>> John Furrier: Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Cloud Native Security Con 2023 North America the inaugural event. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, along with Dave Alonte and Lisa Martin covering from the studio. But we have on location Emmy Eide, who is with Red Hat, director of Supply Chain Security. Emmy, great to have you on from location. Thanks for joining us. >> Emmy Eide: Yeah, thank you. >> So everyone wants to know this event is new, it's an aural event, cloud native con, coup con. Very successful. Was this event successful? They all want to know what's going on there. What's the vibe? What's the tracks like? Is it different? Why this event? Was it successful? What's different? >> Yeah, I've really enjoyed being here. The food is wonderful. There's also quite a few vendors here that are just some really cool emerging technologies coming out and a lot from open source, which is really cool to see as well. The talks are very interesting. It's really, they're very diverse in subject but still all security related which is really cool to see. And there's also a lot of different perspectives of how to approach security problems and the people behind them, which I love to see. And it's very nice to hear the different innovative ideas that we can go about doing security. >> We heard from some startups as well that they're very happy with the, with the decision to have a dedicated event. Red Hat is no stranger to open source. Obviously coup con, you guys are very successful there in cloud native con, Now the security con. Why do you think they did this? What's the vibe? What's the rationale? What's your take on this? And what's different from a topic standpoint? >> For non-security specific like events? Is that what you mean? >> What's different from coup con, cloud native con, and here at the cloud native security con? Obviously security's the focus. Is it just deeper dives? Is it more under the hood? Is it root problems or is this beyond Kubernetes? What's the focus, I guess. People want to know, you know, why the new event? >> I mean, there's a lot of focus on supply chain security, right? Like that's the hot topic in security right now. So that's been a huge focus. I can't speak to the differences of those other conferences. I haven't been able to attend them. But I will say that having a security specific conference, it really focuses on the open community and how technology is evolving, and how do you apply security. It's not just talking about tools which I think other conferences tend to focus on just the tools and you can really, I think, get lost in that as someone trying to learn about security or trying to even implement security, but they talk about what it takes to implement those tools, What's behind the people behind implementing those tools? >> Let's get into some of the key topics that we've identified and get your reaction. One, supply chain security, which I know you'll give a lot of commentary on 'cause that's your focus. Also we heard, like, Liz Rice talking about the extended Berkeley packet filtering. Okay, that's big. You know, your root kernel management, that's big. Developer productivity was kind of implied around removing the blockers of security, making it, you know, more aligned with developer first mentality. So that seems to be our takeaway. What's your reaction to those things? You see the same thing? >> I don't have a specific reaction to those things. >> Do you see the same thing happening on the ground there? Are they covering supply? >> Oh, yeah. >> Those three things are they the big focus? >> Yeah. Yeah, I think it's all of those things kind of like wrapped into one, right? But yeah, there's... I'm not sure how to answer your question. >> Well, let's jump into supply chain for instance. 'Cause that has come up a lot. >> Sure. >> What's the focus there on the supply chain security? Is it SBOMs? Is it the container security? What's the key conversations and topics being discussed around supply chain security? >> Well, I think there's a lot of laughter around SBOM right now because no one can really define it, specifically, and everyone's talking about it. So there's, there's a lot more than just the SBOM conversation. We're talking about like full end-to-end development process and that whole software supply chain that goes with it. So there's everything from infrastructure, security, all the way through to like signing transparency logs. Really the full gambit of supply chain, which is is really neat to see because it is such a broad topic. I think a lot of folks now are involved in supply chain security in some way. And so just kind of bringing that to the surface of what are the different people that are involved in this space, thinking about, what's on the top of their mind when it comes to supply chain security. >> How would you scope the order of magnitude of the uptick in supply chain attacks? Is it pretty heavy right now or is it, you know, people with the hair on fire or is it... What's the, give us the taste of the temperature in the room on the supply chain attacks? >> I think most of the folks who are involved in the space understand just that it's increasing. I mean, like, what is it? A 742% increase average annual year, year over year in supply chain attacks. So the amount of attacks increasing is a little daunting, right, for most of us. But it is what it is. So I think most of us right now are just trying to come together to say, "What are you doing that works? This is what I'm doing that works." And in all the different facets of that. 'cause I think we try to throw, we try to throw tools at a lot of problems and this problem is so big and broad reaching that we really are needing to share best practices as a community and as a security community. So this has been, this conference has been really great for that. >> Yeah, I've heard that a lot. You know, too many tools, not enough platform thinking, not enough architecture, needs some structure. Are you seeing any best practice around frameworks and structure around how to start getting in and and building out more of a better approach or posture? I mean, what's that, what's the, what's the state of the union for supply chain, how to handle that? >> Well, I talked about that a little bit in my my keynote that I gave, actually, which was about... And I've heard other other leaders talk about it too. And obviously it keyed my ear just because I'm so passionate about it, about partnership. So you know, empathetic security where the security team that's enforcing the policies, creating the policies, guidelines is working with the teams that are actually doing the production and the development, hand-in-hand, right? Like I can sit there and tell you, "Hey, you have all these problems and here's your security checklist or framework you need to follow." But that's not going to do them any good and it's going to create a ton of holes, right? So actually partnering with them helping them to understand the risks that are associated with their very specific need and use case, because every product has a different kind of quirk to it, right? Like how it's being developed. It might use a different tool and if I sit there and say, "Hey, you need to log on to this, you need to like make your tool work this platform over here and it's not compatible." I'm going to have to completely reframe how I'm doing productization. I need to know that as a security practitioner because me disrupting productization is not something that I should be doing. And I've heard a couple a couple of folks kind of talking about that, the people aspect behind how we implement these tools, the frameworks and the platforms, and how do we draw out risk, right? Like how do we talk about risk with these teams and really make them understand so it's part of their core culture in their understanding. So when they go back to their, when they go back and having to make decisions without me in the room they know they can make those business decisions with the risk as part of that decision. >> I love that empathetic angle because that's really going to, what needs to happen. It's not just, "Hey, that's your department, see you later." Or not even having a knowledge of the information. This idea of team construction, team management is a huge cultural shift. I'm sure the reaction was very positive. How do you explain that to an organization that's out there? Like how do you... what's the first three steps you got to take? Is there anything that you can share for advice people watch you saying, "Yeah we need to we need to change how our teams operate and interact with each other." >> Yeah, I think the first step is to take a good hard look at yourself. And if you are standing there on an ivory tower with a clipboard, you're probably doing it wrong. Check the box security is never going to be any way that works long term. It's going to take you a long time to implement any changes. At Red Hat, we did not look ourselves. You know, we've been doing a lot of great things in supply chain security for a while, but really taking that look and saying, "How can we be more empathetic leaders in the security space?" So we looked at that, then you say, "Okay, what is my my rate of change going to happen?" So if I need to make so many security changes explaining to these organizations, you're actually going to go faster. We improved our efficiency by 2000% just by doing that, just by creating this more empathetic. So why it seems like it's more hands-on, so it's going to be harder, it's easy to send out an email and say, "Hey, meet the security standard, right?" That might seem like the easy way 'cause you don't have time to engage. It's so much faster if you actually engage and share that message and have a a common understanding between the teams that like, "I'm here to deliver a product, so is the security team. The security team's here to deliver that same product and I want to help you do it in a trusted way." Right? >> Yeah. Dave Alonte, my co-host, was just on a session. We were talking together about security teams jumping on every team and putting a C on their jersey to be like the captain of the intramural team, and being involved, and it goes beyond just like the checklist, like you said, "Oh, I got the SBOM list of materials and I got a code scanning thing." That's not enough, is what we're hearing. >> No. >> Is there a framework or a methodology to go beyond that? You got the empathetic, that's really kind of team issue. You got to go beyond some of the tactical things. What's next beyond, you got the empathy and what's that framework structure when you say where you say anything there? >> So what do you do after you have the empathy, right? >> Yeah. >> I would say Salsa is a good place to start, the software levels. Supply chain levels for software artifacts. It's a mouthful. That's a really good maturity framework to start with. No matter what size organization you have, they're just going to be coming out here soon with version one. They release 0.1 a few months back. That's a really good place to give yourself a gut check of where you are in maturity and where you can go, what are best practices. And then there's the SSDF, which is the Secure Software Development framework. I think NIST wrote that one. But that is also a really, a really good framework and they map really well to each other, actually, When you work through Salsa, you're actually working through the SSDF requirements. >> Awesome. Well, great to have you on and great to get that that knowledge. I have to ask you like coup con, I remember when it started in Seattle, their first coup con events, right? Kind of small, similar to this one, but there's a lot of end user activities. Certainly the CNCF kind of was coming together like right after that. What's the end user activity like there this week? That seems to always been the driver of these events. It's a little bit organic. You got some of the key experts coming together, focus. Have you observed any end user activity in terms of contributions, participation? What's the story on the end user piece there? Is it heavy? Is it light? What's the... >> Um, yeah... It seems moderate. I guess somewhere in the middle. I would say largely heavy, but there's definitely participation. There is a lot of communing and networking happening between different organizations to partner together, which is important. But I haven't really paid attention much to like the Twitter side of this. >> Yeah, you've been busy doing the keynotes. How's Red Hat doing all this? You guys have been great positioned with the cloud native movement. Been following the Red Hat's moves since OpenStack days. Really good, good line of product, good open source, Mojo, of course. Good product mix, right, and relevant. Where's the security focus here? Obviously, you guys are clearly focused on security. How's the Red Hat story going on over there? >> There was yesterday a really good talk that explains that super well. It was given by a Red Hatter, connecting all of the open source projects we've been a part of and kind of explaining them. And obviously again, I'm keying in 'cause it's a supply chain kind of conversation, but I'd recommend that anyone who's going to go back and watch these on YouTube to check that one out just to see kind of how we're approaching the security space as well as how we contribute back to the community in that way. >> Awesome. Great to have you on. Final word, I'll give you the final word. What's the big buzz on supply chain? How would you peg the progress there? Feeling good about where things are? What's the current progress on supply chain security? >> I think that it has opened up a lot of doors for communication between security organizations that have tended to be closed. I'm in product security. Product securities, information securities tend to not speak externally about what we're doing. So you don't want to, you know, look bad or you don't want to expose any risk that we have, right? But it is, I think, necessary to open those lines of communication, to be able to start tackling this. It's a big problem throughout all of our industries, and if one supply chain is attacked and those products are used in someone else's supply chain, that can continue, right? So I think it's good. We have a lot of work to do as an industry and the advancements in technology is going to make that a little bit more complicated. But I'm excited for it. >> You can just throw AI at it. That's the big, everyone's doing AI. Just throw AI at it, it'll solve it. Isn't that the new thing? >> I do secure AI though. >> Super important. I love what you're doing there. Supply chain, open source needs, supply chain security. Open source needs this big time. It has to be there. Thank you for the work that you do. Really appreciate you coming on. Thank you. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> Yeah, good stuff. Supply chain, critical to open source growth. Open source is going to be the key to success in the future with automation and AI right around the corner. And that's important. This theCUBE covers from cloud native con, security con in North America, 2023. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: From Copenhagen, Denmark, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon, and CloudNativeCon Europe 2018. Brought to you by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone, live coverage here in theCUBE, in Europe, at Copenhagen, Denmark for KubeCon Europe 2018. This is theCUBE. We have the CNCF, at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE, with Lauren Cooney, the founder of SparkLabs, new venture around open source and innovation. Our analysts here, today with theCUBE, and our two guests are Michael Hausenblas, who's the direct developer advocate at Red Hat. Diane Meuller's the director of community development at Red Hat, talking about OpenShift, Red Hat, and just the rise and success of OpenShift. It's been really well-documented here on theCUBE, but certainly, in the industry, everyone's taking notice. Great to see you again, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thank you. >> And wonderful to be here again. >> So, first of all, a lot of big news going on. CoreOS is now part of Red Hat, so that's exciting. I haven't had a chance to talk to you guys about that yet here on theCUBE, but great, great puzzle piece from the industry there for you guys, congratulations. >> Yeah, it's been a wonderful collaboration, having the CoreOS team as part of the Red Hat, and the OpenShift team, it's just a perfect fit. And the team from CoreOS, they've always been my favorite people. Alright, and Brandon Philips and the team over there are just awesome. And to have the expertise from Tectonics, the operator framework, which you'll hear more about here at KubeCon EU this week, to have Quay under the wings of Red Hat now, and Quay is a registry with OpenShift or with any other Kubernetes, you know, the stuff that they brought to the table, and the expertise, as well as the wonderful culture that they had, it was such a perfect fit with OpenShift. >> And you know, you guys bring a lot to the table, too. And I was, I mean, I've been kind of critical of CoreOS in the past, in a good way, 'cause I love those guys. I had good chats with them over the years, but they were so pure open-source guys, like Red Hat. >> Diane: Well, there's nothing wrong with being pure open-source. (laughing) >> No, no, I'm cool with that, but you guys have perfected the business more, you have great customers. So one of the things that they were always strong at was the open-source piece but when you start to monetize, and you start to get into the commercialization, it's hard for a start-up to be both, pure open-source and to monetize. You guys now have it together, >> Yeah. >> Great fit. >> So, it's a wonderful thing. We, on the OpenShift side, we have the OpenShift Commons, which is our open-source community, and we've sort of flipped the model of community development and that's at Red Hat. And one of the things is, they've been really strong, CoreOS, with their open-source projects, whether etcd, or you know, a whole myriad of other things. >> Well, let's double down on that. I want to get your thoughts. What is this OpenShift Commons? Take a minute to talk about what you guys had. You had an event Monday. It was the word on the streets, here in the hallways, is very positive. Take a minute to explain what happened, what's going on with that program? >> So OpenShift Commons is the open-source community around OpenShift Origin, but it also includes all the upstream projects that we collaborate with, with everybody from the Kubernetes world, from the Promytheus, all the CNCF project leads, all kinds of people from the upstream projects that are part of the OpenShift Ecosystem, as well as all the service providers and partners, who are doing wonderful things, and all the hosts, like Google, and you know, Microsoft Azure folks are in there. But, we've kind of flipped the model of community development on its head. In the past, if you were a community manager, which is what I started out as, you were trying to get people to contribute to your own code base. And here, because there's so much cross-community collaboration going on, we've got people working on Kubernetes. We got Kubernetes people making commits to Origin. We work on the OCI Foundation, trying to get the container stuff all figured out. >> So when you say you flipped the model, you mean there's now multiple-project contributions going on, or? >> Yeah, we've got our fingers in lots of pies now, and we have to, the collaboration has to be open, and there has to be a lot of communication. So the OpenShift Commons is really about creating those peer-to-peer networks. We do a lot of stuff virtual. I host my own OpenShift Commons briefings twice a week, and I could probably go to three or four days a week, and do it, because there's so much information. There's a fire hose of new stuff, new features, new releases, and stuff. Michael just did one on FAS. You did one before for the machine-learning Saigon OpenShift on Callum. >> Hold on, I want to just get your thoughts, Michael, on this, because what came up yesterday on theCUBE, was integration glue layers are really important. So I can see the connection here. Having this Commons model allows people to kind of cross-pollenate, one. Two, talk about integration, because we've got Promytheus, I might use KubeFlow. So there's new things happening. What does this mean for the integration piece? Good for it, or accelerating it? What's your thoughts? >> Right, right, right. So, I mainly work upstream which means when it is KubeFlow and other projects. And for me, these kind of areas where you can bring together both, the developers, and the end users, which is super important for us to get the feedback to see where we really are struggling. We hear a lot from those people that meet there, what their pinpoints are. And that is the best way to essentially shape the agenda, to say, well, maybe let's prioritize this over this other feature. And as you mention, integration being one big part, and Functions and Service being, could be considered as the visual basics of applications for Cloud Native Computing. It can act as this kind of glue between different things there. And I'm super excited about Commons. That's for me a great place to actually meet these people, and talk with them. >> So the Commons is almost a cross-pollination of folks that are actually using the code, building the code, and they see other projects that makes sense to contribute to, and so it's an alignment where you allow for that cross-pollination. >> It's a huge series of conversations, and one of the things that is really important to all of the projects is, as Michael said, is getting that feedback from production deployments. People who are working on stuff. So we have, I think we're at around 375 organizational members, so there's... >> John: What percentage of end-user organizations, do you think? >> It's probably about 50/50. You know, you can go to Commons.OpenShift.org, and look up the participants list. I'm behind a little bit in getting everybody in there, but-- >> John: So it's a good healthy dose of end-users? >> It's a good healthy dose of end-users. There's some special interest groups. Our special interest groups are more around used cases. So, we just hosted a machine-learning reception two nights ago, and we had about 200 people in the room. I'd say 50% of them were from the KubeFlow community, and the other 50% were users, or people who are building frameworks for our people to run on OpenShift. And so our goal, as always, is to make OpenShift the optimal, the best place to run your, in this case, machine-learning workloads, or-- >> And I think that's super critical, because one of the things that I've been following a little bit, and you know, I have your blog entry in front of me, is the operator framework, and really what you're trying to do with that framework, and how it's progressing, and where it's going, and really, if you can talk a little bit about what you're doing there, I think that would be great for our viewers. >> So what I'm going to do is I'm going to make sure you get Brandon Philips here, on your KubeFlow, sometime this week, 'cause I don't want to steal the thunder from his keynote tomorrow morning-- >> Lauren: Well, drop a couple hints. (laughs) >> John: Share a little bit, come on. >> So the operator stuff that CoreOS, and they brought it to the table, so it's really their baby. They had done a lot of work to make sure that they had first-class access to be able to inject things into Kubernetes itself, and make it run. And they're going to do a better technical talk on it than I am, and make things run. And so that what they've done is they've opened up and created an STK for operators, so other people can build more. And we think, this is a tipping point for Kubernetes, and I really don't want to steal any thunder here, or get in over my head, is the other part of it, too. >> I think Brandon is the right person to talk about that. >> Brandon, we'll drag Brandon over here. >> I'm super excited about it, but let's-- >> Yeah, let's talk about why you're super excited about it. Is there anything you can kind of tell us in terms of what? >> Enables people to run any kind of workload in communities, in a reliable automated fashion. So you bring the experience that human operators have into software. So you automate that application, which makes it even more suitable to run your enterprise application that so far might have not been the best place to run. >> Lauren: That's great, yeah. >> And yeah, I'm also looking forward to Brandon explaining the details there. >> So I think it's great hearing about that, and we talk a lot about how it's great for users. It's great, you know, operators, developers, how they're building things out, and things along those lines. But one of the things that we are not hearing a ton about here, and we want to hear more about, is security. Security is increasingly important. You know, we're hearing bits and pieces but nothing's really kind of coming together here and what're your thoughts on that? >> Security, I was recently, when I blogged about it, and people on Twitter said, well, is that really true that, you know, couldn't this secure body fall? It's like, well, all the pieces are there. You need to be aware of it. You need to know what you're doing. But it is there, right? All the defaults might not be as you would expect it, but you can enable it. And I think we did a lot of innovations there, as well. With our back, and security context, and so on. And, actually, Liz Rice and myself are working on putting the security cookbook, and for a variety that will come out later this year. We're trying to document the best practice, because it is early days, and it's quite a range of things. From building container images in a secure way, to excess control, and so on, so there's a lot of stuff (mumbles). >> What're some of the end-user feedback sessions, or feedback data that you're getting from these sessions? What is some of the things you guys are hearing? What's the patterns? What's the things that are boiling up to the top? >> Well, there's so many. I mean, this conference is one of those ones where it's a cornucopia of talks, and trying to, I just wrote a little blog post called, The Hitchhiker's Guide to KubeCon. It's on blog.openshift.com. And because, you could spend all of your time here in a different track, and never leave it, like Security 1, or in Operations 1, or-- >> John: There's a lot of great content. >> I think the Istio stuff is probably the hottest thing I'm hearing people going to. There was a great deep-dive training session, hands-on on Monday, here, that got incredible feedback. IBM and Google did that one. We had a lot of customer talks and hands-on training sessions on Monday. Here, there are pretty much, there's a great talk coming up this afternoon, on Kube Controllers that Magic... I think that's at 11:45-ish. There are a lot of the stuff around Service Fish, and service brokers, is really kind of the hot thing that people are looking for to get implemented. And we've got a lot of people from Red Hat working on that. There's, oh man, there's etcd updtes, there's a bazillion things going-- >> John: It's exploding big time here. >> Yeah. >> No doubt about it. >> The number one thing that I'm seeing last couple of months, being onsite with customers, and also here, is that given that Kubernetes is now the defective standard of container authorization, people are much more willing to go all-in, you know? >> Yeah. >> A lot of folks were on the fence, for a couple of years, going like, which one's going to make it? Now, it's kind of like, this is a given. You couldn't, you know, just as Linux is everywhere on the servers, that's the same with Kubernetes, and people are now happy to really invest, to like, okay, let's do it now, let's go all in. >> Yeah, and, what we're hearing, too, just stepping back and looking at the big picture is we see the trend, kind of hearing and connecting the dots, as the number of nodes is going to expand significantly. I mean, Sterring was on stage yesterday, and we heard their, and still small, not a lot of huge, not a lot on a large scale. So, we think that the scale question is coming quickly. >> Well, I think it already came, alright? In the machine-learning reception that we had at night, one of the gentleman, Willem Bookwalter, from Microsoft, and Diane Feddema, from Red Hat, and a whole lot of people are talking about how do we get, because machine-learning workloads, have such huge work, you know, GPU, and Google has their TPU requirements to get to scale, to run these things, that people are already pushing the envelope on Kubernetes. Jeremy Eater from Red Hat has done some incredible performance management work. And on the CNCF blog, they've posted all of that. To get the optimal performance, and to get the scale, is now, I think, one of the next big things, and there's a lot of talks that are on that. >> Yeah, and that's Istio's kind of big service mesh opportunity there, is to bring that to the next level. >> To the next level, you know, there's going to be a lot of things that people are going to experience trying to get the most out of their clusters, but also, I think we're still at the edge of that. I mean, someone said something about getting to 2,500 nodes. And I'm like, thinking, that's just the beginning, baby. >> Yeah, it's going to be more, add a couple zeroes. I got to ask you guys, I got to put you both on the spot here, because it's what we do on theCUBE. You guys are great supporters of theCUBE. We appreciate that, but we've had many conversations over the years with OpenShift, going back to OpenStacks, I don't know what year it was, maybe 2012, or I don't know. I forget what year it was. Now, the success of OpenShift was really interesting. You guys took this to a whole 'nother level. What's the reaction? Are you, as you look back now on where you were with OpenShift and where you are today, do you pinch yourself and say, damn? Or what's your view? >> Red Hat made a big bet on Kubernetes three years ago, three and a half years ago, when people thought we were crazy. You know, they hadn't seen it. They didn't understand what Google was trying to open-source, and some of the engineers inside of Red Hat, Clayton Coleman, Matt Hicks, a lot of great people, saw what was coming, reached out, worked with Google. And the rest of us were like, well, what about Ruby and Rails, and Mongo DB, and you know, doing all this stuff? And like, we invested so much in gears and cartridges. And then, once they explained it, and once Google really open-sourced the whole thing, making that bet as a company, and pivoting on that dime, and making version 3.0 of OpenShift and OpenShift Origin, as a Kubernetes-based platform, as a service, and then, switching over to being a container platform, that was a huge thing. And if you had talked to me back then, three years ago, it was kind of like, is this the right way to go? But, then, you know, okay. >> Well, it's important to history to document that point, because I remember we talked about it. And one of the things, you guys made a good bet, and people were scratching their head, at that time. >> Oh yeah. >> Big time. But also, you've got to give credit to the community, because the leaders in the community recognized the importance of Kubernetes early on. We've been in those conversations, and said, hey, you know, we can't screw this up, because it was an opportunity. People saw the vision, and saw it as a great opportunity. >> I think, as much as I like the technical bits, as an engineer, the API being written and go, and so on, I really think the community, that is what really makes the difference. >> Yeah, absolutely does. >> If you compare it with others, they're also successful. But here with CNCF, all the projects, all the people coming together, and I love the community, I really-- >> It's a case study of how to execute, in my opinion. You guys did a great job in your role, and the people didn't get in the way and try to mess it up. Great smart people understood it, shepherded it through, let it grow. >> And it really is kudos to the Kubernetes community, and the CNCF, for incubating all of this wonderful cross-community collaboration. They do a great job with their ambassadors program. The Kubernetes community does amazing stuff around their SIGs, and making sure that projects get correctly incubated. You know, they're not afraid to rejig the processes. They've just done a wonderful thing, changing the way that new projects come into the Kubernetes, and I think that willingness to learn, learn from mistakes, to evolve, is something that's really kind of unique to the whole new way of thinking about open-source now, and that's the change that we've seen. >> And open-source, open movements, always have a defining moment. You know, the OSI model, remember? That stack never got fully standardized but it stopped at a really important point. PCPIP, IP became really important. The crazy improbability world, CISCO, as we know, and others. This is that kind of moment where there's going to be a massive wealth creation, value creation opportunity because you have people getting behind something, as a de facto standard. And then, there's a lot of edge work around it that can be innovated on. I think, to me, this is going to be one of those moments we look back on. >> Yeah, and I think it's that willingness to adjust the processes, to work with the community, and you know, that Kubernetes, the ethos that's around this project, we've learned from a lot of other foundations' mistakes. You know, not that they're better or worse, but we've learned that you could see the way we're bringing in new projects, and adding them on. We took a step back as a community, and said okay, this is, we're getting too many, too soon, too fast. And maybe, this is not quite the right way to go. And rather than doing the big tent umbrella approach, we've actually starting doing some really re-thinking of our processes, and the governing board and the TOC of the CNCF, have done an awesome job getting that done. >> When you got lightning in a bottle, you stop and you package it up, and you run with it, so congratulations. Red Hat Summit next week, we'll be there, theCUBE. >> Oh yeah. >> Looking forward to going deep on this. >> Well, the OpenShift Commons Gathering is the day before Red Hat Summit. We've completely sold out, so sorry, there's a waitlist. We've gone from being, our first one, I think we had 150 people come. There's over 700 people now coming to the Gathering one, and 25 customers with production deployments speaking. This is the day before Red Hat Summit. And I lost count of how many OpenShift stories are being told at Red Hat Summit. It's going to be a crazy, jetlag-y week, next week, so-- >> Congratulations, you guys got a spring in your step, well done. OpenShift going to the next level, certainly the industry and Kubernetes, a service mesh as Istio. Lot of great coverage here in theCUBE, here in Europe for KubeCon 2018 in Copenhagen, Denmark. I'm John Furrier, and Lauren Cooney, the founder of SparkLabs. I'm with theCUBE, we'll be back with more live coverage. Stay with us! Day Two, here at KubeCon, we'll be right back. (upbeat techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Presenting Future Cloud. One event, a world of opportunities. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Okay. We're here with Thomas Scheibe, who's the vice president of Product Management, aka VP of all things Data Center Networking, STN, cloud, you name it in that category. Welcome Thomas, good to see you again. >> Hey, same here. Thanks for having me on. >> Yeah, it's our pleasure. Okay. Let's get right into observability. When you think about observability, visibility, infrastructure monitoring, problem resolution across the network, how does cloud change things? In other words, what are the challenges that networking teams are currently facing as they're moving to the cloud and trying to implement hybrid cloud? >> Yeah. (scoffs) Yeah. Visibility as always is very, very important and it's quite frankly, it's not just, it's not just the networking team, it's actually the application team too, right? And as you pointed out, the the underlying impetus to what's going on here is the, the data center is wherever the data is, and I think we said this a couple years back. And really what happens the, the applications are going to be deployed in different locations, right? Whether it's in a public cloud, whether it's on-prem and they're built differently, right? They're built as micro servers, so they might actually be distributed as well at the same application. And so what that really means is you need, as an operator as well as actually a user, a better visibility, "where are my pieces?", and you need to be able to correlate between where the app is and what the underlying network is, that is in place in these different locations. So you have actually a good knowledge why the app is running so fantastic or sometimes not. So I think that's, that's really the problem statement. What, what we're trying to go after with observability. >> Okay. Let's, let's double click on that. So, so a lot of customers tell me that you got to stare at log files until your eyes bleed, then you've got to bring in guys with lab coats who have PhDs to figure all this stuff out. >> Thomas: Yeah. >> So you just described, it's getting more complex, but at the same time, you have to simplify things. So how, how are you doing that? >> Correct. So what we basically have done is we have this fantastic product that is called ThousandEyes. And so what this does is basically (chuckles) as the name which I think is a fantastic, fantastic name. You have these sensors everywhere and you can have a good correlation on links between if I run a from a site to a site, from a site to a cloud, from the cloud to cloud. And you basic can measure what is the performance of these links? And so what we're, what we're doing here is we're actually extending the footprint of the ThousandEyes agent, right? Instead of just having a, an inversion machine of clouds we are now embedding them with the Cisco network devices, right? We announced this was the Catalyst 9000. And we're extending this now to our 8000 Catalyst product line for the for the SD-WAN products, as well as to the data center products, in Nexus line. And so what you see is, is you know, a half a thing, you have ThousandEyes. You get a million insights and you get a billion dollar off improvements for how your applications run. And this is really the, the power of tying together the footprint of what a network is with the visibility, what is going on. So you actually know the application behavior that is attached to this network. >> I see. So, okay. So as the cloud evolves, it expands, it connects, you're actually enabling ThousandEyes to go further, not just confined within a single data center location but out to the network across clouds, et cetera. >> Thomas: Correct. >> Wherever the network is you're going to have a ThousandEyes sensor and you can bring this together and you can quite frankly pick, if you want to say, Hey I have my application in public cloud provider A domain one, and I have another one in domain two I can do monitor that link. I can also monitor, I have a user that has a campus location or a branch location. I kind of put an agent there and then I can monitor the connectivity from that branch location all the way to the, let's say, corporation's data center or headquarter or to the cloud. And I can have these probes and just the, have visibility in saying, Hey, if there's a performance I know where the issue is. And then I obviously can use all the other tools that we have to address those. >> All right, let's talk about the cloud operating model. Everybody tells us that, you know, it's really the change in the model that drives big numbers in terms of ROI. And I want you to maybe address how you're bringing automation and DevOps to this world of hybrid and specifically, how is Cisco enabling IT organizations to move to a cloud operating model as that cloud definition expands? >> Yeah, no, that's that's another interesting topic beyond the observability. So it really, really what we're seeing, and this is going on for, I want to say couple of years now it's really this transition from operating infrastructure as a networking team, more like a service like what you would expect from a cloud provider, right? This is really around the networking team offering services like a cloud provided us. And that's really what the meaning is of cloud operating model, right? Where this is infrastructure running your own data center where that's linking that infrastructure was whatever runs on the public cloud is operating it like a cloud service. And so we are on this journey for a while. So one of the examples um that we have, we're moving some of the control software assets that customers today can deploy on-prem to an instance that they can deploy in a, in a cloud provider and just basically instantiate things there and then just run it that way. Right? And so the latest example for this is what we have, our Identity Service Engine that is now unlimited availability, available on AWS and will become available mid this year, both on AWS and Azure, as a service. You can just go to Marketplace, you can load it there and now increase. You can start running your policy control in the cloud managing your access infrastructure in your data center, in your campus, wherever you want to do it. And so that's just one example of how we see our Customers Network Operations team taking advantage of a cloud operating model and basically deploying their, their tools where they need them and when they need them. >> Dave: So >> What's the scope of I, I hope I'm saying it right, ISE, right? I.S.E, I think it's um, you call it ISE. What's the scope of that? Like for instance, to an effect my, or even, you know address, simplify my security approach? >> Absolutely. That's now coming to what is the beauty of the product itself? Yes. What you can do is really is, a lot of people talking about is, how do I get to a Zero Trust approach to networking? How do I get to a much more dynamic, flexible segmentation in my infrastructure, again, whether this was only campus access as well as the data center and ISE helps you there. You can use it as a pawn to define your policies and then inter-connect from there, right. In this particular case, we would, instead of ISE in a cloud as a software, alone, you now can connect and say, Hey, I want to manage and program my network infrastructure and my data center or my campus going to the respective controller, whether it's DNA Center for campus or whether it's the, the ACI policy controller. And so yes, what you get as an effect out of this is a very elegant way to automatically manage ,in one place, "what is my policy", and then drive the right segmentation in your network infrastructure. >> Yeah. Zero Trust. It was..Pre pandemic it was kind of a buzzword, now it's become a mandate. I, I wonder if we could talk about- >> Thomas: - Yes >> Yeah, right. I mean, so- >> Thomas: -Pretty much. >> I wondered if we could talk about cloud native apps. You got all these developers that are working inside organizations, they're maintaining legacy apps they're connecting their data to systems in the cloud. They're sharing that data. These developers, they're rapidly advancing their skillsets. How is Cisco enabling its infrastructure to support this world of cloud native, making infrastructure more responsive and agile for application developers? >> Yeah. So you were going to the talk we saw was the visibility. We talked about the operating model how our network operates actually want to use tools going forward. Now the next step to this is, it's not just the operator. How do they actually, where do they want to put these tools? Or how they interact with this tools? As well as quite frankly, as how let's say, a DevOps team, or application team or a cloud team also wants to take advantage of the programmability of the underlying network. And this is where we're moving into this whole cloud native discussion, right. Which has really two angles. So it's the cloud native way, how applications are being built. And then there is the cloud native way, how you interact with infrastructure, right? And so what we have done is we're A, putting in place the on-ramps between clouds, and then on top of it, we're exposing for all these tools APIs that can be used and leveraged by standard cloud tools or cloud-native tools, right? And one example or two examples we always have. And again, we're on this journey for a while, is both Ansible script capabilities that access from RedHat as well as Hashi Terraform capabilities that you can orchestrate across infrastructure to drive infrastructure automation. And what, what really stands behind it is what either the networking operations team wants to do or even the app team. They want to be able to describe the application as a code and then drive automatically or programmatically instantiation of infrastructure needed for that application. And so what you see us doing is providing all these capability as an interface for all our network tools, right. Whether this is ISE, what I just mentioned, whether this is our DCN controllers in the data center whether these are the controllers in the, in the campus for all of those, we have cloud-native interfaces. So operator or a DevOps team can actually interact directly with that infrastructure the way they would do today with everything that lives on the cloud or with everything how they built the application. >> Yeah, this is key. You can't even have the conversation of of Op cloud operating model that includes and comprises on-prem without programmable infrastructure. So that's, that's very important. Last question, Thomas, are customers actually using this? You made the announcement today. Are there, are there any examples of customers out there doing this? >> We do have a lot of customers out there that are moving down the path and using the Cisco High-performance Infrastructure both on the compute side, as well as on the Nexus side. One of the costumers, and this is like an interesting case, is Rakuten. Rakuten is a large telco provider, a mobile 5G operator in Japan and expanding, and as in different countries. And so people, some think, "Oh cloud" "You must be talking about the public cloud provider" "the big three or four". But if you look at it, there's a lot of the telco service providers are actually cloud providers as well and expanding very rapidly. And so we're actually very proud to work together with Rakuten and help them build high performance data center infrastructure based on HANA Gig and actually for a gig to drive their deployment to its 5G mobile cloud infrastructure, which is which is where the whole the whole world, which frankly is going. And so it's really exciting to see this development and see the power of automation visibility together with the High-performance infrastructure becoming a reality on delivering actually, services. >> Yeah, some great points you're making there. Yes, you have the big four clouds, they're enormous but then you have a lot of actually quite large clouds telcos that are either proximate to those clouds or they're in places where those hyper-scalers may not have a presence and building out their own infrastructure. So, so that's a great case study. Thomas.Hey, great having you on. Thanks much for spending some time with us. >> Yeah, same here. I appreciate it. Thanks a lot. >> All right. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, the leader in tech event coverage. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the Globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of Kube Con and Cloud Native Con Europe 2021 virtual brought to you by Red Hat, the cloud native computing foundation and ecosystem partners. >> Hello, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Kube Con and Cloud Native Con 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, here with a great guest, I'm excited to talk to. His company, that he was part of founding CTO, was bought by Red Hat. Ali Golshan, Senior Director of Global Software Engineer at Red Hat, formerly CTO of StackRox. Ali thanks for coming on, I appreciate it. Thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having me excited to be here. >> So big acquisition in January, where we covered it on SiliconANGLE, You guys, security company, venture backed amplify Sequoya and on and on. Big part of Red Hat story in their security as developers want to shift left as they say and as more and more modern applications are being developed. So congratulations. So real quick, just quick highlight of what you guys do as a company and inside Red Hat. >> Sure, so the company's premise was built around how do you bring security the entire application life cycle. So StackRox focuses on sort of three big areas that we talk about. One is, how do you secure the supply chain? The second part of it is, how do you secure infrastructure and foster management and then the third part is now, how do you protect the workload that run on top of that infrastructure. So this is the part that aligned really well with Red Hat which is, Red Hat had wanted to take a lot of what we do around infrastructure, foster management configuration management and developer tools integrated into a lot of the things they do and obviously the workload protection part was a very seamless part of integrating us into the OpenShift part because we were built around cloud native constructs and obviously Red Hat having some of the foremost experts around cloud native sort of created a really great asset. >> Yeah, you guys got a great story. Obviously cloud native applications are rocking and rolling. You guys were in early serverless emerges, Kubernetes and then security in what I call the real time developer workflow. Ones that are building really fast, pushing code. Now it's called day two operations. So cloud native did two operations kind of encapsulates this new environment. You guys were right in the sweet spot of that. So this became quite the big deal, Red Hat saw an opportunity to bring you in. What was the motivation when you guys did the deal Was it like, "wow" this is a good fit. How did you react? What was the vibe at the StackRox when this was all going down? >> Yeah, so I think there's really three areas you look for, anytime a company comes up and sort of starts knocking on your door. One is really, is the team going to be the right fit? Is the culture going to be the right environment for the people? For us, that was a big part of what we were taking into consideration. We found Red Hat's general culture, how they approach people and sort of the overall approach the community was very much aligned with what we were trying to do. The second part of it was really the product fit. So we had from very early on started to focus purely on the Kubernetes components and doing everything we could, we call it sort of our product approach built in versus bolted on and this is sort of a philosophy that Red Hat had adopted for a long time and it's a part of a lot of their developer tools, part of their shift left story as well as part of OpenShift. And then the third part of it was really the larger strategy of how do you go to market. So we were hitting that point where we were in triple digit customers and we were thinking about scalability and how to scale the company. And that was the part that also fit really well which was obviously, RedHat more and more hearing from their customers about the importance and the criticality of security. So that last part happened to be one part. We ended up spending a lot of time on it, ended up being sort of three out of three matches that made this acquisition happen. >> Well congratulations, always great to see startups in the right position. Good hustle, great product, great market. You guys did a great job, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Now, the big news here at KubeCon as Linux foundation open-source, you guys are announcing that you're open-sourcing at StackRox, this is huge news, obviously, you now work for an open-source company and so that was probably a part of it. Take us through the news, this is the top story here for this segment tickets through open-source. Take us through the news. >> Yeah, so traditionally StackRox was a proprietary tool. We do have open-source tooling but the entire platform in itself was a proprietary tool. This has been a number of discussions that we've had with the Red Hat team from the very beginning. And it sort of aligns around a couple of core philosophies. One is obviously Red Hat at its core being an open-source company and being very much plugged into the community and working with users and developers and engineers to be able to sort of get feedback and build better products. But I think the other part of it is that, I think a lot of us from a historic standpoint have viewed security to be a proprietary thing as we've always viewed the sort of magic algorithms or black boxes or some magic under the hood that really moved the needle. And that happens not to be the case anymore also because StackRox's philosophy was really built around Kubernetes and Built-in, we feel like one of the really great messages around wide open-source of security product is to build that trust with the community being able to expose, here's how the product works, here's how it integrates here are the actions it takes here's the ramifications or repercussions of some of the decisions you may make in the product. Those all I feel make for very good stories of how you build connection, trust and communication with the community and actually get feedback on it. And obviously at its core, the company being very much focused on Kubernetes developer tools, service manage, these are all open-source toolings obviously. So, for us it was very important to sort of talk the talk and walk the walk and this is sort of an easy decision at the end of the day for us to take the platform open-source. And we're excited about it because I think most still want a productized supported commercial product. So while it's great to have some of the tip of the spear customers look at it and adopt the open-source and be able to drive it themselves. We're still hearing from a lot of the customers that what they do want is really that support and that continuous management, maintenance and improvement around the product. So we're actually pretty excited. We think it's only going to increase our velocity and momentum into the community. >> Well, I got some questions on how it's going to work but I do want to get your comment because I think this is a pretty big deal. I had a conversation about 10 years ago with Doug Cutting, who was the founder of Hadoop, And he was telling me a story about a company he worked for, you know all this coding, they went under and the IP was gone, the software was gone and it was a story to highlight that proprietary software sometimes can never see the light of day and it doesn't continue. Here, you guys are going to continue the story, continue the code. How does that feel? What's your expectations? How's that going to work? I'm assuming that's what you're going to open it up which means that anyone can download the code. Is that right? Take us through how to first of all, do you agree with that this is going to stay alive and how's it going to work? >> Yeah, I mean, I think as a founder one of the most fulfilling things to have is something you build that becomes sustainable and stands the test of time. And I think, especially in today's world open-source is a tool that is in demand and only in a market that's growing is really a great way to do that. Especially if you have a sort of an established user base and the customer base. And then to sort of back that on top of thousands of customers and users that come with Red Hat in itself, gives us a lot of confidence that that's going to continue and only grow further. So the decision wasn't a difficult one, although transparently, I feel like even if we had pushed back I think Red Hat was pretty determined about open-source and we get anyway, but it's to say that we actually were in agreement to be able to go down that path. I do think that there's a lot of details to be worked out because obviously there's sort of a lot of the nuances in how you build product and manage it and maintain it and then, how do you introduce community feedback and community collaboration as part of open-source projects is another big part of it. I think the part we're really excited about is, is that it's very important to have really good community engagement, maintenance and response. And for us, even though we actually discussed this particular strategy during StackRox, one of the hindering aspects of that was really the resources required to be able to manage and maintain such a massive open-source project. So having Red Hat behind us and having a lot of this experience was very relevant. I think, as a, as a startup to start proprietary and suddenly open it and try to change your entire business model or go to market strategy commercialization, changed the entire culture of the company can sometimes create a lot of headwind. And as a startup, like sort of I feel like every year just trying not to die until you create that escape velocity. So those were I think some of the risk items that Red Hat was able to remove for us and as a result made the decision that much easier. >> Yeah, and you got the mothership with Red Hat they've done it before, they've been doing it for generations. You guys, you're in the startup, things are going crazy. It's like whitewater rafting, it's like everything's happening so fast. And now you got the community behind you cause you're going to have the CNC if you get Kubecon. I mean, it's a pretty great community, the support is amazing. I think the only thing the engineers might want to worry about is go back into the code base and clean things up a bit, as you start to see the code I'm like, wait a minute, their names are on it. So, it's always always a fun time and all serious now this is a big story on the DevSecOps. And I want to get your thoughts on this because kubernetes is still emerging, and DevOps is awesome, we've been covering that in for all of the life of theCUBE for the 11 years now and the greatness of DevOps but now DevSecOps is critical and Kubernetes native security is what people are looking at. When you look at that trend only continuing, what's your focus? What do you see? Now that you're in Red Hat as the CTO, former CTO of StackRox and now part of the Red Hat it's going to get bigger and stronger Kubernetes native and shifting left-hand or DevSecOps. What's your focus? >> Yeah, so I would say our focus is really around two big buckets. One is, Kubernetes native, sort of a different way to think about it as we think about our roadmap planning and go-to-market strategy is it's mutually exclusive with being in infrastructure native, that's how we think about it and as a startup we really have to focus on an area and Kubernetes was a great place for us to focus on because it was becoming the dominant orchestration engine. Now that we have the resources and the power of Red Hat behind us, the way we're thinking about this is infrastructure native. So, thinking about cloud native infrastructure where you're using composable, reusable, constructs and objects, how do you build potential offerings or features or security components that don't rely on third party tools or components anymore? How do you leverage the existing infrastructure itself to be able to conduct some of these traditional use cases? And one example we use for this particular scenario is networking. Networking, the way firewalling in segmentation was typically done was, people would tweak IP tables or they would install, for example, a proxy or a container that would terminate MTLS or become inline and it would create all sorts of sort of operational and risk overhead for users and for customers. And one of the things we're really proud of as sort of the company that pioneered this notion of cloud native security is if you just leverage network policies in Kubernetes, you don't have to be inline you don't have to have additional privileges, you don't have to create additional risks or operational overhead for users. So we're taking those sort of core philosophies and extending them. The same way we did to Kubernetes all the way through service manager, we're doing the same sorts of things Istio being able to do a lot of the things people are traditionally doing through for example, proxies through layer six and seven, we want to do through Istio. And then the same way for example, we introduced a product called GoDBledger which was an open-source tool, which would basically look at a yaml on helm charts and give you best practices responses. And it's something you we want for example to your get repositories. We want to take those sort of principles, enabling developers, giving them feedback, allowing them not to break their existing workflows and leveraging components in existing infrastructure to be able to sort of push security into cloud native. And really the two pillars we look at are ensuring we can get users and customers up and running as quickly as possible and reduce as much as possible operational overhead for them over time. So we feel these two are really at the core of open-sourcing in building into the infrastructure, which has sort of given us momentum over the last six years and we feel pretty confident with Red Hat's help we can even expand that further. >> Yeah, I mean, you bring up a good point and it's certainly as you get more scale with Red Hat and then the customer base, not only in dealing with the threat detection around containers and cloud native applications, you got to kind of build into the life cycle and you've got to figure out, okay, it's not just Kubernetes anymore, it's something else. And you've got advanced cluster security with Red Hat they got OpenShift cloud platform, you're going to have managed services so this means you're going to have scale, right? So, how do you view that? Because now you're going to have, you guys at the center of the advanced cluster security paradigm for Red Hat. That's a big deal for them and they've got a lot of R and D and a lot of, I wouldn't say R and D, but they got emerging technologies developing around that. We covered that in depth. So when you start to get into advanced cluster, it's compliance too, it's not just threat detection. You got insights telemetry, data acquisition, so you have to kind of be part of that now. How do you guys feel about that? Are you up for the task? >> Yeah, I hope so it's early days but we feel pretty confident about it, we have a very good team. So as part of the advanced cluster security we work also very closely with the advanced cluster management team in Red Hat because it's not just about security, it's about, how do you operationalize it, how do you manage it and maintain it and to your point sort of run it longterm at scale. The compliance part of it is a very important part. I still feel like that's in its infancy and these are a lot of conversations we're having internally at Red Hat, which is, we all feel that compliance is going to sort of more from the standard benchmarks you have from CIS or particular compliance requirements like the power, of PCI or Nest into how do you create more flexible and composable policies through a unified language that allows you to be able to create more custom or more useful things specific to your business? So this is actually, an area we're doing a lot of collaboration with the advanced cluster management team which is in that, how do you sort of bring to light a really easy way for customers to be able to describe and sort of abstract policies and then at the same time be able to actually and enforce them. So we think that's really the next key point of what we have to accomplish to be able to sort of not only gain scale, but to be able to take this notion of, not only detection in response but be able to actually build in what we call declarative security into your infrastructure. And what that means is, is to be able to really dictate how you want your applications, your services, your infrastructure to be configured and run and then anything that is sort of conflicting with that is auto responded to and I think that's really the larger vision that with Red Hat, we're trying to accomplish. >> And that's a nice posture to have you build it in, get it built in, you have the declarative models then you kind of go from there and then let the automation kick in. You got insights coming in from Red Hat. So all these things are kind of evolving. It's still early days and I think it was a nice move by Red Hat, so congratulations. Final question for you is, as you prepare to go to the next generation KubeCon is also seeing a lot more end user participation, people, you know, cloud native is going mainstream, when I say mainstream, seeing beyond the hyperscalers in the early adopters, Kubernetes and other infrastructure control planes are coming in you start to see the platforms emerge. Nobody wants another security tool, they want platforms that enable applications handle tools. As it gets more complicated, what's going to be the easy button in security cloud native? What's the approach? What's your vision on what's next? >> Yeah so, I don't know if there is an easy button in security and I think part of it is that there's just such a fragmentation and use cases and sort of designs and infrastructure that doesn't exist, especially if you're dealing with such a complex stack. And not only just a complex stack but a potentially use cases that not only span runtime but they deal with you deployment annual development life cycle. So the way we think about it is more sort of this notion that has been around for a long time which is the shared responsibility model. Security is not security's job anymore. Especially, because security teams probably cannot really keep up with the learning curve. Like they have to understand containers then they have to understand Kubernetes and Istio and Envoy and cloud platforms and APIs. and there's just too much happening. So the way we think about it is if you deal with security a in a declarative version and if you can state things in a way where how infrastructure is ran is properly configured. So it's more about safety than security. Then what you can do is push a lot of these best practices back as part of your gift process. Involve developers, engineers, the right product security team that are responsible for day-to-day managing and maintaining this. And the example we think about is, is like CVEs. There are plenty of, for example, vulnerability tools but the CVEs are still an unsolved problem because, where are they, what is the impact? Are they actually running? Are they being exploited in the wild? And all these things have different ramifications as you span it across the life cycle. So for us, it's understanding context, understanding assets ensuring how the infrastructure has to handle that asset and then ensuring that the route for that response is sent to the right team, so they can address it properly. And I think that's really our larger vision is how can you automate this entire life cycle? So, the information is routed to the right teams, the right teams are appending it to the application and in the future, our goal is not to just pardon the workload or the compute environment, but use this information to action pardon application themselves and that creates that additional agility and scalability. >> Yeah it's in the lifecycle of that built in right from the beginning, more productivity, more security and then, letting everything take over on the automation side. Ali congratulations on the acquisition deal with Red Hat, buyout that was great for them and for you guys. Take a minute to just quickly answer final final question for the folks watching here. The big news is you're open-sourcing StackRox, so that's a big news here at KubeCon. What can people do to get involved? Well, just share a quick quick commercial for what people can do to get involved? What are you guys looking for? Take a pledge to the community? >> Yeah, I mean, what we're looking for is more involvement in direct feedback from our community, from our users, from our customers. So there's a number, obviously the StackRox platform itself being open-source, we have other open-source tools like the KubeLinter. What we're looking for is feedback from users as to what are the pain points that they're trying to solve for. And then give us feedback as to how we're not addressing those or how can we better design our systems? I mean, this is the sort of feedback we're looking for and naturally with more resources, we can be a lot faster in response. So send us feedback good or bad. We would love to hear it from our users and our customers and get a better sense of what they're looking for. >> Innovation out in the open love it, got to love open-source going next gen, Ali Golshan Senior Director of Global Software Engineering the new title at Red Hat former CTO and founder of StackRox which spread had acquired in January, 2021. Ali thanks for coming on congratulations. >> Thanks for having, >> Okay, so keeps coverage of Kube Con cloud native Con 2021. I'm John Furrie, your host. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe. It's the cube presenting active DQ, intelligent automation for data quality brought to you by Io Tahoe. (indistinct) >> Got it? all right if everybody is ready we'll opening on Dave in five, four, three. Now we're going to look at the role automation plays in mobilizing your data on snowflake. Let's welcome. And Duncan Turnbull who's partner sales engineer at snowflake, Ajay Vohora is back CEO of IO. Tahoe he's going to share his insight. Gentlemen. Welcome. >> Thank you, David good to be back. >> Yes it's great to have you back Ajay and it's really good to see Io Tahoe expanding the ecosystem so important now of course bringing snowflake in, it looks like you're really starting to build momentum. I mean, there's progress that we've seen every month month by month, over the past 12, 14 months. Your seed investors, they got to be happy. >> They are they're happy and they can see that we're running into a nice phase of expansion here new customers signing up, and now we're ready to go out and raise that next round of funding. Maybe think of us like Snowflake five years ago. So we're definitely on track with that. A lot of interest from investors and right now trying to focus in on those investors that can partner with us and understand AI data and an automation. >> Well, so personally, I mean you've managed a number of early stage VC funds. I think four of them. You've taken several comm software companies through many funding rounds and growth and all the way to exit. So you know how it works. You have to get product market fit, you got to make sure you get your KPIs, right. And you got to hire the right salespeople, but what's different this time around? >> Well, you know, the fundamentals that you mentioned those that never change. What I can see that's different that's shifted this time around is three things. One in that they used to be this kind of choice of do we go open source or do we go proprietary? Now that has turned into a nice hybrid model where we've really keyed into RedHat doing something similar with Centos. And the idea here is that there is a core capability of technology that underpins a platform, but it's the ability to then build an ecosystem around that made up of a community. And that community may include customers, technology partners, other tech vendors and enabling the platform adoption so that all of those folks in that community can build and contribute whilst still maintaining the core architecture and platform integrity at the core of it. And that's one thing that's changed. We're seeing a lot of that type of software company emerge into that model, which is different from five years ago. And then leveraging the Cloud, every Cloud, Snowflake Cloud being one of them here. In order to make use of what customers end customers in enterprise software are moving towards. Every CIO is now in some configuration of a hybrid. IT is state whether that is Cloud, multi-Cloud, on-prem. That's just the reality. The other piece is in dealing with the CIO, his legacy. So the past 15, 20 years I've purchased many different platforms, technologies, and some of those are still established and still (indistinct) How do you enable that CIO to make purchase whilst still preserving and in some cases building on and extending the legacy material technology. So they've invested their people's time and training and financial investment into. Yeah, of course solving a problem, customer pain point with technology that never goes out in a fashion >> That never changes. You have to focus like a laser on that. And of course, speaking of companies who are focused on solving problems, Duncan Turnbull from Snowflake. You guys have really done a great job and really brilliantly addressing pain points particularly around data warehousing, simplified that you're providing this new capability around data sharing really quite amazing. Duncan, Ajay talks about data quality and customer pain points in enterprise IT. Why is data quality been such a problem historically? >> So one of the biggest challenges that's really affected that in the past is that because to address everyone's needs for using data, they've evolved all these kinds of different places to store it, all these different silos or data marts or all this kind of pluralfiation of places where data lives and all of those end up with slightly different schedules for bringing data in and out, they end up with slightly different rules for transforming that data and formatting it and getting it ready and slightly different quality checks for making use of it. And this then becomes like a big problem in that these different teams are then going to have slightly different or even radically different ounces to the same kinds of questions, which makes it very hard for teams to work together on their different data problems that exist inside the business, depending on which of these silos they end up looking at. And what you can do. If you have a single kind of scalable system for putting all of your data, into it, you can kind of side step along this complexity and you can address the data quality issues in a single way. >> Now, of course, we're seeing this huge trend in the market towards robotic process automation, RPA that adoption is accelerating. You see in UI paths, IPO, 35 plus billion dollars, valuation, Snowflake like numbers, nice comms there for sure. Ajay you've coined the phrase data RPA what is that in simple terms? >> Yeah I mean, it was born out of seeing how in our ecosystem (indistinct) community developers and customers general business users for wanting to adopt and deploy Io Tahoe's technology. And we could see that. I mean, there's not marketing out here we're not trying to automate that piece but wherever there is a process that was tied into some form of a manual overhead with handovers. And so on, that process is something that we were able to automate with Io Tahoe's technology and the employment of AI and machine learning technologies specifically to those data processes, almost as a precursor to getting into marketing automation or financial information automation. That's really where we're seeing the momentum pick up especially in the last six months. And we've kept it really simple with snowflake. We've kind of stepped back and said, well, the resource that a Snowflake can leverage here is the metadata. So how could we turn Snowflake into that repository of being the data catalog? And by the way, if you're a CIO looking to purchase the data catalog tool, stop there's no need to. Working with Snowflake we've enabled that intelligence to be gathered automatically and to be put to use within snowflake. So reducing that manual effort and I'm putting that data to work. And that's where we've packaged this with our AI machine learning specific to those data tasks. And it made sense that's what's resonated with our customers. >> You know, what's interesting here just a quick aside, as you know I've been watching snowflake now for awhile and of course the competitors come out and maybe criticize, "Why they don't have this feature. They don't have that feature." And snowflake seems to have an answer. And the answer oftentimes is, well ecosystem, ecosystem is going to bring that because we have a platform that's so easy to work with. So I'm interested Duncan in what kind of collaborations you are enabling with high quality data. And of course, your data sharing capability. >> Yeah so I think the ability to work on datasets isn't just limited to inside the business itself or even between different business units you're kind of discussing maybe with those silos before. When looking at this idea of collaboration. We have these challenges where we want to be able to exploit data to the greatest degree possible, but we need to maintain the security, the safety, the privacy, and governance of that data. It could be quite valuable. It could be quite personal depending on the application involved. One of these novel applications that we see between organizations of data sharing is this idea of data clean rooms. And these data clean rooms are safe, collaborative spaces which allow multiple companies or even divisions inside a company where they have particular privacy requirements to bring two or more data sets together, for analysis. But without having to actually share the whole unprotected data set with each other. And this lets you to you know, when you do this inside of Snowflake you can collaborate using standard tool sets. You can use all of our SQL ecosystem. You can use all of the data science ecosystem that works with Snowflake. You can use all of the BI ecosystem that works with snowflake. But you can do that in a way that keeps the confidentiality that needs to be presented inside the data intact. And you can only really do these kinds of collaborations especially across organization but even inside large enterprises, when you have good reliable data to work with, otherwise your analysis just isn't going to really work properly. A good example of this is one of our large gaming customers. Who's an appetizer. They were able to build targeted ads to acquire customers and measure the campaign impact in revenue but they were able to keep their data safe and secure while doing that while working with advertising partners. The business impact of that was they're able to get a lift of 20 to 25% in campaign effectiveness through better targeting and actually pull through into that of a reduction in customer acquisition costs because they just didn't have to spend as much on the forms of media that weren't working for them. >> So, Ajay I wonder, I mean with the way public policy is shaping out, you know, obviously GDPR started it in the States, California consumer privacy Act, and people are sort of taking the best of those. And there's a lot of differentiation but what are you seeing just in terms of governments really driving this move to privacy. >> Government, public sector, we're seeing a huge wake up an activity and across (indistinct), part of it has been data privacy. The other part of it is being more joined up and more digital rather than paper or form based. We've all got, so there's a waiting in the line, holding a form, taking that form to the front of the line and handing it over a desk. Now government and public sector is really looking to transform their services into being online (indistinct) self service. And that whole shift is then driving the need to emulate a lot of what the commercial sector is doing to automate their processes and to unlock the data from silos to put through into those processes. And another thing that I can say about this is the need for data quality is as Duncan mentions underpins all of these processes government, pharmaceuticals, utilities, banking, insurance. The ability for a chief marketing officer to drive a a loyalty campaign, the ability for a CFO to reconcile accounts at the end of the month to do a quick accurate financial close. Also the ability of a customer operations to make sure that the customer has the right details about themselves in the right application that they can sell. So from all of that is underpinned by data and is effective or not based on the quality of that data. So whilst we're mobilizing data to the Snowflake Cloud the ability to then drive analytics, prediction, business processes of that Cloud succeeds or fails on the quality of that data. >> I mean it really is table stakes. If you don't trust the data you're not going to use the data. The problem is it always takes so long to get to the data quality. There's all these endless debates about it. So we've been doing a fair amount of work and thinking around this idea of decentralized data. Data by its very nature is decentralized but the fault domains of traditional big data is that everything is just monolithic. And the organizations monolithic that technology's monolithic, the roles are very, you know, hyper specialized. And so you're hearing a lot more these days about this notion of a data fabric or what Jimit Devani calls a data mesh and we've kind of been leaning into that and the ability to connect various data capabilities whether it's a data, warehouse or a data hub or a data lake, that those assets are discoverable, they're shareable through API APIs and they're governed on a federated basis. And you're using now bringing in a machine intelligence to improve data quality. You know, I wonder Duncan, if you could talk a little bit about Snowflake's approach to this topic >> Sure so I'd say that making use of all of your data is the key kind of driver behind these ideas of beta meshes or beta fabrics? And the idea is that you want to bring together not just your kind of strategic data but also your legacy data and everything that you have inside the enterprise. I think I'd also like to kind of expand upon what a lot of people view as all of the data. And I think that a lot of people kind of miss that there's this whole other world of data they could be having access to, which is things like data from their business partners, their customers, their suppliers, and even stuff that's, more in the public domain, whether that's, you know demographic data or geographic or all these kinds of other types of data sources. And what I'd say to some extent is that the data Cloud really facilitates the ability to share and gain access to this both kind of, between organizations, inside organizations. And you don't have to, make lots of copies of the data and kind of worry about the storage and this federated, idea of governance and all these things that it's quite complex to kind of manage. The snowflake approach really enables you to share data with your ecosystem or the world without any latency with full control over what's shared without having to introduce new complexities or having complex interactions with APIs or software integration. The simple approach that we provide allows a relentless focus on creating the right data product to meet the challenges facing your business today. >> So Ajay, the key here is Duncan's talking about it my mind and in my cake takeaway is to simplicity. If you can take the complexity out of the equation you're going to get more adoption. It really is that simple. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think that, that whole journey, maybe five, six years ago the adoption of data lakes was a stepping stone. However, the Achilles heel there was the complexity that it shifted towards consuming that data from a data lake where there were many, many sets of data to be able to cure rate and to consume. Whereas actually, the simplicity of being able to go to the data that you need to do your role, whether you're in tax compliance or in customer services is key. And listen for snowflake by Io Tahoe. One thing we know for sure is that our customers are super smart and they're very capable. They're data savvy and they'll want to use whichever tool and embrace whichever Cloud platform that is going to reduce the barriers to solving what's complex about that data, simplifying that and using good old fashioned SQL to access data and to build products from it to exploit that data. So simplicity is key to it to allow people to make use of that data and CIO is recognize that. >> So Duncan, the Cloud obviously brought in this notion of DevOps and new methodologies and things like agile that's brought in the notion of DataOps which is a very hot topic right now basically DevOps applies to data about how does Snowflake think about this? How do you facilitate that methodology? >> So I agree with you absolutely that DataOps takes these ideas of agile development or agile delivery and have the kind of DevOps world that we've seen just rise and rise. And it applies them to the data pipeline, which is somewhere where it kind of traditionally hasn't happened. And it's the same kinds of messages. As we see in the development world it's about delivering faster development having better repeatability and really getting towards that dream of the data-driven enterprise, where you can answer people's data questions they can make better business decisions. And we have some really great architectural advantages that allow us to do things like allow cloning of data sets without having to copy them, allows us to do things like time travel so we can see what the data looked like at some point in the past. And this lets you kind of set up both your own kind of little data playpen as a clone without really having to copy all of that data so it's quick and easy. And you can also, again with our separation of storage and compute, you can provision your own virtual warehouse for dev usage. So you're not interfering with anything to do with people's production usage of this data. So these ideas, the scalability, it just makes it easy to make changes, test them, see what the effect of those changes are. And we've actually seen this, that you were talking a lot about partner ecosystems earlier. The partner ecosystem has taken these ideas that are inside Snowflake and they've extended them. They've integrated them with DevOps and DataOps tooling. So things like version control and get an infrastructure automation and things like Terraform. And they've kind of built that out into more of a DataOps products that you can make use of. So we can see there's a huge impact of these ideas coming into the data world. We think we're really well-placed to take advantage to them. The partner ecosystem is doing a great job with doing that. And it really allows us to kind of change that operating model for data so that we don't have as much emphasis on like hierarchy and change windows and all these kinds of things that are maybe viewed as a lot as fashioned. And we kind of taken the shift from this batch stage of integration into streaming continuous data pipelines in the Cloud. And this kind of gets you away from like a once a week or once a month change window if you're really unlucky to pushing changes in a much more rapid fashion as the needs of the business change. >> I mean those hierarchical organizational structures when we apply those to begin to that it actually creates the silos. So if you're going to be a silo buster, which Ajay I look at you guys in silo busters, you've got to put data in the hands of the domain experts, the business people, they know what data they want, if they have to go through and beg and borrow for a new data sets cetera. And so that's where automation becomes so key. And frankly the technology should be an implementation detail not the dictating factor. I wonder if you could comment on this. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think making the technologies more accessible to the general business users or those specialists business teams that's the key to unlocking. So it is interesting to see is as people move from organization to organization where they've had those experiences operating in a hierarchical sense, I want to break free from that. And we've been exposed to automation. Continuous workflows change is continuous in IT. It's continuous in business. The market's continuously changing. So having that flow across the organization of work, using key components, such as GitHub and similar towards your drive process, Terraform to build in, code into the process and automation and with Io Tahoe, leveraging all the metadata from across those fragmented sources is good to see how those things are coming together. And watching people move from organization to organization say, "Hey okay, I've got a new start. I've got my first hundred days to impress my new manager. What kind of an impact can I bring to this?" And quite often we're seeing that as, let me take away the good learnings from how to do it or how not to do it from my previous role. And this is an opportunity for me to bring in automation. And I'll give you an example, David, recently started working with a client in financial services. Who's an asset manager, managing financial assets. They've grown over the course of the last 10 years through M&A and each of those acquisitions have bought with its technical debt, it's own set of data, that multiple CRM systems now multiple databases, multiple bespoke in-house created applications. And when the new CIO came in and had a look at those he thought well, yes I want to mobilize my data. Yes, I need to modernize my data state because my CEO is now looking at these crypto assets that are on the horizon and the new funds that are emerging that's around digital assets and crypto assets. But in order to get to that where absolutely data underpins that and is the core asset cleaning up that that legacy situation mobilizing the relevant data into the Snowflake Cloud platform is where we're giving time back. You know, that is now taking a few weeks whereas that transitioned to mobilize that data start with that new clean slate to build upon a new business as a digital crypto asset manager as well as the legacy, traditional financial assets, bonds, stocks, and fixed income assets, you name it is where we're starting to see a lot of innovation. >> Tons of innovation. I love the crypto examples, NFTs are exploding and let's face it. Traditional banks are getting disrupted. And so I also love this notion of data RPA. Especially because Ajay I've done a lot of work in the RPA space. And what I would observe is that the early days of RPA, I call it paving the cow path, taking existing processes and applying scripts, letting software robots do its thing. And that was good because it reduced mundane tasks, but really where it's evolved is a much broader automation agenda. People are discovering new ways to completely transform their processes. And I see a similar analogy for the data operating model. So I'm wonder what do you think about that and how a customer really gets started bringing this to their ecosystem, their data life cycles. >> Sure. Yeah. Step one is always the same. It's figuring out for the CIO, the chief data officer, what data do I have? And that's increasingly something that they want to automate, so we can help them there and do that automated data discovery whether that is documents in the file share backup archive in a relational data store in a mainframe really quickly hydrating that and bringing that intelligence the forefront of what do I have, and then it's the next step of, well, okay now I want to continually monitor and curate that intelligence with the platform that I've chosen let's say Snowflake. In order such that I can then build applications on top of that platform to serve my internal external customer needs. and the automation around classifying data, reconciliation across different fragmented data silos building that in those insights into Snowflake. As you say, a little later on where we're talking about data quality, active DQ, allowing us to reconcile data from different sources as well as look at the integrity of that data. So then go on to remediation. I want to harness and leverage techniques around traditional RPA but to get to that stage, I need to fix the data. So remediating publishing the data in Snowflake, allowing analysis to be formed, performed in Snowflake but those are the key steps that we see and just shrinking that timeline into weeks, giving the organization that time back means they're spending more time on their customer and solving their customer's problem which is where we want them to be. >> Well, I think this is the brilliance of Snowflake actually, you know, Duncan I've talked to Benoit Dageville about this and your other co-founders and it's really that focus on simplicity. So I mean, that's you picked a good company to join in my opinion. So I wonder Ajay, if you could talk about some of the industry sectors that again are going to gain the most from data RPA, I mean traditional RPA, if I can use that term, a lot of it was back office, a lot of financial, what are the practical applications where data RPA is going to impact businesses and the outcomes that we can expect. >> Yes, so our drive is really to make that business general user's experience of RPA simpler and using no code to do that where they've also chosen Snowflake to build their Cloud platform. They've got the combination then of using a relatively simple scripting techniques such as SQL without no code approach. And the answer to your question is whichever sector is looking to mobilize their data. It seems like a cop-out but to give you some specific examples, David now in banking, where our customers are looking to modernize their banking systems and enable better customer experience through applications and digital apps, that's where we're seeing a lot of traction in this approach to pay RPA to data. And health care where there's a huge amount of work to do to standardize data sets across providers, payers, patients and it's an ongoing process there. For retail helping to to build that immersive customer experience. So recommending next best actions. Providing an experience that is going to drive loyalty and retention, that's dependent on understanding what that customer's needs, intent are, being able to provide them with the content or the offer at that point in time or all data dependent utilities. There's another one great overlap there with Snowflake where helping utilities telecoms, energy, water providers to build services on that data. And this is where the ecosystem just continues to expand. If we're helping our customers turn their data into services for their ecosystem, that's exciting. Again, they were more so exciting than insurance which it always used to think back to, when insurance used to be very dull and mundane, actually that's where we're seeing a huge amounts of innovation to create new flexible products that are priced to the day to the situation and risk models being adaptive when the data changes on events or circumstances. So across all those sectors that they're all mobilizing their data, they're all moving in some way but for sure form to a multi-Cloud setup with their IT. And I think with Snowflake and with Io Tahoe being able to accelerate that and make that journey simple and less complex is why we've found such a good partner here. >> All right. Thanks for that. And thank you guys both. We got to leave it there really appreciate Duncan you coming on and Ajay best of luck with the fundraising. >> We'll keep you posted. Thanks, David. >> All right. Great. >> Okay. Now let's take a look at a short video. That's going to help you understand how to reduce the steps around your DataOps let's watch. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the Globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of Kube Con and Cloud Native Con Europe 2021 virtual brought to you by Red Hat, the cloud native computing foundation and ecosystem partners. >> Hello, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Kube Con and Cloud Native Con 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, here with a great guest, I'm excited to talk to. His company, that he was part of founding CTO, was bought by Red Hat. Ali Golshan, Senior Director of Global Software Engineer at Red Hat, formerly CTO of StackRox. Ali thanks for coming on, I appreciate it. Thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having me excited to be here. >> So big acquisition in January, where we covered it on SiliconANGLE, You guys, security company, venture backed amplify Sequoya and on and on. Big part of Red Hat story in their security as developers want to shift left as they say and as more and more modern applications are being developed. So congratulations. So real quick, just quick highlight of what you guys do as a company and inside Red Hat. >> Sure, so the company's premise was built around how do you bring security the entire application life cycle. So StackRox focuses on sort of three big areas that we talk about. One is, how do you secure the supply chain? The second part of it is, how do you secure infrastructure and foster management and then the third part is now, how do you protect the workload that run on top of that infrastructure. So this is the part that aligned really well with Red Hat which is, Red Hat had wanted to take a lot of what we do around infrastructure, foster management configuration management and developer tools integrated into a lot of the things they do and obviously the workload protection part was a very seamless part of integrating us into the OpeShift part because we were built around cloud native constructs and obviously Red Hat having some of the foremost experts around cloud native sort of created a really great asset. >> Yeah, you guys got a great story. Obviously cloud native applications are rocking and rolling. You guys were in early serverless emerges, Kubernetes and then security in what I call the real time developer workflow. Ones that are building really fast, pushing code. Now it's called day two operations. So cloud native did two operations kind of encapsulates this new environment. You guys were right in the sweet spot of that. So this became quite the big deal, Red Hat saw an opportunity to bring you in. What was the motivation when you guys did the deal Was it like, "wow" this is a good fit. How did you react? What was the vibe at the StackRox when this was all going down? >> Yeah, so I think there's really three areas you look for, anytime a company comes up and sort of starts knocking on your door. One is really, is the team going to be the right fit? Is the culture going to be the right environment for the people? For us, that was a big part of what we were taking into consideration. We found Red Hat's general culture, how they approach people and sort of the overall approach the community was very much aligned with what we were trying to do. The second part of it was really the product fit. So we had from very early on started to focus purely on the Kubernetes components and doing everything we could, we call it sort of our product approach built in versus built it on and this is sort of a philosophy that Red Hat had adopted for a long time and it's a part of a lot of their developer tools, part of their shift left story as well as part of OpenShift. And then the third part of it was really the larger strategy of how do you go to market. So we were hitting that point where we were in triple digit customers and we were thinking about scalability and how to scale the company. And that was the part that also fit really well which was obviously, RedHat more and more hearing from their customers about the importance and the criticality of security. So that last part happened to be one part. We ended up spending a lot of time on it, ended up being sort of the outer three matches that made this acquisition happen. >> Well congratulations, always great to see startups in the right position. Good hustle, great product, great market. You guys did a great job, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Now, the big news here at KubeCon as Linux foundation open-source, you guys are announcing that you're open-sourcing at StackRox, this is huge news, obviously, you now work for an open-source company and so that was probably a part of it. Take us through the news, this is the top story here for this segment tickets through open-source. Take us through the news. >> Yeah, so traditionally StackRox was a proprietary tool. We do have open-source tooling but the entire platform in itself was a proprietary tool. This has been a number of discussions that we've had with the Red Hat team from the very beginning. And it sort of aligns around a couple of core philosophies. One is obviously Red Hat at its core being an open-source company and being very much plugged into the community and working with users and developers and engineers to be able to sort of get feedback and build better products. But I think the other part of it is that, I think a lot of us from a historic standpoint have viewed security to be a proprietary thing as we've always viewed the sort of magic algorithms or black boxes or some magic under the hood that really moved the needle. And that happens not to be the case anymore also because StackRox's philosophy was really built around Kubernetes and Built-in, we feel like one of the really great messages around wide open-source of security product is to build that trust with the community being able to expose, here's how the product works, here's how it integrates here are the actions it takes here's the ramifications or repercussions of some of the decisions you may make in the product. Those all I feel make for very good stories of how you build connection, trust and communication with the community and actually get feedback on it. And obviously at its core, the company being very much focused on Kubernetes developer tools, service manage, these are all open-source toolings obviously. So, for us it was very important to sort of talk the talk and walk the walk and this is sort of an easy decision at the end of the day for us to take the platform open-source. And we're excited about it because I think most still want a productized supported commercial product. So while it's great to have some of the tip of the spear customers look at it and adopt the open-source and be able to drive it themselves. We're still hearing from a lot of the customers that what they do want is really that support and that continuous management, maintenance and improvement around the product. So we're actually pretty excited. We think it's only going to increase our velocity and momentum into the community. >> Well, I got some questions on how it's going to work but I do want to get your comment because I think this is a pretty big deal. I had a conversation about 10 years ago with Doug Cutting, who was the founder of Hadoop, And he was telling me a story about a company he worked for, you know all this coding, they went under and the IP was gone, the software was gone and it was a story to highlight that proprietary software sometimes can never see the light of day and it doesn't continue. Here, you guys are going to continue the story, continue the code. How does that feel? What's your expectations? How's that going to work? I'm assuming that's what you're going to open it up which means that anyone can download the code. Is that right? Take us through how to first of all, do you agree with that this is going to stay alive and how's it going to work? >> Yeah, I mean, I think as a founder one of the most fulfilling things to have is something you build that becomes sustainable and stands the test of time. And I think, especially in today's world open-source is a tool that is in demand and only in a market that's growing is really a great way to do that. Especially if you have a sort of an established user base and the customer base. And then to sort of back that on top of thousands of customers and users that come with Red Hat in itself, gives us a lot of confidence that that's going to continue and only grow further. So the decision wasn't a difficult one, although transparently, I feel like even if we had pushed back I think Red Hat was pretty determined about open-source and we get anyway, but it's to say that we actually were in agreement to be able to go down that path. I do think that there's a lot of details to be worked out because obviously there's sort of a lot of the nuances in how you build product and manage it and maintain it and then, how do you introduce community feedback and community collaboration as part of open-source projects is another big part of it. I think the part we're really excited about is, is that it's very important to have really good community engagement, maintenance and response. And for us, even though we actually discussed this particular strategy during StackRox, one of the hindering aspects of that was really the resources required to be able to manage and maintain such a massive open-source project. So having Red Hat behind us and having a lot of this experience was very relevant. I think, as a, as a startup to start proprietary and suddenly open it and try to change your entire business model or go to market strategy commercialization, changed the entire culture of the company can sometimes create a lot of headwind. And as a startup, like sort of I feel like every year just trying not to die until you create that escape velocity. So those were I think some of the risk items that Red Hat was able to remove for us and as a result made the decision that much easier. >> Yeah, and you got the mothership with Red Hat they've done it before, they've been doing it for generations. You guys, you're in the startup, things are going crazy. It's like whitewater rafting, it's like everything's happening so fast. And now you got the community behind you cause you're going to have the CNC if you get Kubecon. I mean, it's a pretty great community, the support is amazing. I think the only thing the engineers might want to worry about is go back into the code base and clean things up a bit, as you start to see the code I'm like, wait a minute, their names are on it. So, it's always always a fun time and all serious now this is a big story on the DevSecOps. And I want to get your thoughts on this because kubernetes is still emerging, and DevOps is awesome, we've been covering that in for all of the life of theCUBE for the 11 years now and the greatness of DevOps but now DevSecOps is critical and Kubernetes native security is what people are looking at. When you look at that trend only continuing, what's your focus? What do you see? Now that you're in Red Hat as the CTO, former CTO of StackRox and now part of the Red Hat it's going to get bigger and stronger Kubernetes native and shifting left-hand or DevSecOps. What's your focus? >> Yeah, so I would say our focus is really around two big buckets. One is, Kubernetes native, sort of a different way to think about it as we think about our roadmap planning and go-to-market strategy is it's mutually exclusive with being in infrastructure native, that's how we think about it and as a startup we really have to focus on an area and Kubernetes was a great place for us to focus on because it was becoming the dominant orchestration engine. Now that we have the resources and the power of Red Hat behind us, the way we're thinking about this is infrastructure native. So, thinking about cloud native infrastructure where you're using composable, reusable, constructs and objects, how do you build potential offerings or features or security components that don't rely on third party tools or components anymore? How do you leverage the existing infrastructure itself to be able to conduct some of these traditional use cases? And one example we use for this particular scenario is networking. Networking, the way firewalling in segmentation was typically done was, people would tweak IP tables or they would install, for example, a proxy or a container that would terminate MTLS or become inline and it would create all sorts of sort of operational and risk overhead for users and for customers. And one of the things we're really proud of as sort of the company that pioneered this notion of cloud native security is if you just leverage network policies in Kubernetes, you don't have to be inline you don't have to have additional privileges, you don't have to create additional risks or operational overhead for users. So we're taking those sort of core philosophies and extending them. The same way we did to Kubernetes all the way through service manager, we're doing the same sorts of things Istio being able to do a lot of the things people are traditionally doing through for example, proxies through layer six and seven, we want to do through Istio. And then the same way for example, we introduced a product called GoDBledger which was an open-source tool, which would basically look at a yaml on helm charts and give you best practices responses. And it's something you we want for example to your get repositories. We want to take those sort of principles, enabling developers, giving them feedback, allowing them not to break their existing workflows and leveraging components in existing infrastructure to be able to sort of push security into cloud native. And really the two pillars we look at are ensuring we can get users and customers up and running as quickly as possible and reduce as much as possible operational overhead for them over time. So we feel these two are really at the core of open-sourcing in building into the infrastructure, which has sort of given us momentum over the last six years and we feel pretty confident with Red Hat's help we can even expand that further. >> Yeah, I mean, you bring up a good point and it's certainly as you get more scale with Red Hat and then the customer base, not only in dealing with the threat detection around containers and cloud native applications, you got to kind of build into the life cycle and you've got to figure out, okay, it's not just Kubernetes anymore, it's something else. And you've got advanced cluster security with Red Hat they got OpenShift cloud platform, you're going to have managed services so this means you're going to have scale, right? So, how do you view that? Because now you're going to have, you guys at the center of the advanced cluster security paradigm for Red Hat. That's a big deal for them and they've got a lot of R and D and a lot of, I wouldn't say R and D, but they got emerging technologies developing around that. We covered that in depth. So when you start to get into advanced cluster, it's compliance too, it's not just threat detection. You got insights telemetry, data acquisition, so you have to kind of be part of that now. How do you guys feel about that? Are you up for the task? >> Yeah, I hope so it's early days but we feel pretty confident about it, we have a very good team. So as part of the advanced cluster security we work also very closely with the advanced cluster management team in Red Hat because it's not just about security, it's about, how do you operationalize it, how do you manage it and maintain it and to your point sort of run it longterm at scale. The compliance part of it is a very important part. I still feel like that's in its infancy and these are a lot of conversations we're having internally at Red Hat, which is, we all feel that compliance is going to sort of more from the standard benchmarks you have from CIS or particular compliance requirements like the power, of PCI or Nest into how do you create more flexible and composable policies through a unified language that allows you to be able to create more custom or more useful things specific to your business? So this is actually, an area we're doing a lot of collaboration with the advanced cluster management team which is in that, how do you sort of bring to light a really easy way for customers to be able to describe and sort of abstract policies and then at the same time be able to actually and enforce them. So we think that's really the next key point of what we have to accomplish to be able to sort of not only gain scale, but to be able to take this notion of, not only detection in response but be able to actually build in what we call declarative security into your infrastructure. And what that means is, is to be able to really dictate how you want your applications, your services, your infrastructure to be configured and run and then anything that is sort of conflicting with that is auto responded to and I think that's really the larger vision that with Red Hat, we're trying to accomplish. >> And that's a nice posture to have you build it in, get it built in, you have the declarative models then you kind of go from there and then let the automation kick in. You got insights coming in from Red Hat. So all these things are kind of evolving. It's still early days and I think it was a nice move by Red Hat, so congratulations. Final question for you is, as you prepare to go to the next generation KubeCon is also seeing a lot more end user participation, people, you know, cloud native is going mainstream, when I say mainstream, seeing beyond the hyperscalers in the early adopters, Kubernetes and other infrastructure control planes are coming in you start to see the platforms emerge. Nobody wants another security tool, they want platforms that enable applications handle tools. As it gets more complicated, what's going to be the easy button in security cloud native? What's the approach? What's your vision on what's next? >> Yeah so, I don't know if there is an easy button in security and I think part of it is that there's just such a fragmentation and use cases and sort of designs and infrastructure that doesn't exist, especially if you're dealing with such a complex stack. And not only just a complex stack but a potentially use cases that not only span runtime but they deal with you deployment annual development life cycle. So the way we think about it is more sort of this notion that has been around for a long time which is the shared responsibility model. Security is not security's job anymore. Especially, because security teams probably cannot really keep up with the learning curve. Like they have to understand containers then they have to understand Kubernetes and Istio and Envoy and cloud platforms and APIs. and there's just too much happening. So the way we think about it is if you deal with security a in a declarative version and if you can state things in a way where how infrastructure is ran is properly configured. So it's more about safety than security. Then what you can do is push a lot of these best practices back as part of your gift process. Involve developers, engineers, the right product security team that are responsible for day-to-day managing and maintaining this. And the example we think about is, is like CVEs. There are plenty of, for example, vulnerability tools but the CVEs are still an unsolved problem because, where are they, what is the impact? Are they actually running? Are they being exploited in the wild? And all these things have different ramifications as you span it across the life cycle. So for us, it's understanding context, understanding assets ensuring how the infrastructure has to handle that asset and then ensuring that the route for that response is sent to the right team, so they can address it properly. And I think that's really our larger vision is how can you automate this entire life cycle? So, the information is routed to the right teams, the right teams are appending it to the application and in the future, our goal is not to just pardon the workload or the compute environment, but use this information to action pardon application themselves and that creates that additional agility and scalability. >> Yeah it's in the lifecycle of that built in right from the beginning, more productivity, more security and then, letting everything take over on the automation side. Ali congratulations on the acquisition deal with Red Hat, buyout that was great for them and for you guys. Take a minute to just quickly answer final final question for the folks watching here. The big news is you're open-sourcing StackRox, so that's a big news here at KubeCon. What can people do to get involved? Well, just share a quick quick commercial for what people can do to get involved? What are you guys looking for? Take a pledge to the community? >> Yeah, I mean, what we're looking for is more involvement in direct feedback from our community, from our users, from our customers. So there's a number, obviously the StackRox platform itself being open-source, we have other open-source tools like the KubeLinter. What we're looking for is feedback from users as to what are the pain points that they're trying to solve for. And then give us feedback as to how we're not addressing those or how can we better design our systems? I mean, this is the sort of feedback we're looking for and naturally with more resources, we can be a lot faster in response. So send us feedback good or bad. We would love to hear it from our users and our customers and get a better sense of what they're looking for. >> Innovation out in the open love it, got to love open-source going next gen, Ali Golshan Senior Director of Global Software Engineering the new title at Red Hat former CTO and founder of StackRox which spread had acquired in January, 2021. Ali thanks for coming on congratulations. >> Thanks for having, >> Okay, so keeps coverage of Kube Con cloud native Con 2021. I'm John Furrie, your host. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

>> (soft upbeat music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's the cube with digital coverage of Ansible Fest 2020, brought to you by RedHat. >> Hello, welcome to the cubes coverage of Ansible Fest 2020. We're not in person, we're virtual. I'm John Furrier , your host of theCube. We've got a great power panel here of RedHat engineers. We have Brad Thorton, Senior Principle Software Engineer for Ansible networking. Adam Miller, Senior Principle Software Engineer for Security and Jill Rouleau, who's the Senior Software Engineer for Ansible Cloud. Thanks for joining me today. Appreciate it. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks. >> Good to be here. >> We're not in person this year because of COVID, a lot going on but still a lot of great news coming out of Ansible Fest this year. Last year, you guys launched a lot since last year. It's been awesome. Launched the new platform. The automation platform, grown the collections, certified collections community from five supported platforms to over 50, launched a lot of automation services catalog. Brad let's start with you. Why are customers successful with Ansible in networking? >> Why are customers successful with Ansible in networking? Well, let's take a step back to a bit of classic network engineering, right? Lots of CLI interaction with the terminal, a real opportunity for human error there. Managing thousands of devices from the CLI becomes very difficult. I think one of the reasons why Ansible has done well in the networking space and why a lot of network engineers find it very easy to use is because you can still see an attack at the CLI. But what we have the ability to do is pull information from the same COI that you were using manually, and showed that as structured data and then let you return that structured data and push it back to the configuration. So what you get when you're using Ansible is a way to programmatically interface and do configuration management across your entire fleet. It brings consistency and stability, and speed really to network configuration management. >> You know, one of the big hottest areas is, you know, I always ask the folks in the cloud what's next after cloud and pretty much unanimously it's edge, and edge is super important around automation, Brad. What's your thoughts on, as people start thinking about, okay, I need to have edge devices. How does automation play into that? And cause networking, edge it's kind of hand in hand there. So what's your thought on that? >> Yeah, for sure. It really depends on what infrastructure you have at the edge. You might be deploying servers at the edge. You may be administering IOT devices and really how you're directing that traffic either into edge compute or back to your data center. I think one of the places Ansible is going to be really critical is administering the network devices along that path from the edge, from IOT back to the data center, or to the cloud. >> Jill, when you have a Cloud, what's your thoughts on that? Because when you think about Cloud and Multicloud, that's coming around the horizon, you're looking at kind of the operational model. We talked about this a lot last year around having Cloud ops on premises and in the Cloud. What should customers think about when they look at the engineering challenges and the development challenges around Cloud? >> So cloud gets used for a lot of different things, right? But if we step back Cloud just means any sort of distributed applications, whether it's on prem in your own data center, on the edge, in a public hosted environment, and automation is critical for making those things work, when you have these complex applications that are distributed across, whether it's a rack, a data center or globally. You need a tool that can help you make sense of all of that. You've got to... We can't manage things just with, Oh, everything is on one box anymore. Cloud really just means that things have been exploded out and broken up into a bunch of different pieces. And there's now a lot more architectural complexity, no matter where you're running that. And so I think if you step back and look at it from that perspective, you can actually apply a lot of the same approaches and philosophies to these new challenges as they come up without having to reinvent the wheel of how you think about these applications. Just because you're putting them in a new environment, like at the edge or in a public Cloud or on a new, private on premise solution. >> It's interesting, you know, I've been really loving the cloud native action lately, especially with COVID, we're seeing a lot of more modern apps come out of that. If I could follow up there, how do you guys look at tools like Terraform and how does Ansible compare to that? Because you guys are very popular in the cloud configuration, you look at cloud native, Jill, your thoughts. >> Yeah. So Terraform and tools like that. Things like cloud formation or heat in the OpenStack world, they do really, really great at things like deploying your apps and setting up your stack and getting them out there. And they're really focused on that problem space, which is a hard problem space that they do a fantastic job with where Ansible tends to come in and a tool like Ansible is what do you do on day two with that application? How do you run an update? How do you manage it in the longterm of something like 60% of the workloads or cloud spend at least on AWS is still just EC2 instances. What do you do with all of those EC2 instances once you've deployed them, once they're in a stack, whether you're managing it, whatever tool you're managing it with, Ansible is a phenomenal way of getting in there and saying, okay, I have these instances, I know about them, but maybe I just need to connect out and run an update or add a package or reconfigure a service that's running on there. And I think you can glue these things together and use Ansible with these other stack deployment based tools really, really effectively. >> Real quick, just a quick followup on that. what's the big pain point for developers right now when they're looking at these tools? Because they see the path, what are some of the pain points that they're living right now that they're trying to overcome? >> I think one of the problems kind of coincidentally is we have so many tools. We're in kind of a tool explosion in the cloud space, right now. You could piece together as as many tools to manage your stack, as you have components in your stack and just making sense of what that landscape looks like right now and figuring out what are the right tools for the job I'm trying to do, that can be flexible and that are not going to box me into having to spend half of my engineering time, just managing my tools and making sense of all of that is a significant effort and job on its own. >> Yes, too many may add, would choke in years ago in the big data search, the tools, the tool train, one we call the tool shed, after a while, you don't know what's in the back, what you're using every day. People get comfortable with the right tools, but the platform becomes a big part of that thinking holistically as a system. And Adam, this comes back to security. There's more tools in the security space than ever before. Talking about tool challenges, security is the biggest tool shed everyone's got tools they'd buy everything, but you got to look at, what a platform looks like and developers just want to have the truth. And when you look at the configuration management piece of it, security is critical. What's your thoughts on the source of truth when it comes into play for these security appliances? >> So these are... Source of truth piece is kind of an interesting one because this is going to be very dependent on the organization. What type of brownfield environment they've developed, what type of things that they rely on, and what types of data they store there. So we have the ability for various sources of truth to come in for your inventory source and the types of information you store with that. This could be tagged information on a series of cloud instances or series about resources. This could be something you store in a network management tool or a CMDB. This could even be something that you put into a privilege access management system, such as, CyberArk or hashivault. Like those are the things and because of Ansible flexibility and because of the way that everything is put together in a pluggable nature, we have the capability to actually bring in all of these components from anywhere in a brownfield environment, in a preexisting infrastructure, as well as new decisions that are being made for the enterprise as I move forward. And, and we can bring all that together and be that infrastructure glue, be that automation component that can tie all these disjoint loosely coupled, or complete disc couple pieces, together. And that's kind of part of that, that security posture, remediation various levels of introspection into your environment, these types of things, as we go forward, and that's kind of what we're focusing on doing with this. >> What kind of data is stored in the source of truth? >> I mean... So what type of data? This could be credential. It could be single use credential access. This could be your inventory data for your systems, what target systems you're trying to do. It could be, various attributes of different systems to be able to classify them ,and codify them in different ways. It's kind of kind of depending, be configuration data. You know, we have the ability with some of the work that Brad and his team are doing to actually take unstructured data, make it structured, bullet into whatever your chosen source of truth is, store it, and then utilize that to, kind of decompose it into different vendors, specific syntax representations and those types of things. So we have a lot of different capability there as well. >> Brad, you were mentioned, do you have a talk on parsing, can you elaborate on that? And why should network operators care about that? >> Yeah, welcome to 2020. We're still parsing network configuration and operational state. This is an interesting one. If you had asked me years ago, did I think that we would be investing development time into parsing with Ansible network configurations? I would have said, "Well, I certainly hope not. "I hope programmability of network devices and the vendors "really have their API's in order." But I think what we're seeing is network containers are still comfortable with the command line. They're still very familiar with the command line and when it comes time to do operational state assessment and health assessment of your network, engineers are comfortable going to the command line and running show commands. So really what we're trying to do in the parsing space is not author brand new parking and parsing engine ourselves, but really leverage a lot of the open source tools that are already out there bringing them into Ansible, so network engineers can now harvest the critical information from usher operational state commands on their network devices. And then once they've gotten to the structure data, things get really interesting because now you can do entrance criteria checks prior to doing configuration changes, right? So if you want to ensure a network device has a very particular operational state, all the BGP neighbors are, for example before pushing configuration changes, what we have the ability to do now is actually parse the command that you would have run from the command line. Use that within a decision tree in your Ansible playbook, and only move forward when the configuration changes. If the box is healthy. And then once the configuration changes are made at the end, you run those same health checks to ensure that you're in a speck can do a steady state and are production ready. So parsing is the mechanism. It's the data that you get from the parsing that's so critical. >> If I had to ask you real quick, just while it's on my mind. You know, people want to know about automation. It's top of mind use case. What are some of these things around automation and configuration parsing, whether it's parsing to other configuration manager, what are the big challenges around automation? Because it's the Holy grail. Everyone wants it now. What are the couches? where's the hotspots that needs to be jumped on and managed carefully? Or the easiest low hanging fruit? >> Well, there's really two pieces to it, right? There's the technology. And then there's the culture. And, and we talk really about a culture of automation, bringing the team with you as you move into automation, ensuring that everybody has the tools and they're familiar with how automation is going to work and how their day job is going to change because of automation. So I think once the organization embraces automation and the culture is in place. On the technology side, low hanging fruit automation can be as simple as just using Ansible to push the commands that you would have previously pushed to the device. And then as your organization matures, and you mature along this kind of path of network automation, you're dealing with larger pieces, larger sections of the configuration. And I think over time, network engineers will become data managers, right? Because they become less concerned about the network, the vendors specific configuration, and they're really managing the data that makes up the configuration. And I think once you hit that part, you've won at automation because you can move forward with Ansible resource modules. You're well positioned to do NETCONF for RESTCONF or... Right once you've kind of grown to that it's the data that we need to be concerned about and it could fit (indistinct) and the operational state management piece, you're going to go through a transformation on the networking side. >> So you mentioned-- >> And one thing to note there, if I may, I feel like a piece of this too, is you're able to actually bridge teams because of the capability of Ansible, the breadth of technologies that we've had integrations with and our ability to actually bridge that gap between different technologies, different teams. Once you have that culture of automation, you can start to realize these DevOps and DevSecOps workflow styles that are top of everybody's mind these days. And that's something that I think is very powerful. And I like to try to preach when I have the opportunity to talk to folks about what we can do, and the fact that we have so much capability and so many integrations across the entire industry. >> That's a great point. DevSecOps is totally a hop on. When you have software and hardware, it becomes interesting. There's a variety of different equipment, on the security automation. What kind of security appliances can you guys automate? >> As of today, we are able to do endpoint management systems, enterprise firewalls, security information, and event management systems. We're able to do security orchestration, automation, remediation systems, privileged access management systems. We're doing some threat intelligence platforms. And we've recently added to the I'm sorry, did I say intrusion detection? We have intrusion detection and prevention, and we recently added endpoint security management. >> Huge, huge value there. And I think everyone's wants that. Jill, I've got to ask you about the Cloud because the modules came up. What use cases do you see the Ansible modules in for the public cloud? Because you got a lot of cloud native folks in public cloud, you've got enterprises lifting and shifting, there's a hybrid and multicloud horizon here. What's some of the use cases where you see those Ansible modules fitting well with public level. >> The modules that we have in public cloud can work across all of those things, you know. In our public clouds, we have support for Amazon web services, Azure GCP, and they all support your main services. You can spin up a Lambda, you can deploy ECS clusters, build AMI, all of those things. And then once you get all of that up there, especially looking at AWS, which is where I spend the most time, you get all your EC2 instances up, you can now pull that back down into Ansible, build an inventory from that. And seamlessly then use Ansible to manage those instances, whether they're running Linux or windows or whatever distro you might have them running, we can go straight from having deployed all of those services and resources to managing them and going between your instances in your traditional operating system management or those instances and your cloud services. And if you've got multiple clouds or if you still have on prem, or if you need to, for some reason, add those remote cloud instances into some sort of on-prem hardware load balancer, security endpoint, we can go between all of those things and glue everything together, fairly seamlessly. You can put all of that into tower and have one kind of view of your cloud and your hardware and your on-prem and being able to move things between them. >> Just put some color commentary on what that means for the customer in terms of, is it pain reduction, time savings? How would you classify their value? >> I mean, both. Instead of having to go between a number of different tools and say, "Oh, well for my on-prem, I have to use this. "But as soon as I shift over to a cloud, "I have to use these tools. "And, Oh, I can't manage my Linux instances with this tool "that only knows how to speak to, the EC2 to API." You can use one tool for all of these things. So like we were saying, bring all of your different teams together, give them one tool and one view for managing everything end to end. I think that's, that's pretty killer. >> All right. Now I get to the fun part. I want you guys to weigh in on the Kubernetes. Adam, if you can start with you, we'll start with you go in and tell us why is Kubernetes more important now? What does it mean? A lot of hype continues to be out there. What's the real meet around Kubernetes what's going on? >> I think the big thing is the modernization of the application development delivery. When you talk about Kubernetes and OpenShift and the capabilities we have there, and you talk about the architecture, you can build a lot of the tooling that you used to have to maintain, to be able to deliver sophisticated resilient architectures in your application stack, are now baked into the actual platform, so the container platform itself takes care of that for you and removes that complexity from your operations team, from your development team. And then they can actually start to use these primitives and kind of achieve what the cloud native compute foundation keeps calling cloud native applications and the ability to develop and do this in a way that you are able to take yourself out of some of the components you used to have to babysit a lot. And that becomes in also with the OpenShift operator framework that came out of originally Coral S, and if you go to operator hub, you're able to see these full lifecycle management stacks of infrastructure components that you don't... You no longer have to actually, maintain a large portion of what you start to do. And so the operator SDK itself, are actually developing these operators. Ansible is one of the automation capabilities. So there's currently three supported there's Ansible, there's one that you just have full access to the Golang API and then helm charts. So Ansible's specifically obviously being where we focus. We have our collection content for the... carries that core, and then also ReHat to OpenShift certified collection's coming out in, I think, a month or so. Don't hold me to the timeline. I'm shoving in trouble for that one, but we have those things going to come out. Those will be baked into the operator's decay that we fully supported by our customer base. And then we can actually start utilizing the Ansible expertise of your operations team to container native of the infrastructure components that you want to put into this new platform. And then Ansible itself is able to build that capability of automating the entire Kubernetes or OpenShift cluster in a way that allows you to go into a brownfield environment and automate your existing infrastructure, along with your more container native, futuristic next generation, net structure. >> Jill this brings up the question. Why don't you just use native public cloud resources versus Kubernetes and Ansible? What's the... What should people know about where you use that, those resources? >> Well, and it's kind of what Adam was saying with all of those brownfield deployments and to the same point, how many workloads are still running just in EC2 instances or VMs on the cloud. There's still a lot of tech out there that is not ready to be made fully cloud native or containerized or broken up. And with OpenShift, it's one more layer that lets you put everything into a kind of single environment instead of having to break things up and say, "Oh, well, this application has to go here. "And this application has to be in this environment.' You can do that across a public cloud and use a little of this component and a little of that component. But if you can bring everything together in OpenShift and manage it all with the same tools on the same platform, it simplifies the landscape of, I need to care about all of these things and look at all of these different things and keep track of these and are my tools all going to work together and are my tools secure? Anytime you can simplify that part of your infrastructure, I think is a big win. >> John: You know, I think about-- >> The one thing, if I may, Jill spoke to this, I think in the way that a architectural, infrastructure person would, but I want to try to really quick take the business analyst component of it as the hybrid component. If you're trying to address multiple footprints, both on prem, off prem, multiple public clouds, if you're running OpenShift across all of them, you have that single, consistent deployment and development footprint for everywhere. So I don't disagree with anything they said, I just wanted to focus specifically on... That piece is something that I find personally unique, as that was a problem for me in a past life. And that kind of speaks to me. >> Well, speaking of past lives-- >> Having me as an infrastructure person, thank you. >> Yeah. >> Well, speaking of past lives, OpenStack, you look at Jill with OpenStack, we've been covering the Cuba thing when OpenStack was rolling out back in the day, but you can also have private cloud. Where you used to... There's a lot of private cloud out there. How do you talk about that? How do people understand using public cloud versus the private cloud aspect of Ansible? >> Yeah, and I think there is still a lot of private cloud out there and I don't think that's a bad thing. I've kind of moved over onto the public cloud side of things, but there are still a lot of use cases that a lot of different industries and companies have that don't make sense for putting into public cloud. So you still have a lot of these on-prem open shift and on-prem OpenStack deployments that make a ton of sense and that are solving a bunch of problems for these folks. And I think they can all work together. We have Ansible that can support both of those. If you're a telco, you're not going to put your network function, virtualization on USC as to one in spot instances, right? When you call nine one one, you don't want that going through the public cloud. You want that to be on dedicated infrastructure, that's reliable and well-managed and engineered for that use case. So I think we're going to see a lot of ongoing OpenStack and on-prem OpenShift, especially with edge, enabling those types of use cases for a long time. And I think that's great. >> I totally agree with you. I think private cloud is not a bad thing at all. Things that are only going to accelerate my opinion. You look at the VM world, they talked about the telco cloud and you mentioned edge when five G comes out, you're going to have basically have private clouds everywhere, I guess, in my opinion. But anyway, speaking of VMware, could you talk about the Ansible VMware module real quick? >> Yeah, so we have a new collection that we'll be debuting at Ansible Fest this year bore the VMware REST API. So the existing VMware modules that we have usually SOAP API for VMware, and they rely on an external Python library that VMware provides, but with these fare 6.0 and especially in vSphere 6.5, VMware has stepped up with a REST API end point that we find is a lot more performance and offers a lot of options. So we built a new collection of VMware modules that will take advantage of that. That's brand new, it's a lighter way. It's much faster, we'll get better performance out of it. You know, reduced external requirements. You can install it and get started faster. And especially with these sphere seven, continuing to build on this REST API, we're going to see more and more interfaces being exposed so that we can take advantage. We plan to expand it as new interfaces are being exposed in that API, it's compatible with all of the existing modules. You can go back and forth, use your existing playbooks and start introducing these. But I think especially on the performance side, and especially as we get these larger clouds and more cloud deployments, edge clouds, where you have these private clouds and lots and lots of different places, the performance benefits of this new collection that we're trying to build is going to be really, really powerful for a lot of folks. >> Awesome. Brad, we didn't forget about you. We're going to bring you back in. Network automation has moved towards the resource modules. Why should people care about them? >> Yeah. Resource modules, excuse me. Probably I think having been a network engineer for so long, I think some of the most exciting work that has gone into Ansible network over the past year and a half, what the resource modules really do for you is they will reach out to network devices. They will pull back that network native, that vendor native configuration. While the resource module actually does the parsing for you. So there's none of that with the resource modules. And we returned structured data back to the user that represents the configuration. Going back to your question about source of truth. You can take that structure data, maybe for your interface CONFIG, your OSPF CONFIG, your access list CONFIG, and you can store that data in your source of truth under source of truth. And then where you are moving forward, is you really spend time as every engineer managing the data that makes up the configuration, and you can share that data across different platforms. So if you were to look at a lot of the resource modules, the data model that they support, it's fairly consistent between vendors. As an example, I can pull OSPF configuration from one vendor and with very small changes, push that OSPF configuration to a different vendor's platform. So really what we've tried to do with the resource modules is normalize the data model across vendors. It'll never be a hundred percent because there's functionality that exists in one platform that doesn't exist and that's exposed through the configuration, but where we could, we have normalized the data model. So I think it's really introducing the concept of network configuration management through data management and not through CLI commands anymore. >> Yeah, that's a great point. It just expands the network automation vision. And one of the things that's interesting here in this panel is you're talking about, cloud holistically, public multicloud, private hybrid security network automation as a platform, not just a tool, we're still going to have all kind of tools out there. And then the importance of automating the edge. I mean, that's a network game Brad. I mean, it's a data problem, right? I mean, we all know about networking, moving packets from here to there, but automating the data is critical and you give have bad data and you don't have... If you have misinformation, it sounds like our current politics, but you know, bad information is bad automation. I mean, what's your thoughts? How do you share that concept to developers out there? What should they be thinking about in terms of the data quality? >> I think that's the next thing we have to tackle as network engineers. It's not, do I have access to the data? You can get the data now for resource modules, you can get the data from NETCONF, from RESTCONF, you can get it from OpenConfig, you can get it from parsing. The question really is, how do you ensure the integrity and the quality of the data that is making up your configurations and the consistency of the data that you're using to look at operational state. And I think this is where the source of truth really becomes important. If you look at Git as a viable source of truth, you've got all the tools and the mechanisms within Git to use that as your source of truth for network configuration. So network engineers are actually becoming developers in the sense that they're using Git ops to worklow to manage configuration moving forward. It's just really exciting to see that transformation happen. >> Great panel. Thanks for everyone coming on, I appreciate it. We'll just end this by saying, if you guys could just quickly summarize Ansible fast 2020 virtual, what should people walk away with? What should your customers walk away with this year? What's the key points. Jill, we'll start with you. >> Hopefully folks will walk away with the idea that the Ansible community includes so many different folks from all over, solving lots of different, interesting problems, and that we can all come together and work together to solve those problems in a way that is much more effective than if we were all trying to solve them individually ourselves, by bringing those problems out into the open and working together, we get a lot done. >> Awesome, Brad? >> I'm going to go with collections, collections, collections. We introduced in last year. This year, they are real. Ansible2.10 that just came out is made up of collections. We've got certified collections on automation. We've got cloud collections, network collections. So they are here. They're the real thing. And I think it just gets better and deeper and more content moving forward. All right, Adam? >> Going last is difficult. Especially following these two. They covered a lot of ground and I don't really know that I have much to add beyond the fact that when you think about Ansible, don't think about it in a single context. It is a complete automation solution. The capability that we have is very extensible. It's very pluggable, which has a standing ovation to the collections and the solutions that we can come up with collectively. Thanks to ourselves. Everybody in the community is almost infinite. A few years ago, one of the core engineers did a keynote speech using Ansible to automate Philips hue light bulbs. Like this is what we're capable of. We can automate the fortune 500 data centers and telco networks. And then we can also automate random IOT devices around your house. Like we have a lot of capability here and what we can do with the platform is very unique and something special. And it's very much thanks to the community, the team, the open source development way. I just, yeah-- >> (Indistinct) the open source of truth, being collaborative all is what it makes up and DevOps and Sec all happening together. Thanks for the insight. Appreciate the time. Thank you. >> Thank you. I'm John Furrier, you're watching theCube here for Ansible Fest, 2020 virtual. Thanks for watching. (soft upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and back in 2013, when it was becoming pretty obvious that the cloud was going to have a major impact on our industry, the IT industry, I wrote at the time that the way incumbents were going to have to compete was to really go into vertical markets and build ecosystems for their own clouds, and that's exactly what IBM did late last year, when it announced a major partnership with Bank of America in the financial services cloud, and guess what, Hillery Hunter is back in the house, she's the vice president and CTO of the IBM cloud, and an IBM fellow, Hillery, great to see you again, thanks for coming back on. >> Thanks so much for having me again, always a pleasure to be here. >> So we had an awesome conversation, I think we got into the FS cloud a little bit, but as I was saying, you guys announced last year, Bank of America, but let me start here. Why does the industry need a financial services cloud? >> Yeah, you know, it's key that we ground ourselves in that question of why a financial services cloud, and I think it really goes back to the sensitivity of the workloads and the data that that industry stewards. The financial services industry stewards the data of millions and millions of customers, and they are heavily regulated because of that, and they handle very high value transactions, and being able to take that context and translate that into what does it mean to do high value transactions, sensitive data, consumer data computing, also with all those benefits of elasticity and the value proposition of different deployment locations, is really what financial cloud is about. And those needs of that industry are a little bit different, the regulations are higher, the bar and data protection is higher, and the need to interlock across workload characteristics and the cloud deployment is a bit different. And so, we are bringing what we know about that industry to bear in the context also of cloud computing. >> Okay, so you're making some new announcements, there's some hard news here, but I want to know, if you're an executive, or business leader in the financial services industry, what's in it for me in these announcements? >> Yeah, what's in it for you is that we are moving into the next phase of financial services cloud in making the policy framework that has been developed through an enormous amount of work available to additional industry participants, and we're also moving into a phase of global expansion, and so being able to take this value proposition of an end to end considered secure and confine environment for financial services, out to more players in the industry, out to additional geographies and deployment locations, it's an exciting moment because everyone's really not looking just for a cloud, but they're looking for a choice of deployment locations, they're looking to move more workload to the cloud, and this is really about providing a cloud solution that more workload can move to, not just the first couple phases of analytics and things like that, but also moving into more transformation of the core of banking and the core of banking business, so it is about getting more workload to the cloud, getting that done faster, and getting it done at a net improved security and compliance posture. >> Got it, so I want to ask you about some learnings, now you're the double whammy of learnings here. When you announced the collaboration with B of A, obviously one of the top banks of the world, you've obviously made some progress since then, but the other part of that whammy was COVID. So what did you learn from the collaboration with B of A, and have you guys, how have you expanded your thinking BC, from before COVID, versus AC, after COVID? >> Yeah, you know, the initial motivation for this program was about having trust and transparency in public cloud, and having a public cloud suited also to sensitive and even core banking workloads. We have seen this conversation and the need for it and the urgency for it only pick up since COVID. A lot of things in the world kind of took a pause, but cloud computing really accelerated. We're seeing that businesses need to digitally transform their banking, so core banking transformation is a very hot topic. They need to deal with elasticity, we worked with banks during COVID that were having to suddenly stand up their national equivalent of the Payroll Protection Program. Banks that had to suddenly have three times the elasticity, because all of a sudden consumers were interacting with them purely digitally. And cloud can enable all of those kind of things, and so COVID has really accelerated the motivation toward banking in the cloud, and also toward core banking transformation, which is at the heart of setting a very high security bar in public cloud, to be able to also enable those kind of workloads. >> Yeah, so many changes as a result of COVID, I mean the volume of loans, like you said, everything was digital. I know a lot of older people that always still like to go into the bank, that like to see people, and they knew people and people knew them, well they had no choice but to go digital, so that's huge, if you didn't have a digital solution, and cloud is fundamental in that equation. But let's get into it a little bit more. We talked a little about this at IBM Think, but what are the key attributes that make the IBM financial services cloud suitable for financial services, is it the certifications, I wonder if you could add some color there. >> Yeah, so the key elements of the financial services cloud program are number one, a policy framework, which is a set of controls that are customized to the financial services industry, so this isn't about some existing standard, this is a customization of controls and security for the financial services industry, and that's a major element of what we're announcing right now. In addition to the policy framework is also the way that the different elements of the industry and of regulatory expertise are coming together, so this cloud, and these public cloud offerings, were co-developed and co-designed with IBM Promontory, with IBM Security Services that work with banks, with our anchor partner, and moving forward, we'll be advised by an advisory council of CSOs who have that day to day experience with security and with regulations. And so that is also a very unique context for not this being just a point in time with a policy framework, but being an ongoing initiative that will stay up to date, as security concerns and as regulatory concerns change. And the third aspect is a really unique set of technologies that make all of that possible, so you have to define how the cloud is going to be secure, and then you have to actually do it, and the unique capabilities that we have in IBM public cloud that have enabled this program include a number of things, but amongst them, the industry's highest standard for data protection, with our FIPS-140-2 Level 4 based key protect service, it includes capabilities that we'll be releasing through our acquisition of Spanugo around cloud security and compliance posture management, mapped back to that context of financial services. And so it's really three things, it's a policy framework custom and optimized for the financial services industry, the forward evolution of that through industry expertise, and participation of multi parties in that, and then core technologies that enable folks to accomplish that security posture through data protection, through cloud security posture management, et cetera. >> I forgot about the Promontory, you guys made that acquisition several years ago, that's a nice little feature of the FS cloud. But I want to ask, how hard is it to get these certifications? I mean it's obviously not a layup. Lot of work, lot of time, my reason of my question, is this a moat for you, as you guys start to scale? How difficult is it? >> Yeah, so we have been putting in the time and effort, and so that's why this is an exciting moment for us with the initial work product of this effort. And so our intention really is not for that to be a moat, but for us having traversed the moat, to now have a bridge there through the methodology that we built, through the control framework that we built, for others to now get across that moat. And so this is really about taking what is an extensive amount of work, and an extensive amount of expertise, IBM Promontory, you just mentioned, but they monitor over 70 regulatory obligations in over 20 jurisdictions globally, right? I mean this is a tremendous depth of expertise, and so having crossed the moat, and having built the bridge across it, this is where we can then help others to save time in this process of adopting public cloud for further workloads. >> You've mentioned workloads, you've talked about core financial workloads, but maybe give us a little insight on what type of workloads are the most suitable for the financial services cloud, because let's face it, most of the hardcore mission-critical workloads haven't moved, actually probably none of 'em have moved to the cloud, you kind of referenced that before. Ginni Rometty talks about that all the time. But what are the right workload strategic fits for your cloud? >> Yeah, you know you mentioned Ginni Rometty, and so I'll take a quick note there from some of the language that you'll hear her use, she talks about, there was chapter one of the cloud journey, and stuff that was on less sensitive data, analytics, some things on public information, were certainly done, also in finance and also in regulated industries in the cloud. And she talks about chapter two, chapter two being mission-critical workloads. And this program really is the definition of chapter two for the financial services industry. It is the enabling expertise, the enabling control set, the enabling security technologies, the enabling cloud services, for that chapter two, right, for that next layer of adoption of things that had been kept behind the firewall, had been kept in a private cloud context, can now be considered also for public cloud. And so easing that adoption, streamlining that process, et cetera, is really what we're looking to accomplish. >> I mean obviously IBM, huge presence in the banking community, is this really for just big banks? What about the ecosystem, what do you got in there for ISVs and SaaS providers? >> Yeah, you know, you asked me a question at the beginning here about COVID and what's happened, and I think, the transformation of ISV providers to become SaaS providers, the expansion of their capabilities being needed in payments and digital client experiences and such, also for regionals and second and third tier banking institutions and such, is as much of what is happening right now as anything else, amongst the first tiers, because there's just as much pressure for transformation and digital consumer experience, and other things like that, also in the regionals and second and third tiers. So part of our announcement is around the ecosystem of partners that we have now for the financial services cloud program. And that includes ISVs and SaaS providers that are servicing many different types of needs of institutions large and small, so we're seeing those that are servicing core banking, and payments, those that are servicing analytics use cases for this industry, and even HR function, just because of that concern about stewarding data well for these industries and those first tier banks, and so that transition to digital, that drive to infuse AI capabilities, the need to transform core banking, is something that's very much also happening within the ISV and SaaS providers, and we're thrilled with the wide variety of partner base that we're seeing develop there within our ecosystem for this program. >> I was talking to a CIO friend of mine several years ago, and he said to me, "You know, this idea of lifting and shifting, "it's fine, you get little cost savings, maybe, "but unless you change your operating model "and you drive an innovation agenda, "you really aren't going to get the type "of telephone number returns from cloud "that you would want or expect." So my question is around innovation, and we've said many times in theCUBE that the new innovation cocktail, it's not Moore's law anymore, it's the combination of data applying machine intelligence and then the cloud, and the reason why the cloud is important is scale, okay, there's maybe a little bit of cost as well, but it's also innovation. It's the ability to attract people into an ecosystem, and that resonates with line of business. If your cloud is just about making IT's life better, well that's nice, but what's in this announcement and in this initiative for the line of business? >> Yeah, it is all about the workloads. I always say that to me the cloud journey is about, number one your platform, which is the thing onto which you modernize. It is what are you going to get out of moving to containers, what are you going to get out of moving to microservices, how does that help all of those cloud metrics that you mentioned? But number two, it's about the workload, right, which workloads are we talking about, how will they deliver, how will those workloads be able to because of cloud deliver not just TCO but improvement in customer experience, how will those workloads be able to meet elasticity, resiliency, cybersecurity concerns, changes in the way the workforce is working these days, et cetera. And from the line of business perspective, there is a tremendous need to consume, for example, fintech-based innovation. But a lot of folks have struggled to move past POCs because of concerns about security and compliance, for those deployment scenarios, and so being able to bring the ISVs and SaaS providers, and then also fintechs into an ecosystem with a prescriptive and proactive security and compliance context is really what we're all about here. And that will enable a flourishing of adoption of innovation. >> You know, I always love to talk about the competition on these episodes. But I want to ask differentiation, how different is this, can I just go to any cloud supplier and get this, will I eventually be able to, what's IBM's differentiation, Hillery? >> Yeah, so you want to think of it that, in financial services, you are concerned, and you have to be concerned about everything. You have to be concerned about things into the details of the cloud itself, you have to be concerned about things that are related to the behavior and the permissions of your developers in that environment. Financial services cloud really has to be an end to end, soup to nuts conversation, and so this is a program of our public cloud, where end to end, we can stand behind and provide trust and resiliency and this policy framework, end to end within an environment that can be trusted for mission-critical workload. And so when we look at differentiation, our investments are in bringing together IBM's expertise all the way going back to regulations and security consulting that we've been doing for decades in this industry, applying that to that cloud context, taking capabilities that are developed all the way down into the transistors, investments we've made even into the silicon around how cryptography is done, bringing that into the cloud context. And so having brought those things together into our public cloud context, that's how we're able to solution this in a different way, because it really is end to end about the expertise, from all of that regulatory advising, that security context, all the way down into the silicon and the transistors, and I think that's a very unique value proposition, as a cloud provider, it's a tremendous opportunity for us to bring together those pieces. And to continue to be a trusted partner to these companies that we have long been a trusted partner of. >> Now of course you guys have a relationship with VMware, you were the first, actually, to announce a VMware cloud relationship. And so let's say, okay, I got some VMware workloads, I move 'em into your FS cloud. Make sure that I've got the security and compliance checked. Six months down the road, so I've done that sort of first step, what's next for me, is that the end, or are there other things on my journey? >> Yeah, so absolutely, I mean VMware is part of what we are solution financial services clients to, but also cloud-native, and OpenShift, containerization, that modernization journey, is an ongoing journey for everyone, and so to your point of what's next, we're seeing a continual conversation of balancing lift and shift and modernization across workloads, and there are different reasons at different points in time, for people to consider that. I think the key is that they trust where they are taking that data, and whatever the form is that the workload goes, it needs to be in the context of that trust around the data in a security context, and so we're absolutely seeing everything, honestly, from financial services institutions looking to engage with us, also in our new research innovation lab, where we're engaging directly with financial services clients that are trying to work through this differentiation, is it virtualization, is it containerization, is it even serverless? What is the right and most effective balance of how workloads are programmed and run for the next generation of banking. >> You know, Hillery, I've been doing a lot of interviews in the last decade, and it's been interesting to see the ascendancy of cloud, of course, but also the change in perception, particularly in financial services, in the early days of cloud, cloud was an evil word. The C that should not be named. And so I want to understand if I'm, and of course COVID has also changed the perception, because if you weren't digital and you didn't have cloud, you couldn't really transact businesses as well, you didn't have that business resiliency. So, what if I'm a financial services person now, okay, I'm through the knothole, I want to get started, where do I start? >> Yeah, well call us first, but past that, I think that the conversations, the first conversations that we're having with our clients are, number one, do you have an architecture? So is cloud not just a place, like I like to say, but is cloud a plan, is there an architectural plan to enable you to have consistency, for example, in your developer experience between your private cloud environment and your public cloud environment? Architecturally are there those foundational choices around common services about being able to deploy capabilities in one location, and develop them in another, et cetera. All those value propositions of what we have been creating around OpenShift and Cloud Paks in our public cloud, and consistency across different environments and such, I think that's the first thing to start with is architecting a cloud, not accidental usage of multiple environments, but architecting use of multiple environments. And then I think the second conversation is to make a security and compliance plan that is going to be robust enough to withstand even the intense scrutiny of a regulated industry CCO and risk team, and so that's the other foundational conversation that we're having with our clients, and helping them with, so we can provide services and reference architectures, and all that other kind of thing, to enable them to stabilize planning on both fronts, both architecturally for what cloud means in its entirety, not just a cloud, but in its entirety, all clouds, multicloud, hybrid cloud, et cetera. And then secondly, then, a comprehensive security plan for that public cloud choice, and that's what we're really locking down with this policy framework, is bringing standardization on that for public cloud. >> Well, lot of innovation for the financial services community, which is again your wheelhouse. I wrote a piece right around Think that IBM's future rests on its innovation agenda, and I'm glad you brought up the notion of private, public, and then the whole hybrid thing, because I see OpenShift as a key, and RedHat as a key enabler of that across whether it's cloud, on-prem, edge, across multiple clouds. That's an ambitious agenda, as somebody who's responsible for cloud. That is something that is real innovation, and really differentiable I think, in the marketplace, and probably pretty expensive to build out across all those different platforms. >> Yeah, it is, but I think on the word innovation, my mind, as an IBMer, goes to the IBM research division. Thousands of researchers globally, and they've very much been a part of this journey with us. The journey with us on containerization, the journey on workload modernization from monolith to microservices, the journey of our public cloud, and now also very much a part of our work in financial services, so our research division is this incredible gift and asset that we have, that is working with us also on our cloud security and compliance posture management, that security and compliance control center that we're talking about in this announcement, et cetera, and so them being a part of this innovation stream for us is a really exciting part, again, of bringing together all these different pieces that IBM has to offer in this space to make it all stack up, to be a cloud for financial services. >> I got a couple of little housekeeping items before we close here. This is announced for the US first, right? What about other regions, first of all, is that correct, and what about other regions? >> That's correct, and we are also announcing additional participation of global banking partners as well in this announcement. And so this is also again our initial public statement of our expansion past the US. >> Last question, so just give us a glimpse of the future, where do you want to be in a few years, thinking about let's say three years down the road, what's that outcome look like? >> Yeah, you know I think that three years from now, we would love to see that people are able to make a decision, going back to your question about the line of business owners, make a decision about what they're trying to accomplish with a workload, and not be held back by security and compliance concerns in terms of putting that workload where it needs to be, where it will be most efficient, and where it can be embraced by a set of cloud capabilities that enable it to move in a competitive pace forward, infusing AI into everything that is done. Leveraging the latest in technologies, and serverless computing and all these other kind of things that can facilitate a line of business delivering more value so that cloud really continues, but also realizes its promises in that chapter two version of the story, also for regulated industries and also for their mission-critical workloads. >> Well Hillery, good luck with this, I mean congratulations on the progress that you've made, really since you guys announced this late last year, and really excited to see this start to take off, and you're a great guest, love having you on, thank you so much. >> Thanks so much for having me, pleasure talking to you as always. >> All right, cheers. And thank you everybody for watching, this is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and we'll see you next time. (calm music)

>> Announcer: 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 coming to you from our Boston area studio and this is a special CUBE Conversation, we always love talking to startups around the industry, understanding how they're creating innovation, doing new things out there, and oftentimes one of the exits for those companies is they do get acquired, and happy to welcome back to the program one of our CUBE alumni, Sheng Liang, he is the cofounder and CEO of Rancher, today there was an announcement for a definitive acquisition of SUSE, who our audience will know well, we were at SUSECON, so Sheng, first of all, thank you for joining us, and congratulations to you and the team on joining SUSE here in the near future. >> Thank you, Stu, I'm glad to be here. >> All right, so Sheng, why don't you give our audience a little bit of context, so I've known Rancher since the very early days, I knew Rancher before most people had heard the word Kubernetes, it was about containerization, it was about helping customers, there was that cattles versus pets, so that Rancher analogy was, hey, we're going to be your rancher and help you deal with that sprawl and all of those pieces out there, where you don't want to know them by name and the like, so help us understand how what was announced today is meeting along the journey that you set out for with Rancher. >> Absolutely, so SUSE is the largest independent opensource software company in the world, and they're a leader in enterprise Linux. Today they announced they have signed a definitive agreement to acquire Rancher, so we started Rancher about six years ago, as Stu said, to really build the next generation enterprise compute platform. And in the beginning, we thought we're going to just base our technology based on Docker containers, but pretty soon Kubernetes was just clearly becoming an industry standard, so Rancher actually became the most widely used enterprise Kubernetes platform, so really with the combination of Rancher and SUSE going forward, we're going to be able to supply the enterprise container platform of choice for lots and lots of customers out there. >> Yeah, just for our audience that might not be as familiar with Rancher, why don't you give us your position in where we are with the Kubernetes landscape, I've talked about many times on theCUBE, a few years ago it was all about "Hey, are we going to have some distribution war?" Rancher has an option in that space, but today it's multicloud, Rancher works with all of the cloud Kubernetes versions, so what is it that Rancher does uniquely, and of course as you mentioned, opensource is a key piece of what you're doing. >> Exactly, Stu, thanks for the question. So this is really a good lead-up into describing what Rancher does, and some of the industry dynamics, and the great opportunity we see with SUSE. So many of you, I'm sure, have heard about Kubernetes, Kubernetes is this container orchestration platform that basically works everywhere, and you can deploy all kinds of applications, and run these applications through Kubernetes, it doesn't really matter, fundamentally, what infrastructure you use anymore, so the great thing about Kubernetes is whether you deploy your apps on AWS or on Azure, or on on-premise bare metal, or vSphere clusters, or out there in IoT gateways and 5G base stations and surveillance cameras, literally everywhere, Kubernetes will run, so it's, in our world I like to think about Kubernetes as the standard for compute. If you kind of make the analogy, what's the standard of networking, that's TCPIP, so networking used to be very different, decades ago, there used to be different kinds of networking and at best you had a local area network for a small number of computers to talk to each other, but today with TCPIP as a standard, we have internet, we have Cisco, we have Google, we have Amazon, so I really think as successful as cloud computing has been, and how much impact it has had to actually push digital transformation and app modernization forward, a lot of organizations are kind of stuck between their desire to take advantage of a cloud provider, one specific cloud provider, all the bells and whistles, versus any cloud provider, not a single cloud provider can actually supply infrastructure for everything that a large enterprise would need. You may be in a country, you may be in some remote locations, you may be in your own private data center, so the market really really demands a standard form of compute infrastructure, and that turned out to be Kubernetes, that is the true, Kubernetes started as a way Google internally ran their containers, but what it really hit the stride was a couple years ago, people started realizing for once, compute could be standardized, and that's where Rancher came in, Rancher is a Kubernetes management platform. We help organizations tie together all of their Kubernetes clusters, regardless where they are, and you can see this is a very natural evolution of organizations who embark on this Kubernetes journey, and by definition Rancher has to be open, because who, this is such a strategic piece of software, who would want their single point of control for all compute to be actually closed and proprietary? Rancher is 100% opensource, and not only that, Rancher works with everyone, it really doesn't matter who implements Kubernetes for you, I mean Rancher could implement Kubernetes for you, we have a Kubernetes distro as well, we actually have, we're particularly well-known for Kubernetes distro design for resource constrained deployments on the edge, called K3S, some of you might have heard about it, but really, we don't care, I mean we work with upstream Kubernetes distro, any CNCF-compliant Kubernetes distro, or one of many many other popular cloud hosted Kubernetes services like EKS, GKE, AKS, and with Rancher, enterprise can start to treat all of these Kubernetes clusters as fungible resources, as catalysts, so that is basically our vision, and they can focus on modernizing their application, running their application reliably, and that's really what Rancher's about. >> Okay, so Sheng, being acquired by SUSE, I'd love to hear a little bit, what does this mean for the product, what does it mean for your customers, what does it mean for you personally? According to Crunchbase, you'd raised 95 million dollars, as you said, over the six years. It's reported by CNBC, that the acquisition's in the ballpark of 600 to 700 million, so that would be about a 6X increment over what was invested, not sure if you can comment on the finances, and would love to hear what this means going forward for Rancher and its ecosystem. >> Yeah, actually, I know there's tons of rumors going around, but the acquisition price, SUSE's decided not to disclose the acquisition price, so I'm not going to comment on that. Rancher's been a very cash-efficient business, there's been no shortage of funding, but even amounts to 95 million dollars that we raised, we really haven't spent majority of it, we probably spent just about a third of the money we raised, in fact our last run to fundraise was just three, four month ago, it was a 40 million dollar series D, and we didn't even need that, I mean we could've just continued with the series C money that we raised a couple years ago, which we barely started spending either. So the great thing about Rancher's business is because we're such a product-driven company, with opensource software, you develop a unique product that actually solves a real problem, and then there's just no barrier to adoption, so this stuff just spreads organically, people download and install, and then they put it in mission-critical production. Then they seek us out for commercial subscription, and the main value they're getting out of commercial subscription is really the confidence that they can actually rely on the software to power their mission-critical workload, so once they really start using Rancher, they recognize that Rancher as an organization provide, so this business model's worked out really well for us. Vast majority of our deals are based on inbound leads, and that's why we've been so efficient, and that's I think one of the things that really attracted SUSE as well. It's just, these days you don't just want a business that you have to do heavy weight, heavy duty, old fashioned enterprise (indistinct), because that's really expensive, and when so much of that value is building through some kind of a bundling or locking, sooner or later customers know better, right? They want to get away. So we really wanted to provide a opensource, and open, more important than opensource is actually open, lot of people don't realize there are actually lots of opensource software even in the market that are not really quite open, that might seem like a contradiction, but you can have opensource software which you eventually package it in a way, you don't even make the source code available easily, you don't make it easy to rebuild the stuff, so Rancher is truly open and opensource, people just download opensource software, run it in the day they need it, our Enterprise subscription we will support, the day they don't need it, they will actually continue to run the same piece of software, and we'd be happy to continue to provide them with patches and security fixes, so as an organization we really have to provide that continuous value, and it worked out really well, because, this is such a important piece of software. SUSE has this model that I saw on their website, and it really appeals to us, it's called the power of many, so SUSE, turns out they not only completely understand and buy into our commitment to open and opensource, but they're completely open in terms of supporting the whole ecosystem, the software stack, that not only they produce, but their partners produce, in many cases even their competitors produce, so that kind of mentality really resonated with us. >> Yeah, so Sheng, you wrote in the article announcing the acquisition that when the deal closes, you'll be running engineering and innovation inside of SUSE, if I remember right, Thomas Di Giacomo has a similar title to that right now in SUSE, course Melissa Di Donato is the CEO of SUSE. Of course the comparison that everyone will have is you are now the OpenShift to SUSE. You're no stranger to OpenShift, Rancher competes against RedHat OpenShift out on the market. I wonder if you could share a little bit, what do you see in your customer base for people out there that says "Hey, how should I think of Rancher "compared to what RedHat's been doing with OpenShift?" >> Yeah, I mean I think RedHat did a lot of good things for opensource, for Linux, for Kubernetes, and for the community, OpenShift being primarily a Kubernetes distro and on top of that, RedHat built a number of enhanced capabilities, but at the end of the day, we don't believe OpenShift by itself actually solves the kind of problem we're seeing with customers today, and that's why as much investment has gone into OpenShift, we just see no slowdown, in fact an acceleration of demand of Rancher, so we don't, Rancher always thrived by being different, and the nice thing about SUSE being a independent company, as opposed to a part of a much larger organization like RedHat, is where we're going to be as an organization 100% focused on bringing the best experience to customers, and solve customers' business problems, as they transform their legacy application suite into cloud-native infrastructure. So I think the opportunity is so large, and there's going to be enough market there for multiple players, but we measure our success by how many people, how much adoption we're actually getting out of our software, and I said in the beginning, Rancher is the most widely used enterprise Kubernetes platform, and out of that, what real value we're delivering to our customers, and I think we solve those problems, we'll be able to build a fantastic business with SUSE. >> Excellent. Sheng, I'm wondering if we could just look back a little bit, you're no stranger to acquisitions, remember back when Cloud.com was acquired by Citrix, back when we had the stack wars between CloudStack and OpenStack and the like, I'm curious what lessons you learned having gone through that, that you took away, and prepared you for what you're doing here, and how you might do things a little bit differently, with the SUSE acquisition. >> Yeah, my experience with Cloud.com acquired by Citrix was very good, in fact, and a lot of times, you really got to figure out a way to adapt to actually make sure that Rancher as a standalone business, or back then, Cloud.com was a standalone business, how are they actually fitting to the acquirer's business as a whole? So when Cloud.com was acquired, it was pretty clear, as attractive as the CloudStack business was, really the bigger prize for Citrix was to actually modernize and cloudify their desktop business, which absolutely was like a two billion dollar business, growing to three billion dollars back then, I think it's even bigger now, with now everyone working remote. So we at Citrix, we not only continued to grow the CloudStack business, but more importantly, one of the things I'm the most proud of is we really played up a crucial role in modernizing and cloudifying the Citrix mainline business. So this time around, I think the alignment between what Rancher does and what SUSE does is even more apparent, obviously, until the deal actually closes, we're not really allowed to actually plan or execute on some of the integration synergies, but at a higher level, I don't see any difficulty for SUSE to be able to effectively market, and service their global base of customers, using the Rancher technology, so it's just the synergy between Kubernetes and Linux is just so much stronger, and in some sense, I think I've used this term before, Kubernetes is almost like the new Linux, so it just seems like a very natural place for SUSE to evolve into anyway, so I'm very very bullish about the potential synergy with the acquisition, I just can't wait to roll up my hands and get going as soon as the deal closes. >> All right, well Sheng, thank you so much for joining us, absolutely from our standpoint, we look at it, it's a natural fit of what Rancher does into SUSE, as you stated. The opensource vision, the community, and customer-focused absolutely align, so best of luck with the integration, looking forward to seeing you when you have your new role and hearing more about Rancher's journey, now part of SUSE. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you Stu, it's always great talking to you. >> All right, and be sure, we'll definitely catch up with Rancher's team at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon European show, which is of course virtual, as well as many other events down the road. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE.

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation on June 23rd the Wall Street Journal reported that Dell is exploring strategic options for its approximately 81% share in VMware both Dell and VMware stocks popped on the news we believe that Dell is floating this trial balloon to really gauge investor customer and partner sentiment and perhaps send a signal to the short sellers that you know what Michael Dell has other arrows in his quiver to unlock in case you want to squeeze me I'm gonna squeeze you back who knows hello everyone and welcome to this week's wiki Bond cube insights powered by ETR in this breaking analysis we'll unpack some of the complicated angles in the ongoing VMware saga and assess five scenarios that we think are possible as it pertains to this story as always we're going to bring in some ETR customer data to analyze what's happening with the spending picture let's take a look at what happened and just do a quick recap The Wall Street Journal story said that Dell was considering spinning off VMware or buying the remaining 19 percent of VMware stock that it doesn't own the Journal article cited unnamed sources and said that a spinoff would not likely happen until 7 September 2021 for tax reasons that would mark of course the 5 year anniversary of Dell acquiring EMC and would allow for a tax free transaction always a good thing what's going on here and what options does Dell really have what does it mean for Dell VMware customers and partners we're gonna try to answer those questions today so first of all why would Dell make such a move well I think there's tweet from your own name Marc he's a portfolio manager at one main capital it kind of sums it up he laid out this chart which shows Dells market cap prior to the stock pop you know it's closer to 38 billion today and the value of its VMware owner which is over 50 billion since the stock pop but let me cut to the chase investors value the core assets of Dell which accounts for around 80 billion dollars in revenue when you exclude vmware somewhere south of negative 10 billion dollars why it's because Dell is carrying more than 30 billion dollars of core debt when you exclude Dell Financial Services and it looks like a conglomerate owning the vast majority of VMware shares Michael Dell has something like a 97 percent voting control Cordell is a low margin low growth business and as some have complained that Michael uses VMware as his piggy bank and many investors just won't touch the stock so the stock generally Dell stock has underperformed I've often said even going back to the EMC days that owning the stock of VMware's owner is actually a cheap way to buy vmware but that's assuming that the value somehow gets unlocked at some point so Dell is perhaps signaling that it has some options and other levers to pull as I said you may be trying to give pause to the shorts now let's have a look at some of the ETR spending data and value and evaluate the respective positions of Dell and VMware in the market place this chart here uses the core ETR methodology that we like to talk about all the time for those not familiar we use the concept of net score net score is a simple metric it's like Net Promoter Score sort of the chart shows element the elements of Dells net score so each quarter ETR goes out and ask customers do you plan to adopt the vendor new that's the lime green at 4% spend more relative to last year more meaning more than 6% that's the forest green and you can see that's at 32% flat spend is the grey meaning plus or minus 5% and then decrease spending by 6 percent or greater that's the pink and that's just 11% for Dell or are you replacing the platform to see that that's the bright red there at 7% so net score is a measure of momentum and it's derived by adding the greens and subtracting the Reds and he can see Dell in the last ETR survey which was taken at the height of the pandemic has a net score of 18% now we we colored that soft red it's not terrible but it's not great either now of course this is across Dells entire portfolio and it excludes vmware so what about vmware so this next graphic that we're showing you it applies the exact same methodology to vmware and as you can see vmware has a much higher net score at 35% which of course shouldn't surprise anybody it's a higher growth company but 46% of vmware customers plan to spend more this year relative to last year and only 11% planned to spend less that's pretty strong now what if we combined dell and vmware and looked at them as a single entity hmm wouldn't that be interesting okay here you go so there were nine hundred and seventy five respondents in the last ETR survey when we matched the two companies together and you can see the combined net score is 27% with 42 percent of respondents planning to spend more this year than they did last year so you may be asking well is this any good how does this compare to dell and vmware competitors well I'm glad you asked so here we show that in this chart the net score comparisons so we take the combined dell and vmware at 27% Cisco as we often reported consistently shows pretty strong relative to the enterprise data center players and you can see HPE is a kind of a tepid 17 percent so it's got some work to do to live up to the promises of the HP HPE split we also we also show IBM red hat at 14% so there's some room for improvement there also and you can see IBM in the danger zone as we break that down and red hat much stronger but you know what it softened somewhat in the EGR survey since last year so we'd like to see better momentum from IBM and RedHat it's kind of unfortunate that kovat hit when it did his IBM was just kind of ramping up its RedHat go to market now just for comparison purposes for kicks we include Nutanix nifty annex is a much smaller company but it's one that's fairly mature and you can see at 52% its net scores much higher than the big whales now we've been reporting for months on high fliers like automation anywhere CrowdStrike octa rubric snowflake uipath these emerging companies have net scores you know north of 60% and even in the 70% range but of course they're growing from a much smaller base so you would expect that now let's put this into context with a two-dimensional view that we'd like to show now as you know in addition to net score that metric we like to use so-called market share market share is a measure of pervasiveness in the data set or essentially market share in the survey and it's a proxy for a real market share so what this chart here does it plots several companies with their net scores on the y-axis and market share on the x-axis and you can see that we combine Dell and VMware together and we plotted them in that red highlighted box just for comparison purposes so what does this tell you about the competitive landscape well first everyone would love to be AWS Microsoft - we didn't plot Microsoft because they're so bloody dominant they skew the chart somewhat but they would be way way out to the right on the x-axis because they have such a huge number of products and mentions in the data set so we left them out now you can see vmware and cisco are kind of right on top of each other which is sort of ironic as they're you know kind of increasingly overlapping with their offerings in the marketplace particularly nsx and you can see the other companies and for context we've added a few more competitors like theme and CommVault and you know they're in a pretty strong position as well as the combination of Dell and VMware so let's start there Steve Phil analyst Brad Reebok was quoted in the market watch publication is saying the following we have long believed Dell would ultimately buy in the approximately 19% our 12 and a half billion of VMware that it does not own in order to gain full control over VMware's substantial free cash flow which is about four billion dollars annually and we still expect this to be the ultimate outcome huh you know I don't know I'm not sure about this on the one hand you can see from the previous chart this would be a better outcome for Dell from a competitive standpoint what it did is it pulls Dell up and to the right yeah but perhaps not so much for VMware as it went down and to the left adèle would have to raise a bunch more cash to do this transaction and what take on even more debt you know maybe it could get Silverlake to finance the deal you know then essentially Dell would become the Oracle of infrastructure you know it certainly would make Dell even more strategic to CIOs would that be good for customers well on the one hand I guess it would bring better integration between Dell and VMware yeah but I wonder if that's the critical issue for customers yeah and nearly and I think it would stifle VMware's innovation engine and a little bit further and I wonder how Pat Yeltsin here would react I mean my guess is he would call it a day and what about Sanjay Putin who was the obvious next in line for the CEO job at VMware what he becomes the president of Dells software division and what about the rest of the team at VMware yes they're a Silicon Valley stalwart and that would slowly morph into austin-based Dell with the debt burden growing you know it's gonna mean more of VMware's cash would go to paying down the debt meaning less for R&D or even stock buybacks what you know I'm not a huge fan of and I'm not a huge fan of this scenario for sure the the technology park partner ecosystem would be ice cold on such a deal although you know you could argue there are already less than lukewarm but here I want to explore some other options so the next on the list is Dell could sell VMware to a private equity firm mmm or a strategic it could basically wipe out its debt and have some cash left over to sail into the sunset that would be a big pill for someone to swallow even though Michael Dell has 97 percent voting power I think there's fine print that says he has a responsibility to protect the interest of the minority shareholders so to get approval it would have to sell at a premium you know that could be as high as you know almost seventy billion dollars Microsoft has the cash but they don't need VMware and Amazon I guess could pull it off but that certainly is not likely even if Google who has the cash we're interested in buying VMware Google be the most likely candidate you know it would give Google Cloud instant access to the coveted enterprise but it's really hard to conceive I mean same for a PE company 65 to 70 billion you know they get their money out in 15 to 20 years so I I just I just don't see that as viable all right what's next how about this scenario of spinning off VMware that the Journal reported so in this transaction Dell shareholders would get a bunch of vmware stock now there may be some financial wizardry that tom sweet dell CFCF owned his band of financial geniuses could swing I can't even begin to speculate what that would be but but I've heard there's some magic that they could pull off to maybe pull some cash out of such a transaction and this would unlock the value of both Dell and VMware by removing the conglomerate and liquidity hangover for Dell and it were to definitely attract more sideline investors into VMware stock and Michael Dell would still own a boatload of VMware stock personally so there's an incentive there so this is interesting and certainly possible you know I think in a way it would be good for VMware customers VMware we get full autonomy and control over its destiny without Delvaux guarding its cash so it could freely innovate Dell would become probably less strategic for customers so I don't think that for Dell EMC buyers you know the technology ecosystem partners like HPE IBM Napa cetera would would would they would like it more but they were already kind of down the path of looking to optimize VMware alternatives so you know think about Cisco but you know I think for VMware customers okay I think for for daily MC customers not so much now what about the do-nothing scenario you know I think this is as possible as any outcome Dell keep chipping away at its debt using VMware as a strategic linchpin with customers sure they continue to pay the liquidity overhang tax and they'll frustrate some shareholders who we're going to remain on the sidelines but you know that's been the pattern anyway now what about delivering some of the VMware ownership so the more I think about it the more I like this scenario what if del sold 20% of its VMware stake and let's say raised ten twelve billion dollars in cash that it could use to really eat into its debt burden a move like this combined with its historical debt pay down could cut its death debt in half by say 2021 and get the company back to investment grade rating something that Tom sweet has aspired towards this one dropped hundreds of millions if not a billion dollars to the bottom line and it would allow Dell to continue to control VMware what I don't know I don't know if there are nuances to this scenario in other words does this dropping ownership from roughly eighty percent to about sixty percent trigger some loss of control or some reporting issue I'm sure it's buried somewhere in the public filings or acquisition Docs but this option to me makes some sense it doesn't really radically alter their relationships with customers or partners so it's kind of stable with VMware maintains its existing autonomy and even somewhat lessens Dale's perceived control over VMware in an attacks Dells debt burden yeah it's still a bit of a halfway house but I think it's a more attractive and as I said stable option in my view okay let's talk about what to look for next you know it looks like the stock market is coming to the reality that we are actually in a recession although it appears that Nasdaq is trying to ignore this or maybe the the markets a little bit off because they're afraid Joe Biden is gonna win the election he's not gonna be good for the for the economy we'll see we'll see what the economic shutdown means for tech companies in this earnings season etrs next survey is in the field and they're gonna have fresh data on the impact of kovat going into the dog days of summer here's what I think let me give you my preview and you'll see in a few weeks you know how accurate is I believe that tech spending is going to be soft broadly I think it's gonna especially be the case for legacy on-prem providers and expect their traditional businesses to to deteriorate somewhat I think there's gonna be bright spots in text protect for sure the ones we've reported on cloud yes absolutely automation you know I'm really looking closely at the battle between the two top our PA vendors automation anywhere in uipath I think there's a really interesting story brewing there and the names that we've been pounding like snowflake the security guys like CrowdStrike and octa and Z scalar I think they're gonna continue to do very well with this work from home pivot we also expect Microsoft to continue to show staying power but because of their size you know they're exposed to soft demand pockets but I think that continue to be very very strong and threatening to a lot of segments in the market now for Dell I think the data center businesses continue to be a tough one despite some of the new product cycles especially in storage but I think dal is gonna continue to benefit from the work from home pivot as I believe there's still some unmet demand and laptops we're gonna see that I believe show up in Dells income statement in the form of their their client revenue I'd love to know what you think you could tweet me at Devante or you can always email me at david dot Volante at Silicon angle com please comment on my LinkedIn post always appreciate I post weekly on silicon angle calm and on wiki bond calm so check out those properties and of course go to e TR dot plus for all the survey action as I say e TR is in the field with the current survey they got fresh Cova data so we're excited the report on that in the coming weeks remember these episodes are all available as podcast wherever you listen this is Dave Volante for the cube insights powered by ETR thanks for watching everyone we'll see you next time [Music]

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of VeeamON 2020 brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of VeeamON 2020 online. Of course, instead of all gathering together in Las Vegas, we were getting to talk to participants of the community where they are around the globe. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest on the program, he's part of the opening keynote I'm sure most of you saw, Simon Kofkin-Hansen, chief technology officer for VMware Solutions inside of IBM. Simon, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu, it's a pleasure to be here. >> All right, so you know, obviously we know IBM quite well. We at theCUBE at you know, the virtual events, both RedHat Summit and IBM Think not too long in the past there. Talking a lot about you know, the open hybrid cloud many of the messages that I hear from Veeam remind me of what I heard at their environments you know, it, multicloud environment, we need flexibility in what we're doing, we, you know, need to of course you know, data is such an important piece of what's going on. Maybe before we get into it too much, give us a little bit about you know, your role there, where you fit into that whole discussion of what IBM is with Cloud. >> So Stu, yeah, I'm the chief technology officer of IBM, of Veeam solutions on the IBM cloud. Primarily involved and helped create the partnership that exists between IBM and VMware today. Basically, I'm providing automated solutions for our clients. Automated, secure solutions for our clients around the VMware and the IBM Cloud infrastructure space. >> Yeah, well, Simon, it's interesting stuff, you've got some good history there, maybe you might remind our audience you know, I remember at VMWorld, before there was a big partnership, that VMware made with a certain public cloud provider that gets talked about a lot, IBM was the first and if I saw you know, correctly, I'd love for you to be able to provide the data behind it. There are more VMware customers on the IBM Cloud than any other cloud is what I believe is the data I saw, I think. So bring us in little bit more, explain that relationship. >> So yes, we were, as IBM, beginning of all of this, I mean VMware and IBM have had a long relationship. And in fact, IBM manages over 850,000 predominantly VMware workloads on-prems, and have done for the last 10+ years. But in the latest iteration of this partnership, we brought together our automation and our codified experience from dealing with these, our client accounts around the world and brought that expertise along with VMware's product side to align this automated stdc stack on cloud platforms. And first to market with that automated stdc stack called VMware Cloud Foundation. First to market out and we've had a great ongoing relationship since then. It's really resonated with many of our clients and our enterprise clients out there. >> All right well Simon, one of the most important pieces of that, you know, VMware stdc message is that I have VMware, I know how, I manage that environment, and it's got a really robust ecosystem, so, of course Veeam started exclusively in the VMware environments, now lives across many environments, but you know the comment I've made on some of these interviews for VeeamON is, wherever the VMware solution and VMware Cloud goes, Veeam could just go along for the ride, really, if it were. There's obviously some integration work and testing, but help dig into a little bit, what that means for you know, solutions like Veeam tying into what VMware is doing, and what VMware is doing in the IBM Cloud. >> Well particularly at the beginning of this relationship, part of this partnership with VMware was its rich partner ecosystem. And I was given the remit and had the luxury to choose the best of the best products that's out there. Which wasn't necessarily IBM's products in this particular space. Obviously we chose Veeam for backup. I mean Veeam's reputation out there's the backup, it's known as the market leader for the backup of its actual workloads. So it was very important for us to embrace that ecosystem. And it's been a great partnership from the very, very beginning. Getting the backup products out into our platform and as we've done more recently, bringing in the new enhancements like Veeam Cloud Connect to deal with data replication and more use cases around migration and the movement of data in a hybrid cloud sense. And Veeam has been right there with us every step of the way. >> Yeah, so Simon, you're a CTO, so bring us in a little bit architecturally because when I think about hybrid cloud or even you know having to move my data between you know different data centers, you know there are, you know, the physics challenges, and you know sometimes I can, you know, get closer, I can (microphone cuts out) through there, and then there's the financial considerations. So give us to how we have to think about that, what is data movement in 2020, you know, what considerations do we have to have here, and how does IBM maybe differentiate a little bit from some others? >> So I'll answer your first question, I'll answer some of the last questions first. What does data movement in 2020 look like? Well, to be perfectly honest, Stu, we never imagined what would happen this year, but data mobility and the movement of data in a hybrid scenario has never been more acute or prevalent because of the stage that the world is currently in and the conditions that we're living in today. Being able to use familiar based tooling that represents what is used in an on-premises state, over in the cloud, enabling Veeam, or people who have existing investments in Veeam, to use that tooling for multiple different use cases. Not just backup, but that actual data replication functionality has become ever more prevalent in these cases. I was saying similar messages back in 2019 and 2018 and as long as back in 2010. I feel as though, I look at that, it's been almost a decade now, talking about the need or the capabilities of hybrid cloud and this movement of data. But I've absolutely seen an absolute increase in it over the last few years and particularly in 2020 in this current situation. The major difference from an IMB perspective is I would say, is our openness, and our, how we're dealing with the openness in the community, and our commitment to open source. Our flexibility, our security, and the way we actually deal with the enterprise. And one of the major differentiations is the security to the core. Actually building up the security, looking at the secure elements, making sure their data is safe from tampering, it's encrypted both in transit and at rest. And these are many of the factors that our enterprise clients actually demand of us and particularly when we look at the regulated industries with their heavy focus on the financial services sector. And Veeam, with its capabilities and its ability to both do the backup and migration functionality, sort of clients are expecting a two-for-one deal, in these days when they're trying to cut costs, and get out of their own data centers in an effort to cut their costs. >> Excellent. Well, Simon, you know you laid out really the imperative for enterprises, you know today and how they're dealing with that, bring us in as to what differentiates the IBM-Veeam relationship versus just IBM is open and flexible, so there are a lot of options. You know what particularly is there about Veeam that makes that relationship special? >> Well, I think it all down to the partnership and the deep willingness to work together. The research that we're doing in the products, yeah? Looking at ways that we can take Veeam beyond the VMware space and into bare metals and containers. But maintaining that level of security and flexibility that clients demand. I mean, many clients, if they've invested in a particular technology to do their backups, back up and DR, because of the heavy data requirements are still one of the most important if not the most important use case that many cloud users or many of our clients actually go for. So having that partnership with Veeam, in not only dealing with the traditional base, which is the VMware backups, but really pushing the boundaries and looking how we can extend that into migrations, into containers, and bare metal, by still keeping that level of security and flexibility. It's a difficult balance. Sometimes to make it more secure, you have to make things less flexible. And vise-versa, having things more flexible, they become less secure. So being willing to work us and actually define that difficult balance, and still provide the level of the user experience and the level of functionality that our clients demand, and keeping both client sets happy, both IBM and Veeam. It's challenging at times, but I guess it's what makes the job interesting and exciting. >> Yeah Simon, I'm actually glad you mentioned containers as one of the you know, modernization efforts going on there. Of course from Veeam's standpoint, when vSphere 7 rolls out, that they are being supported in you know one of the first work in that. I'd love to hear your viewpoint, what you're hearing from customers, how you expect, as a VMware partner for cloud, that movement of VMs and containers and how they're going together. What should we be looking for as that kind of matures and progresses? >> So I would absolutely watch this space. Particularly as we move into this. Containers and VMs living very much side-by-side. With VMware's announcements around Project Pacific and tanzu, it's very interesting. It's certainly a furor around the market. And we as IBM are very closely working with them with our acquisition last year of RedHat and its containerization platform. All while maintaining our ability in the OpenShift community around Kubernetes. So Stu, obviously I'm privy to a lot more information which I really can't really say and dig into too much detail around this particular angle but just to say that, watch this space. There's a lot going to happen. You're going to see a lot of announcements in the back half of 2020 and in the first few halves of 2021, particularly around the carburetions between containers and VMs and seeing how the different offerings from the different companies shape-- (mic cuts out) interesting times ahead. >> Yeah, absolutely. Simon, maybe you're right, don't want to get you in trouble as looking too much into the future, but maybe bring us into, I'm sure you're having lots of conversations with customers, what's their mindset, you talked about, you know, there's bare metals, virtualization, containers, you know application modernization, I've always said the long haul of the dent in any transformation and modernization (mic stutters) doing, so you know, 'cause some of the challenges and opportunities that you're hearing from customers that you and your partner are helping to solve? >> So some of the challenges around this containerization is containerization (mic stutters) is taking a lot longer and its taking a lot more time than we originally anticipated or expected. So the realization is actually hitting that VMware is going to be around for a while. I mean, the idea that people are thinking that they're just going to transform their applications, or all their VMs over a six or 12-month period, is just not reality. So we're living in this hybrid platform way, where you have VMware, you have virtual machines, and containers coexisting. Certain parts of the application, namely the, if I take the three-tier web app as an example, consisting of a http server, an application server, and a database. When you containerize that, or modernize that, it's very easy to modernize the http server, which turns into the ingress/egress servers on the container. It's very easy to modernize the application server, which is fairly static and you can just put a container. But as we know, Stu, data is sticky. So what many enterprises the data migration, or the way that the database is transformed, is the thing that takes the longest. So we're seeing out there in the enterprises people who are running their apps both with the ingress/egress service, the application server container containerized, but the database still living on a virtual machine, for a extended period of time. And until that made the final jump or chone their data service, they make that move. I do see this being, I personally, I honestly don't believe in my lifetime VMs will actually disappear. Because we're seeing that in some cases it's actually too costly for organizations to actually transform their applications or there's no real business case. It works perfectly well with the existing process. There's no need to modernize. But they're looking at ways and what parts of the architecture can be modernized, and containers are definitely the future for all the attributes that we know and love. But there is going to be this hybrid world. So having tools and partners like Veeam, who are willing to cross the ecosphere of the different platforms, is critical for our clients today and critical for partnerships that we have. Like the one we have with Veeam. >> All right well Simon, it goes back to one of those IT maxims, you know, is IT always additive. We almost never really get rid of anything, we just keep adding to it and changing it and as you said, data is that critical component and I think you highlighted nicely how you know, Veeam fits in you know, very much for that story. So Simon, thank you so much for joining us, pleasure having you on the program, glad to have you in theCUBE alumni ranks at this point. >> Thank you Stu, and thank you, it was a pleasure. Take care. >> All right stay tuned for lots more coverage from VeeamON 2020 online, I'm Stu Miniman, and thanks for watching theCUBE. (calm music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in 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. I'm coming from the Boston area studio. We were supposed to have a KubeCon Europe in Amsterdam. First in the spring, they pushed it off to the summer, and, of course, the decision due to the global pandemic is it's making it virtual. But happy to welcome to the program two guests that I was planning to have on in person, but couldn't wait for our virtual coverage of the event, though. Happy to welcome the co-founders of TriggerMesh. Sitting in the middle is Mark Hinkle, who is the CEO of the company, and to the other side is Sebastien Goasguen, who is also the co-founder and the Chief Product Officer. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us, Stu. >> Thanks, Stu. >> All right, so, it's interesting, we've been covering the cloud native space for a number of years, and especially at KubeCon, there's always some of those discussions of does cloud kill on-premises, does this new thing kill that old thing. And in some of the early days of KubeCon, it was like, well, containers are really interesting, and there was all the buzz for years about Docker but, hey, the next thing is going to be serverless. And serverless, we don't need to think about any of that stuff, it's the nirvana of what developers wanted. So therefore, let's not worry about containers, but you sit in that space really helping to connect between some of the various pieces. So, I guess, Sebastien, maybe if I could start with you, 'cause you've built some of these various projects, when you go through and look at your background, you've been involved in the co-business space, uBLAS, and now for TriggerMesh but, you know, give us some of that background as to how, from a technological under pinnings, the community's been thinking about how these worlds fit together. >> Yeah sure, it's very interesting because first, the container rejuvenation started with Docker obviously and then Kubernetes appeared, and the entire community started building this. And this was really an evolution from the virtual machine orchestration, right. People needing a better way to package applications, deploy them, and they said, "You know what, "virtual machines are not that great for this. "Can't we have a better vehicle to do this" and that's where, really, containers took over. And it made total sense and so we saw this switch from, craziness about open stack and even cloud stack that Mark and I worked on, and putting all the focus on containers. And then comes AWS always innovating, always in the lead, and AWS saying, "Hey, you know what? "Actually, we need to go serverless. "We need to forget about the infrastructure. "What people want is really deploy applications "without worrying about the infrastructure. "They want things that are going to auto scale. "They want to pay very little, even pay per function call "and not pay when your VM is up." So AWS really pushed this mindset of serverless, but then what was the meaning in that realm of containers, and that's when I started Kubeless and I said, "You know what, if you would need to build function "as a service, you should build it on Kubernetes, "and use Kubernetes as a platform." And from there we started started seeing this fight, a little bit, between people, saying "Hey, forget containers, go serverless." So in TriggerMesh, we're not really taking that stance. We really see on-premises has, it's always going to be here, we have worked clouds on-premises, we have our own data centers but definitely there is more and more cloud usage, and when you start using the cloud you don't want to care about the infrastructure in the cloud, right. So, you want as much serverless as possible in the cloud, but you know you have to deal with your on-premises, data bases and some work loads and so on. So you have to be a pragmatic and you have to pick the best of both worlds and keep moving to modernize your stack and your IT in general. >> Excellent, alright so Mark, at the CNCF I'd seen the Knative project come out and it was talking about how we can connect containers and serverless, and one of the questions I'd been asking is "Well look, there are a lot "of open source projects for serverless." But when I talk to the community, when I talk to users, you say serverless, I think AWS. Sebastien was just talking about, so, I was sitting at the KubeCon shows and talking to the vendors and a lot of really big vendors were working on Knative, Oracle, IBM, RedHat and others and I said if this doesn't connect with AWS first and Azure second, I don't understand what we're doing. Yes, there's probably a place for on-premises but that was when, I think you and I had a conversation, we'd been looking at this space, so how did the ideas that Sebastien talked about turn into an initiative and a company of TriggerMesh. >> Well, early on we latched onto the Knative announcement that Google made. Google had given Sebastien some insight into where they were going with serverless, and the Knative project before it launched. And then they actually quoted him in the release which started interest in our company which was the only company in name at that point. But we really didn't know where Knative and Kubernetes together were going and the serverless movement, but we thought at first that there would need to be management capabilities to do lifecycle management around serverless functions, but what we realized, or Sebastien realized, early on was that it's not so much the management of serverless, because the whole idea of serverless is to abstract away all of the severs and architecture so that all you're really dealing with is the run time. So the problem that we saw early on was not managing but actually integrating applications across serverless framework, so the name TriggerMesh, that came from the idea that you trigger serverless functions and that you would mesh architectures whether they be legacy applications or they be file services or other serverless clouds across the fabric of the internet. So that's Triggermesh and that's really where we're going and we see that there's a couple of proof points in our industry for that already and people having the desire to do that. >> All right excellent, so that integration that you're talking about. Help Sebastien explain, there's some news I believe its the EveryBridge Cloud Native Integration Platform that's just announced. Help us understand what that is and what should we be kind of comparing it to other solutions in the industry today. >> Yeah so, you know we are very happy about the EveryBridge announcement and it's really, we're getting beta, we are doing a beta release of EveryBridge available in our SaaS cloud, the Triggermesh.io and really to first piggy back on what Mark was saying, is that a lot of people still believe serverless is just functions, right. And for us serverless is much more than this. Serverless is about building event driven applications. We see it with AWS, with things like they are doing with EventBridge, for example, but we really believe in this mindset. What we are trying to do is to help people build applications, build cloud native applications, that fundamentally are event driven and they are linking cloud services in the public cloud providers and also on-premises work load, right. So EveryBridge allows people to do this, to build those cloud native apps as basic event flows that connect event sources wherever they are, could be events that are on-prem from an eCommerce application, ERP application, could be events that are circulating through a Kafka infrastructure on-prem, and people can connect those event sources with what we call targets. So those targets could be on-premises, they would be OpenShift work loads for example or they could be in the cloud at AWS lambda functions, Google cloud run, or even dedicated SaaS like Twilio, SendGrid, and so on, so that's when we saw really over the last 18 to almost two years now, is that serverless is more of an integration problem, more like traditional IPaaS that we've seen, right. So basically we are building a new IPaaS solution at the frontier of serverless offerings from the public clouds, traditional messaging systems like Kafka, Remittent, Q and so on, plus the, I would say, the old IPaaS solution and we're doing all of this backed by Kubernetes and Knative. >> Excellent, so Mark I heard Sebastien talking about, he mentioned OpenShift, talked about Google, speak a little bit to really the ecosystems, the market places that TriggerMesh fits into. What are the use cases that you are seeing customers using. >> Yeah, I think a couple of the, to the dive into the on-prem triggers we have capabilities to trigger oracle database changes that could actually pick off cloud based ETL transactions. We're seeing that users are going through digital transformation and really to be more specific given the global climate right now, it's remote work, and the idea of lifting and shifting all of your infrastructure into the cloud is pretty daunting and long ask, but if you can front end those systems with new cloud native architecture and you have a way to create those event flows to tie in your existing systems to new portals for your employees to get their work done, automate workflows to provision new systems, like Zoom for example, and other conferencing systems, you can use the serverless front ends and work flows that actually integrate with all of your existing infrastructure and give you a way to extend your life of your applications and modernize them. >> Yeah, the long pole on attending modernization is that application. Sebastien maybe I'd come to you on this is, I think about iPaaS, when you look at that space they talk about all the integration that they need to work on, usually there are certifications involved, you mentioned Oracle databases, these are things that we need to go in there with a engineering effort and make sure that it is tested and certified by the ISV out there. Does containerization, Kubernetes, and serverless, does this change it at all, does this make it easier to move along these environments? I guess the question is for the enterprise, normally this change is rather slow. Mark was just alluding to the fact that we need to do some of these things faster, to try to react from what's happening in the world. >> Yeah, I think that's the entire premise of containers. It's speeding up the software life cycle and the speed at which we can deliver new features, for all our applications and so on. So, a big part of the job, when Docker started and then Kubernetes has been, if you adopt that type of infrastructure and that type of artifact, containers, you're going to speed up your software management and software delivery. So now what happens is that you have slow moving pieces, maybe pieces that you've had in your data center for 10, 20 years, for quite a while, and then you have these extremely fast moving environment, which is containerized and running Kubernetes plus the cloud. That's even, we could say even faster moving, and you can, that's definitely the challenge, that's where we see the value and that's where we see the struggle, is that you have all those big companies that have those slow moving pieces Oracle DB, IBM MQ, and so on and they need to make those pieces relevant in a fast moving containerized world and in a cloud native world, right. So how do you bridge that gap? Well that's what we do, we provide bridges. We provide integration bridges with every bridge, there you go. So we connect the event sources from Oracle DB and MQ and we bring that to a more fast moving cloud native environment, whether it's managed Kubernetes on Google GKE or whether its still on-prem in OpenShift. >> Mark, want to get your view point, just being a start up in today's global environment, obviously, you look at the cloud data space, many of the companies are distributed. We're talking to Sebastien from over in Europe, you're down in North Carolina, but give us your view point as a startup. How is the current economic environment impacting you, impacting your partners, impacting your customers. >> So, our partners and customers are probably moving more slowly than we do as a startup because they had physical brick and mortar offices and now they are coming into our world. We're 100% virtual, we're in 3 continents across over 12 time zones. That kind of work versus where they're at, I think everybody is consciously moving ahead, the one thing that I will say is that their interest in being more like the startups that are virtual, don't have brick and mortar, are really good at online collaboration. They look at us for sort of inspiration on how they are going to do business going forward or at least for the foreseeable future. So, overall I think that, not only are we teaching them about cloud native technologies but we're just teaching them about distributed work forces in a quarantined world. >> Absolutely, and I think those are some of the key learnings that you look at that are diversity consistent in the cloud native space. Want to give you both a final word and-- >> And Stu if I just add something. Mark and I have been working from home for quite a while, eight to 10 years, and definitely right now this is not the normal working from home, right, we all have, most of us have kids at home 24/7. The cognitive load in the news is huge, this is not the normal environment. So we are extremely careful, we help each other definitely internally in the team, you know, India, Vietnam, Germany, Spain, U.S. We have to be extremely careful that everybody is not falling down and putting too much on the nerves and their spirits right, so not a normal environment and even though we know how to do it we have to be careful. >> Yeah Sebastien, I'm so glad you brought that up 'cause this is not just a, how do we move to a distributed system. There is the rest of the impact on that. All right so lets give you both final words. Hopefully, we absolutely will be gathering together even if we are remote for the KubeCon event for Europe, other event later on this year, but Sebastien let's start with you, final take aways. >> Yeah, so we are very excited to build a startup. It's fast moving, its an exciting industry and really seeing the beta release of EveryBridge for us. We are trying to bring the future of event driven application to everybody, event sources to targets for everyone, not just on AWS and taking all of the strength of Kubernetes with us. It's going to be a familiar system for all Kubernetes lovers. >> Great, and Mark. >> Well as we talked about today, we are very excited about the EveryBridge announcement, and if you are interested in a cloud native, serverless, digital transformation we think we have great tools for you. But on a more personal and global note, I think Sebastien hit something that's really important, it's that even though we are not all together it's really important to check in. Even these virtual sessions have been, it's nice to interact with your colleagues and friends in the industry but be kind to each other and don't just take it for granted. that everything is good at the other end of the wire so reach out to each other and we'll all get through this together. >> Well Mark and Sebastien, thank you so much for joining us. Absolutely the personal pieces as well as TriggerMesh. You're helping to pull some of those technology communities together so congratulations on the progress and definitely look forward to tracking where you go from here. >> Thanks Stu. >> Thanks a lot. >> We appreciate it. >> All right be sure to check out theCUBE.net, we will be covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe as it goes virtual as well as lots of others in the cloud developer space. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat 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 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 around the globe it's the cube with digital coverage of Red Hat summit 2020 brought to you by Red Hat welcome back this is the cubes coverage of Red Hat summit 2020 of course the event happening digitally we're bringing in the guests from where they are around the globe happy to welcome back to the program and he's one of the keynotes because he's also many times cube alumni chris wright is the senior vice president and chief technology officer at Red Hat chris it is great to see you and we've got almost matching hats you have a real red hat fedora I've got one that the you know kubernetes Red Hat team OpenShift team gives out in Europe so in case anybody in the Red Hat community goes yes I've been a longtime member of the community I got you know I think my original Red Hat baseball cap probably 15 years ago but the Hat that I had is not one of the nice felt one it is they're pretty good to see here all right so we've gotta wait a little bit to get your keynote but so many topics I want to get to with you but you know of course as I mentioned me open and it's pretty obvious everyone's remote right now is kind of you know special times we are living in so bring us inside a little bit you know your your organization your group or community you know what what this means and how's everybody doing well I mean it'd be hard not to sort of acknowledge that there's a major global event happening right now and and kovetz really changing how we operate how we work from a RedHat perspective our number one priority is just employee safety and employ health and so we we were quick to send our folks home and have everybody to work from home and so what's interesting from a RedHat point of view I think and then even if you broaden that out to open-source communities the the distributed nature of open-source development and and specifically the engineering teams Red Hatter are pretty distributed kind of mirroring those open-source communities that we participate in so in the one hand you can kind of say well things haven't changed substantially in the sense of how do we how do we operate in upstream communities but on the other hand people working from home is it's a whole new set of challenges I mean my kids are 12 and 14 but you know say you have toddlers that's a real distraction or you have a working environment at home that's crowded with multiple people I mean it can really change how you approach your daily your your your daily work life um so creating that balance has been really important and for our teams we talk a lot about just think empathy think about how you're supporting one another and again when you broaden that out to the larger communities I think probably a really important aspect of open-source development is crossing corporate boundaries and being inclusive of such a broad set of contributors that there's a built-in resiliency associated with open source communities which i think is fantastic and then when you add to that sort of the the enthusiasm around just doing great things there's a lot of interesting activities that are collaborative in nature that are community based that are trying to address the Kovach crisis whether it's 3d printing of supplies or whether it's contact tracing applications that help people understand where they become across kovat or anything like that I mean a lot of cool stuff happening that's inspired by a real challenge to the entire globe yeah okay Chris one of my favorite things the last few years that summit has you know talk and he's cut talking to companies that are going through their journey of you know what we usually call digital transformation what we have always said from the research side is what separates you know people that have successfully gone through this is that data and they become data-driven and data is such an important piece of what they're doing well I think everyone has been getting a real crash course on data because not only businesses but you know governments and you know the entire globe now is you know watching the daily data trying to understand data sources you know bring us inside is to you know really the importance of data and you know where that intersects with everything that red hat is well the those are great examples I mean it's sometimes a little depressing but the the notion that data is a critical part of decision-making and access to quality data in real time is what helps us make better decisions more effective decisions and more efficient decisions and so when you when you look at the amount of data being produced it just keeps growing you know it's sort of on the exponential growth curve and when you look at the commensurate amount of compute power associated with all of that data it's also growing which is maybe an obvious statement what it says is we are gathering more and more data and the degree to which we can pull meaningful insights out of that data is really how much we can impact our companies you know value and differentiation and in the context of something like Cova that means vaccine discoveries and you know shortening times to field trials in in a more business context it's talking about how quickly you can respond to your customers needs and we see a really dynamic shift and the work force all working from home that puts a real strain on the infrastructure we're here supporting infrastructure builders and the amount of data that they can collect to efficiently operate infrastructure is critical at a time when people are distributed and getting access into the lab environments is challenging and so it you know I think there's a lot to be said for the amount of data that's being produced and then how we analyze it we think of it in terms of bringing data to applications and historically they kind of lived in separate I'd call them silos bringing the data sources and data processing and model development all onto a common platform is a really powerful thing that's happening in the industry today which is which is exciting so you know we were bringing data to be a central actors how I like to describe it yeah well look I'm really glad how you connected that discussion of data to the applications we as you know my background really is on the infrastructure side and the concern I have a lot of times as infrastructure people you know we talk about the bits and bytes we talk about the infrastructure but the only reason we have infrastructure is to run those applications and you know deal with that data it was hoping you can connect the dots for us the key note that all gave one of the main things he's talking about it where's the open hybrid cloud and I had a great discussion with him on the cube so with that setup of applications and data you know how does that intersect you know with what Red Hat calls the open hybrid cloud and what differentiates Red Hat's position there from some of the other discussions that we hear in the industry about cloud whether the open hybrid cloud is is a platform I think that's the best way to think of it and that platform it's a it's a platform that spans different types of infrastructures so that's public clouds that's on-premises data centers you know the enterprise zones themselves and I think important increasingly out to the edge so the notion of where you deploy isn't also coupled to what platform do I have to develop to in order to do that deployment and you know when we talk about the edge extending out to the edge that means you're getting closer to those data sources so bringing the data in doing the Associated inference and making decisions close to that data where latency really can matter is a big part of what that open hybrid cloud platform brings to to the market or to our customers and when you think about an application developer typically an application developer is trying to in a you know enable some some behavior or feature or functionality and the more we can drive use data to drive the behavior or drive the functionality the more personalized and application is the more intelligent the application is and so the connection between data the data sources the data processing the data science behind data cleansing and model generation and the associated models that can be easily accessed by applications that's the real power that's the real value that works to help develop for our customers so they can change their business we actually do this internally it's how we operate you know we collect data we use data to make decisions we use data in our product release process and the platform that we've created is a data processing and analytics and machine learning platform that we use internally and we also make that externally available as an open source project the open data hub so open and data and hybrid cloud are all intertwined at this point yeah one of the things that really has been highlighted to me at Summit this year is that connection you know we always knew Red Hat had you know strong developer community out there but you know you think back to Linux Linux has eyes directly into the application you look across the portfolio and it's not the app dev team over here and the infrastructure team over here and you know how do we operate all of these various pieces you know ansible you know has connections into all the various roles so what want you to just comment you know with kind of your you know CTO role and you you look over the entire portfolio but that discussion of you know how roles are changing how organization and make sure that they're not a bunch of various functions that aren't in sync but you know we're really coming together to help respond to the business needs and move forward in the speed that is needed in today's world well I think the the early stages of that were well captured with the DevOps phrase so bringing developers and operations closer together it's not always clear what that means and in some cases that the the notion of a of a platform and the notion of operating an application and then who operates the platform I think there there's been some question in the industry about exactly what that means we're thinking of it today to sort of stick with the buzzwords in the dev sac ops context and even what I would call AI dead set cops so in data and intelligence infused obses cops and the idea is developers are just trying to move rapidly so the degree to which the underlying infrastructure is just there to support application development is the operations teams need yeah that's what the operation seems trying to provide developers need at the same time access to tooling to consistency from test environments through to production environments and also access to those data models that I was talking about earlier so bringing that all together I think on the DevOps side or the dev Sackhoff side it's how can you build a platform that gives the right business specific guidelines and sort of guardrails that allow developers to move as quickly as possible without getting themselves into trouble and you know inadvertently creating a security vulnerability by pulling in an old dependency as a concrete example so bringing these things together I think is what's really important and it's a big part of what we're focused on the so operational side being infused with intelligence that's data in telemetry you're gathering from at the platform level and using models to inform how you operate the system and then if you go up a level to the application development sort of CIC deep pipeline where can you make intelligent recommendations to developers as they're pulling in dependencies or even writing code and then give easy access to the data science workflow to intercept so that what you're delivering is a well integrated model with an application that you know has a lifecycle and a maintenance that is well understood yeah so so Chris you know we've watched this is the seventh year we've had the cubit at Red Hat summit of course Red Hat itself has a large portfolio but not only Red Hat but you know the open source communities there are so many you know countless projects out there and you have a huge partner ecosystem you were just talking a bunch about DevOps you know I've got sitting at my desk you know one of those charts that shows you know DevOps tooling and it here's some of the platforms and here's all the various pieces and it's like you know I think there's only you know 50 or 80 different rules on that but how's Red Hat and the community overall how are you helping customers you know deal with this you know challeng world is you know we've got the paradox in place out there on it you know we understand that you know everybody's needs something a little bit different but how are we helping to give a little bit of structure and guidance in the the ever-changing world well I think it's one of the values of pulling content together if you think of a set of components being brought together as curation then we're helping curate the content and assembling pieces together it turns out is a is a lot of work especially when you want a lifecycle manage those components together so one basic thing that we're doing is bringing together an entire distribution of content so it's not just a single it's not just Linux it's not just kubernetes it's Linux and kubernetes engineered together with a set of supporting tooling for logging and monitoring and CI pipelines and all of that we bring together in a context that we opinionated or prescriptive what we also focus on is understanding that every Enterprise has a as its own legacy and history and set of investments that they've made so that process where we bring together an opinionated stack also needs to incorporate the flexibility so where can we plug in a CI pipeline that your your enterprise already has or where can we plug in your monitoring logging tools so that kind of flexibility allows us to bring together some best-of-breed components that we're finding in the open-source communities with flexibility to bring a whole set of ecosystem partners and if we go back to that open data have conversation there are a lot of data centric tools that we put in the open data have open source project we have commercial partners that can support things like say spark as a concrete example or tensorflow and so you know combine those those are open source projects but they're not coming from Red Hat they're coming from our ecosystem partners combine that all together into something that's engineered to work together and you're taking a lot of the friction out of the system so that developers can just move quickly all right so Chris give us a little bit of preview what what are people gonna see in the keynote and you know there's some people that are going to be watching this interview live but others will be efforts though I believe edge is one of the pieces we'll be touching on in the keynote but give us a little bit of what will we can expect well whatever you'll have to come to the keynote to really get the full full experience but what we're trying to to talk through is how data is really fundamentally changing business and if and we talk through that that's sort of story line starting with how it impacts red hats but you know at one level we're an enterprise we have our own business needs we use data to drive how we operate we also see that the platforms that we're building are really helpful for our customers to harness the value of data and change their own business and in the context of doing that we get to take a look at some ways where those business changes have industry-wide effects you know that we talk about things like 5g and artificial intelligence and where these things come together especially in edge computing really interesting space for these things all kind of converge and you know so kind of that that broad broad story line of data something that we use to change how we operate something that we build is from a platform point of view of our customers change how they operate and ultimately those changes have major impacts across the industry which is was which is pretty exciting pretty cool yeah I'm curious Chris you know I think back a few years ago I would have been interviewing you about like NFB and many of the themes it feels like we were talking about there we're really setting the table for the discussion we've been having for 5b is is that you know do you agree with that you know what would what's kind of the same and different from what we might have been looking at five years ago this it's very much and I love that question because it touches on something I think is really important it's very much an evolution and so in the tech world we talked so much about disruption and I think we overplay disruption I think what's interesting is technology evolution just consistently changing and moving forward gives rise at points in time to really interesting convergence of change that can be disruptive so as a concrete example NFV historically was about really improving the operational efficiencies of the service providers building networks and helping them move more rapidly so they could introduce new services most of that was focused on 4G most of that was focused on the core of the network today we're introducing 5g across the industry the discussions are moving technology wise into where do containers fit into this new world and the discussion at the network level is not only in the core but all the way out to the edge and then when you look at the edge where you have a portion of the network operating as software you have a platform like open ship that can also host enterprise or consumer facing education so this is really all of those early stages of NFV are culminating in this in a place today where the technology supports total software infrastructure for the network and utilizing that same cloud that you're running using to run the network to power enterprise or consumer facing applications that's pretty far away from where we were in the early days of NFB very much in evolution and then if you take it one step further and say orgy smart devices and cloud computing gave rise to a set of disruptive businesses ten years ago those businesses did not exist today we can't imagine life without them 5g device proliferations and not just smartphones but a whole set of new devices and edge computing are the ingredients that give rise to that same next wave of innovation where 10 years from now we can't really imagine what are the businesses that in 10 years we won't be able to imagine our lives without so we're at a really interesting inflection point and it's it's partially through this evolution of technology I think it's really exciting all right Chris last question for you there's always so many different pieces going on you know red hats really striking a nice balance there's not really as much of the habla and announcements but you know so much you know everything that does is built on open source so you know there's always things I run across it's like oh I need to you know look down the rabbit hole a little bit and what was that Farkas thing I think I'd heard that word before where all of the projects at the CN CF where you know Red Hat's involved in so you know in the last minute he or give us you know any areas where people said hey you know go google this go look up this you know project other cool things that you know you and your team are working on that you want to make sure to highlight well you you've mentioned one which is Korkis and not often time we talk about infrastructure I think it's a really cool project that is developer focus it's it's in the Java space and it's really bringing Java from an enterprise development platform into a modern language that can be used to build cloud native applications or even serverless functions I think serverless is a critical space so we've been talking for quite some time about all the ways serverless can be impactful we're in a place now where K native as a project is maturing and the the kind of world around it is getting more sophisticated so we have a serverless offer and as part of part of the open shift platform so you know making sure you're paying attention to what's happening in the K native space I think is is really important there's a whole new set of management challenges that will be in the security and a multi cluster space we're bringing those we're bringing technology to bear in this space and as RedHat we will bring those out as open source projects so looking for the open source communities around where you hear things like ECM or advanced container management or multi cluster managed environments which are the norm at this point you know those are some examples of things I think are important and then there's a world of stuff that's data focused there's all of the data science tools you know too many to really enumerate but that I think is an example where open-source is leading the space leading the industry in terms of where all where all those tools are developed and how the coverage and access developers have to data science tools all right well thank you so much Chris right always a pleasure to catch up with you and definitely looking forward to your your you know alright thank you all right lots more coverage check out the cube dotnet you can see all the interviews after they've gone out live they will be on demand all those projects Chris mentioned I've had deep dives on all of them so also hit up Chris square myself on Twitter if you have any follow up always love to hear the feedback I'm Stu minimun and as always thank you for watching the cube [Music]

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 around the globe it's the cube with digital coverage of Red Hat summit 2020 brought to you by Red Hat welcome back this is the cubes coverage of Red Hat summit 2020 of course this year instead of all gathering together in San Francisco we're getting to talk to red hat executives their partners and their customers where they are around the globe I'm your host Stu minimun and happy to welcome to the program Nick Barr said who is the senior director of Technology Strategy at Red Hat he happens to be on a boat in the Bahamas so Nick thanks so much for joining us hey thank you for inviting me it's a great pleasure to be here and it's a great pleasure to work for a company that has always dealt with remote people so it's really easy for us to kind of thing yeah Nick you know it's interesting I've been saying probably for the last 10 years that the challenge of our time is really distributed systems you know from a software standpoint that's what we talked about and even more so today and number one of course the current situation with the global plan global pandemic but number two the topic we're gonna talk to you about is edge and 5g it's obviously gotten a lot of hype so before we get into that - training Nick you know you came into Red Hat through an acquisition so give us a little bit about your background and what you work on Baretta about five years ago company I was working for involves got acquired by read at and I've been very lucky in that acquisition where I found a perfect home to express my talent I've been free software advocate for the past 20-some years always been working in free software for the past 20 years and Red Hat is really wonderful for that yeah it's addressing me ok yeah I remember back the early days we used to talk about free software now we don't talk free open-source is what we talk about you know dream is a piece of what we're doing but yeah let's talk about you know Ino Vaughn's I absolutely remember the they were a partner of Red Hat talked to them a lot at some of the OpenStack goes so I I'm guessing when we're talking about edge these are kind of the pieces coming together of what red had done for years with OpenStack and with NFB so what what what's the solution set you're talking about Ferguson side how you're helping your customers with these blue well clearly the solution we are trying to put together as to combine what people already have with where they want to go our vision for the future is a vision where openshift is delivering a common service on any platform including hardware at the far edge on a model where both viens and containers can be hosted on the same machine however there is a long road to get there and until we can fulfill all the needs we are going to be using combination of openshift OpenStack and many other product that we have in our portfolio to fulfill the needs of our customer we've seen for example a Verizon starting with OpenStack quite a few years ago now going with us with openshift that they're going to place on up of OpenStack or directly on bare metal we've seen other big telcos use tag in very successful to deploy their party networks there is great capabilities in the existing portfolio we are just expanding that simplifying it because when we are talking about the edge we are talking about managing thousands if not millions of device and simplicity is key if you do not want to have your management box in Crete excellent so you talked a lot about the service providers obviously 5g as a big wave coming a lot of promise as what it will enable both for the service providers as well as the end-users help us understand where that is today and what we should expect to see in the coming years though so in respect of 5g there is two reason why 5g is important one it is B it is important in terms of ad strategy because any person deploying 5g will need to deploy computer resources much closer to the antenna if they want to be able to deliver the promise of 5g and the promise of very low latency the second reason it is important is because it allows to build a network of things which do not need to be interconnected other than through a 5g connection and this simplifies a lot some of the edge application that we are going to see where sensors needs to provide data in a way where you're not necessarily always connected to a physical network and maintaining a Wi-Fi connection is really complex and costly yeah Nick a lot of pieces that sometimes get confused or conflated I want you to help us connect the dots between what you're talking about for edge and what's happening the telcos and the the broader conversation about hybrid cloud or red hat calls at the O the open hybrid cloud because you know there were some articles that were like you know edge is going to kill the cloud I think we all know an IP nothing ever dies everything is all additive so how do these pieces all go together so for us at reddit it's very important to build edge as an extension of our open hybrid cloud strategy clearly what we are trying to build is an environment where developers can develop workloads once and then can the administrator that needs to deploy a workload or the business mode that means to deploy a workload can do it on any footprint and the edge is just one of these footprint as is the cloud as is a private environment so really having a single way to administer all these footprints having a single way to define the workloads running on it is really what we are achieving today and making better and better in the years to come um the the reality of [Music] who process the data as close as possible to where the data is being consumed or generated so you have new footprints - let's say summarize or simplify or analyze the data where it is being used and then you can limit the traffic to a more central site to only the essential of it is clear that we've the current growth of data there won't be enough capacity to have all the data going directly to the central part and this is what the edge is about making sure we have intermediary of points of processing yeah absolutely so Nikki you talked about OpenStack and OpenShift of course there's open source project with with OpenStack openshift the big piece of that is is kubernetes when it comes to edge are there other open source project the parts of the foundations out there that we should highlight when looking at these that's Luke oh there is a tremendous amount of projects that are pertaining to the edge read ad carry's many of these projects in its portfolio the middleware components for example Quercus or our amq mechanism caki are very important components we've got storage solutions that are super important also when you're talking about storing or handling data you've got in our management portfolio two very key tool one called ansible that allows to configure remotely confidence that that is super handy when you need to reconfigure firewall in Mass you've got another tool that he's a central piece of our strategy which is called a CM read at forgot the name of the product now we are using the acronym all the time which is our central management mechanism just delivered to us through IBM so this is a portfolio wide we are making and I forgot the important one which is real that Enterprise Linux which is delivering very soon a new version that is going to enable easier management at the edge yeah well of course we know that well is you know the core foundational piece with most of the solution in a portfolio that's really interesting how you laid that out though as you know some people on the outside look and say ok Red Hat's got a really big portfolio how does it all fit together you just discussed that all of these pieces become really important when when they come together for the edge so maybe uh you know one of the things when we get together summit of course we get to hear a lot from your your your customer so any customers you can talk about that might be a good proof point for these solutions that you're talking about today so right now most of the proof points are in the telco industry because these are the first one that have made the investment in it and when we are talking about their eyes and we are talking about a very large investment that is reinforced in their strategy we've got customers in telco all over the world that are starting to use our products to deploy their 5g networks and we've got lots of customer starting to work with us on creating their tragedy for in other vertical particularly in the industrial and manufacturing sector which is our necks and ever after telco yet yeah well absolutely Verizon a customer I'm well familiar with when it comes to what they've been used with Red Hat I'd interviewed them it opens back few years back when they talked about that those nmv type solutions you brought a manufacturing so that brings up one of the concerns when you talk about edge or specifically about IOT environment when we did some original research looking at the industrial Internet the boundaries between the IT group and the OT which heavily lives lives in manufacturing wouldn't they did they don't necessarily talk or work together so Houser had had to help to make sure that customers you know go through these transitions Plus through those silos and can take advantage of these sorts of new technologies well obviously you you have to look at a problem in entirety you've got to look at the change management aspect and for this you need to understand how people interact together if you intend on modifying the way they work together you also need to ensure that the requirements of one are not impeding the yeah other the man an environment of a manufacturer is really important especially when we are talking about dealing with IOT sensors which have very limited security capability so you need to add in the appropriate security layers to make what is not secure secure and if you don't do that you're going to introduce a friction and you also need to ensure that you can delegate administration of the component to the right people you cannot say Oh from now on all of what you used to be controlling on a manufacturing floor is now controlled centrally and you have to go through this form in order to have anything modified so having the flexibility in our tooling to enable respect of the existing organization and handle a change management the appropriate way is our way to answer this problem right Nick last thing for you obviously this is a maturing space lots of age happening so gives a little bit of a look forward as to what users should be affecting and you know what what what pieces will the industry and RedHat be working on that bring full value out of the edge and find a solution so as always any such changes are driven by the application and what we are seeing is in terms of application a very large predominance of requirements for AI ml and data processing capability so reinforcing all the components around this environment is one of our key addition and that we are making as we speak you can see Chris keynote which is going to demonstrate how we are enabling a manufacturer to process the signal sent from multiple sensors through an AI and during early failure detection you can also expect us to enable more and more complex use case in terms of footprint right now we can do very small data center that are residing on three machine tomorrow we'll be able to handle remote worker nodes that are on a single machine further along we'll be able to deal with disconnected node a single machine acting as a cluster all these are elements that are going to allow us to go further and further in the complication of the use cases it's not the same thing when you have to connect a manufacturer that is on solid grounds with fiber access or when you have to connect the Norway for example or a vote and talk about that too Nick thank you so much for all the updates no there's some really good breakouts I'm sure there's lots on the Red Hat website find out more about edge in five B's the Nick bark set thanks so much for joining us thank you very much for having me all right back with lots more covered from Red Hat summit 2020 I'm stoom in a man and thanks though we for watching the queue [Music]