge opportunities in hybrid cloud multi cloud and edge computing absolutely one of the questions is you know how will I be M services really be transformed you know Dave we've watched over the last decade some of the big service organizations have really shrunk down cloud changed the marginal economics you've done so much discussion of this over the last handful of years that you need to measure yourself against the hyper scalars you need to you know see where you can add value and the question is Dave you know when and where do we think of IBM in the new era well so coming back to sort of your point about RedHat and services is it about cloud is a developer's near-term I've said it's it's more about services than it is about cloud longer-term I think it is about cloud but but IBM's definition of cloud is maybe a little different than 10 hours but when Jeannie when on the roadshow - after the redhead acquisitions you said this is gonna be a creative - free cash flow within one year and the reason why I always believe that is because they were gonna plug Red Hat and we've talked about this an open shift right into their services business and start modernizing applications right away they've actually achieved that so I think they had pretty good visibility and that was kind of a mandate so IBM's huge services organization is in a good position to do that they've got deep industry expertise we heard Arvind Krishna on his keynote talking about that Jim Whitehurst talking more about services you really didn't hear Jim you know previously in his previous roles talk a lot about services other than as part of the ecosystem so it's an interesting balancing act that that iBM has to do the real thing I want to dig into Stu is winning the day with the with with the architecture of hybrid cloud so let's start with with cloud talk about how IBM defines cloud IBM on its earning earnings call we talked about this on our Red Hat Summit analysis the cloud was you know 23 billion you know growing it whatever 20 20 plus percent when my eyes have been bleeding reading IBM financial statements in ten case for the last couple of weeks but when you go in there and you look at what's in that cloud and I shared this on my braking analysis this week a very small portion of that cloud revenue that what last year 21 billion very small portion is actually what they call cloud cloud and cognitive software it's only about 20 percent of the pie it's really services it's about 2/3 services so that is a bit of a concern but at the same time it's their greatest opportunity because they have such depth and services if IBM can increase the percentage of its business that's coming from higher margin software a business which was really the strategy go back 20 years ago it's just as services became this so big it's so pervasive that that software percentage you know maybe it grew maybe it didn't but but that's IBM's opportunities to really drive that that that software based revenues so let's talk about what that looks like how does OpenShift play in that IBM definition of cloud which includes on Prem the IBM public law everybody else's public cloud multi-cloud and the edge yeah well first of all Dave right the question is where does IBM technologies where do they live so you know look even before the Red Hat piece if we looked at IBM systems there's a number of times that you're seeing IBM software living on various public clouds and that it's goodness you know one of the things we've talked about for a number of years is you know how can you become more of a software company how can you move to more of the you know cloud consumption models you go in more op X and capex so IBM had done some of that and Red Hat should be able to help supercharge that when we look at some of the announcements the one that of course caught my other most Dave is the you know IBM cloud satellite would would say the shorthand of it it's IBM's version of outposts and underneath that what is it oh it's open shift underneath there and you know how can I take those pieces and we know open ship can live across you know almost any of the clouds and you know cannot live on the IB cloud IBM cloud absolutely can it be open ship be in the data center and on virtualization whether it be open source or VMware absolutely so satellite being a fundamental component underneath of open ship makes a lot of sense and of course Linux yeah Linux underneath if you look at the the one that we've heard IBM talking about for a while now is cloud packs is really how are they helping customers simplify and build that cloud native stack you start with Red Hat Enterprise Linux you put openshift on top of that and then cloud packs are that simple toolset for whether you're doing data or AI or integration that middleware that you talked about in the past iBM has way the ways that they've done middleware for decades and now they have the wonderful open source to help enable that yeah I mean WebSphere bluemix IBM cloud now but but OpenShift is really that pass layer that that IBM had coveted right and I was talking to some of IBM's partners getting ready for this event and they say if you dig through the 10k cloud packs is one of those that you know there are thousands of customers that are using this so it's good traction not just hey we have this cloud stuff and it's wonderful and we took all of these acquisitions everything from SoftLayer to software pieces but you know cloud packs is you know a nice starter for companies to help really move forward on some of their cloud native application journey yes so what whatever we talked about this past week in the braking analysis and certainly David floor has been on this as well as this notion of being able to run a Red Hat based let's call it a stack everywhere and Jim White has talked about that essentially really whether it's on Prem at the edge in the clouds but the key there stew is being able to do so natively so every layer of you know it began call it the stack IT services the data plane the control plane the management plane all the planes being able to the networking the transport etc being natively able to run wherever it is so that you can take fine-grain advantage and leverage the primitives on respective clouds the advantage that IBM has in my view would love your thoughts on this is that Red Hat based platforms it's open source and so I mean it's somebody gonna trust Amazon to be the the cloud native anybody's cloud yeah you know solution well if you're part of the Amazon stack I mean I Amazon frankly an Oracle have similar kind of mindset you know redstack Amazon stack make it all homogeneous and it'll run just fine IBM's coming at it from an open source perspective so they they in some ways will have more credibility but it's gonna take a lot of investment to really Shepherd those standards they're gonna have to put a lot of commitments in committers and they're gonna have to incent people to actually adhere to those standards yeah I mean David's the idea of pass the platform as a service that we've been chasing as an industry for more than a decade what's interesting if you listen to IBM what's underneath this well it's you know taking advantage of the container based architecture with kubernetes underneath so can I run kubernetes anywhere yeah pretty much every cloud has their own service OpenShift can live everywhere the question is what David floors rightly putting out okay if I bake to a single type of solution can i really take advantage of the native offerings so the discussion we've always had for a long time as dua virtualize something in which case I'm really abstract away I get to you know I can't take advantage of the all various pieces do I do multi cloud in which case I have some least common denominator way of looking at cloud because I what I want to be able to do is get the value in differentiation out of each cloud I use but not be stuck on any cloud and yes Dave Red Hat with openshift and based with kubernetes and the open source community is definitely a leading way to do that what you worry about is saying okay how much is this stuck on containerization will it be able to take advantage of things like serverless you talk to IBM and say okay underneath it's going to have all this wonderful components Dave when I talked to Andy Jesse and he says if I was rebuilding AWS today it would all be service underneath so what is that underlying construct you know is it flexible and can it be updated Red Hat and IBM are going to bridge between the container world and the serverless world with things like a native but absolutely we are not yet at the Nirvana that developers can just build their apps and know that it can run anywhere and take advantage of anything so you know some things we know we need to keep working so a couple other things there so Jim Weider has talked about ingesting innovation that the nature of innovation is such that it comes from a lot of different places open source obviously is a you know fundamental you know component of that he talked about the telco edge he gave an example of Vodafone Arvind Krishna talked about anthem kind of redefining healthcare post kovat so you're seeing some examples of course that's good that IBM puts forth some really you know proof points it's not just you know slide where which is good I think the the interesting thing you know you can't just put you know containers out there and expect the innovation to find its way into those containers it's gonna take a lot of work to make sure that as those different layers of the stack that we were talking about before are actually going to come to fruition so there's there's the there's some other announcements in this regard to these Edgecumbe edge computing application manager let's say the telco edge a lot of automation focused you mentioned IBM satellite there's the financial services cloud so we're seeing IBM actually you know sprinkle around some investments there as I said in my breaking in houses I'd like to see them dial up those investments a little bit more maybe dial down the return of cash at least for the next several years to shareholders yeah I mean Dave the concern you would talk to most customers and you say well if you try to even optimize your own data center and turn it into a cloud how can you take advantage of the innovation that the Amazon Microsoft Google's and IBM's are Tait are putting out there in the world you want to be able to plug into that you want to be able to leverage those those new services so that is where it's definitely a shift Dave you think about IBM over a hundred years usually they're talking about their patent portfolio I I think they've actually opened up a lot of their patent portfolio to help attack you know the kovat 19 so it is definitely a very different message and tenor that I hear under Arvind Krishna you know in very early days than what I was used to for the last decade or two from IBM yeah well at the risk of being a little bit repetitive one of the things that I talked about in my breaking the analysis I highlighted that arvind said he wants to lead with a technical story which I really like Arvin's a technical visionary his predecessors his three predecessors were not considered technical visionaries and so I think that's one of the things that's been lacking inside of IBM I think it's one of the reason why why Services has been such a dominant component so look Lou Gerstner too hard to argue with the performance of the company but when he made the decision and IBM made the decision to go all-in on services something's got to give and what gave and I've said this many many times in the cube was was product leadership so I'd like to see IBM get back to that product leadership and I think Red Hat gives them an opportunity to do that obviously Red Hat Linux you know open source is a leader the leader and this is jump all as we've talked about many times in this multi hybrid cloud edge you know throwing all the buzzwords but there's some interesting horses on the track you got you got VMware we throw in AWS just because they're there you can talk about cloud without talking about AWS certainly Microsoft has designs there Cisco Google everybody wants a piece of that pie and I would say that you know Red Hat with with with OpenShift is in a good position if in fact they can make the investments necessary to build out those stacks yeah it's funny Dave because IBM for the history the size that they are often can get overlooked you talk about you know we've probably spent more air time talking about the VMware Amazon relationship than almost any in the last few years well we forget we were sitting at vmworld and two months before VMware announced the Amazon partnership who was it that was up on the main stage with Pat Gelson der it was IBM because IBM was the first partner I I believe that I saw numbers that IBM was saying that they have more hosted VMware environments than anyone out there I'd love to see the data on it to understand there because you know IBM plays in so many different places they just often are not you know aggregated and counted together you know when you get outside of some of the you know middleware mainframe some of the pieces that you talked about earlier Dave so IBM does have a strong position they just haven't been the front center leader too often but they have a broad portfolio and very much services led so they they kind of get forgotten you know off on the sides so IBM stated strategy is to bring those mission critical workloads into the cloud they've said that 80% of the workloads remain on Prem only 20% have been been clarified you know when you when you peel the onions on that there's just is so much growth and cloud native workloads so you know there's there is a somewhat of a so what in that but I will say this so where are the mission critical workloads where do they live today they live on Prem we can but but but whose stacks are running those it's IBM and it's Oracle and and David floor has done some research that suggests that if you're gonna put stuff into the cloud that's mission-critical you're probably better off staying with those those stacks that are going to allow you to a lower risk move not have to necessarily rip and replace and so you know migrating mission-critical Oracle database into AWS or db2 you know infrastructure into AWS is is gonna be much more challenging than than going same-same into the IBM cloud or the respective Oracle cloud so I guess my question to you Stu is why do people want to move those mission critical workloads into the cloud do they well first of all it's unlocking innovation that you talked about Dave so you know we've looked at from a VMware standpoint versus a red hat standpoint if you talk about building new apps doing containerization having that cloud native mindset do I have a bimodal configuration not so not a word that we talk about as much anymore because I want to be able to modernize it modernizing those applications doing any of those migrations we know or super challenging you know heck David Flair has talked about it for a long long time so you bring up some great points here that you know Microsoft might be the best at meeting customers where they are and giving people a lot of options IBM lines up in many ways in a similar ways my biggest critique about VMware is they don't have tight ties to the application it's mostly you know virtual eyes it or now we have some cloud native pieces but other than the pivotal group they didn't do a lot with modernization on applications IBM with their middleware history Red Hat with everything that they do with the developer communities are well positioned to help customers along those digital journeys and going through those transformations so it's you know applications need to be updated you know if anybody that's used applications that are long in the tooth know that they don't have the features that I want they don't react the way they want heck today Dave everybody needs to be able to access things where they are on the go you know it's not a discussion anymore about you know virtual desktop it's about you know work anywhere have access to the data where I need it and be much more flexible and agile and those are some of the configurations that you know iBM has history and their services arm can help customers move along those journeys yeah so you know I think one of the big challenges iBM has it's got a it's got a its fingers in a lot of pies AI you know they talk a lot about blockchain they're about quantum quantum is not gonna be here for a while it's very cool we have an interview coming up with with Jamie Thomas and you know she's all over the quantum we've talked to her in the past about it but I think you know if you think about IBM's business in terms of services and product you know it's whatever it is a 75 you know billion dollar organization 2/3 or and maybe not quite 2/3 maybe 60 Plus percent is services services are not an R&D intensive business you look at a company like Accenture Stu I think Accenture spent last year 800 million on R&D they're a forty five billion dollar forty six billion dollar company so if you really isolate the IBM you know company to two products whatever its call it 25 30 billion they spend a large portion of that that revenue on R&D to get to the six billion but my argument is it's it's not enough to really drive the type of innovation that they need just another again Accenture data point because they're kind of a gold standard along with IBM you.why and others and and a couple of others in services they return seventy six percent of their cash to shareholders iBM has returned consistently 50 to 60 percent to its shareholders so arvind stated he wants to return IBM to growth you know every every IBM CEO says that Ginni I used to talk about has to shrink to grow as I said unfortunately so you should run out of time and now it's up to Arvind to show that but to me growth has got to come from fueling Rd whether it's organic or inorganic I'd like to see you know organic as the real driver for obvious reasons and I don't think just open source in and of itself obviously is going to attract that it'll attract innovation but whether or not IBM will be able to harness it to his advantage is the real challenge unless they're making huge huge commitments to that open source and in a microcosm you know it's a kind of a proxy we saw what happened to Hortonworks and cloud era because they had to had to fund that open source commitment you know IBM we're talking about much much with the hybrid multi-cloud edge much much bigger opportunity but but requirement and we haven't even talked about AI you know bringing you know I think I think you have a quote on you know data is the fuel what was that quote yes it was Jim Whitehurst he said data is the fuel cloud is the platform AI is accelerant and then security my paraphrase is the mission control there so sounds a lot like your innovation cocktail that you've been talking about for the last year or so Dave but iCloud but so okay but AI is the accelerant and I agree by the way applying AI to all this data that we have you know over the years automating it and scaling it in the cloud it's critical and if IBM wants to define cloud as you know the cloud experience anywhere I'm fine with that I'm not a fan of the way they break down their cloud business I think it's bogus and I've called them on that but okay fine so maybe we'll get by that I'll get over it but but but really that is the opportunity it's just it's got to be funded yeah no Dave absolutely iBM has a lot of really good assets there they've got strong leadership as you said can Arvind do another Satya Nadella transformation there's the culture there's the people and there's the product so you know IBM you know absolutely has a lot of great resources and you know smart people and some really good products out there as well as really good ecosystem partnerships it's you know Amazon is not the enemy to IBM Microsoft is a partner for what they're doing and even Google is somebody that they can work with so you know I always say back in the ten years I've been working for you Dave I think the first time I heard the word coopertition I thought it was like an IBM trademark name because they were the ones that really you know lead as to have a broad portfolio and work with everybody in the ecosystem even though you don't necessarily agree or partner on every piece of what you're doing so in a multi cloud AI you know open ecosystem IBM's got a real shot yeah I mean a Satya Nadella like move would be awesome of course Satya had a much much larger you know of cash hoard to play with but but I guess the similarity stew are you you're notwithstanding that now we have three prominent companies run by Indian native born leaders which is pretty astounding when you think about it but notwithstanding that there are some similarities just in terms of culture and emphasis and getting back to sort of the the technical roots the technical visionaries so I'm encouraged but I'm watching very closely stew as I'm sure you are kind of where those investments go how how it plays in the marketplace but but I think you're right I think people underestimate IBM and and but the combination of IBM Red Hat could be very dangerous yeah Dave how many times do we write the article you know has the sleeping giant of IBM been awoken so I think it's a different era now and absolutely there's IBM has the right cards to be able to play at some of these new tables and it's a different IBM for a different era somebody said to me the other day that and probably you've probably heard this you have to but it was first I heard of it is that within five years IBM had better be a division of Red Hat versus the other way around so all right Stu thanks for for helping to set up the IBM think 2020 digital event experience what coming at you wall-to-wall coverage I think we've got over 40 interviews lined up Stu you you have been doing a great job both last week with the Red Hat summit and helping out with IBM thanks so thanks for that Dave no no rainy week at the new Moscone like we had last year a really good content from the comfort of our remote settings yeah so keep it right there buddy this is Dave a lot a force to Minutemen go to Silicon angle calm you'll check out all the news the the cube net we'll have all of our videos will be running wall-to-wall wiki bong calm has some some of the research action this day Volante force too many we'll be right back right after this short break [Music]

>>From the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston. It's the cube covering IBM thing brought to you by IBM. >>Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman and we're here with the cubes coverage of IBM. Thank you. 2020. The global experience reaching all of the participants of the event where they are. I'm happy to welcome back one of our cube alumni, Mike Farris, who is the vice president of corporate development and strategy at red hat. Mike, it's great to see you. Likewise too. Happy to be here. All right, so what Mike, uh, you know, lots of things to talk about a few weeks back. Uh, of course the management changes happened. Uh, we're fresh off of a red hat summit. Uh, I, I had a pleasure really talking to a lot of your peers, uh, your new boss, uh, and uh, you know, many of the customers. Uh, but for our, I think audience, right? Bring us up to speed. Uh, you know, back in 2019, it, uh, the, the largest software acquisition ever, uh, completed with IBM buying red hat and there've been some management changes, uh, some people, uh, switching roles. >>And, and you've got a new title, so, uh, bring her audience speed. Sure. Absolutely. So it's, it's been an exciting several, several months as we've gone through this. Of course. Um, we knew things were going to happen, things were announced clearly with Jenny's retirement quite a while ago. Um, but certainly, you know, the Arvin announcement and then as well as having both Jim Whitehurst become president. Okay. Oh, Cormier becoming CEO of red hat. You know, it's been an exciting several months trying to try to go through this and understand, you know, what would change and frankly, what would not change. Um, I'll say from red hats perspective, having been with red hat for coming up, you're on 20 years, uh, not a lot is really changed. We're still focused on our mission of being the owner leading enterprise open source software company, uh, focusing on both taking our, our platforms, both red hat enterprise Linux and now OpenShift a Ford in the market, partnering around middleware components, hardening around our management, uh, as well as our storage elements. >>So, you know, our mission hasn't changed and that's kind of one of the key aspects of this. I'll say that certainly, you know, with Arvind now as CEO of IBM and Jim Whitehurst is president of IBM along with Oh for me or being, you know, CEO of red hat and we've got a really strong leadership group in place at IBM that understands what red hat is, what we mean to the customer and just as importantly what we mean to the open source community. Uh, and, and that type of action and, and, and drive is certainly something that, that we think, you know, that leadership in place will help to ensure that the value we've delivered to customers, frankly from day one back when we launched red hat enterprise Linux or red hat advanced server, frankly, uh, it's something that, that we'll be able to continue to do and drive in the community and with the customers as we move forward. >>Yeah. Mike, it's interesting when we look out, uh, on the, the ecosystems and happening out there, we understand for customers sometimes it might be challenging to say, Hey, I listened to 10 different vendors and they all say the same words. I've got multi hybrid cloud, digital modernization, things like that. Well, with our hat as a, as an analyst firm, we kind of say, okay, everybody does things a little bit different. Do you know if you look at the big cloud players, they are all playing different games. When we looked at the IBM strategy pre acquisition of red hat and red hat, they line up pretty well, you know, red hat. Yeah, very much. At summit it was open hybrid cloud. Uh, when I look at IBM, maybe a little bit more talk of multicloud than hybrid. Well, but hybrid is long bend a piece of it. >>So yeah. Okay. Give us a little bit of the inside, you know, with your strategy hat on it. How much had it been okay. Strong alignment, obviously IBM and red hat decades. Um, but you know, there are some places where, uh, you need to make sure that people understand that, you know, red sat still please markers with all the clouds. And of course IBM has services that span many places, but they also have, you know, products and services that are, uh, it was particular to IBM thing. Absolutely. And I think, you know, it's important to note, and this is well established that, you know, one of the core, uh, justifications and reasons for the acquisition was really around red hats. A physician, not just an open source, but in the hybrid cloud. Um, we've been talking about that for sure many years in fact, before most of the vendor's name has predicted up. >>Um, uh, but just as importantly, I think if you look back at Marvin Krishna's announcements on frankly the day that he was named CEO, uh, you know, he starts talking about things like IBM's focus being hybrid. Yeah. AI. And how did those things come together and who were the participants in that value being delivered? Certainly from red hat's perspective is, as we've said, we've been talking about hybrid and delivering on hybrid for many years now. Now that's being, being pushed as part of the IBM overall message. Um, and so certainly being able to leverage that value and extend it throughout the ecosystem that IBM brings throughout the software that IBM has and their services. You know, certainly we think we've got a, a good opportunity to really take that message broader in the market. Um, you know, with again, with, with both Paul and Jim, president and CEO of red hat working together and we'll be able to take that and leverage that capability throughout all of IBM generally. >>Yeah. I'm glad you brought up the AI piece because one of the things that really struck me, thumb it often we're talking about plot worms and we're talking about infrastructure. And while that is my background, we understand that the reason infrastructure exists is because my Apple, that application and one of the most important piece of applications or data. So, you know, red hat of course has a strong history with hi guys, uh, to applications and data. You, you've got an operating system as you know, one of the core pieces of what you're doing. And when I think about IBM and its strengths, well the first thing I probably think of is services. But the second thing I think of was all of the businesses productivity, uh, the databases, you know, all these applications that IBM has. I read it over the years, uh, wondering if we can just click down one notch and you talk about, uh, you know, hybrid cloud and AI and everything. >>How are IBM and red hat helping customers build all of those new applications go through those transformations, uh, to really be modern enterprises? Yeah, so certainly if you look at red hat's history where we focused very much on building the platforms and again, whether that was red hat, enterprise, Linux open shift or J boss, you know, our focus has been how can we make a standardized platform, it will work across the industry regardless of use case or industry verdict. IBM, you know, has both platforms as well as a lot of investment in capabilities in the higher level value services as well as the specializations. And use of these applications and platforms for specific vertical industries. And a lot of what they've been able to bring to the table with your investments in Watson and AI as well as a lot of their data services has certainly start to come to fruition. >>And when we start taking these two in combination and applying, for example, a focus on developers, developer tools, being able to bring a value to not just uh, the operations folks, but also the developer side and really put a lot of the AI capabilities cross that we're starting to see, you know, accelerated value, accelerated use. And then if you layer that on top of a hybrid approach, you know, we've got a very strong message that crosses everything from, you know, existing applications to net new applications before developing from their DevOps cycle all the way through their operation cycle at the bottom end where they're, they're actually trying to do boy cross multiple platforms, multiple infrastructures, and keep everything consistently managed, secured and operated. And that's, that's really the overall message that we're seeing as we talk about this together with IBM. All right. So, Mike, you touched on some of the products that that red hat, uh, offers in the portfolio. >>Uh, it was, it was a real focus at summit, not really to talk about the announcements, you know, a week before a summit two came out. Yeah. Uh, OpenShift bar dog four wasn't a big w blob. Uh, you know, give us the update on really the red hat portfolio and you know, where are those points? You know, IBM is helping red hat scale. Yeah. So certainly you've touched on some of the big ones, right? Well, OpenShift itself with the four dot. Four release brings a lot of new capabilities, uh, that are being brought forward to those customers. I have a better management, better capabilities and what they can do from monitoring service, et cetera. Um, but certainly also things like what we're doing with OpenShift virtualization, which was another announcement. There were, we're actually doing, you know, bringing a game, changing capability to the market, uh, and enabling customers that have both existing, uh, virtual virtualized environments and also new or, or migrated or transformed a container, native environments and running those on the same platform. >>With the same management infrastructure, we see that as huge to be able to simplify the management capabilities, understand cost and be able to control those environments in a much more consistent way. Uh, secondly, uh, you know, one of the big things that's been happening is really around advanced container management. What we're calling an ACM. Uh, this is, this is a good example of how red hat and IBM have worked together, uh, to bring existing IBM capabilities and what they had called a multi cluster management or MCM and bring those not just into red hat yes. Part of our platforms, but also have red hat take the step of open sourcing that and making it part of the industry standard through open source community. So being able to take that type of value that IBM had matured, take it through red hat into the open source community, but simultaneously deliver it to our customers. >>Yeah. Open shift and make it part of the platform. It's something we really see as, as a huge value add. Mmm. We're also doing a lot more with hyperscalers, especially in the space of OpenShift managed services. Uh, you saw some of those last week and I would encourage everyone to go out and, and look at the Paul Cormier and Scott Guthrie announcements that we did. There was a keynote, a video that you can go review. Uh, but, but certainly, uh, certainly the focus on how do we work with these hyperscalers inclusive of IBM, uh, to make open shift and much more fluid deployment option, have it more, more service oriented, a both on premise and off premise so the customers can actually, uh, work together better in it. Yeah. A red hat I think has always done a really good job of highlighting those partnerships. It's way easy on the outside to talk about the competitive nature of the industry. >>And I remember a few years ago, a red hat made, you know, a strong partnership with AWS. You mentioned, you know, Scott Guthrie from Microsoft. Well, okay. Not Satya Nadella. Okay. Love it last year, but Microsoft long partner. Oh, okay. Of course, with IBM back to the earliest days, uh, and with red hat or, uh, you know, in the much more recent days, uh, there was those partnerships. So critically important. ACM definitely an area, uh, we want to watch it. It was really question we had had, if you look at last year, Microsoft announced Azure, uh, there are lots of solutions announced as to how am I going to manage in this multicloud world. Um, because it's not, my piece is everywhere. It's now I need to manage a lot of things that are out of my control from different vendors and hopefully we learned a lot of the lessons from the multi-vendor era that will be fixed in the multi cloud era. >>Oh, absolutely. And you know, arc was part of our discussion with Scott Guthrie last week or Paul's discussion and you'll see a demo of that. But I would also expect that you'll see more things coming from us markers as well. Right. You know, this is about building a platform, a hybrid platform that works in a multicloud world and being able to describe that in a very consistent way. Manage it. You were at entitled it in a very consistent way of across all the vendors, inclusive of both self and managed services, only one option. And so we're very focused on doing that. Um, IBM, certainly AXA assisting in that, helping grow it. But overall this focus is really about red has perspective about making that hybrid, right? the leading hybrid platform, the leading Coobernetti's. Okay. uh, in the industry. And that's, that's really where starting from with OpenShift. >>All right. So, so Mike, we started out the discussion talking about some of the changes and you know, where red hat stays, red hat and where the company is working together. Obviously the leadership changes. Oh, we're a big piece. Uh, congratulations you, you got, you know, a new role. I've seen quite a few people, uh, with some new titles. Uh, you know, w which is always nice to see. Uh, the, the people that have been working for a long time. The other area where seems from the outside there coordinated effort is around the covert response. So, you know, I've seen the, the public letters from, from Arvin Krishna of course. red hat and Paul Cormier's letter. Well, he is there. Uh, IBM was one of the first companies that we had heard from, uh, that said, Hey, you know, we're not going to RSA conference this year. >>We're moving digital, uh, with the events. So no real focus on them boys. And then of course boarding customers. Yeah. How does that covert response happen? And am I right from the outside that it looks like there, there is a bit of United right attack, this global pandemic response. It is a, you know, I think there's two levels to this. Certainly between red hat and IBM were well coordinated. Um, within, within red hat we have, uh, we have teams that are specifically dedicated to making sure, yeah, our associates and more importantly, uh, our customers and the overall communities are well-served through this. As you said earlier in the interview, uh, certainly we hold back on any significant product announcements at summit, including with some of our partners merely because we wanted to maintain this focus on how can we help everyone through this very unfortunate experience. >>Um, and so, you know, as obviously a lot of us, all of us are sitting at home now globally. Uh, the focus is very much how do we stay connected or we keep the business flowing as much as possible through this and, and, and keep people safe and secure in their environments and make sure that we serve both the customers and the associates. Yes. Awesome away. So there's a lot of sensitivity and we want to make sure that, you know, the industry and the overall world knows, uh, that we're very focused on keeping people healthy and moving forward as we, as we work through this together as a world. Yeah. Well, Mike Ferris, thank you so much for the update. It's been been a pleasure catching up. Great. Thanks dude. Appreciate it. All right. Stay tuned for lots more coverage from IBM. Think 20, 20. The global digital experience. Okay. To a minimum. And thank you. We're watching. Thank you.

from around the globe it's the cube with digital coverage of Red Hat summit 2020 brought to you by Red Hat last year in 2019 IBM made the biggest M&A move of the year with a 34 billion dollar acquisition of red hat it positioned IBM for the next decade after what was a very tumultuous tenure by CEO Ginni Rometty who had to shrink in order to grow unfortunately she didn't have enough time to do the grille part that has now gone toward Arvind Krishna the new CEO of IBM this is Dave Volante and I'm here with Stu minimun and this is our Red Hat keynote analysis is our 7th year doing the Red Hat summit and we're very excited to be here this is our first year doing Stu the Red Hat summit post IVM acquisition we've also got IBM think next week so what we want to do for you today is review what's going on at the Red Hat summits do you've been wall-to-wall with the interviews we're gonna break down the announcements IBM had just announced its quarter so we get some glimpse as to what's happening in the business and then we're gonna talk about going forward what the prognosis is for both IBM and Red Hat well and Dave of course our audience understands there's a reason why we're sitting farther apart than normal in our studio and you know why we're not in San Francisco where the show is supposed to be this year last year it's in Boston Red Hat summit goes coast-to-coast every year it's our seventh year doing the show first year doing it all digital of course our community is always online but you know real focus you know we're gonna talk about Dave you know you listen to the keynote speeches it's not the as we sit in our preview it's not the hoopla we had a preview with pork or mayor ahead of the event where they're not making big announcements most of the product pieces we're all out front it's open source anyway we know when it's coming for the most part some big partnership news of course strong customer momentum but a different tenor and the customers that Red Hat's lined up for me their interview all talking you know essential services like medical your your energy services your communication services so you know real focus I think Dave both IBM and right making sure that they are setting the appropriate tone in these challenging times yeah I mean everybody who we talked to says look at the employees and safety comes first once we get them working from home and we know that they're safe and healthy we want to get productive and so you've seen as we've reported that that shift to the work from home infrastructure and investments in that and so now it's all about how do we get closer to clients how do we stay close to clients and be there for them and I actually have you know business going forward you know the good news for IBM is it's got strong cash flow it's got a strong balance sheet despite you know the acquisition I mean it's just you know raise some more you know low low cost debt which you know gives them some dry powder going forward so I think IBM is gonna be fine it's just there's a lot of uncertainty but let's go back to your takeaways from the Red Hat Summit you've done you know dozens of interviews you got a good take on the company what are you top three takeaways - yeah so first of all Dave you know the focus everybody has is you know what does Red Hat do for the cloud story for IBM OpenShift especially is absolutely a highlight over 2,000 customers now from some really large ones you know last year I interviewed you know Delta you've got you know forward and Verizon up on stage for the keynote strong partnership with Microsoft talking about what they're doing so OpenShift has really strong momentum if you talk about you know where is the leadership in this whole kubernetes space Red Hat absolutely needs to be in that discussion not only are they you know other than Google the top contributor really there but from a customer standpoint the experience what they've built there but what I really liked from Red Hat standpoint is it's not just an infrastructure discussion it's not OPM's and containers and there's things we want to talk about about VMs and containers and even server lists from Red Hat standpoint but Red Hat at its core what it is it they started out as an operating system company rel Red Hat Enterprise Linux what's the tie between the OS and the application oh my god they've got decades of experience how do you build applications everything from how they're modernizing Java with a project called Korkis through how their really helping customers through this digital transformation I hear a similar message from Red Hat and their customers that I hear from Satya Nadella at Microsoft is we're building lots of applications we need to modernize what they're doing in Red Hat well positioned across the stack to not only be the platform for it but to help all of the pieces to help me modernize my applications build new ones modernize some of the existing ones so OpenShift a big piece of it you know automation has been a critical thing for a while we did the cube last year at ansible fest for the first time from Red Hat took that acquisition has helped accelerate that community in growth and they're really Dave pulling all the pieces together so it's what you hear from Stephanie shirasu ironically enough came over from IBM to run that business inside a Red Hat well you know now she's running it inside Red Hat and there's places that this product proliferate into the IBM portfolio next week when we get where it I didn't think I'm sure we'll hear a lot about IBM cloud packs and look at what's underneath IBM cloud packs there's open shift there's rel all those pieces so you know I know one of the things we want to talk about Davis you know what does that dynamic of Red Hat and IBM mean so you know open shift automation the full integration both of the Red Hat portfolio and how it ties in with IBM would be my top three well red hat is now IBM I mean it's a clearly part of the company it's there's a company strategy going forward the CEO Arvind Krishna is the architect of the Red Hat acquisition and so you know that it's all in on Red Hat Dave I mean just the nuance there of course is the the thing you hear over and over from the Red Hatters is Red Hat remains Red Hat that cultural shift is something I'd love to discuss because you know Jim Whitehurst now he's no longer a Red Hat employee he's an IBM employee so you've got Red Hat employees IBM employees they are keeping that you know separation wall but obviously there's flowing in technology and come on so come on in tech you look at it's not even close to what VMware is VMware is a separate public company has separate reporting Red Hat doesn't I mean yes I hear you yo you got the Red Hat culture and that's good but it's a far cry from you know a separate entity with full transparency the financials and and so I I hear you but I'm not fully buying it but let's let's get into it let's take a look at at the quarter because that I think will give us an indication as to how much we actually can understand about RedHat and and again my belief is it's really about IBM and RedHat together I think that is their opportunity so Alex if you wouldn't mind pulling up the first slide these are highlights from IBM's q1 and you know we won't spend much time on the the the IBM side of the business although we wanted to bring some of that in but hit the key here as you see red hat at 20% revenue growth so still solid revenue growth you know maybe a little less robust than it was you know sequentially last quarter but still very very strong and that really is IBM's opportunity here 2,200 clients using red hat and an IBM container platforms the key here is when Ginni Rometty announced this acquisition along with Arvind Krishna and Jim Whitehurst she said this is going to be this is going to be cash flow free cash flow accretive in year one they've already achieved that they said it's gonna be EPS accretive by year two they are well on their way to achieving that why we talked about this do it's because iBM has a huge services organization that it can plug open shift right into and begin to modernize applications that are out there I think they cited on the call that they had a hundred ongoing projects and that is driving immediate revenue and allows IBM to from a financial standpoint to get an immediate return so the numbers are pretty solid yeah absolutely Dave and you know talking about that there is a little bit of the blurring a line between the companies one of the product pieces that came out at the show is IBM has had for a couple of years think you know MCM multi cloud management there was announced that there were actually some of the personnel and some of the products from IBM has cut have come into Retta of course Red Hat doing what they always do they're making it open source and they're it's advanced cluster management really from my viewpoint this is an answer to what we've seen in the kubernetes community for the last year there is not one kubernetes distribution to rule them all I'm going to use what my platforms have and therefore how do I manage across my various cloud environments so Red Hat for years is OpenShift lives everywhere it sits on top of VMware virtualization environments it's on top of AWS Azure in Google or it just lives in your Linux farms but ACM now is how do I manage my kubernetes environment of course you know super optimized to work with OpenShift and the roadmap as to how it can manage with Azure kubernetes and some of the other environments so you know you now have some former IBM RS that are there and as you said Dave some good acceleration in the growth from the Red Hat numbers we'd seen like right around the time that the acquisition happened Red Hat had a little bit of a down quarter so you know absolutely the services and the the scale that IBM can bring should help to bring new logos of course right now Dave with the current global situation it's a little bit tough to go and be going after new business yeah and we'll talk about that a little bit but but I want to come back to sort of when I was pressing you before on the trip the true independence of Red Hat by the way I don't think that's necessarily a wrong thing I'll give an example look at Dell right now why is Dell relevant and cloud well okay but if Dell goes to market says we're relevant in cloud because of VMware well then why am I talking to you why don't I talk to VMware and so so my point is that that in some regards you know having that integration is there is a real advantage no you know you were that you know EMC and the time when they were sort of flip-flopping back and forth between integrated and not and separate and not it's obviously worked out for them but it's not necessarily clear-cut and I would say in the case of IBM I think it's the right move why is that every Krista talked about three enduring platforms that IBM has developed one is mainframe that's you know gonna here to stay the second was middleware and the third is services and he's saying that hybrid cloud is now the fourth and during platform that they want to build well how do they gonna build that what are they gonna build that on they're gonna build that an open shift they they're there other challenges to kind of retool their entire middleware portfolio around OpenShift not unlike what Oracle did with with Fusion when it when it bought Sun part of the reason - pod Sun was for Java so these are these are key levers not necessarily in and of themselves you know huge revenue drivers but they lead to awesome revenue opportunities so that's why I actually think it's the right move that what IBM is doing keep the Red Hat to the brand and culture but integrate as fast as possible to get cash flow or creative we've achieved that and get EPS accretive that to me makes a lot of sense yeah Dave I've heard you talk often you know if you're not a leader in a position or you know here John Chambers from Cisco when he was running it you know if I'm not number one or number two why am I in it how many places did IBM have a leadership position Red Hat's a really interesting company because they have a leadership position in Linux obviously they have a leadership position now in kubernetes Red Hat culturally of course isn't one to jump up and down and talk about you know how they're number one in all of these spaces because it's about open source it's about community and you know that does require a little bit of a cultural shift as IBM works with them but interesting times and yeah Red Hat is quietly an important piece of the ecosystem let me let me bring in some meteor data Alex if you pull up that that's that second slide well and I've shown this before in braking analysis and what this slide shows in the vertical axis shows net score net score is a measure of spending momentum spending velocity the the horizontal axis is is is called market share it's really not market share it's it's really a measure of pervasiveness the the mentions in the data set we're talking about 899 responses here out of over 1200 in the April survey and this is a multi cloud landscape so what I did here Stu I pulled on containers container platforms of container management and cloud and we positioned the companies on this sort of XY axis and you can see here you obviously have in the upper right you've got Azure in AWS why do I include AWS and the multi cloud landscape you answered that question before but yesterday because Dave even though Amazon might not allow you to even use the word multi cloud you can't have a discussion of multi cloud without having Amazon in that discussion and they've shifted on hybrid expect them to adjust their position on multi-cloud in the future yeah now coming back to this this this data you see kubernetes is on the kubernetes I know is another company but ETR actually tracks kubernetes you can see how hot it is in terms of its net score and spending momentum yeah I mean Dave do you know the thing the the obvious thing to look at there is if you see how strong kubernetes is if IBM plus red hat can keep that leadership in kubernetes they should do much better in that space than they would have on with just their products alone and that's really the lead of this chart that really cuts to the chase do is you see you see red Red Hat openshift has really strong spending momentum although I will say if you back up back up to say April July October 18 19 it actually was a little higher so it's been pushed down remember this is the April survey that what's ran from mid-march to mid April so we're talking right in the middle of the pandemic okay so everybody's down but nonetheless you can see the opportunity is for IBM and Red Hat to kind of meet in the middle leverage IBM's massive install base in its in its services presence in its market presence its pervasiveness so AKA market share in this rubric and then use Red Hat's momentum and kind of meet in the middle and that's the kind of point that we have here with IBM's opportunity and that really is why IBM is a leader in at least a favorite in my view in multi cloud well Dave if you'd look two years ago and you said what was the competitive landscape Red Hat was an early leader in the kubernetes you know multi-cloud discussion today if you ask everybody well who's doing great and kubernetes you have to talk about all the different options that amazon has Amazon still has their own container management with ACS of course IKS is doing strong and well and Amazon whatever they do they we know they're going to be competitive Microsoft's there but it's not all about competition in this space Dave because you know we see Red Hat partnering across these environments they do have a partnership with AWS they do have you know partnership with you know Microsoft up on stage there so where it was really interesting Dave you know one of the things I was coming into this show looking is what is Red Hat's answer to what VMware is really starting to do in this space so vSphere 7 rolled out and that is the ga of project Pacific so taking virtualization in containers and putting them together Red Hat of course has had virtualization for a long time with KVM they have a different answer of how they're doing openshift virtualization and it rather than saying here's my virtual environment and i can also do kubernetes on it they're saying containers are the future and where you want to go and we can bring your VMs into containers really shift them the way you have really kind of a lift and shift but then modernize them Dave customers are good you know you want to meet customers where they are you want to help them move forward virtualization in general has been a you don't want to touch your applications you want to just you know let it ride forever but the real the real driver for companies today is I've got to build new apps I need to modernize on my environment and you know Red Hat is positioning and you know I like what I'm hearing from them I like what I'm hearing from my dad's customers on how they're helping take both the physical the virtual the containers in the cloud and bring them all into this modern era yeah and and you know IBM made an early bet on on kubernetes and obviously around Red Hat you could see actually on that earlier slide we showed you IBM we didn't really talk about it they said they had 23% growth in cloud which is that they're a twenty two billion dollar business for IBM you're smiling yeah look good for IBM they're gonna redefine cloud you know let AWS you know kick and scream they're gonna say hey here's how we define cloud we include our own pram we include Cano portions of our consulting business I mean I honestly have no idea what's in the 22 billion and how if they're growing 22 billion at 23% wow that's pretty awesome I'm not sure I think they're kind of mixing apples and oranges there but it makes for a good slide yeah you would say wait shouldn't that be four billion you added he only added two or three billion you know numbers can tell a story but you can also manipulate but the point is the point is I've always said this near term the to get you know return on this deal it's about plugging OpenShift into services and modernizing applications long term it's about maintaining IBM and red-hats relevance in the hybrid cloud world which is I don't know how big it is it's a probably a trillion-dollar opportunity that really is critical from a strategy standpoint do I want to ask you about the announcements what about any announcements that you saw coming from Red Hat are relevant what do we need to know there yeah so you know one of the bigger ones we already talked about that you know multi cloud manager what Red Hat has the advanced cluster management or ACM absolutely is an era an area we should look VMware Tong's ooh Azure Ark Google anthos and now ACM from Red Hat in partnership with IBM is an area still really early Dave I talked to some of the executives in the space and say you know are we going to learn from the mistakes of multi vendor management Dave you know you think about the CA and BMC you know exactly of the past will we have learned for those is this the right way to do it it is early but Red Hat obviously has a position here and they're doing it um did hear plenty about how Red Hat is plugging into all the IBM environments Dave Z power you know the cloud solutions and of course you know IBM solutions across the board my point of getting a little blue wash but hey it's got to happen I think that's a smart move right you know we talked about you know really modernizing the applications in the environments I talked a bit about the virtualization piece the other one if you say okay how do I pull the virtualization forward what about the future so openshift serverless is the other one it's really a tech preview at this point it's built off of the K native project which is part of the CNC F which is basically how do I still have you know containers and kubernetes underneath can that plug into server list order server let's get it rid of it everything so IBM Oracle Red Hat and others really been pushing hard on this Kay native solution it is matured a lot there's an ecosystem growing as how it can connect to Asher how it can connect to AWS so definitely something from that appdev piece to watch and Dave that's where I had some really good discussions with customers as well as the the Red Hat execs and their partners that boundary between the infrastructure team and the app dev team they're hoping to pull them together and some of the tooling actually helps ansible is a great example of that in the past but you know others in the portfolio and lastly if you want to talk a huge opportunity for Red Hat IBM and it's a jump ball for everyone is edge computing so Red Hat I've talked to them for years about what they were doing in the opened stack community with network function virtualization or NFV Verizon was up on stage I've got an interview for Red Hat summit with Vodafone idea which has 300 million subscribers in India and you know the Red Hat portfolio really helping a lot of the customers there so it's the telco edge is where we see a strong push there it's definitely something we've been watching from the you know the big cloud players and those partnerships Dave so you know last year Satya Nadella was up on the main stage with Red Hat this year Scott Guthrie you know there he's at every Microsoft show and he's not the red head show so it is still ironic for those of us that have watched this industry and you say okay where are some of the important partnerships for Red Hat its Microsoft I mean you know we all remember when you know open-source was the you know evil enemy for from Microsoft and of course Satya Nadella has changed things a lot it's interesting to watch I'm sure we'll talk more at think Dave you know Arvind Krishna the culture he will bring in with the support of Jim Whitehurst comes over from IBM compared to what Satya has successfully done at Microsoft well let's talk about that let's let's talk about let's bring it home with the sort of near-term midterm and really I want to talk about the long term strategic aspects of IBM and Red Hat's future so near-term IBM is suspended guidance like everybody okay they don't have great visibility some some some things to watch by the way a lot of people are saying no just you know kind of draw draw a red line through this quarter you just generally ignore it I disagree look at cash flow look balance sheets look at what companies are doing and how they're positioning that's very important right now and will give us some clues and so there's a couple of things that we're watching with IBM one is their software business crashed in March and software deals usually come in big deals come in at the end of the quarter people were too distracted they they stopped spending so that's a concern Jim Cavanaugh on the call talked about how they're really paying attention to those services contracts to see how they're going are they continuing what's the average price of those so that's something that you got to watch you know near-term okay fine again as I said I think IBM will get through this what really I want to talk about to do is the the prospects going forward I'm really excited about the choice that IBM made the board putting Arvind Krishna in charge and the move that he made in terms of promoting you know Jim Whitehurst to IBM so let's talk about that for a minute Arvind is a technical visionary and it's it's high time that I VM got back to it being a technology company first because that's what IBM is and and I mean Lou Gerstner you know arguably save the company they pivoted to services Sam Palmisano continue that when Ginny came in you know she had a services heritage she did the PWC deal and IBM really became a services company first in my view Arvind is saying explicitly we want to lead with technology and I think that's the right move of course iBM is going to deliver outcomes that's what high-beams heritage has been for the last 20 years but they are a technology company and having a technology visionary at the lead is very important why because IBM essentially is the leader prior to Red Hat and one thing mainframes IBM used to lead in database that used to lead in storage they used to lead in the semiconductors on and on and on servers now they lead in mainframes and and now switch to look at Red Hat Red Hat's a leader you know they got the best product out there so I want you to talk about how you see that shift to more of a sort of technical and and product focus preserving obviously but your thoughts on the move the culture you're putting Jim as the president I love it I think it was actually absolutely brilliant yeah did Dave absolutely I know we were excited because we you know personally we know both of those leaders they are strong leaders they are strong technically Dave when I think about all the companies we look at I challenge anybody to find a more consistent and reliable pair of companies than IBM and Red Hat you know for years it was you know red hat being an open-source company and you know the way their business model said it it's not the you know Evan flow of product releases we know what the product is going to be the roadmaps are all online and they're gonna consistently grow what we've seen Red Hat go from kind of traditional software models to the subscription model and there are some of the product things we didn't get into too much as to things that they have built into you know Red Hat Enterprise Linux and expanding really their cloud and SAS offerings to enhance those environments and that that's where IBM is pushing to so you know there's been some retooling for the modern era they are well positioned to help customers through that you know digital transformation and as you said Dave you and I we both read the open organization by Jim lighters you know he came in to Red Hat you know really gave some strong leadership the culture is strong they they have maintained you know really strong morale and I talked to people inside you know was their concern inside when IBM was making the acquisition of course there was we've all seen some acquisitions that have gone great when IBM has blue washed them they're trying to make really strong that Red Hat stays Red Hat to your point you know Dave we've already seen some IBM people go in and some of the leadership now is on the IBM side so you know can they improve the product include though improve those customer outcomes and can Red Hat's culture actually help move IBM forward you know company with over a hundred years and over 200,000 employees you'd normally look and say can a 12,000 person company change that well with a new CEO with his wing and you know being whitehurst driving that there's a possibility so it's an interesting one to watch you know absolutely current situations are challenging you know red hats growth is really about adding new logos and that will be challenged in the short term yeah Dave I I love you shouldn't let people off the hook for q2 maybe they need to go like our kids this semester is a pass/fail rather than a grid then and then a letter grade yeah yeah and I guess my point is that there's information and you got to squint through it and I think that look at to me you know this is like Arvin's timing couldn't be better not that he orchestrated it but I mean you know when Ginny took over I mean was over a hundred million a hundred billion I said many times that I beams got a shrink to grow she just ran out of time for the Gro part that's now on Arvind and I think that so he's got the cove in mulligan first of all you know the stocks been been pressured down so you know his tenure he's got a great opportunity to do with IBM in a way what such an adela did is doing at Microsoft you think about it they're both deep technologists you know Arvind hardcore you know computer scientist Indian Institute of Technology Indian Institute of Technology different school than Satya went to but still steeped in in a technical understanding a technical visionary who can really Drive you know product greatness you know in a I would with with Watson we've talked a lot about hybrid cloud quantum is something that IBM is really investing heavily in and that's a super exciting area things like blockchain some of these new areas that I think IBM can lead and it's all running on the cloud you know look IBM generally has been pretty good with acquisitions they yes they fumbled a few but I've always made the point they are in the cloud game IBM and Oracle yeah they're behind from a you know market share standpoint but they're in the game and they have their software estate in their pass a state to insulate them from the race to the bottom so I really like their prospects and I like the the organizational structure that they put in place in it by the way it's not just Arvind Jim you mentioned Paul Cormier you know Rob Thomas has been been elevated to senior VP really important in the data analytic space so a lot of good things going on there yeah and Dave one of the questions you've been asking and we've been all talking to leaders in the industry you know what changes permanently after the this current situation you know automation you know more adoption of cloud the importance of developers are there's even more of a spotlight on those environments and Red Hat has strong positioning in that space a lot of experience that they help their customers and being open source you know very transparent there I both IBM and Red Hat are doing a lot to try to help the community they've got contests going online to you know help get you know open source and hackers and people working on things and you know strong leadership to help lead through these stormy weathers so Stuart's gonna be really interesting decade and the cube will be here to cover it hopefully hopefully events will come back until they do will be socially responsible and and socially distant but Stu thanks for helping us break down the the red hat and sort of tipping our toe into IBM more coverage and IBM think and next week this is Dave alotta for Stu minimun you're watching the cube and our continuous coverage of the Red Hat summit keep it right there be back after this short break you [Music]

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hi everybody Dave Volante here with Stu minumum we have some breaking analysis we're gonna break down the acquisition of IBM Red Hat by IBM was announced today that it closed Stu was originally announced in October a 34 billion dollar acquisition so not a surprise surprise that it closed a little bit earlier than people thought people would thinkin you know well into the second half closed in July they got through all the all the issues in Europe what does this mean in your view to the industry yeah so Dave we did a lot of analysis when the deal was announced absolutely the the cloud and the ripples of change that are happening because of cloud are the impetus for this and you know the the question we've been having for years Dave is you know how many companies can stay kind of independent in you know their swimlane to what they're doing or are we going to see more massive consolidations we're not that far off of the 67 billion dollar acquisition of Dell buying EMC to go heavily into the enterprise market and of course there are cloud implications what happened there and you know we're watching the growth of cloud what's happening in the developer world you know we've watched Red Hat for a long time and you know Red Hat has a nice position in the world and it carved themselves out a nice role into what has been emerging as hybrid and multi cloud and in my opinion that's you know the number one reason why arvind and the IBM team you know when to take that 20-year partnership and turn it into you know now just part of the IBM portfolio Arvind Krishna executive at IBM a longtime player there so the the the deal is so you talked about Dells acquisition we've talked a lot about the VMware model keeping the company separate and of course Red Hat is not going to be a separately traded public company it is going to be a distinct unit inside of IBM's cloud and cognitive software group as I understand it is that right so the question is will it be reported separately or is it going to be oh we're gonna throw everything into our cloud number yeah so Dave this is where all of us that have watched and known IBM you know for our entire careers because they've been around over a hundred years on ask what's going to happen so from a reporting structure Jim Whitehurst reports to Ginny from a Wall Street standpoint it sounds like it's gonna be just thrown into the cloud piece you know Dave isn't it that the the the standard practice today that you throw lots of stuff in there so we can't figure out what your cloud business really is I mean let's look at Oracle or even Microsoft and what they had you know Amazon's probably the only one that clearly differentiates you know this is revenue that we all understand is cloud and can you know touch and feel it so sure I IBM you know you've got all of the the piece that used to be soft layer it's now the IBM cloud piece there are lots of software pieces in that mix the cloud and cognitive is a big umbrella and you know Red Hat adds a few billion dollars worth of revenue into that stream so IBM's assumptions here juni talks a lot about chapter two chapter one was a lot of front-end systems that sort of the growth was everybody thought everything was going into the cloud that's really not the way it is 80% of the workloads are still on Prem and in Chapter two was all about you know connecting those to any cloud multi-cloud heard her words the IBM cloud or the Amazon Google or Microsoft cloud etc etc she made the statement that that we are the only hybrid multi-cloud open source company okay I guess that's true does it matter that they're the only hybrid multi-cloud open source company and are they yeah so I mean Dave anytime a vendor tries to paint themselves as the number one or you know leader in the space it's you know that's how they're defining it that's not how customers think of it customers you know don't think is much about whether it's multi cloud or hybrid cloud they're doing cloud and they're working with you know more than one supplier it is very rare that you find somebody I'm all-in and then you dig in oh yeah wait I'm using office 365 and Salesforce and oh wait there was that cool new thing that Google announced that somebody off on the sides doing so we understand that today it's a multi cloud world tomorrow to be a multi cloud we're absolutely open source is growing you know at great leaps and bounds Red Hat is you know the you know best example we've had of that that trend something I've been watching for the last 20 years and you know it is impressive to see it but you know even when you talk to customers of you know most customers are not you know flag-waving I must do everything open-source you know that they have a little bit more nuanced view of it sure lots of companies are participating in contributing to open source but you know I've yet to talk to too many companies that were like well when I'm making this decision you know this is absolutely what it is am i concerned about my overall costs and I'm concerned about transparency am i concerned about you know security and how fast I can get things resolved and by the way open-source can help with a lot of those things that's what they need to think about but look IBM you know had a longtime partnership with Red Hat Red Hat has a strong position in the marketplace but they're not the only ones there you know you mentioned VMware Dave VMware cross has a strong play across multi cloud environments you know we see Red Hat at all of the cloud shows you see yeah IBM at many of the cloud shows but you've got Cisco out there with their play it is still you know this this chapter - if you agree with Ginny's terminology we are relatively early in that but you know IBM I believe is strengthened in their positioning I don't think it radically changes the landscape just because you know Red Hat is still going to stay you know working with the Amazons and Microsoft and Google's and and and other players out there so it doesn't dramatically change the landscape it just consolidates two players that already worked closely let me ask a question so I mean was clearly positioning this as a cloud play you know generally and you know in a multi cloud specifically is this a cloud play okay um so I'll say yes but Dave so absolutely the future and where the growth for Red Hat and where IBM and for this thirty four billion dollars to be successful the tip of the spear is open shift and therefore you know how does that new cloud native multi cloud environment you know where do they play but at its core you know red heads still Linux Red Hat Enterprise Linux you know is it stills you know that is the primary driver of revenue and Linux isn't going away as a matter of fact Linux is growing Microsoft you know just revealed that there are more Linux workloads sitting in Azure than there are windows we already knew that there were you know strong Linux out there and Microsoft is embrace Linux we saw Satya Nadella at Red Hat summit and you know we've seen that proliferation of linux out there so linux is still you know growing in it where it's being used out there and in the cloud you know linux is what most people are using so the reason why I think this acquisition is interesting Jim Whitehurst today said publicly that it was a great deal that IBM was getting but then he couched he said of course it's a great deal for our shareholders too so and Ginni chimed in and said yes it was a fair deal okay fine 34 billion you know we'll see the reason why I think IBM likes this deal and IBM you know generally has been been good over in history with acquisitions you know clearly some mega acquisitions like PwC which was transformative me we have time to talk about that Cognos and some of the other software acquisitions done quite well not a hundred percent but the reason why I think IBM likes this deal is because it's a good cash flow deal so I think in many ways and they don't talk about this because it's not sexy marketing but iBM is a services company over 60% of the company's revenue comes from professional services IBM loves complexity because they can bring in services throw the big blue blanket around you and do a lot of integration work and the reason is that I think this is an interesting acquisition from from a financial standpoint and Ginny says this all the time this is not about cost synergies this is about revenue opportunities when you try to put everything in the cloud you always run into the back-end systems and her point is that those back-end systems need to be modernized how do you modernize those back-end systems openshift it's not trivial to do that you need services and so iBM has a large install base probably by my estimate you know certainly tens of billions of dollars of opportunity there to modernize back-end systems using Red Hat technology and that means that it's a front-loaded deal from a cash flow standpoint that they will find automatically revenue Cyn to plug in to IBM's captive install base what are your thoughts yeah Dave III think that your analysis is spot-on so RedHat has been one of these most consistent you know revenue companies out there you steadily when they went from a billion dollars to now they're right around three billion dollars they had the March to five billion dollars they had a couple of minor blips in their quarterly earnings but if you plug in that IBM services organization you really have the opportunity to supercharge this is not the opportunity is to have that that huge IBM services organization really helped you know grow those engagements do more openshift you know get more Linux help ansible you know really become the standard for you know automation in the modern workplace the challenge is that too many IBM people get involved because the the thing that everybody's a little worried about is IBM's done well with a lot of those acquisitions but they don't leave them stand alone even you know VMware for many years was a standalone company today VMware in Dell they're one company they're in lockstep from a management standpoint and they're working closely together what differentiates RedHat is you know iBM has groups that are much larger than RedHat that do some of the same things but RedHat with their open-source mission and and where they're driving things and the innovation they drive they move a little bit faster than IBM traditionally does so can will the Red Hat brand the Red Hat people and Red Hat still stay independent enough so that they can till you know hop on that next wave you know they they jumped early into kubernetes and that was the wave that really helped them drive for what they're doing the open shift you know even Dave you know Red Hat ahead bought core OS which was a smaller company moving even faster than Red Hat and while they've done a really good job of integrating those people absolutely from what I've heard it is slowed things down a little bit just because Red Hat compared to core OS was a much bigger company and of course IBM is a be a myth compared to Red Hat so will they throw these groups together and you know who will be making the decisions and can they you know maintain that that culture and that growth mindset well the point is structure we bring up VMware a lot as the model and of course when EMC bought VMware for paltry six hundred million six thirty five million dollars it folded it in and then spun it back out which was the right move certainly allowed the ecosystem to blossom I don't think IBM is gonna take that same approach blue wash is the term they'll probably blue wash that now cuz no Dave they said iBM has said they will not blue eyes there's no purple red stay separate absolutely there's concerns you know so to get those revenue synergies there's there's you're gonna have to plug into IBM systems and that requires some some work and IBM generally good at that so we'll see we'll keep our eyes on that it's but but I would predict that IBM is not going to do a VMware like well it's going to be some kind of hybrid Dave one of the other things is you talked about so Jim Whitehurst you know executive respective had him on the cube a lot he's reporting to Ginny you know the question is is this Ginny's last big move and who replaces her yeah let's talk about succession planning so a lot of a lot of rumors that Whitehurst is is next he's 52 years old I've said I don't I don't think they would do that but but let's talk about it first of all just you know Jim white her side sort of interviewed him the number of times but but you know I'm quite well you think even watch the job so you know I talked with Jim a little bit at red hat summit you know he kind of makes light of it he said you know knowing IBM the way we all know IBM IBM has always taken somebody from inside to do that he feels that he has a strong mission still to drive Red Hat he is super passionate about Red Hat he wrote a book book about the open source culture and is still driving that so I think from everything I see from him that's still the job that he loves and wants to do and you know it's a very different challenge to run IBM I'm not saying he would turn it down if that was the direction that it went if it went down to it but I did not see him angling and positioning like that would be where he wants to go well and of course you know Jim is from North Carolina he's got that kind of southern folksy demeanor you know comes across as the so the nicest guy in the room he's also the smartest guy in the room but oh we'll see we'll see what happens there I've said that I think Martin Schroder is going to be the next CEO of IBM Martin Schroder did three years of combat duty as the CFO in in what was a tough time for IBM to be a CFO they were going through those big transitions talking about you know they had to had to do the the SoftLayer acquisition they had to put together those strategic initiatives and so he's has he has CFO chops so he understands finance deeply he ran you know when IBM's big services business he's now responsible for IBM's revenue generation he's a spokesperson you know in many ways for the company he's like the prototypical choice he would not be surprising at all to see IBM plug him right in a little bit of history as you know still him a bit of a history historian of the industry have been around for a while John Akers back in the early 1990s when IBM's mainframe business was was tanking and the whole company was was tanking and it was at the risk of actually believe it or not running out of money they were gonna split up the company because the industry was breaking apart Intel and microprocessors Microsoft and software C gated disk drives you know Oracle and databases and to be more competitive from a product standpoint they were gonna split the company up into pieces Gerstner came in and said no way Gerson it was you know CEO of American Express said no that's not how customers want to buy he bought PwC for a song compared to what Carly Fiorina at HP a Carly Fiorina at HP wanted to pay I think 15 billion for it I want to say IBM paid five billion or maybe even less for PwC it completely transformed the company it transformed IBM into a services company and that's where what IBM is today they don't like when you say that but that's where the revenue was coming from what that did now and they also started to buy software companies IBM was restricted from getting into applications for years and years and years because of the DOJ because they owned the mainframe they had a monopoly while Microsoft and Intel changed all that IBM started to buy software companies and bought lots of them so they became a services company with a collection of software assets and the main mainframe and you know the power they have a storage business and you know Finance I'd be a global finance business etc etc so my my point is I'm not sure Jim Whitehurst would want to run that you know it's it's kind of messy now what you need run that is somebody who really understands finance knows how to turn the knobs and that's why I think you know Martin Schroeder is actually an excellent pick for that to keep the cash flow going to keep the dividend going to keep the stock buybacks going it's still in my view not a growth play I think there's certainly near-term growth that can be had by modernizing applications but I don't look at IBM as a growth company I look at IBM as a portfolio company that throws off a lot of cash and if and when the market stops rewarding growth and profit list growth a company like IBM will become more favorable to investors yeah and the question at the end of the day is after spending thirty four billion dollars for red hat does IBM help weather the storm of what is happening with the phenomenal growth of AWS the changes happening in Microsoft build more of a relationship than they've already had with Google and help position themselves for this next wave of IT there's IBM helped create a lot of the waves that you know happen in IT well the pure play cloud players are in it for the long game you know you know Amazon's philosophy is give tools to builders and allow them to disrupt the you know traditional old guard whether it's old guard technology companies or old guard industry players and you've seen the stat of how many Fortune 1000 companies or you know have gone out of business in the last 20 or 30 years or whatever it is that's going to continue and Amazon and and certainly Google and Microsoft want to support that disruption by providing cloud tooling and put the data in the hands of people that allows them to create new business models now that doesn't mean everybody's gonna throw up there mainframes it's it's not gonna happen it's certainly not gonna happen overnight and probably will never happen but I just don't see how IBM becomes a growth company in that scenario the growth is going to be continue to be with the cloud well but Dave we had seen IBM I'd say struggle a little bit when it comes to the the developers these days and the Red Hat acquisition is definitely going to be a boon to them in this space because Red Hat all about the developers that that's what you know that their customers are so you know that that's such a huge community that they've already tapped into so Ginny has said this hybrid multi-cloud is a chapter two with a trillion dollar opportunity so who else is going after that trillion dollar opportunity let's let's lay it out there who are the multi cloud players VMware obviously IBM Red Hat with open shift is in there Google with anthos Cisco is coming at it from a network perspective so they have coming at it from their position of strength even though you know you know they're relatively new entrants well ever everybody wants to be the new management layer in this multi cloud environment what VMware had done is had you know vCenter became you know the console for everyone as they were consolidating all of their silos and when I go to a multi cloud environment right where do I live you know Microsoft has a strong play there that's the other you know VMware IBM Red Hat anthos Google Mentos Cisco and Microsoft yeah and of course the one that while they won't say that they are multi cloud you can't talk about multi cloud without talking about Amazon because Amazon is a piece of everyone's cloud environment we were seeing what they're doing with outpost there so they are the kind of Spectre looming over this entire multi-cloud discuss yeah right on I think you got to put Amazon into that mix they will be an entrance into this multi cloud play and it's not gonna be a winner-take-all deal I could say cisco is coming at it from a position of networking strength Microsoft has its software estate and it's gonna do very well there IBM Red Hat coming at it from a standpoint of modernizing applications and there's a services could play and services component there and VMware of course coming at it from the the infrastructure operating system I don't see Oracle as interested in that market there may be some smaller players like turbo anomic you know who probably get gobbled up by one of these guys that we just mentioned but that really is the landscape and this is you know five six companies a trillion dollars there's plenty to go around all right Stu final thoughts on on the the Red Hat news the IBM news that they've finalized the Red Hat acquisition yes so you know what you want to look for is you know first of all you know what's happening organizationally you know if open shift is the primary you know the the tip of the sphere what we're talking about here for this you know cloud native multi-cloud world you know what does you know the IBM Cloud messaging looked like they're gonna have an analyst event here in a couple of weeks that you know that they've invited all the analysts to going into what does that cloud portfolio looks like how do they sort through all of the kubernetes options that they've had today do they try to elevate IBM cloud to be a stronger player or will they let Red Hat continue to play across all of the cloud environments that they have so you know organization and product positioning of the two things that I'm looking at the most Tom Siebel said publicly yesterday that IBM is a great company national international treasure but they miss cloud and they missed a I I wouldn't agree totally they didn't miss cloud they were late to cloud they had to buy software they're in cloud just like Oracle's in cloud not as competitive as the AWS cloud but they're they've got a cloud yeah HP doesn't have a cloud Dell doesn't have a cloud these these two companies that I just mentioned do AI yeah they're not sound of generalized AI like what Google and Amazon and Facebook and Microsoft are doing IBM's trying to solve you know big chewy problems iBM is a services company as they said so you know Watson you see a lot of negative stories about Watson but Watson requires a lot of services to make it work and it's as they say solving different problems so they're a player in AI multi cloud is new and this move the acquisition of red hat yes thirty four billion dollars expensive it's not gonna be pretty on the balance sheet but they get good cash flow so they'll deal with that over time it puts them right in the mix as a leader in multi cloud so thanks to for breaking down the the acquisition and thank you for watching this is Dave Volante what's do min and then we'll see you next time

>> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back here on theCUBE, joined by Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls, as we wrap up our coverage here of the Red Hat Summit here in 2019. We've been here in Boston all week, three days, Stu, of really fascinating programming on one hand, the keynotes showing quite a diverse ecosystem that Red Hat has certainly built, and we've seen that array of guests reflected as well here, on theCUBE. And you leave with a pretty distinct impression about the vast reach, you might say, of Red Hat, and how they diversified their offerings and their services. >> Yeah, so, John, as we've talked about, this is the sixth year we've had theCUBE here. It's my fifth year doing it and I'll be honest, I've worked with Red Hat for 19 years, but the first year I came, it was like, all right, you know, I know lots of Linux people, I've worked with Linux people, but, you know, I'm not in there in the terminal and doing all this stuff, so it took me a little while to get used to. Today, I know not only a lot more people in Red Hat and the ecosystem, but where the ecosystem is matured and where the portfolio is grown. There's been some acquisitions on the Red Hat side. There's a certain pending acquisition that is kind of a big deal that we talked about this week. But Red Hat's position in this IT marketplace, especially in the hybrid and multi-cloud world, has been fun to watch and really enjoyed digging in it with you this week and, John Walls, I'll turn the camera to you because- >> I don't like this. (laughing) >> It was your first time on the program. Yeah, you know- >> I like asking you the questions. >> But we have to do this, you know, three days of Walls to Miniman coverage. So let's get the Walls perspective. >> John: All right. >> On your take. You've been to many shows. >> John: Yeah, no, I think that what's interesting about what I've seen here at Red Hat is this willingness to adapt to the marketplace, at least that's the impression I got, is that there are a lot of command and control models about this is the way it's going to be, and this is what we're going to give you, and you're gonna have to take it and like it. And Red Hat's just on the other end of that spectrum, right? It's very much a company that's built on an open source philosophy. And it's been more of what has the marketplace wanted? What have you needed? And now how can we work with you to build it and make it functional? And now we're gonna just offer it to a lot of people, and we're gonna make a lot of money doing that. And so, I think to me, that's at least what I got talking to Jim Whitehurst, you know about his philosophy and where he's taken this company, and has made it obviously a very attractive entity, IBM certainly thinks so to the tune of 34 billion. But you see that. >> Yeah, it's, you know, some companies say, oh well, you know, it's the leadership from the top. Well, Jim's philosophy though, it is The Open Organization. Highly recommend the book, it was a great read. We've talked to him about the program, but very much it's 12, 13 thousand people at the company. They're very much opinionated, they go in there, they have discussions. It's not like, well okay, one person pass this down. It's we're gonna debate and argue and fight. Doesn't mean we come to a full consensus, but open source at the core is what they do, and therefore, the community drives a lot of it. They contribute it all back up-stream, but, you know, we know what Red Hat's doing. It's fascinating to talk to Jim about, yeah you know, on the days where I'm thinking half glass empty, it's, you know, wow, we're not yet quite four billion dollars of the company, and look what an impact they had. They did a study with IDC and said, ten trillion dollars of the economy that they touch through RHEL, but on the half empty, on the half full days, they're having a huge impact outside. He said 34 billion dollars that IBM's paying is actually a bargain- >> It's a great deal! (laughing) >> for where they're going. But big announcements. RHEL 8, which had been almost five years in the works there. Some good advancements there. But the highlight for me this week really was OpenShift. We've been watching OpenShift since the early days, really pre-Kubernetes. It had a good vision and gained adoption in the marketplace, and was the open source choice for what we called Paths back then. But, when Kubernetes came around, it really helped solidify where OpenShift was going. It is the delivery mechanism for containerization and that container cluster management and Red Hat has a leadership position in that space. I think that almost every customer that we talked to this week, John, OpenShift was the underpinning. >> John: Absolutely. >> You would expect that RHEL's underneath there, but OpenShift as the lever for digital transformation. And that was something that I really enjoyed talking to. DBS Bank from Singapore, and Delta, and UPS. It was, we talked about their actual transformation journeys, both the technology and the organizational standpoint, and OpenShift really was the lever to give them that push. >> You know, another thing, I know you've been looking at this and watching this for many many years. There's certainly the evolution of open source, but we talked to Chris Wright earlier, and he was talking about the pace of change and how it really is incremental. And yet, if you're on the outside looking in, and you think, gosh, technology is just changing so fast, it's so crazy, it's so disruptive, but to hear it from Chris, not so. You don't go A to Z, you go A to B to C to D to D point one. (laughing) It takes time. And there's a patience almost and a cadence that has this slow revolution that I'm a little surprised at. I sense they, or got a sense of, you know, a much more rapid change of pace and that's not how the people on the inside see it. >> Yeah. Couple of comment back at that. Number one is we know how much rapid change there is going because if you looked at the Linux kernel or what's happening with Kubernetes and the open source, there's so much change going on there. There's the data point thrown out there that, you know, I forget, that 75% or 95% of all the data in the world was created in the last two years. Yet, only 2% of that is really usable and searchable and things like that. That's a lot of change. And the code base of Linux in the last two years, a third of the code is completely overhauled. This is technology that has been around for decades. But if you look at it, if you think about a company, one of the challenges that we had is if they're making those incremental change, and slowly looking at them, a lot of people from the outside would be like, oh, Red Hat, yeah that's that little Linux company, you know, that I'm familiar with and it runs on lots of places there. When we came in six years ago, there was a big push by Red Hat to say, "We're much more than Linux." They have their three pillars that we spent a lot of time through from the infrastructure layer to the cloud native to automation and management. Lots of shows I go to, AnsiballZ all over the place. We talked about OpenShift 4 is something that seems to be resonating. Red Hat takes a leadership position, not just in the communities and the foundations, but working with their customers to be a more trusted and deeper partner in what they're doing with digital transformation. There might have been little changes, but, you know, this is not the Red Hat that people would think of two years or five years ago because a large percentage of Red Hat has changed. One last nugget from Chris Wright there, is, you know, he spent a lot of time talking about AI. And some of these companies go buzzwords in these environments, but, you know, but he hit a nice cogent message with the punchline is machines enhance human intelligence because these are really complex systems, distributed architectures, and we know that the people just can't keep up with all of the change, and the scope, and the scale that they need to handle. So software should be able to be helping me get my arms around it, as well as where it can automate and even take actions, as long as we're careful about how we do it. >> John: Sure. There's another, point at least, I want to pick your brain about, is really the power of presence. The fact that we have the Microsoft CEO on the stage. Everybody thought, well (mumbles) But we heard it from guest after guest after guest this week, saying how cool was that? How impressive was that? How monumental was that? And, you know, it's great to have that kind of opportunity, but the power of Nadella's presence here, it's unmistakable in the message that has sent to this community. >> Yeah, you know, John, you could probably do a case study talking about culture and the power of culture because, I talked about Red Hat's not the Red Hat that you know. Well, the Satya Nadella led Microsoft is a very different Microsoft than before he was on board. Not only are they making great strides in, you know, we talk about SaaS and public cloud and the like, but from a partnership standpoint, Microsoft of old, you know, Linux and Red Hat were the enemy and you know, Windows was the solution and they were gonna bake everything into it. Well, Microsoft partnered with many more companies. Partnerships and ecosystem, a key message this week. We talked about Microsoft with Red Hat, but, you know, announcement today was, surprised me a little bit, but when we think about it, not too much. OpenShift supported on VMware environments, so, you know, VMware has in that family of Dell, there's competitive solutions against OpenShift and, you know, so, and virtualization. You know, Red Hat has, you know, RHV, the Red Hat Virtualization. >> John: Right, right, right. >> The old day of the lines in the swim lanes, as one of our guests talked about, really are there. Customers are living in a heterogeneous, multi-cloud world and the customers are gonna go and say, "You need to work together, before you're not gonna be there." >> Azure. Right, also we have Azure compatibility going on here. >> Stu: Yeah, deep, not just some tested, but deep integration. I can go to Azure and buy OpenShift. I mean that, the, to say it's in the, you know, not just in the marketplace, but a deep integration. And yeah, there was a little poke, if our audience caught it, from Paul Cormier. And said, you know, Microsoft really understands enterprise. That's why they're working tightly with us. Uh, there's a certain other large cloud provider that created Kubernetes, that has their own solution, that maybe doesn't understand enterprise as much and aren't working as closely with Red Hat as they might. So we'll see what response there is from them out there. Always, you know, we always love on theCUBE to, you know, the horse is on the track and where they're racing, but, you know, more and more all of our worlds are cross-pollinating. You know, the AI and AI Ops stuff. The software ecosystems because software does have this unifying factor that the API economy, and having all these things work together, more and more. If you don't, customers will go look for solutions that do provide the full end to end solution stuff they're looking for. >> All right, so we're, I've got a couple in mind as far as guests we've had on the show. And we saw them in action on the keynotes stage too. Anybody that jumps out at you, just like, wow, that was cool, that was, not that we, we love all of our children, right? (laughing) But every once in awhile, there's a story or two that does stand out. >> Yeah, so, it is so tough, you know. I loved, you know, the stories. John, I'm sure I'm going to ask you, you know, Mr. B and what he's doing with the children. >> John: Right, Franklin Middle School. >> And the hospitals with Dr. Ellen and the end of the brains. You know, those tech for good are phenomenal. For me, you know, the CIOs that we had on our first day of program. Delta was great and going through transformation, but, you know, our first guest that we had on, was DBS Bank in Singapore and- >> John: David Gledhill. >> He was so articulate and has such a good story about, I took outsourced environments. I didn't just bring it into my environment, say okay, IT can do it a little bit better, and I'll respond to business. No, no, we're going to total restructure the company. Not we're a software company. We're a technology company, and we're gonna learn from the Googles of the world and the like. And he said, We want to be considered there, you know, what was his term there? It was like, you know, bank less, uh, live more and bank less. I mean, what- >> Joyful banking, that was another of his. >> Joyful banking. You don't think of a financial institution as, you know, we want you to think less of the bank. You know, that's just a powerful statement. Total reorganization and, as we mentioned, of course, OpenShift, one of those levers underneath helping them to do that. >> Yeah, you mentioned Dr. Ellen Grant, Boston Children's Hospital, I think about that. She's in fetal neuroimaging and a Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School. The work they're doing in terms of diagnostics through imaging is spectacular. I thought about Robin Goldstone at the Livermore Laboratory, about our nuclear weapon monitoring and efficacy of our monitoring. >> Lawrence Livermore. So good. And John, talk about the diversity of our guests. We had expats from four different countries, phenomenal accents. A wonderful slate of brilliant women on the program. From the customer side, some of the award winners that you interviewed. The executives on the program. You know, Stefanie Chiras, always great, and Denise who were up on the keynotes stage. Denise with her 3D printed, new Red Hat logo earrings. Yeah, it was an, um- >> And a couple of old Yanks (laughing). Well, I enjoyed it, Stu. As always, great working with you, and we thank you for being with us as well. For now, we're gonna say so long. We're gonna see you at the next Red Hat Summit, I'm sure, 2020 in San Francisco. Might be a, I guess a slightly different company, but it might be the same old Red Hat too, but they're going to have 34 billion dollars behind them at that point and probably riding pretty high. That will do it for our CUBE coverage here from Boston. Thanks for much for joining us. For Stu Miniman, and our entire crew, have a good day. (funky music)

>> Man: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> And we are back live in Boston as we continue our coverage here on theCUBE of Red Hat Summit 2019. It is our sixth year here at the show and this year obviously some huge announcements. A significant moment it's been for Red Hat, we heard from Jim Whitehurst a little bit ago. Stu Miniman, John Walls, we're now joined as well by Niall Fitzgerald, who is the GM of IT Application Architecture and Design at Spark NZ. Niall, good afternoon, or I guess good morning still we're in an Eastern time zone. >> Yeah it's the middle of the night in New Zealand I'd say. >> Yeah, so Spark NZ New Zealand. Tell us a little bit first off about Spark NZ. What the folks back home are doing right now, work-wise, and your role with the company. >> Yeah, so Spark is the largest provider of telecommunication services in New Zealand. All the traditional type of services you'd expect, mobile, broadband, et cetera. We came out of the traditional kind of post office, so we've a lot of heritage, and about four years ago we rebranded from Telecom New Zealand into Spark. To represent that we were changing from being a telco into much broader range of digital services. Our purpose is to help all New Zealanders win big in the digital world. >> Niall, step back for a second. Talk to our audience that might not know the telecom industry as well as you, I've been an observer and participator in the industry but you know back in the dot com boom it was like limitless bandwidth and we're gonna do all these wonderful things, and cloud and digitization, have put some new opportunities as well as stresses and strains on your industry so, you know what's going on and you said you rebranded? >> Yeah, look, I think it's well-known it's been a tough last few years for most telcos in the world. I was listening to Red Hat talking yesterday about 60 consecutive quarters or more of growth, I don't think there's any telco in the world that probably has the same story. Like most, we're facing kinda decline in all the traditional revenues like voice and text and things like that, so we're all having to kinda rebrand ourselves and deliver much higher levels of customer service. People expect the same levels of service from us that they do from Amazon, Google, and everyone else. In Spark what that means to us is we've moved into lots of new things as you said, things like ICT, we're now very big in cloud, we've recently launched a Spark Sports brand and we've got streaming right to the key events like Formula 1. We're going to stream the Rugby World Cup, which is a massive event for New Zealanders, so looking forward to seeing that and Ireland on the all blacks in the final in September this year. So yeah, lot going on. Tough times but forcing us to keep changing every year. >> And so, about these changes that you're making whether technologically based, let's just deal with that. What is that ultimately going to do for you in terms of better customer service delivery? So, you've got inherent challenges, you've talked about them at all, that the world's changing, how we use this medium, this communication opportunity is changing, and you've been just a little behind the wave, hard to keep up with it, so rapidly changing. How much of a challenge is that? And then how are you going to address this going forward? How do you stay relevant? >> Yeah I think we're lucky in one regard because if I look back about five, seven years ago we were like most traditional telcos. We had a spaghetti for want of a better description of systems, and then we had all was multiples of everything, at the time we had 19 integration layers and 10 billing systems and it wasn't uncommon. But way back in 2012 we actually embarked on a massive transformation program, and we spent five years consolidating all of that infrastructure so going into about 2017 we were very lucky in that we had a massive foundation laid already, so what that then enabled us to do was to actually push away calls from our contact centers into mobile apps, into digital adoption. We've been a big embracer of things like big data and robotic process automation as well to try and take cost out of our industry. So, I think we're quite well placed. Now that allows us to do things like innovate new products for our customers so we bundle things like Spotify and Netflix. It allows to introduce things like Spark Sports brand, which we couldn't have done five years ago before the transformation We just wouldn't have been able to enable these things with our existing kind of legacy IT estate. >> So how's open-source play into all this for you? >> Yeah open-source, I suppose our first foray into open-source was when we went to start embracing big data and automation. So we started using things like Hadoop and various other things and our entire platform is based around open-source. We changed to an IMS network recently and we started embracing things like OpenStack, and then it really took us to a new level recently when we started working on Red Hat's Fuse, and OpenShift we started implementing that. >> Okay, so the OpenStack show for many years, the last few years we saw the telcos coming in specifically for network function virtualization or NFV. Is that what you're using in that space? >> Yeah, we are. Interestingly, at this conference I've heard a lot of people talk about OpenShift and OpenStack, obviously, particularly in the telco game. We actually came out a bit differently from the application space. So we had an integration platform that we had put in through this transformation phase which had served us well, and was connecting all of our 40, 50 systems together. But it was coming up to a life cycle event, and we decided we'd look externally and see had we options beyond just upgrading it. So we started looking around, and we effectively found Fuse, and in bringing in Fuse we then brought OpenShift in, which is quite different to what I've seen from a number of other people, they're bringing in things like OpenShift and building on top of it. We did it the other way around, you know? And we did it primarily for cost reasons, you know? >> Yeah, so talk a little bit about that impact of Fuse and OpenShift, what that means. Were you already down the containerization journey, or did that help drive >> Niall: No, no some of that modernization? >> That's exactly what happened. If I'm honest we hadn't really explored containerization too much because we had come to the end of our kind of transformation journey. Open-source and containerization wasn't around when we went through that. So we kinda needed some really core reasons to move on, so, yeah effectively what happened was we looked at Fuse, I was gonna say primarily for cost, but we were looking for something that we could migrate to where it makes sense. We were looking for something that wasn't a massive lift for the people who worked in our integration already, so they could be rescaled into it, and interestingly we turned agile recently which has changed the way we look at the needs of our systems. So our old integration platform, if we needed to deploy a change we had to take an outage, which was fine when we had a centralized IT department who deployed once a month and took a two hour outage, but when you have 20 tribes all developing features in isolation and they wanna go straight through to production, if everybody took an outage then our systems wouldn't really be up very often. So one of the key things that we were looking at for our new integration platform was can we deploy hot and can we scale? So that's basically where Fuse came into us. >> Okay, so can you? >> We can and we do. Still a little bit nervous about pressing the button mid-day and doing stuff >> Right, simultaneously and thinking this has really gotta work, right? >> Yeah then normally, >> We saw it today though on the demo stage, on the keynote. You know, simultaneous operations going on. >> No, we do it, and they normally don't tell me when they're doing it they just do it and tell me it worked afterwards, but no it's actually been really successful and you can imagine connection 40 or 50 systems together is effectively the equivalent of about 2,000 API's and we managed to migrate, we're about 70% of the way through. But we've managed to migrate those without actually impacting the systems that use them and that's probably been one of our most successful IT projects that I've seen. >> It's funny, you said we were towards the end of our transformation journey, and of course I think we all understand, it is just, I might've reached a marker in my journey, but it needs to be a continuous process. And you went through an agile transformation. So bring us in a little bit. Organizationally, what happened there. Some of the good, the bad, and the ugly of agile, 'cause I mean agile's always an ongoing thing. >> It is, yeah. So about the start of last year we started to think about agile and the need to change our ways of working. And we looked at a number of models overseas, and companies like Spotify and various banks, and we settled on a model of chapter and tribes. And we took about six months in looking at what that meant for us as an organization and all of the things that we needed to change. Everything from, people's contracts to people's titles. We got rid of all complex titles and moved down to simple things like Developer, Tester, et cetera. We had to train our people in agile so we ran boot camps for over 2,000 people. We had one with 500 people attend. We had to review all of our processes and see where we had centralized things like IT governance or procurement. How do you actually manage this when you have up to 20 different people effectively, or tribes doing their own developments, so over a period of about six months we went through all of these. We started with a concept of some forerunner tribes so we could figure out how this thing actually works, you know? And get some lessons. And then on the first of July last year, about a 2,000 people in various buildings packed up their stuff in their desks and moved into a new world, into their tribes with different working spaces and different collaboration areas and all the tools that we need. So, yeah we're about nine months down that journey now and it's been good. >> How many total employees? >> We have about 5,000 in total. >> 5,000, so you had 500 at one time. 10% of your workforce in training at one time. >> That's right, yeah. Absolutely. >> How do you keep the wheels on the bus rolling? Because I mean you're asking people not only to learn new skills, but learn them in a new environment, and learn them literally in a new place. I mean that's just massive change and I think, we're human beings. We're creatures of habit to a certain extent. You had to hit a lot of bumps along the way. >> Yeah, so one of the key things we did upfront was we said the operate part of our business, which is effectively things like our contact center, our sales staff, our service desks, we will not go agile with those on the first day, because they operate in a slightly different way of working. The people in our stores, et cetera. So we had a concept of agile light and agile heavy. So we kinda parked them for a minute so that we wouldn't do exactly what you say and let the wheels fall off the trolley. And we took to people that were the IT developers, the product development staff, and all of that, which came to just over about 2,000 people, and we firstly flipped those 2,000 people and put those through bootcamp. But even as you say, scheduling the boot camps, we made sure that we always had the right people on the ground and we would schedule smaller boot camps for them later if we needed to do it, but yeah. >> So nine months in now. You talking to your peers, if they're gonna go through. Any key learnings, what were some of the most challenging things that you ran into? >> I think probably the major one is that agile at its heart is a way of working, and despite the name it's actually quite prescriptive in how you should work, you know? When you pick up the agile book it tells you all the ceremonies you need to run and the processes that you need to run as well. And I think you need to be pragmatic in how you implement it because there are so many different flavors of agile. The one flavor, even with an organization of Spark size, it doesn't work. So the tribes and squads that are building out new products compared to the tribes that are doing things like upgrading systems, they will work in different ways. So I think the first thing is be pragmatic, take the goodness and the intent of agile, but implement it in how it works for you. And there's some other practical considerations, like prior to being agile we had quite a large number of our technology partners were based offshore in India, and you know it's quite difficult to run a 10 AM stand up in New Zealand setting the priorities for the day and the sprint plans, when, you know, four members of your team are asleep in India. You know, they're missing out on all of the goodness and the collocation and the sharing, so one of the things we had anticipated that, so luckily enough we had moved a lot of those people onshore in advance of agile, you know? But it is a big cultural change for everyone in the organization, not least the leadership teams as well. >> John: Well you got through it. >> We got through it, but there's no going back. >> Absolutely, no you're in the deep end now. Well, Niall, thanks for being with us, we appreciate the time joining us here on theCUBE, and I think that an Irishman is always welcomed in Boston. >> Thank you very much! We've been enjoying the hospitality. >> Yeah the door's always open. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you very much. Niall Fitzgerald, joing us from Spark NZ. Back with more here on theCUBE, you're watching this live at the Red Hat Summit 2019.